Nobody in that room argues with him

The purest `haunted` case in film, and the clearest demonstration of the thing the whole film is actually about, which is not the rabbit. Elwood P. Dowd has an invisible companion six foot three and a half inches tall, and takes him drinking and introduces him to almost everyone he meets. The mechanism that keeps this intact is **not** the animal. It is the **complicity of the people around him**, and the film is unusually honest about how cheap that complicity is. His sister Veta "in exasperation, admits to the attending psychiatrist, Dr. Sanderson, that she sees Harvey once in a while herself" - which is not the same as seeing him, and is not meant to be, and is enough for her to be committed in Elwood's place while he walks out free. Dr. Chumley, the head of the sanatorium, discovers the mistake, convinced that Elwood is insane, searches the town for him, finds him at his favourite bar - and then, four hours later, "Chumley had wandered off with Harvey after several rounds of drinks." The professional sent to certify the delusion goes off with the delusion. Every bond in this corpus needs somebody to maintain it, and this one is maintained by the fact that **nobody will say the sentence.** Elwood's belief costs nothing as long as everyone around him declines to price it. Three more things make it the right entry and not merely a nice one. The rabbit is not a rabbit: Elwood describes Harvey as a **puca**, a creature of Celtic mythology, and the play spells it *pookah* (p-o-o-k-a) with the character Wilson reading the definition aloud from a dictionary on page 33 of Chase's playbook - so even the ontology is a thing somebody made up and passed on. Wikipedia's own summary of the source hedges exactly as an encyclopedia should: Elwood "claims to have an unseen (and presumably imaginary) friend", and a neutral reference hedging is worth more than a confident one. And the performance is layered further than most people notice: a real man playing a man who is trusted, who converses with a thing nobody else in the room can see, while the audience half-believes him because James Stewart's face is doing work no script controls. Two corrections to the record while we are here, because they were nearly got wrong: the 1950 film was directed by **Henry Koster**, not Cukor, and Mary Chase's play is **1944**, premiered 1 November 1944 at the 48th Street Theatre, with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama awarded 1945 - not 1946, which several sources imply.