The Books of My Life: I Do and I Don't

 

Jeanine Basinger, for my money, is one of the most insightful cultural historians and sociologists writing on Hollywood film these days. In her book I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies (New York: Knopf, 2012), Basinger takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening romp through the history of the Hollywood marriage film mercifully free of the psychoanalytic jargon that so often makes academic books on films far more tedious than the films they are analysing, a remarkable achievement in and of itself.  

In I Do and I Don't Basinger explores the history and culture of the Hollywood marriage movie from the silent era of marriage movies, cautionary tales to be laughed at and be sad about, to the 21st century the post-marriage marriage movie. At the heart of the Hollywood marriage film genre, Basinger argues, is the couple, the men and women who are either getting married, the I dos as Basinger calls them, or getting divorced, the I don'ts, and the dramatic and comedic situations impacting the couple in the Hollywood marriage movie, namely, infidelity, in-laws, children, incompatibility, class, addiction, and murder. Basinger explores how the genre with its couples and its situations changed as a result of the impact of the coming of sound, the impact of World War II with its absent husbands overseas and its home front wives fighting to defeat the Nazis, and the impact of the sexual revolution in the 1950, 1960s and after. Along the way Basinger explores the spectacle and ritual of consumption in Hollywood films,  furniture, furs, and hats that populate classic era Hollywood marriage movies, and she explores the fairy tale have your cake--we will show you society's ideal norms and rules, norms and rules you should live your lives by--and the eat it too--please feel free to live your life momentarily through the characters on screen breaking society's norms and rules even though it won't last and everything will return to normal (pun intended) in the end--nature of the Hollywood marriage movie, both of which had appeal to the audiences who paid to watch the Hollywood marriage movie, a sociological approach to Hollywood film that is far more compelling, at least to me, than the oedipal fantasies of todays almost cultic psychoanalytic critics.

As was the case with Basinger's books on the World War Two genre and the women's film, I found I Do and I Don't one of the best books on Hollywood film I have read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in media history, film history, Hollywood history, approaches to popular culture, and particularly to those who find the hegemonic mode of film analysis these days not particularly enlightening.