the melodrama of the unknown man
02/05/2017
What can be asked from life? What desires are permitted within the boundaries of society? What is the most satisfactory condition under which a subject can experience this unrealised and dissatisfactory world? To be understood, perhaps not by many but by at least by one, and to live in a state of collaborative understanding, where motives and yearnings are not questioned, is the greatest channel towards happiness that can be available to us. Understanding - to be physically intimate without shame. To find poignant expression of our interior lives not only through art, literature and music but on the tongues of our lovers and friends - the joy of mutual articulation. Kinship kindles joy and freedom within a person; kinship with expression produces the most profound love for living. Or, in the words of Cavell, “the achievement of human happiness requires not the perennial and fuller satisfaction of our needs as they stand but the examination and transformation of those needs”[1] – a feat only achieved by lifelong, tireless and mutual communication.
This is not an easy thing to attain, especially for those who are marginalised or may not conform to society’s norms. These marginalised people are denied this undervalued privilege of understanding that may grant them happiness. These are the invisible people who will never inhabit the spaces that they covet. They must remain unknown, not only to others but always to themselves as their desires – even the simplest as being understood, are not permitted. To not be able to know oneself creates a great lack in a life – effectively enacting a void of communication. How can these unknown people ever achieve self-reliance or ever understand self-improvement, when the self itself is beneath a shroud, which they are incapable of lifting?
Stanley Cavell, a 20th century proponent of the principles of moral perfectionism by way of Emerson and Wittgenstein, combats the dilemma of the actualization of self knowledge for an unknown individual within his book Contesting Tears – The Melodrama Of The Unknown Woman [2]. In this book, he addresses a number of previous works, mostly sourced from the cinematic landscape of the late 30’s and early 40’s that form a genre for him, along with a founding myth that can tie them together. He uses these works to illustrate and explain the purpose of his conception of moral perfectionism. The strategy behind Cavell’s use of films as the symbolic form by which to explore these very real questions of self-reliance in a contemporary society is the very perfectionist nature of the relationship between audience and the film as exemplar. According to Cavell, we can enter into a transformative conversation with a film that has the potential to leave both parties affected and improved[3]. Films can promote empathy and understanding in this way, as they provide the viewer with a new way of thinking – a learning experience which can lead them to imagine a future, improved self, as influenced by the lessons of the film. Of course, Cavell maintains a number of rules as to what makes a ‘good film’ – or a film in which this exemplar/student relationship can be effectively enacted[4]. The most important rule proposed by Cavell is that these ‘good’ films should depict normal, commonly experienced lives and small tragedies, projecting every-day dilemmas that the audience can consider and apply their own knowledge to. Ordinariness, and ordinary language, is where Cavell sees the possibilities of moral perfectionism.
For Cavell, the great driving force behind his thematic presentation of an unknown woman melodrama is a painful, realistic sense of irony. Irony serves to isolate the central figure from those around her within the narrative, creating that very misunderstood unknowness that drives the story. However, Cavell also notes that not only does irony isolate the woman in the narrative from her fellow players, it isolates her from the audience in a particular, purposeful way [5]. The melodrama, whilst being watched, becomes a question of what she knows, how she knows and how she escapes doubt about what she knows – which leads as audience to turn these questions to themselves, projecting onto this an almost blank canvas of what they would do in all the situations presented upon the screen. Unknowness is an expressiveness that demands an acknowledgement that is sometimes beyond our reach. In this way, unknowness becomes proof of existence.
Cavell’s particular brand of moral perfectionism – the form that speaks to a true blooded, mid century American understanding – has been utilized, or perhaps grotesquely exploited, by the contemporary American conservatives and their media proponents. The ‘underdog’ narrative that is so prevalent within the films that Cavell explores – particularly the films scrutinized within Pursuits Of Happiness[6], the late 30’s, 40’s and 50’s popular cinematic fare that Cavell has so much fondness for – has been bastardized and applied to many various media forms to appeal to the nostalgic American public. It has been diluted entirely to its bare bones, missing the meat of equality and mutuality that gave it such flavour.
The concept that conversation has the power to transform the participants into becoming actualized individuals has seemed to imply that those who talk the most, and talk the loudest, can brainwash their listeners – without understanding that conversation is a mutual engagement. The American right can eagerly latch onto the vein of Cavell’s teaching that can lean slightly to anti-intellectualism, the one that denies contextuality or the ownership over certain values – certainly, for some feminist academics, such as Modleski, Cavell’s work on ‘female movies’ and his denial of their contextualised positions could have been seen as politically insensitive during the gender turmoil of the time[7].
These contemporary conservatives deny the ideal that communication is a two-sided practise that is always in a state of progress. The individual can never reach a perfect state, and only though conversation with others and the attempt to communicate can any improvement in these individuals be achieved. Everyone must be listened to, and if you fail to communicate to a certain group, it is not their loss but your own failure that you must rectify. Only by communication can the sickening scepticism of life be overcome.
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) is so important for moral perfectionism within the current political landscape of today through its dedication to its central character, Chiron. By presenting Chiron’s unknowness, a new empathy and understanding is encouraged on the part of the viewer as we, who may not have ever experienced any of the tribulations that Chiron does within the narrative, are encouraged to be involved in a two way conversation with the film. Alternatively, those who have undergone any element of Chiron’s struggle – be it with sexuality or his place within society – can identify with Chiron and feel represented and included within the conversation by a film that sensitively depicts the dilemmas faced by such a character.
Is the black, poor, gay man, symbolized in Moonlight by Chiron, one of the most marginalised figures within contemporary American society? By being black, Chiron is already at a disadvantage in a world that values whiteness over all. His race has already marked him as not worthy of having a subjective identity. His class only serves to silence him further in the eyes of the cultural conscious – those who are poor and uneducated are not granted the opportunity or the forums by which to converse with others in a way that would progress moral perfectionism as put forward by Cavell. By being gay, Chiron is in danger of being abandoned by his only viable lifeline, the black community, due to the powerful influence of toxic hypermasculinity[8] that denies not only homosexuality but also male fallibility and sensitivity – even empathy, on a whole, must be shunned. Economically speaking, due to his social situation the only way that he can have a successful career is to become that bastion of hypermasculinity – a fully fledged, muscled and grill-wearing, drug dealer. If he were to acknowledge his sexuality, even privately, this channel would not be available to him and he would not be able to physically survive without it. Chiron sacrifices his desires and dreams – his cognitive life- to keep his body alive in a world full of closed doors and turned backs. He is, therefore, one of the least ‘known’ figures of the contemporary American consciousness – not only does the audience know very little about his status or his internal life, but he can never fully know it himself as he is in a constant state of suppression and silence. Like the unknown woman within Cavell’s key melodramas, Chiron is always quiet. He barely ever speaks, and on the rare occasions that he does, he is closed, his plodding utterances designed specifically to give nothing away. Only in fleeting, valuable moments, with his understanding mentor Juan or his lover, Kevin, does he allow a glimpse into the heart he keeps beneath monk-like solitude.
Unknowness according to Cavell is tied up within transformation and dualism – in Chiron’s case, the three stages of his life (separated by contemplative title screens as Little, Chiron and Black, his masculine ‘gangster’ moniker) and the hope of the fourth. In a film that is aware of its existence as a film – as a piece of art – such as Moonlight is – this unknowness is not for the other – it is a proof of existence for Chiron. There is recreation there, the unknown character can give birth to new selves within the narrative - a metamorphosis. The first self is condemned to a mode of existence that is less than a person. They stake their lives on the possibility of envisioning a better self – this vision allows them to become their second self. Therefore, the ghost of the future allows them to become themselves. According to Cavell, there are four steps involved within melodrama. These are; doubleness, self-transcendence, avoidance of fixation or repetition, and an openness to the unknown future[9]. These steps can be traced within Chiron’s journey – his double life of his public and private (homosexual) self, his transformation into the masculine, strong ‘Black’, his encounters with the demons of his past that deny repetition and his openness to his reconciliation with Kevin, during which he admits to have never known himself in a powerful scene in with Kevin asks “Who is you, Chiron?” and he responds, in his most eloquent moment within the film, that he is not sure but expresses a fervent wish to find out (see Fig.1). As stated in Matteo Falomi’s essay ‘Perfectionism And Moral Reasoning’ in the European Journal Of Pragmatism And American Philosophy “To put the contrast more sharply, one might say that while moral theories tries to answer questions of the form “What ought I to do?”, perfectionism concerns itself with questions of the form “Who am I?”[10]. Through both Kevin’s direct question and the premature advice of his mentor, Juan, who tells a young Chiron “You gotta decide for yourself who you are. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.”, Chiron is constantly being confronted with this very perfectionist question, one that he cannot even allow himself to answer but, in his reconciliation, he may begin to understand.
Figure 1
There is a comparison to be made between the dominating mother figure within the melodrama of the unknown woman and the mother figure within Moonlight. Performed masterfully by the British actress Naomi Harris, it is obvious throughout the narrative of Moonlight that she serves as an emblem of love, hate, guilt, pity and desire for our unknown protagonist. This is encapsulated in a scene from the chapter that portrays Chiron’s childhood – ‘Little’. The scene is devoid of any diegetic noise, and shows Chiron’s mother screaming noiselessly at a prone Chiron from within the strong coloured boundaries of a bright pink corridor whilst a symphony, perhaps the sounds of Chiron’s internal mind, plays. She is confined and unleashed, a monster and a victim all at once.
Through her drug addiction, Chiron’s mother forces him into unhappy positions, often leaving him alone whilst she disappears to entertain men or to smoke crack both granting him with a prodigal independence, which is illustrated by a scene in which a young Chiron draws his own DIY bubble bath with dish soap, and robbing him of what little financial capital he has been mercifully granted. She also infers to Juan, the saviour figure of the narrative, that she knows of Chiron’s sexuality, asking him why he thinks the other children pick on Chiron, telling him to take notice of ‘the way he walks’ - an almost stereotypically homophobic statement that she spits out with a mixture of venom and pain. Despite being aware that Chiron may be gay, even from childhood, she never reaches out to him or attempts to give him a piece of that understanding which he desperately craves, instead silencing the conversation and making Chiron alert to the concept that this is a part of himself that he must supress. This creates an ironic misunderstanding, or understanding, as described by Cavell as key to the melodrama. She is evidently embarrassed by him and he by her which becomes a mutually excruciating relationship in which neither party can ever feel fulfilled within society – she considers herself a failure of a mother for raising such a boy, and he feels her to blame for some of his discomfort with himself. However, the reconciliation and a confirmation of unrequited, motherly love lessens Chiron’s burden in a way that diverges from the typical melodrama.
As Cavell has noted, the melodrama of the unknown woman relies entirely on the irony of human identity and the failure of communication. It also could be seen, especially in the case of the film Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) that the narrative drive is a woman’s search for a mother or the mothers gaze, which is often far different (nurturing and understanding) than the gaze that she endures from her own mother. This can also be translated into the relationship within the viewer of this sort of melodrama with the screen – the screen can be identified as a field of communication between women. This was allegorized by Cavell in Stella Dallas as the lit windows in the final sequence, displaying Stella’s daughters wedding to her estranged, unknown, isolated mother[11]. It is the search for a mothers gaze.
How could this be seen within the film Moonlight, with the gender, class and race so alien? According to Cavell, fathering and mother are not the same as when a son becomes a father he easily transcends the role without complication. Sons are not afforded the same complex intertwinement with the psyche of their mothers that daughters may be burdened with. Cavell pays a lot of attention to the role of mutual mothering between daughter and mother within these films, they often portray the daughters as both receivers and givers of care. This is true of Moonlight as Chiron often enacts a caring position for his drug addicted mother, draping a blanket over her when he finds her sleeping in the living room at night, begrudgingly giving her money and visiting her in rehab, no matter how painful he may find this encounter. However, Cavell, due to the limitations of his time, is quite restrictive when it comes to gender, which is a lot more openly understood in the contemporary context. He should not have to take the ‘daughter’ role in some hackneyed approximation of femininity, made all the more problematic by the archaic association of homosexuality and the female, instead it should be opened to more gender neutral terms than Cavell allowed at the point of his writing. Perhaps the gaze that Chiron craves is not strictly mothering, but caring. Once again, the framework insists on expansion to encompass changing social boundaries.
The theme of reconciliation connotes a key difference between Moonlight and any of the melodramas of the unknown woman that Cavell explores within ‘Contesting Tears’ but it is one that I find important, especially considering the other key Cavell founding myth - that of the comedy of remarriage, explored within his book Pursuits of Happiness. The two myths – that of the unknown woman and that of the remarriage, are almost intertwined within this film – offering new life to its performance of a path of self-reliance. The definite element of remarriage within Moonlight is found in the relationship between Kevin and Chiron. They, like the couples of the comedies of remarriage, have known each other since they were both young children – seemingly forever (see Fig.2 and Fig. 3). Kevin seems to be the only person, aside from Juan, who not only understands Chiron, but one who makes an active effort to do so and this striving is evident throughout all stages of Chiron’s existence. Even their shared dialogue has the snap and the fire, the easy back and forth that can be recognised from a comedy of remarriage. At the end of Moonlight, their reunion is where I find the main transformation of this melodramatic form.
Figure 2 (top), Figure 3 (bottom)
I feel that this combination of Cavell’s myths, however ambiguous it may be, to be a vital transformation in the illustration of contemporary moral perfectionism is because it allows a new freedom and happiness for a such a specifically marginalized and ignored character. Due to his marginality, Chiron can never achieve self-reliance by leaving; he can never be free in the world without the conversation and understanding that he craves. He needs a marriage, of some form, to be free. He needs Kevin to show him that he can be understood before he can begin to know himself. He cannot reject the world in the traditional way that the Unknown Woman, most importantly in Cavell’s understanding of the much referred to leaving scene within Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’[12], must. Chiron is not safe to act as a singular agent of his change. He does not have the strength alone to begin his journey.
Considering the typical leading man in this Cavellian film genre, Kevin provides a far more nuanced male character than normally scene. He too has an element of unknowness to his character and he is in fact up to the task of helping Chiron – if the world allows for it. Kevin had no choice but to reject and deny Chiron in the key moment in the film in which Kevin is forced to beat Chiron at school and drastically change Chiron’s life. It was not a choice made for personal gain or through simple ignorance, but a choice made for survival. These melodramas work by negation or a fundamental misunderstanding. Chiron interprets Kevin’s actions – not as a defensive shield for the both of them, but as an aggressive and hateful attack. However, their reconciliation bypasses this betrayal in a way rarely enjoyed within a film of this genre. Chiron’s acceptance of being ‘taught’ by Kevin, of being helped by him to discover his identity, is a crucial difference.
The beating scene is key as a turning point within the film as it would normally function, a channel for transformation and a step towards self realization, but it does not. In this rapid sequence, Chiron, who has been heavily bullied not only because of the elements of his sexuality that his peers seem to sniff on him, despite his efforts, is set up for a beating by his main antagonist to be administered by none other than his only friend and first lover, Kevin. Kevin is pressured to beat Chiron badly and does so both regretfully and enthusiastically – seemingly aware that this pain both to Chiron and to himself is a temporary one compared to what will come for them if he does not carry out this savage duty. Chiron, morally and physically destroyed by Kevin, whom he had previously bestowed the sensitive the task of unearthing his burgeoning sexuality and therefore his soul, now feels like any chance for understanding or love have been exhausted in this great betrayal. He retaliates, not against Kevin, but against his bully – smashing a chair over his back in class in a vicious attack and leads to him being escorted from school in the back of a police car, a stunned Kevin watching on. This scene portrays Chiron’s first step towards a hyper-masculine conformity that comes in the form of uncontrollable violence. He has pushed himself even further away from his truth or the possibility of understanding. But the question is, did he have any choice? Again, Cavell’s highlighted irony is performed.
According the Cavell, there are actually only a few key differences in the myths of the Unknown Woman and the remarriage comedy[13], less than their typical final scenes (rejection vs. reconciliation) would normally suggest. The fate of a woman in one of these movies can veer either one or the other, depending on the circumstances of their environment. In fact, the unknown woman melodrama is an adjacent genre and can be described as the inverse of the comedy. The element of sexuality is vital to this inversion – intimacy within these films can either make or destroy the women. In the remarriage comedy, at the point of impotence within intimacy, the woman will become disappointed and will seek revenge[14] – if she manages to overcome her disappointment through conversation and understanding with her partner, they can remake their union and be happy. However, if the revenge she seeks becomes tragic through a lack of conversation and understanding, through ironic twists of circumstance a misunderstanding, she is now the victim of a melodrama.
There is an interesting connection that can be made when looking at the role of time and growth within Moonlight and within other films of the Unknown Melodrama genre – the use of time within the films is strikingly similar. When comparing Moonlight to Letters From An Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948) this becomes very apparent – both films utilize the stages of a person’s life, from childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood, as thematic segments within the film. Both films begin with the protagonists at a place of dangerous innocence. Lise cannot know how her curious obsession with her handsome neighbour will come to both dominate her existence and Chiron cannot know that the way that he is and the way that he acts will cause him to be marked and bullied throughout his adolescence – that his relationship with Juan, whose kind support will temporarily soothe – but will influence Chiron’s unwillingness to look upon himself as who he truly is as he will model himself upon Juan, who serves almost as a ‘Jaquith’ (Now, Voyager, Irving Rapper, 1942) within the narrative, transforming into the same man, albeit with different hidden sensitivities. During their teenage years, the two, Lise and Chiron – united in their isolation – make the blind leaps towards their downfalls as they both begin to love, find themselves mistreated and betrayed and then make a choice that will alter them forever and set them on their lonely paths. Lise chooses to have her child. Chiron chooses to embrace criminality. In their adulthood they are both presented with a test as to the fortitude of their new lifestyles in which they hide and remain denied – their loves return to them and they are both in the role of the examined – tested by temptation- and the role of the examiner. They must discover if now, after all this time, their previous betrayer has finally become worthy of providing them with the understanding and appreciation that they crave. Lise find that he is not. Chiron sees a possibility that he could be and the film ends on a far more optimistic note.
In the Cavellian genre discourse, the difference in the roles of past and memory within the remarriage comedy and the unknown woman melodrama is emblematic of their divergences.[15] In the remarriage comedy, the past is a fun, golden period and in the melodrama, the past is frozen and inescapable[16]. The action will always return to the place of abandonment or transcendence. For Chiron, his past is his mother, Kevin, Juan and Miami but also unlike Lise, not only does he acknowledge these ghosts, they acknowledge him, therefore breaking the narrative chain before it is too late and he is plunged into tragedy. As previously highlighted within this piece as the key transformation of moral perfectionism within Moonlight, the transaction is mutual and rewarding. Lise was only acknowledged by her past in the form of her lover finally reading her letter and understanding her pain when it was far too late for the both of them and only tragedy could remain. Moonlight still has a hope for love and marriage, of a sort, at its core, and a possibility for transcendence for the characters is inherent within this hope. Moonlight symbolically ends with an encounter with Chiron as a child, emblematic of his forgiveness (Fig. 4).
Figure 4
In the tradition of Cavell, who would often insert a literary reference into his understandings of genre, splicing between film, Shakespeare and jazz, it is pertinent when discussing Moonlight to consider the current grand resurgence of James Baldwin. His resurfacing as a relevant figure in popular academic discussion is partly due to a brilliant new documentary that was constituted by unpublished notes on the deaths of three civil rights leaders, all of whom he was personally acquainted with. This new documentary, titled I am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017) is a searing film that confronts the viewer not only with Baldwin’s incredible, almost understated and weary prose about each great but ill-fated man, it displays both resounding images of American lies and also American truth, situating sequences of John Wayne shooting at Indians mere seconds between harrowing real life photography of lynching. This use of film is an important feature as it situates Baldwin as one who lives and writes alongside Cavell but with a vastly different vantage. One of the interesting things about the film I Am Not Your Negro was how little it unveiled about Baldwin’s sexuality, instead choosing to focus solely on his involvement in civil rights. Baldwin could be the first intersectionalist, often combining work about racial inequality with that of homosexuality. Baldwin not only wrote about this marginalised unknown figure – the queer, poor black man – he experienced his own life as one who is unknown in this way[17]. In fact, he had to leave America by escaping to Europe to try and find a piece of the understanding and communication that had so far been denied him. The films that shed so much light on Cavell’s life and confirmed his understanding of the world could not mean to Baldwin what Cavell assumed they could mean for everyone – they were instead a symbol of an America that he rejected. The change in focus of representation from the films upon which Cavell’s work is based to those that can portray modern moral perfectionism in a way that is necessary to extend and refresh Cavell’s concept of perfectionism is vital in refreshing its meaning and purpose. There is only so far that a film can be understood symbolically and the immediate legibility of the founding myths only functions when whiteness, heteronormativity and monogamy exist as the accepted norm. Now society has changed, partly through the work of theorists such as Judith Butler[18], who denied the existence of stable gender and acknowledged the level of performativity require, the media must be challenged, through representation and intersectionality, to reflect the multi-dimensionality of the cinematic audience. The film screen must be expanded if it wishes to reach its new and eager audience.
Both intrinsic to the success of his work as a legible transformation of continental thinkers but also the stumbling block for contemporary readers of Cavell is that very ‘American-ness’ of Cavell’s conception of moral perfectionism. As stated by Anna Cooper in her paper ‘America's Representative Men: Moral Perfectionism, Masculinity and Psychoanalysis in Good Will Hunting’[19], the all-too tangible link between frontiersmanship, patriotism and the ‘self-improvement’ of the likes of Emerson should not be ignored, nor can these concepts and their inherent masculinities. When Cavell wrote Pursuits Of Happiness and Contesting Tears he was conspicuously trying to bring women into the fold of these types of philosophies, attempting to situate the female within this framework, which still remained rigidly heteronormative and strikingly white. Yet, still, those of a different race and sexuality are unrepresented, not only in film but also in political and social reality, as the America that Cavell is situated within deteriorates into a parody-esque simulacrum. Within their work, the likes of James Baldwin and Barry Jenkins are asking, and have been asking for a long time, ‘what about us?’ - what about those who do not fit within categorization, the American unwanted, the swept-under-the-rug, the ignored? They too long to achieve moral perfectionism but they exist in a country that will not recognise them. This is why I believe the work of these artists and the way in which the base formulas and narrative directions of the work are very similar to the founding myths identified by Cavell, but with tweaks that allow inclusion, are greatly important. These divergences from the bounds of not only heteronormativity and race but from tragedy or comedy promote hope and display the ripe importance, of knowing oneself and being completely true to oneself, which is vital to the film landscape of today as it creates empathy and understanding amongst the audience to counteract a highly sceptical and belligerent society.
[1] Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), pp 4
[2] Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).
[3] Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman.
[4] Stanley Cavell. "The Good Of Film." In Cavell On Film, edited by William Rothman, 333-48. New York: SUNY, 2005.
[5] Stanley Cavell, Cities Of Words: Pedagogical Letters On A Register Of The Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005.
[6] Stanley Cavell, Cities Of Words: Pedagogical Letters On A Register Of The Moral Life.
[7] Tania, Modleski and Stanley Cavell. "Critical Inquiry." Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (September 1990): 237-44.
[8] Patrick Derilus, "Sometimes I Cry: The Toxic Hypermasculinity Of Black Men." The Good Men Project . September 12, 2016. Accessed April 19, 2017.
[9] Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman.
[10] Matteo Falomi,."Perfectionism And Moral Reasoning." European Journal Of Pragmatism And American Philosophy 2, no. 2 (2010): 85-100. Accessed April 23, 2017. Pp. 86
[11] Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman pp.211
[12] Stanley Cavell, Cities Of Words: Pedagogical Letters On A Register Of The Moral Life.
[13] Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman pp.115
[14] Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage
[15] Stanley Cavell. Cities Of Words: Pedagogical Letters On A Register Of The Moral Life.pp.395
[16] Stanley Cavell. Cities Of Words: Pedagogical Letters On A Register Of The Moral Life. Pp.396
[17] Michael Cuby. "James Baldwin's Queerness Was Inseparable from His Blackness." Vice, February 4th, 2017. Accessed April 22nd, 2017.
[18] Judith Butler. "Gender, Sexuality, Performance – Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity." Judith Butler: Live Theory. doi:10.5040/9781472545688.ch-002.
[19] Ann Cooper, ‘America's Representative Men: Moral Perfectionism, Masculinity and Psychoanalysis in Good Will Hunting’, Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): 270-88. Accessed March 23, 2017. Film-Philosophy.
FILMOGRAPHY
Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins. United States: A24, 2016. Film.
Now, Voyager. Directed by Irving Rapper. Burbank: Warner Brothers, 1942. Film.
Stella Dallas. Directed by King Vidor. Hollywood: United Artists, 1937. Film.
Letters From An Unknown Woman. Directed by Max Orphuls,
Hollywood: Universal Pictures, 1948. Film.
I Am Not Your Negro. Directed by Raoul Peck. United States: Magnolia Pictures
and Amazon Studios, 2016. Film.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Judith. "Gender, Sexuality, Performance – Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity." Judith Butler: Live Theory. doi:10.5040/9781472545688.ch-002.
Cavell, Stanley. Cities Of Words: Pedagogical Letters On A Register Of The Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005.
Cavell, Stanley, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1969; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977; updated version, 2002)
Cavell, Stanley. "The Good Of Film." In Cavell On Film, edited by William Rothman, 333-48. New York: SUNY, 2005.
Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982)
Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (enlarged edition), including new: “Foreword to the Enlarged Edition” and “More of The World Viewed” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979)
Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981)
Cavell, Stanley, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990)
Cavell, Stanley, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996)
Cooper, Anna. "America's Representative Men: Moral Perfectionism, Masculinity and Psychoanalysis in Good Will Hunting." Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): 270-88. Accessed March 23, 2017. Film-Philosophy.
Cuby, Michael. "James Baldwin's Queerness Was Inseparable from His Blackness." Vice, February 4th, 2017. Accessed April 22nd, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/james-baldwins-queerness-was-inseparable-from-his-blackness.
Derilus, Patrick. "Sometimes I Cry: The Toxic Hypermasculinity Of Black Men." The Good Men Project . September 12, 2016. Accessed April 19, 2017. https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/sometimes-cry-toxic-hypermasculinity-black-men-dg/.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Portable Emerson. Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014.
Falomi, Matteo. "Perfectionism And Moral Reasoning." European Journal Of Pragmatism And American Philosophy 2, no. 2 (2010): 85-100. Accessed April 23, 2017. http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/FALOMI.pdf.
Modleski, Tania, and Stanley Cavell. "Critical Inquiry." Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (September 1990): 237-44.
The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)