Anagnorisis

        Recognition scenes, in which characters suddenly detect schemes in their worlds that they did not previously understand, can involve the characters' changed identification of others in the plot.  Almost inevitably, though, that change in identifying others also changes characters' perceptions of themselves as the identifiers, judges of character, knowers of themselves.  Sometimes these scenes can become so familiar as to be comic rather than tragic, a characteristic of classically influenced plots which the Cohen brothers took advantage of in the generically unstable Raising Arizona (1987).  As the movie veers between tragedy and comedy, the protagonist, Nicholas Cage, finds himself pursued by a bounty hunter played by Randall "Tex" Cobb.  At a crucial moment, as the bounty hunter is about to crush Cage in his arms, Cage's character grasps and removes the arming pins of hand grenades attached to the bounty hunter's vest just as both see identical "Woody Woodpecker" tattoos on each other's shoulders, implying (by anagnorisis convention) that they are somehow related, perhaps brothers.  The "brothers" spring apart in a double-anagnorisis, but revelation comes too late for the bounty hunter, alas, because he cannot shed the vest of his profession before it destroys him.