We
all love It’s a Wonderful Life. We love James
Stewart’s perpetually harassed George Bailey, we love
Lionel Barrymore’s avaricious Potter, we love all the
citizens of Bedford Falls, especially 
when
they aren’t a mad mob of ingrates bent on destroying George’s
bank. But there is something else we also love about Frank Capra’s
bleak 1946 fable of small-town America --- the kindergarten
religiosity represented by the character of the wingless angel
Clarence. And that crush, grown stronger with the distance of
fifty years-plus, says as much about some of the movies in our
neighbourhood theatres now as about the relatively few people
who went to see Clarence when he first arrived on the screen
in the middle of another century.
Looked
at today, the dramatic conceit of a Clarence in an otherwise
naturalistic generational saga can strike us as esoteric to
the extreme. Capra himself was reported to have called the device
“shit” before being pressured by Stewart to proceed
with the project. The director’s initial misgivings might
or might not have been true in the specific case of It’s
a Wonderful Life, but the fact of the matter was, the Clarence
kind of figure was all but a norm for major features turned
out by Hollywood in the 1940s. Both during World War II and
in its aftermath, one story after another featured angels, devils,
spirits or other presences not preoccupied with buying milk
at the grocery store. The most casual list of these pictures,
encompassing every genre from sophisticated comedy to gangster
tales, would have to include Here Comes Mr. Jordan, I Married
a Witch, I Married an Angel, A Guy Named Joe, The Remarkable
Andrew, Happy Land, That’s the Spirit, The Horn Blows
at Midnight, The Human Comedy, Heaven Can Wait, The Cockeyed
Miracle, Angel on My Shoulder, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The
Bishop’s Wife, Down to Earth, and Portrait of
Jennie. When he wasn’t being shocked, shocked by
the gambling going on at Rick’s saloon, Claude Rains in
particular specialized in walking through walls and materializing
in the middle of rooms --- and this was many years after portraying
The Invisible Man.
Analyses
of this absorption with other-worldly characters have hardly
been lacking over the years. When these figures appeared in
pictures made during the war, they supposedly reflected a popular
anxiety for a divinely guided victory over the Nazis and Fascists.
When they popped up in postwar tales, they were said to be symptoms
of the spiritual malaise afflicting the mass consumer society
beneath all its new material gains. In other words, through
subsequent outside punditry as much as within the plot machinations
of the films themselves, as sociology as much as cinematic drama,
the articulate figures who spoke in precise cadences, usually
wore black and had a penchant for knowing how races would turn
out before they were run, just about explained everything. As
for the human beings all these spooks were dealing with, they
were the opposite of American self-sufficiency --- their most
noble feats negotiated by visible heavenly emissaries, their
lowest ambitions charted by Satanic tempters, their bumbling
around otherwise viewed as vacuous life sentences.
It
is within this context that we have come to appreciate Clarence
and It’s a Wonderful Life as a holiday bauble
--- not because the ending takes place around a Christmas tree
or because one particular TV station has managed to demonstrate
the meaning of private in public domain for its exclusive showings
between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but because it responds
to eggnog sentimentality for depicting the unreal as physically
real (viz.. see Santa Claus). The further time has removed us
from what was fairly typical story-telling in the 1940s, the
more singular the mix of naturalism and fantasy has impressed
us as being. There was really a period when people didn’t
think twice about objectifying their beliefs that way? Wow!
The
descendants of these almost-flesh-and-blood objectifications
in our own time have had little of the divine or demonic about
them; indeed, apart from the farcical God of a Morgan Freeman
following the standup routines of George Burns, they have been
non-existent. Instead, the cinematic reach for the esoteric
has been very humanly grounded. On one level, we have had (over
and over again) The Sixth Sense notion of a dead protagonist
being the last to realize he is dead --- something Claude Rains
would have straightened him out about very fast. But even more
prominent have been the approaches to the paranormal through
the technological, in both belief and representation. Computer
effects weren’t invented just to fall in the middle of
cyberspace for sparking debate about whether they actually fell.
The computerized razzle-dazzle of an Inception, not
to mention all its earlier matrixes with and without a capital
M, has no time for kindergarten religiosity. Now it is the science
that is kindergarten, and with the same dedication to passing
off block games and erector set activities as profound insight.
If human behaviour isn’t shown to be quite as helpless
and vacuous on its own as back in the 1940s, it is shown to
be arrogantly dangerous and still in need of a cautioning hand.
Or, failing that and too many failures at the box office, even
more sophisticated technology!
Welcome
to Potterville.
Also
by Donald Dewey:
Being
and Disconnectedness
History
of Humour in the Cinema
Cartoon
Power
