Page - 35 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

34 | Toufic El-Khoury www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 23–37 burden of faith in daily experiences and in one’s intimate perception of complex questioning is at the heart of American transcendentalist thought. Cavell sees marriage as “the repetition of everydayness”.29 The essence of his view of marriage has the same paradoxical pattern as the ideas of Kierkegaard: Cavell describes marriage with concepts not usually related to it. The notion of the “leap” developed by Kierkegaard is particularly revealing, and also surpris- ing in its evocation of a need for constant renewal inside a state determined by permanence. The threat of divorce consolidates the legitimacy of marriage in Cavell’s argumentation, just as the fallibility of marriage, in Kierkegaard’s ethi- cal stage, gives it its credibility, and just as the risk of metaphysical doubt con- solidates, in the religious stage, the possibility of faith.30 Marriage for Cavell, like faith for Kierkegaard, is a gamble, for it rests not on a religious certitude or on a sacred and unbreakable bond (the indefectible contract for the first, the rational proof of the existence of God for the second), but on the risks inherent in an individual choice that we accept, and assume, despite everything.31 Thus, remarriage is the essence of modern marriage: an improbable game and educa- tion, defined by action instead of intention, conversation instead of norms. In his study of another comedy, It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, US 1934), Cavell describes the adventures of a couple, not a married couple, but still one experiencing all the conflictual interactions, the construction of an intimacy. and the ability to converse normally associated with the development of a con- jugal bond. The couple are on the run for various reasons (Ellen Andrews, a rich heiress, is escaping her father to reunite with her playboy husband, and Peter Warne, a worn reporter, is helping her in order to get the exclusive story; they recognize in predictable fashion that they are falling for one another), and we realize very quickly, in Cavell’s words, that what this pair does together is less important than the fact that they do whatever it is together, that they know how to spend time together, even that they would rather waste time together than do anything else – except that no time they are together could be wasted.32 The comic adventures underline the reciprocity this couple is building and pre- sent a particularity of the love process that we can identify as a “spiritual ca- maraderie”, a notion already popular in the 1920s and found in Wilhelm Reich’s 29 See Cavell 1981, 241. 30 One of the most famous statements by Kierkegaard interweaves faith and marriage. Talking about his inability to marry his longtime fiancée, he claimed: “If I had faith, I would have married Regine”. Did he change his mind about marriage because he was not sure it would succeed? If he had accepted the possibility of failure, marriage would have been possible. Here is the main “awful truth” the movie and Cavell are talking about. 31 See Cavell 1993, 231–232. 32 Cavell 1981, 83.