The Awful Truth: On Metonymic Rationality in Hawks and Cavell

Sa？etak When Stanley Cavell analyzes Hollywood comedies of remarriage, he mobilizes their narratives as the platform from which to address America as a political and a philosophical project. This is also where Cavell acknowledges the affinity of the cinematic narrative and psychoanalysis, most notably perhaps in his sustained interest in the Hollywood woman as a spectacle of crisis and critique. With this in mind, I propose to discuss the Cavellian woman, of his cinema books, who dominates the “green world” of the Hollywood remarriage comedy: the bucolic story-space which Cavell associates with the Emersonian vision of America and identifies as definitive to its critical character. I focus however on the comedy in which there seems to be no climactic green world – Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) – and argue that Hawks’ woman mobilizes metropolitan courtrooms and the adjacent spaces in a similar fashion, as if to suggest that the Emersonian green world is not absent from Hawks’ film but rather metonymic to the positions America would assign to (pure) reason. Finally, I show how this Cavellian complex corresponds to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical fascination with woman, film and America