The Marriage Canon Returns!

Welcome back, friends, to the Marriage in the Media Canon. Last week, we revisited 4 films (most, if not all classics) which masterfully capture and showcase some fundamental aspect of marriage lived in real life. These films all rose above more Hallmark-style romances to explore marriage as an institution entered into and lived by humans - with all their faults and misgivings. They were quality captures of less-than-perfect situations portrayed through quality films. For that reason, I hope you can forgive me for only listing classics: it is hard to find quality films these days.

The declining talent and production of many recent films I’ve seen as compared to similar films of not so recent past is a topic for another article. As passionate as I am on the subject, we cannot divert ourselves to it much here. That being said, however, the cheesy or situationship-turned-marriage relationships showcased in much of modern media cut deeper than generally decreasing quality of media overall. Rather, they reflect a forgetting on a more primal level of our culture: the loss of understanding the nature, ends, and operations of a healthy lived marriage. The more we as a society see marriage as a fallible and breakable contract in which all is permitted so long as the consenting adults within the contract live by the tolerances of the other adult, the more removed from reality our culture becomes. Healthy marriages in the media are simply not possible because they are increasingly eclipsed and absent from life and culture in general. 

With these premises established, we return for part 2 of the Marriage in the Media Canon. You will find here a second set of movies, both of which chosen by the same criteria: masterfully capture and showcase some fundamental aspect of marriage lived in real life. I hope you will note that they are not all classics this time - although I am sure this article will enshrine them as such to your minds… These films, as were the last, are what I consider to be 2 more of the greatest films which uphold and portray deep and real truths about marriage.  Again, these films are not always straightforward in their portrayal of the union, and though I deem them worthy of entire family viewing on a regular basis, as always the parents who remain guardians of the family must decide for themselves.  

1) Up (2009). Disney’s animated film Up won the #1 animated film of the year when it was released. In my opinion, it ought to have won more acclaim than it did. Made back in the years when Disney was capable of more than mere live-action remakes, preachy animations, and cheesy superhero flicks, Up has not been the center of conversation or the (to my knowledge) been established as of classic Disney canon films. Perhaps this film has merely been eclipsed by the conglomerate that Disney has become; maybe modern filmgoers can’t appreciate the more human takes of this movie. Whatever the reason, Up seems to have fallen by the wayside of movies, and I think it is a crying shame.

Up begins with a tear-jerker prologue if I ever saw one. Young boy meets girl, they grow to adulthood together, marry, and purchase the abandoned little country home they first met in so many years ago. They fix it up by hand, begin their life together, and joyously plan a life full of their own children. They soon find that they cannot have children of their own, and it hits the wife very, very hard. I suspect a miscarriage might have been involved (for reasons I will share in a moment), but the circumstances of their infertility are left to the imagination. The couple moves past this, however, and continue a life full of joy and true companionship through their old age. And then, at the cusp of going to one more adventure together to South America, now elderly wife collapses while climbing their favorite cloud watching hill. She dies in the hospital, leaving him a grumpy old - and lonely - man in what is now the last standing house in a desert of industrial housing development.

There is literally an entire life story to this movie before the actual narrative begins! The boy’s name is Carl, and the love of his life’s name is Ellie. They bond over their shared love of adventure, and that begins their shared life together. In fact, it dictates their whole life together, as Carl would later discover: Ellie filled her “Adventure Book” with memories of the two of them together throughout their life. 

The actual narrative of the story is kind of silly: Carl flies away with his house (thanks to millions of balloons) with an 8-year old stowaway as he tries to deliver his home to “Paradise Falls,” the initial adventure destination he and Ellie first bonded over. They find a 13-foot tall bird, talking dogs, and a very old adventurer with murder on his mind, all against the backdrop of Carl’s devotion to his deceased wife and their once shared dream of happily-ever-after at the falls. 

I will confess: if you somehow don’t watch the first 10 minutes of this movie, the entire narrative is silly. Having seen those crucial minutes, though, the movie itself wonderfully captures three things about marriage which cause me to include it here. 

First, the real life-ness of marriage. Carl and Ellie don’t have a happily-ever-after; they lived a happily-til-death-do-us-part. Their shown life in those first 10 minutes was most definitely not one of fairy tale. From hard work to mishaps in handiwork to the devastation that is infertility, these two held together and helped each other through every step and never once blamed each other. The infertility part really stuck out to me with this. They clearly not only intended to have lots of children, they also seemed to be expecting one. Typically, I see couples preparing a nursery when they are expecting - not when start “trying.” When the doctor tells them they cannot have children, Ellie takes it incredibly personally, and even seems to isolate for a time. But Carl refuses to leave her to her own thoughts, and blame that his own excitement and desires would not come to fruition is the farthest thing from his mind. So, the companionship and shared life illustrated by this preface is reason #1 for Up’s inclusion in this canon.

Reason #2 is Carl’s continued devotion to Ellie even while she is not there. His loneliness and constant conversation with her - coupled to his protection of the idea of her - is reminiscent of ancient Christian devotion to deceased spouses. There is still a metaphysical bond created through marriage, and even though the physical bond is severed at death, it is not as if you were never married to begin with. JPII talks about this briefly in his book, Love and Responsibility. While we cannot get into the depths of the theology behind this, that Carl is still irrevocably changed by his marriage to Ellie speaks to the concreteness of the marital bond.

The third reason Up finds itself on this list of canon is its illustration of a marriage foundation. Carl and Ellie lived life together as an adventure. It’s what they initially bonded over, its specifically how Ellie characterized their entire life together, and it was only through explicit adventure that Carl realized this foundation for himself. Up showcases the shared and created identity that marriage is - simultaneously forming and being formed by the spouses. Carl and Ellie’s identities were tied to their marital foundation; they were not mere individuals living within a marital contract. 

Up is a silly movie. At one point, when the dogs start talking, you might be tempted to throw your hands in the air and wonder “can this movie get any more ridiculous?” Believe me, it can and will. That being said, the fantastical nature of the adventure ought not to eclipse the deeper marital profundity that this movie illustrates; at least, I hope it doesn’t. 

2) The Philadelphia Story (1940). This entry into the canon was actually a suggestion by my wife. I had never seen the film, but she insisted on my watching it. For a long time, I could not for the life of me see where she was coming from to suggest this. It is a film adaptation of a play by the same name - a characteristic that many classic films share, and is a stark contrast to modern movies which are expressly written for the screen. But that is a topic for another time.

The film begins with a Pennsylvania upper class woman (Katherine Hepburn) throwing her upper class husband (Cary Grant) out of the house, followed by the announcement of their divorce, followed by Grant returning to the family home on the eve of her remarriage to a blue collar worker with a lower class reporter and his accompanying photographer (Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey) with the supposed intention of getting an inside scoop into higher class life for a publication. With this rocky beginning, I spent the first entire half hour of the film looking for a kind way out of including this movie and softly telling my wife it didn’t fit the criteria.

But then minute 31 (symbolically, I don’t know the precise timestamp) came. In an electrifying scene, Grant and Hepburn bandy words between them about their failed marriage, what it was like, and what went wrong. Grant was a drinker, and gave into his vice too freely and often. But through the course of their conversation, we the watchers begin to realize that Grant’s drinking wasn’t the deal breaker for the marriage - merely the force multiplier. Rather, Hepburn embodied an attitude and bearing which quickly and decisively not only barred but effectively killed love when it was offered to her: she was, as Grant said, “a goddess.” She bore herself too puritanically, setting herself up above all others as the pinnacle of a life well lived, calculated, and controlled. She did this so completely that all she was capable of interiorly was a sort of worship from afar offered to her by her lover - whomever that might be at the time. In fact, she bore herself with such lofty bearing that she effectively blotted out any and all of her own faults and errors of judgement induced by alcohol, rarely though they occur.

The theme of goddess vs. woman is repeated to her by all three men primarily in her life: prior husband, husband to be, and her father. All three present it to her as a matter of fact, but all three have a different perspective. While Grant is lamenting her statued nature which did not allow her to be a wife, her fiancé offers a distant adoration of her stately beauty and poise. Her father, at the last, laments that he did not have a woman for a daughter; he had a proud goddess, light from afar, successful and who makes him proud, but without the warmth and caring that makes a woman. 

The consecutive men deeming her “goddess” strikes a chord in the heart of Hepburn, and she begins to melt a bit. She had already had the marriage based on the notion of iconic unblemish, and realized the second marriage would be a reboot of the same. Her bitterness for her first husband blinded her to his growth he had undertaken for her sake - and perhaps that is what troubled their marriage to begin with: he grew into a man, while she tried to remain the goddess.

The fourth male perspective Hepburn gets is from Stewart, a perspective different from anyone else’s. He has not known her for very long, and so actually only gets to know her during the interim of her transformation. He sees her - really sees her - for the first time when Grant and she have their exchange. Stewart takes umbrage at Grant’s calling her a goddess, but later on struggles to articulate why he protests it. He sees something there in her that is beautiful, and being young himself almost “falls in love” for the first time. It is a passionate puppy love, but with a semblance of both innocence and truth to it. It mesmerizes Hepburn to have someone whom she sees loves her not for her goddess characteristics but as a woman; she and Stewart almost have an affair the eve before her second wedding.

To make a long story short: the wedding is called off, it is revealed that Grant only showed up to protect Hepburn and her family from being blackmailed and scrutinized by scandal, and it is Hepburn and Grant - the original couple of the story - who are now wedded publicly (they had eloped before). In the last moments of the movie, such a wedding is possible only by Hepburn’s completing her transformation, shedding off the former loftiness to be able to truly love as a woman, and receive love from a man. 

OK, this is a movie with lots of turns and important scenes, and is quite impossible to summarize adequately. Just go watch it. It’s also not apparent at first why on earth this movie makes it to this list. It starts with a divorce, shows a father who is a womanizer, almost shows the heroine in an affair, and ends with the original marriage. I promise you, though: this movie made it to the list for different reasons besides “the original marriage was publicly ratified and she didn’t marry someone else!” Rather, The Philadelphia Story made it to this list because it emphasizes two characteristics of marriage already recognized in other canonical movies: fidelity and humanness.

First, fidelity. Remember back to last week when Random Harvest was featured. There was a short scene there where Coleman almost married someone else during his reverse-amnesia. Garson was just going to stand by and watch it happen; even though she loved him with greater love than is easily found in media, the terms under which she had been bound to him before were now nebulous, and her demanding fulfillment of those vows would merely elicit a legalistic, contractual - and not covenantal - response from Coleman. She was, in essence, “free” to have married Coleman, whereas it was unclear whether he was so free. So she stood by to approximate what she could in fulfilling her vows, even when it was unclear whether he ever could. This is heroism, for again it could be doubted whether he was ever free to marry her, which would have made their initial union null, even though she was genuinely attached to him. 

What was a small portion of Random Harvest is integral to the narrative in The Philadelphia Story. It could be doubtful as to whether Hepburn was free to marry the first time, since the pretenses under which she could have said “yes” were impeded by her unreal and inhumane vision of marriage, womanhood, and consequentially herself. Marriage is created by the freely given consent to be united with another person, ratified by the consummation. Note: the two key words being freely and consent. Her “freedom” to have consented is what is under question; I have no doubt she actually consented to whatever it was she thought she was consenting to. 

Either way, Grant was free to consent in a way that Hepburn simply was not capable. He was transformed by his marriage, and sought to overcome his flaws for her sake. He also continued to stand by and protect her, her family, and her future - whatever that might look like - out of love for her. He remained faithful to what he had vowed to do, above and beyond the legalistic contractualism that sometimes informs what marriage looks like. And, when it was clear that she, too, had finally reached a point of human freedom to consent to a true marital union, he was right there to offer his own love to her once again. 

If fidelity shown in Random Harvest is the first reason this movie made the cut, the humanness from Up is the second reason. Put simply, gods don’t marry. Marriage is a human institution, elevated to that of the supernatural only through the sacraments. Marriage is not only for the sake of bringing forth children, and it is definitely not a mere contract within which persons of moral virtue simply “fit into” and can white-knuckle through any hardship because, well, they don’t have the faults of normal people. Rather, marriage is also for the mutual edification of the spouses, so that they can go from their fallen states to a more perfect union with God, too. In other words, companionship is supposed to provide improvement and soul-changing growth of virtue. Grant underwent this (hence his fidelity); Hepburn was incapable of it until the end. Her final transformation into woman from goddess highlighted how essential it is for a true and good marriage.

There is much more we could talk about The Philadelphia Story. Class struggle, the comparison of the icons of the three male figures, contrapositioned against the fourth male, the image of womanhood vs goddess, and so much more. That is partly why it is so hard to write a sufficient summary of this movie: there is just too much going on in an excellent film. Perhaps I will tackle some of these in later articles. But the reason why I try at all is to induct this movie into what I believe its rightful place is: among the canon of movies masterfully portraying marriage.

When I first set out to publish part 2 of the canon, I had a list of another 4 movies to add to it. In essence, the goal was to double the previous list, adding some newer movies and moving away from exclusively classic films (fantastic as those classics might be). I have failed in that original intention - I have included this week half of what I had hoped, one was still a classic and the other a Disney animation. This being said: if I have failed from my original intent, it is for good reason.

What was initially going to be a 2-part series of marriage in movies has now become a 3-part series. There are enough films to reflect on to actually increase the number of articles it would take to adequately treat with them all. And, for those of you beginning to fear that all these films will be taken from the early-mid 1940’s, I have a word of encouragement: the next installment has several movies from more recent memory. And so, it is with a sense of satisfaction and joy that I can announce that a third article is forthcoming, including the last set of 4 films to add to this canon (at this time)! Stay tuned; OR, head on over to my Substack (Remembering Tomorrow!) to see the next installment!