Aesthetic Experience, Film Comedy and Suffering in <i>Sullivan’s Travels</i> : The Prisoners’ Laughter

This article examines the way aesthetic experience is represented in contrast to direct experience in Preston Sturges’s film Sullivan’s Travels (1941). The film portrays the efforts of a successful Hollywood film director to acquire the experience of suffering in order to make a film with social significance. The film suggests a contrast between lived experience and aesthetic experience in conveying a political message and social knowledge. Framed in terms of Jacques Rancière’s Kantian aesthetics, I defend the view that aesthetic representations provide a specific link to knowledge and politics that is mediated and indeterminate. Sturges’s film complicates the desire for direct experience by playing on conventional forms, genres and tropes in Hollywood comedy films. I argue that Sullivan’s Travels confronts us with pleasure in the depiction of suffering, articulating the specifically aesthetic connection between experience, knowledge and politics.