A Cinematic Exploration of Raising Arizona
This is the time in which the drug addled children of the 60’s, who lived through disco in the ’70s, decided to settle down and create the next biggest baby boom of the century, the generation later known as X, then Y, then Next. In this baby craze, biological clocks were ticking faster than science could go, and fertility drugs were all the rage. Take this atmosphere to the Arizona desert, where our protagonists, Hi and Ed, first meet while Hi is being booked for his umpteenth robbery. Nicolas Cage plays Hi with a rubber face that is elastic enough to be perplexingly cartoonish while at the same time displaying identifiable and real expressions, something that Jim Carrey must have modeled himself after, but failed to grasp its subtlety. Holly Hunter has an equally inflexible face as Ed, which is short for Edwina, as she tersely barks in the opening scene. Her expressions have two modes, the pinched angry mother look, and the slightly looser but still uptight lament of the I-want-to-be-a-mother look. Add to this rigidity the fact that she is a cop in the beginning of the movie and you have the strict schoolteacher of Looney Tune magnitude, all over again.
Actually, in all accuracy, which this movie isn’t too big on, the opening scene isn’t really a scene at all, but rather a collection or montage of short snippets, all voiced over by Hi. This introductory sequence lasts about ten minutes and brings the audience a quick but rich background of the characters and the reasons behind the madness that is to ensue. It is rather explanatory, but in a fun, clever, and jocular way. Here is where we first meet Hi, the convenience store robber extraordinaire, and follow him on his circular merry go ride on the revolving door of justice. It follows the same sequence from imprisonment, to parole board, to freedom, to robbery, and the return to imprisonment. While Hi develops his relationship with the mug-shot snapping Ed, the movie cleverly attacks the justice system at the time, as the parole board member says, “we got no choice but to turn you back to society,” and another agrees, “these doors goan swing wide.” Hi himself questions the whirlpool he’s trapped in, directly addressing moviegoers, “I don’t know how you come down on the incarceration question, whether it’s for rehabilitation or revenge, but I was beginning to think that revenge is the only argument makes any sense.” He delivers this opinion while the camera illustrates another botched robbery attempt and his subsequent arrest.
Around this point in this rollicking opening capsule, at arrest number two or so, I began to uneasily feel the pathos beneath the humor. My suspicion began to grow that perhaps this movie wasn’t just about some funny looking, funny talking people, but rather it was dealing on some level with real flawed humans “wrassling” with pain I could understand. One such scene in the introduction was an amazingly shot moment where the film stops on its own eloquence. Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography is wackily beautiful and entirely appropriate to the film, and in this moment, he hits perfection. It is a scene that occurs earlier in the sequence, Hi and his cellmate Moses are in their beds, the camera is at a high angle looking down on them, cradling the triangle of their elbows while their heads are pillowed on their hands. They are in the exact same position staring off to space while Moses intones in his crawdad flecked bible language, and Hi dreams of Ed. He says, “More and more my thoughts turned to Ed, and I finally felt the pain of imprisonment.” After he says this, the camera slowly moves in on his vacant stare while the voice over delivers one of the most poignant lines in a surprisingly poignant film, “The joint is a lonely place after lock-up and lights out, when the last of the cons has been swept away by the sandman.” The camera cuts to Hi’s point of view, the springs of the bunk bed above him, and in a ridiculously lovely touch, Sonnenfeld superimposes on the bottom of the bunk the image of Ed smiling behind her camera. This scene is akin the last one of this opening shebang where Hi and Ed are happily married, sitting on cheap plastic lawn chairs, and watching the kind of breathtaking sunset that only the Southwest can produce. These moments stop the movie in its frantic insanity and focus on the true core of the film, two people in love who think this world is so beautiful they feel that, “everyday we keep a child out of the world is a day he’ll miss.” “Raising Arizona” nearly brought a tear to my overly sentimental eye in these moments, but luckily I was saved swiftly by the return of the fantastic voice of Hi.
In Cage’s voice over, we are introduced to one of the strange dialects used in the movie. He blends a gee-shucks ma’am bashfulness with a confident Texas twang and then muddles it all with a hint of wistful roaming-the-range cowboy. It is the same kind of bizarre and overdone language found in many cartoons, but Cage gives it a heart and makes it believable in the world of the movie. Indeed, all the characters have outlandish and unrecognizable dialects and this adds to the absurdity and otherworldliness of the film. While this may be very enjoyable to some who embrace the craziness with open minds, to others such as Roger Ebert, it can be distracting. Ebert seemed to loathe “Raising Arizona” in its entirety and one of his main sore points was exactly this issue of dialect. In his review of the film on March 20, 1987, he wrote, “I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters. They usually end up sounding silly.” He goes on to say that furthermore, “it’s best to have your characters speak in strong but unaffected English, especially when your story is set in the present. Otherwise they’ll end up distracting the hell out of everybody.” In his opinion, the “arch and artificial level” of the language in the film is distracting, unconvincing, unrealistic, and slows down the progress of the film. Yet, he is looking at the movie as if it were trying to be a real life take on a couple trying to have a baby, rather than an oddball comedy coming at the issue out of left field, wait, even further, out of a freakin’ UFO. Ebert’s scrutiny for the straight laced realism that he seems to want the film to embody can be seen when he says of Hi, “Maybe, of course, he just happens to talk that way.” In this comment, he treats Hi as a real person, as if the Coen brothers were just kicking around a trailer park and found this charming couple, Hi and Edwina, who just happened to talk funny, and made a movie about them. No, the point of Raising Arizona is not reality, but to make fun of reality, silly Ebert.
As I said before, the Coen brothers aren’t too big on accuracy, and this incongruous language is one of the ways in which they create a Southwest all their own. They do not try to recreate the Arizona, the Southwest, that the country knew at the time, but rather, they take their own hilarious spin on the region and create characters that are crazy but slightly identifiable at the same time. In doing this, they work to satirize the regions, playing on various stereotypes, the sparse trailer park as embodying suburban Tempe, for example. In another example, when Hi and Ed kidnap the fifth quintuplet of the furniture baron Nathan Arizona, the distraught father is asked by the press whether he thinks a UFO took them. This question plays with the notoriety of such places as Roswell, New Mexico and in general mocks the people for believing in UFOs when Nathan replies that they should not ask such questions lest his wife believe that is what happened and lose all hope. While the film has a lot of fun teasing the Southwest, it does so in a general sense and I got the feeling that the Coens’ hadn’t really spent much time down there. Being from New Mexico myself, I easily got the jokes that any joe-schmoe across the nation would understand, but I didn’t see any details that made it particularly the Southwest, besides the obvious desert setting. It is the same feeling I got when reading an interview with the brothers about their latest endeavor, “‘O Brother Where Art Thou,” which seems to me (from the trailers, I haven’t seen the movie) to be rather similar to this one, escaped convicts with funky high-toned drawls, yodeling tunes, etc. In the interview they claimed that this new movie was based loosely on the Odyssey and then amended with the fact that they had never actually read Homer’s epic poem, but instead had read the comic book version of it. In this same way, I feel that they have not actually experienced much of the Southwest while creating the script, and thus were loosely basing the film on the Road Runner version. This is by no means a criticism, but rather, furthers serves the idea of how the movie operates in the realm of the absurd.
But back to the babies. At the end of the unusual opening, where we don’t get the title “Raising Arizona” on the screen until ten minutes of maudlin have already passed, we know that Hi and Ed are going to resort to desperate measures. They cannot adopt a baby, due to Hi’s dubious record, and as Hi says, “biology and the prejudices of others conspired to keep us childless.” So, we go along with our gooney but touching protagonists to the house of the schmoozy salesman Nathan Arizona. Trey Wilson happily buffoons the part of Nathan, particularly with the disgusting touch of including a plug for his business at the end of the press conference about his stolen child. Anyways, Hi sneaks into the lucky household and attempts to steal a baby. This scene is the only point where I must agree with Ebert when he says, “Here’s a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it’s worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced.” The Coen brothers have the brilliant touch of using dark dun-da-dum Jaws music to undermine the babies cuteness and endow them with some force of terror as they crawl around like little speed demons, defeating Hi as he tries to steal one. While the scene is funny, it definitely is stretched too far, it is the one joke that the film gives too much time to get old. Indeed, the emphasis is on babies, on youth, and all the gags and jokes work in exactly this manner, the freshness and unexpectedness of them wears away if they are left on the screen to age.
Once the infant is safely stolen and the couple brings him to his new home, the film blows up from its single track into three different stories, each of which are elaborately, and a tad mysteriously, intertwined. While the happy baby thieves sleep their first night away as a blissful “family unit,” trouble brews. Hi predicts it in his dream of the badman, a motorcycling maniac who is a mixture the Mad Max villains and Road Warrior. As a bunny loving young girl, the one scene I remember clearly is the one in which Tex Cobb blows up a bunny with a hand grenade and I must say I squealed in horror this time too. At this point however, the film begins to dwell upon the undertones of anxiety associated with procreation. The lone rider figure of the Apocalypse seems to embody the nuclear blasted future so many people feared in the 80’s. When Hi’s old prison buddies, the brothers Gale and Evell, played by John Goodman and William Forsythe respectively, break out of jail, another fear comes to life. Actually, on a quick side note – their escape scene was even more hilarious to watch today in comparison with the remarkably similar one in “The Shawshank Redemption,” did Stephen King watch “Raising Arizona,” was his reference on purpose? One can only wonder. Anyways, when these two bumbling, beer guzzling, good for nothing brothers arrive at the happy household, they ignite the tomcat impulse in Hi and immediately create a tension. They present the anti-thesis to the American dream that Hi and Ed are chasing, and as they offer Hi an escape from married life, symbolized hysterically in a plate of fried chicken and biscuits that they offer at the same time in the frame, they argue, “you’re young, you got your health, what do you want with a job?” For them, Hi is just playing house while they know his true nature is, as he argues himself earlier in the excellently choreographed chase scene, a wanderer, a nomad, a bandit.
The chase scene itself is the turning point of Hi and Ed’s marriage and a exaggerated encapsulation of parent’s stress to provide for their children. As Hi returns to his old way of life in order to provide for his son, Ed returns to her cop roots and thoroughly disapproves. As they careen around corners trying to elude the cops, Hi politely giving directions in the middle of their argument to the location of the Huggies he just ran down the street with, they discuss the status of their marriage. Ed admonishes Hi for bringing their son into this, saying “what kind of home life is this for a toddler?” She wants what the baby manual, the media, and American society tells her to want: the stable family unit, Ozzie and Harriet. But Ed doesn’t fit that picture, at least not yet. He is trying though, and the shot in which he runs desperately down the street clutching the pack of Huggies in open fire, must have invoked similar feelings of embattlement in parents trying to raise decent families in this “crazy world.”
Underlying this feeling of anxiety over child raising is the problem of paternity. As the kidnapped baby is passed from hand to hand, it is called by a different Junior variation depending upon the kidnapper. Hi and Ed’s friends, the swinging couple Glen and Dot, want the child in return for certain damage done to Glen’s face by Hi’s fist. He says that Dot needs something new to cuddle and that he’ll call the baby Glen Jr. When Gale and Evell steal the child, they decide to call it Gale Jr. Every couple calls the baby Junior, invoking the creepy sense that these people are having kids just as playthings, as “critters” as Hi says, or as miniature versions of themselves. While this subtle criticism might unsettle parents, the scenes where Gale and Evell leave the baby on the top of the car and drive away, leaving the helpless infant in the middle of the road, are sure to instill feelings of terror, which is in turn ridiculed by the brother’s long winded screams at the realization of their mistake.
When all is said and done, and the bouncing bundle of joy is returned to its rightful owners, (yes, key word there – owners as the baby is referred to “it” often in the movie) Hi and Ed are still left childless. Their desperation and ache for a dream has carried us through the entire raucous drive of the film and we are left feeling deeply their disappointment while questioning the whole idea of parenthood. The ridiculousness of their actions is entirely unwarranted, but at the same time, wholly justified by our own sympathy. Nathan foreshadows the baby debate in our current time when he says, “Well lookit. If you can’t have kids you gotta just keep tryin’ and hope medical science catches up with you. Like Florence’n me-it caught up with a vengeance.” Currently, the film brings into question the lengths couples will go to in order to have kids, in the form of artificial insemination and running ads in Ivy League publications looking for an egg donor with perfect SAT scores, standing 5′ 9″ or more, blonde haired, blue eyed, and weighing less than 130 lbs. Is that kind of genetic selection all that different from how Hi tries to pick the best out of the identical quintuplets and is sure that he got the right one? Is it any more accurate? Can you call a baby your junior when it doesn’t have any of your genetic material? And what is the vengeance this new technology will wreak upon our lives? However, “Raising Arizona” doesn’t linger too long on moralistic questions such as these, rather the film ends with Hi’s endearingly optimistic view of the future, “and it seemed real. It seemed like us. And it seemed like well … our home . . . If not Arizona, then a land, not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved…. I dunno, maybe it was Utah.”
