Page - 31 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

30 | Toufic El-Khoury www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 23–37 vain and indefinite desire. The individuals who make up the couple must try to pull themselves out of this state to understand better their acceptance of it. The movie shows us the conflict and a way to resolve it but without guarantee- ing success, thus faithful to the comic spirit. More importantly, it is the lack of a guarantee that the marriage will succeed, its inherent fallibility, that gives the it legitimacy in the minds of the parties involved. CAVELL AND KIERKEGAARD’S LEGACY Cavell’s approach seems rooted in what he considers a typically American way of discussing marriage and romance. That idea is popular, but it is not always accept- ed. David Shumway, a cultural and literary historian, criticizes Cavell’s approach and locates the American screwball comedies’ approach to love and marriage in a more global cultural legacy. He also claims that as the social role of marriage grew smaller, the conjugal state was associated with romance and intimacy. Whereas medieval romances opposed love and the state of marriage, as noted by Denis de Rougemont in his study of Béroul’s Tristan and Iseult,15 the seventeenth century introduced the idea of love as an emotion which formed a source of marriage and as no longer “directed by social institutions such as family or religion”.16 The new form of marriage we encountered earlier started to appear in the seventeenth century in a form designated “companionate marriage” in England, but not as a product of romance. According to Shumway, “The choice of spouse was increas- ingly left in the hands of children themselves and was based mainly on tempera- mental compatibility with the aim of lasting companionship”.17Two discourses start to coexist, in essence contradictory and their differences unrecognized. Romance offered “adventure, intense emotion and the possibility of finding the perfect mate”, while intimacy promised “deep communication, friendship and sharing that will last beyond the passion of new love”.18 In his study, Shumway points out a first paradox in our modern understand- ing of what marriage must be. However, the idea of paradox is at the heart of Cavell’s discussion of the subject. Moreover, Shumway’s assumption, as well as his remarks about the difficulty of establishing the grounds for reciprocity while discussing the unpredictability of human desire, suggests a tension between two discourses that we can find in Kierkegaard’s thought about the same institution. One of the differences between Kierkegaard’s esthetical and the ethical stages concerns the subject’s choice to free himself from all “profane” media- tions – the judgment of an outside gaze. For instance, in “Some Reflections on 15 See de Rougemont 2001, 17. 16 Shumway 2003, 18. 17 Shumway 2003, 17. 18 Shumway 2003, 27.