>Don't sneer at Frank Capra. He hadn't a bourgeois bone in his body.
>(Lots of sentimental bones, but that's another story. I'm sentimental
>myself.) There are few indictments of the corruptions of power more savage
>than _Mr Smith goes to Washington._
As a post-Christmas gift to LBOers, here's Ray Carney's insightful take on Capra's take on capitalism, as represented in It's a Wonderful Life:
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The first hint that Potter ... is less a person than a mere narrative convenience, a way of representing a general principle of opposition, is that although we are once or twice told that his full name is Harry C. Potter, he is referred to for almost the entire film only by his last name. He has no more intimate personal identity--no family, friends, or relatives--than that single, stark, unadorned last name would suggest.
>From James Agee, who reviewed the film during its original release in 1946,
to Elliot Stein, who wrote about it thirty-five years later, this aspect of
the film has been misunderstood.... Stein snidely argued that the point of
It's a Wonderful Life was that the "only thing wrong with capitalism is
Lionel Barrymore"--who plays Potter. The problem with either Agee's or
Stein's approach is that it personalizes a dramatic predicament whose
essential interest is its movement beyond personalities. It would be hard
to think of a more profound misreading of the text Capra presents, and one
that is especially unfair insofar as it trivializes and sentimentalizes the
film by treating it this way and then proceeds to accuse Capra of the
trivialization and sentimentalization the critic himself has perpetrated.
Stein is inadvertently right in saying that It's a Wonderful Life is
essentially about "what is wrong with capitalism."... What is wrong with
capitalism, according to Capra, is, of course, nothing traceable to or
localizable in any individual but rather its fundamental repression of our
free imaginative energies, its demands that we relentlessly channel them
into socially and ethically responsible careers of action. [...]
It's a Wonderful Life is not even obliquely about an abuse of power or the perversion of a particular system of relationships. George's town, his occupation, and his daily routine are normal in every respect, but it is the potential frustrations and repressiveness of normal, ordinary life that Capra makes the subject of his film. It is the definition of normal life that is at fault, if anything, Capra suggests. [...]
As Capra shows in the dreamland sequence, it is not that Potter is unaware of or indifferent to matters of sexuality and biology but that he is interested in them only in terms of their potential for being translated into capital. ... [I]n the dreamland sequence, Capra shows that Potter's capitalism can handle [the biological and sexual] realms too, as long as they can be converted into abstract, capitalistic forms of accumulation. Pottersville, the town that Bedford Falls has been turned into in the dreamland episode, is Capra's 1940s version of today's Vegas, Forty-Second Street, and L.A. Strip, with their massage parlors, trashy bars, and expensive cheap thrills. Sex is merchandized in girlie shows, romance in dime-a-dance parlors; exoticism, ethnicity, and the lure of the strange or distant are marketed in sleazy "theme" nightclubs and bars; and even the excitement of raw human aggression is organized and made profitable through sports like boxing matches.
Pottersville includes in a perverted form all of the adventure, romance, and excitement that George dreams of living in the whole preceding film (and in which he is utterly unable to participate in the daylight world of Bedford Falls), but it has all been harnessed to the capitalist project and cashed in on. Potter is interested in sex and violence and adventure, but only insofar as they are convertible into marketable commodities. ... Anything that can be converted, at whatever cost to the instincts of the common good, is converted; anything that resists capitalistic denaturing and commodification--as to tender, loving, personal intimacies--is renounced and repudiated. [...]
... Violet is a profligate sexual spender, and Potter is a miserly sexual hoarder, but they perform frictionlessly together in the same capitalistic system, and in fact each needs the other to complete the cycle.
Potter and Violet, his mirror image, do not define the only possibilities within capitalism in the film. Sam Wainwright is a local playboy who combines Potter's financial success with Violet's eroticism and, in doing so, dramatizes the argument I have just made about their potential complementarity. Both Violet and Potter tempt George at specific moments, but each is incomplete in some way. In suggesting that there can be a reconciliation between the fulfillment of instinctual desires and the long-term financial and social accumulations of capitalism, Sam is for George far and away the most imaginatively disturbing of all of the characters in the film. He is a millionaire world-traveler and industrialist who lives the dreams of travel, glamour, romance, and wealth about which George only reads and dreams. He has made a fortune in plastics, manufacturing airplane windshields during the war, and yet he also has a blond on his arm throughout the film (a different one each time we see him). His manufacturing [of] windshields demonstrates his trick of turning other people's adversity into his own personal form of virtue. While George supervises scrap-rubber drives and plays airraid warden in Bedford Falls, Sam makes a killing on the murder and bloodshed of the war.
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