In Frye’s account of comic resolution, the concluding “festival” stood out to me. In ancient Greek comedies, both an individual and a social issue are resolved under a “general atmosphere of reconciliation”, which the festival is both a codification and expression of (Frye 60). The same is true of the remarriage (with marriage being a ritual in itself), where this is made possible due to “a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival” (Cavell 19). The importance of a final social ritual is not just in the celebration of the individual– the lover’s (re)togetherness– but in the formation of a new social order free from the obstacles that the lover’s faced. These two readings seem to ask for connections to be made with the past readings, especially with regards to the idea of transgression. But without gratuitous quotations, it is clear that the finality of Frye and Cavell’s romantic festival comes from its washing away of transgressions by this performance of a cleansing ritual and the construction of a new, freer social order.
There is no more complete comic festival, a celebration of the individual lovers’ triumph and the simultaneous reconciliation and birth of a cleansed social order, than the Catalina Wine Mixer. Step Brothers follows the unbinding effect Brennan and Dale have on those around them, both as destruction and creation. For Brennan and Dale, their duet solidifies their commitment to brotherly love and to not giving up their youth and whimsy. It is only through the partnership of the two that they have a social unit which accommodates their lives, which had up to then transgressed against their social structures.
Their defiant musical number is exactly as Dale hopes, it is “beautiful music for a sad world”, which we also witness wrangling the joy out of the crushing social structure of normalcy and mundanity. The vignettes that pop out of the other characters’ minds reveal repressed desires– whether of new romance, brotherly acceptance, or rekindled love. The Catalina Wine Mixer as a festival makes real a social unit for Brennan and Dale, and reveals to the rest of the bound and tense world how a similar “miracle of change may be brought about” (Cavell 23). It is in the temporary irrationality, the dreamlike trance, of the comic ritual that all can visit the “green world” and see “the triumph of life over the waste land”, and live on knowing this possibility of a more free world (Frye 67).
This is modern version of the dance finale in a comedy is a great example. There is one in Bridesmaids as well, a film from a similar time. The joke of the Catalina wine mixer coming to fruition in this movie is shows the utopia which was erupted through the chaos of the film.
I think that Step Brothers is a really good example of the ‘festival’ as a final social ritual, in which a new social order is formed, because, as you mentioned, the new social unit that is formed is based on family, in the form of a brotherly bond between Dale and Brennan. I find that in many examples given in the readings, and indeed other comedies in which this festival event occurs, often the re-forming of a social unit occurs as the reconstruction of broken a family unit.