Seite - 36 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/02

Marriage and Its Representations | 35www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 23–37 writings in 1930:33 what matters most in the shared experience of the protago- nists is not what they do together but the fact that the experience is shared. The “spiritual camaraderie” refers to action as well as intention. The experience by itself highlights the affective and moral reciprocity: the fact of being married, or together, is less important than the couple’s acknowledgement of an essential feeling, building a consciousness of being a couple. Cavell is less interested in the battle-of-the-sexes comic convention than in the idea of debate: the sexual power relationship, on which comedy built most of its narrative coda, matters less than a moral conversation that articulates how the protagonists will con- sider living together. CONCLUSION Not every American comedy offers the discussion about marriage provided by the comedies selected by Cavell. In Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, US 1943) for instance, Henry Van Cleeve (Don Ameche), a sympathetic womanizer, ar- rives in purgatory and confesses that he does not deserve to go to heaven due to his conjugal misdeeds. His marriage to Martha (Gene Tierney) temporarily puts on hold his fun-loving nature and his need to seduce. The movie carefully avoids showing the other women in his life: members of his family talk about them, only their profession (mainly as chorus girls) identifies them, and visual ellipses or external indications suggest their existence, as with the example of the jeweler’s bill found by Martha in Henry’s coat. During his whole life, and until his arrival in purgatory, Henry has been torn between two “feelings”: the esthetical and the ethical, between the Don Juan and the Husband personas, in the Kierkegaardian sense of the words. He is torn between his attraction to all women, to the feminine multitude on one side, and his fidelity to one woman untouched by any critical comparison with the others. Hence, the protagonist is part of a “virtual” triangle, faced with two ideals rather than two persons: one indefinite (a consistent although anonymous feminine multitude) and one a personalized entity (his wife, Martha, representing the whole institution of marriage). However, for various reasons Cavell’s approach does not seem to apply to Lubitsch’s movie: he states at the beginning of Pursuits of Happiness that the movies he selected for his study were written and directed by seminal Ameri- can authors (Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, for example). The fact that the movie is adapted from a Hungarian dramatist’s play (Birthday by Leslie Bush-Fekete) does not help; it seems to consolidate Cavell’s belief that Lubitsch, like other European directors, has a rather “Continental” view of mar- 33 See Reich 1993.