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December 19, 2006

It's a Wonderful Counter-History: capsizing Capra

With Christmas and Christmas classics just around the corner, two takes on It's a Wonderful Life. First, ever-pessimistic "The Long Emergency" author Jim Kunstler, at his "Clusterfuck Nation" blog, muses on "the fact that things sometimes end up the opposite of the way we expect." It's a Wonderful Life, he writes, is "a splendid, heartwarming movie in many ways... It was released a year after the awful ordeal of World War [II] ended, which itself had followed the decade-long tribulation of the Great Depression. America was weary but victorious. Democracy and decency had triumphed over manifest evil, but the memory of all that hardship lingered on. [But] the main business of Bailey Building and Loan was financing the first new suburban subdivisions of the automobile age. In one of the movie's major set pieces, George Bailey opens Bailey Park, a tract of car-dependent cookie-cutter bungalows, and turns over the keys to the first house to the Italian immigrant Martini family. Had the story continued beyond 1946 into, say, the 1980s... we would have seen the American landscape ravaged by suburban development, and the main street towns like Bedford Falls gutted and left for dead. That was the perverse outcome of George Bailey's good intentions. We also would have witnessed the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s, when changes in federal regulation opened the door to an orgy of looting and grift (acted out largely in suburban development scams) so extravagant that a quarter-trillion dollar federal bail-out was eventually required... Clarence the guardian angel takes George Bailey on a tour of Bedford Falls as-if-George-had-never-been-born... Main Street is lined with gin mills, strip clubs, and dance halls instead of wholesome banks, groceries, and pharmacies. (Oddly, casinos are absent, because in 1946 we lacked the vision to see how truly demoralized our nation could get.) ... Now the weirdest thing is that Pottersville is depicted as a busy, bustling, lively place—the exact opposite of what main streets all over America really became, thanks to George Bailey's efforts—a wilderness of surface parking, from sea to shining sea, with WalMart waiting on the edge of every town like Moloch poised to inhale the last remaining vapors of America's morale... Most ironically, today America's favorite main street town, Las Vegas, is Pottersville writ large, and most Americans see absolutely nothing wrong with it. How wonderful is that?" [Via James Wolcott.] And second, at DVD Savant, Glenn Erickson argues that the movie's retrospective chronology was crafted in the editing suite: Most of the "elements of the flashback wraparound were relatively inexpensive to put together. Only actors' voices were used, radio-style. We don't see George's neighbors or wife and children praying, we merely hear them. Heaven is represented by a little animation of blinking stars and planets. A blurry point of view is optically added to represent Clarence's 'learning' to see the heavenly 'rerun' of scenes from George's childhood. Later, the first time we see James Stewart as George Bailey, his gesture imagining a big suitcase is frozen-framed, so that time can be alotted for Clarence's voiceover to assess the now grown-up boy whose life he has been watching." [More heavy chawing at the link.]

Posted by Ray Pride at December 19, 2006 07:08 AM

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