Raising Arizona (1987) is Like Prescription Medication for My Film Allergies

Howdy, reader! I’m starting with a quick note this week to let you know that I’ll be spoiling significant things from Raising Arizona, which is a film that doesn’t exactly hinge on plot surprises, but I still think it’s best experienced without any prior knowledge. If this one has eluded you all these years, give it a watch and come back! I’ll be waiting.

Folks, it’s mid-September. And in Alabama, that usually means we’re still seeing temperatures well north of 90 degrees. But somehow, someway, September chose to mostly cooperate this year, and what we refer to as “false fall” turned out to be the real thing—relative to September expectations, at least.

And that means it’s allergy season!* So today I would like to discuss film allergies.

You may call them something else, but we all have them. Certain tropes, devices, or structural commonalities that simply don’t work for us most of the time, if not every time. They don’t make the movies in question bad or unenjoyable, but they can definitely lessen our enjoyment when they show up.

The cinema doctors have diagnosed me with three significant allergens (that they know of).** But in my experience, film allergies don’t operate in the same way that biological allergies do. For me, there are instances when a film uses a trope that I don’t like and does it so well that I can’t help but love it.

Case in point: Raising Arizona employs not one but two of my least favorite things in a film. Both at the same time in a couple of instances. But it does them so well that the result is a perfect movie.

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Because I am allergic to voice-over monologues. And Raising Arizona doesn’t just start with one—it goes on for 11 minutes leading up to the title card. It begins with a very simple introduction by the central character, played by Nicolas Cage: “My name is H.I. McDunnough,” he says as he’s thrust into position for a mugshot. “Call me Hi.” It ain’t exactly Goodfellas, but for a man who shares a name with a common greeting, it’s an appropriate origin.

But this extended voice-over doesn’t fall victim to the trappings of most internal monologues. Hi doesn’t share any deep thoughts in an attempt to establish a tone or give any sort of speech to mine for cheap character development. Instead, he simply gives us a history lesson—from his “recidivism” to meeting his future wife at the police station to their unfulfilled desire to have children—so that by the time that title card comes up, the two central characters and their primary quest (stealing a baby [Nathan Jr.] from a well-off couple who just had quintuplets) have been well established.

And it works. In fact, it’s excellent. It’s pretty damn funny too. If the script had been written by anyone lesser than the Coen Brothers and the lines had been read by anyone other than Cage, it would probably feel like hackneyed garbage. Thankfully, that isn’t the case.

Hi’s internal monologue only returns two more times in the film, and both of them are dream sequences—which brings us to my other film allergy.*** I usually can’t stand movie dreams. When the audience understands up front that they’re watching a dream, it’s less offensive, even though the dream is typically used to convey something symbolic that the screenwriter didn’t know how to demonstrate otherwise. When viewers are tricked into thinking a dream is reality, though, it’s often a terrible excuse for a misleading jump scare (on top of the weak thematic junk).

Thankfully, the two dream sequences in Raising Arizona are the former kind. The first one begins with a shot of Hi and his wife Ed (played brilliantly by Holly Hunter) asleep in their bed; the monologue even begins with “That night, I had a dream.” And he dreams of “the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse” in a montage that establishes the film’s villain (Leonard Smalls, a grizzled bounty hunter) in a similar manner to the opening voice-over. Then Hi opens his eyes and finds Ed comforting their stolen infant with a beautiful lullaby.

The Smalls character is the film’s only real departure into a sort of folksy magical realism, so it kinda makes sense that Hi would dream of him before eventually facing off with him. Again, it’s the sort of thing that would fall apart in lesser hands, but the Coens (even on just their second film) knew exactly what they were doing.

But it’s the film’s final sequence—another dream, anchored by another voice-over—that really makes Raising Arizona an exception to my cinematic conditions.

It begins the same way the first one does—Hi saying “That night, I had a dream” over another shot of him and Ed sleeping peacefully—but instead of being visited by a hellish vision, he’s “light as the ether.” Hi is now “a floating spirit, visiting things to come,” accompanied by Carter Burwell’s beautiful rendition of Ed’s earlier lullaby. He sees (and we see) supporting characters from the film returning to a sort of karmic equilibrium. And he sees Nathan Jr. as a child playing with a football on Christmas morning that he and Ed have gifted him anonymously. And he sees Nathan Jr. excelling on the football field as a young adult. Finally, he sees a “cloudier” picture “years, years away” of he and Ed in their old age, surrounded by their children and their many grandchildren for a holiday feast.

And then Hi wakes up. It’s a beautiful monologue.**** And given the adventure that the viewer has just gone on—one where the protagonists didn’t succeed in their quest, though they remain together and avoid an even worse fate—it’s downright cathartic. When I first saw this film as a teenager, the final montage didn’t move the needle much. As a middle-aged man, it brings me to the verge of tears.

So I guess it really comes down to the chef, not the ingredients.***** And it’s evidence that maybe it’s not such a good idea to evaluate art in absolutes. As with the films themselves, success depends on the execution more than the idea. Let’s just not fall prey to recidivism when it comes to screenplay crimes, okay Hollywood?

*In my mind, it’s kinda always allergy season, but I did the research (i.e. one Google search) and September is indeed one of the peaks of common allergens, at least here in Alabama.

**My third major film allergy, which we will not be discussing today, is flashbacks. Maybe one day I’ll find an excuse to write about flashbacks, but suffice it to say I think they’re almost always lazy and/or dumb.

***Unless you count his reading of the note he leaves for Ed when he’s preparing to abandon her and Nathan Jr. Which I don’t. Those words were meant for Ed first and the audience second.

****“And I don’t know. You tell me. This whole dream. Was it wishful thinking? Was I just fleeing reality like I know I’m liable to do? But me and Ed. We can be good too. And it seemed real. It seemed like us. And it seemed like…well, our home.” 🥲

*****Another perfect Coen Brothers movie, No Country For Old Men, begins with a voice-over monologue and ends with the main character describing a dream. (Sam Van Hallgren of the Filmspotting podcast took the comparison even further.)

Raising Arizona is now streaming on Hulu and Hoopla, and it is available to rent elsewhere.