(no subject)
I tried to get Netflix to ship me it's a Beautiful Life before Christmas, but no dice - it was in demand then and I had to wait till now. But I'm kind of glad that I did because I feel like the movie had a different feeling for me in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, which I know sounds insane, but bear with me.
Now, before I get to my central thesis, I should provide a little bit of background: I've never seen It's a Beautiful Life. Partly, that's because my involvement with old movies is fairly recent, but part of it is that it just didn't seem like a movie I'd like. I'm not big on Christmas, and it has a reputation for being saccharine, which isn't a problem per se, but which also doesn't recommend it. However, after recently watching Frank Capra's other films like Mr. Deeds Goes To Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I had realized that his films might be unabashedly sentimental, but that didn't mean that they were bad - in fact, I found them to be legitimately heart warming.
When I was barely a few minutes into Life, I realized that the film isn't really that sentimental at all, and that's by necessity. The plot is about convincing a man not to commit suicide so there has to be some reason for him to want to commit suicide. The deck is a little slanted towards the human decency side at the end of the film - it lays the war hero stuff on a little thick in the World War Two section - but it also doesn't make any bones about some of the harsher parts of life. Barely five minutes in we see that George Bailey's employer has lost his son to the influenza and he takes his sadness out on young George, boxing his ears, and he's deaf in one ear because of a bad infection he got as a kid. It's a world where there's bad people, sickness, arbitrary death, money problems - a lot of legitimate ills which are not really wished away inside the film.
However, what was most telling to me is that the film doesn't really cover up George's domestic problems. It starts with his parents: he's desperate to leave town, but then he has to stay to put his father's affairs in order after he dies. Then he ends up missing out on college to run the family business. He continually does the right thing for his family, but at a great personal cost. The film doesn't knock his wife and children, but I don't know that it paints a sympathetic picture of them, either. When he comes home at his most distressed his kids, being kids, can't appreciate that and keep interrupting him to tell him that they just burped. It's a comical scene, in a way, but one that I'm sure most parents appreciate as true. Kids have no patience for your problems and won't give you any peace. He needs a minute to think, and he's not going to get it at his house, not with four rugrats, one of whom is sick.
What struck me during the middle portion of the film is how different the World War Two generation looked at life from the Vietnam Generation. Films like Beautiful Life and Grapes of Wrath and Mrs. Miniver don't really sugarcoat a lot of their protagonists problems - especially Grapes of Wrath - and are vehicles meant to convince people that while life can be harsh, it can still be inspiring, and it generally does so by arguing that there's still a lot of compassion in the human heart. But a lot of baby boomer films take the opposite tack: they present an idealized facade and then expose the sickening emptiness behind it. It's not just The Graduates and their stories of aimlessness; it's not just the Shampoos which suggest a certain world weariness; it's an entire legacy that lives on today in films like Revolutionary Road or tv shows like Mad Men - revisionists histories which are meant to express that despite the superficial trappings, the boomers had to fight to find meaning in their lives.
I don't know that it could have been any different. The so-called Greatest Generation couldn't very well have ignored the Great Depression or World War Two, but there was no point in illuminating how much those things sucked - no one had any doubts about that. But they had to struggle on despite those things. The Boomers, on the other hand, inherited a world which should have been better, but humans aren't wired to be happy on a base level. Despair is probably pretty consistent, regardless of how merited it is... It's a yin and a yang. People who are down and out need to believe they can be happy again; people that are affluent need to understand that affluence can't buy money.
Now why I mention Gabrielle Giffords might be more obvious. Nobody has really denied how senseless that shooting was, but a lot of the best speeches about it - especially Jon Stewart's speech on Monday and Barack Obama's speech tonight - are based around the idea that while one man was crazy enough to start shooting, there were far more people who were willing to sacrifice themselves for the other people who were getting shot. In other words, the basic message of It's a Beautiful Life applies to what happened in that Safeway parking lot in Arizona: it's a given that senselessly cruel things happen, but it's also a given that compassion exists, and that as sure as night follows day, pointless score-keeping and bitter accusations will follow something like that - but so will calls for us to listen to our better angels. The point at the end of It's a Beautiful Life is that we touch those around us and I think that's the point of what happened with Giffords, whether that's for the ill (Sarah Palin's rhetoric, which she seemingly never thought someone would take seriously) or for the good (Giffords herself).
I understand that this will sound insane, but what It's a Beautiful Life ultimately reminded me of the most was Children of Men. And I say that not because both are basically thought experiments about the value of one individual life - I say that because they both have a strange mixture of optimism and cynicism. In Life, there are people who put profit before their fellow men, and in Men, there are plenty of men who are heartless killers. But the scene at the end of Life where the good George Bailey has done comes back to him (which is a bit too literal, but whatever) and the scene in Men where the battle stops after the baby comes out confirms something that I think is important - even in the middle of unnecessary pain - in the face of purposefully created disasters - compassion is not just possible, it is kind of inevitable. 9/11 is not just a story of senseless tragedy - it's a story about firefighters sacrificing their lives for strangers.
I suppose that's ultimately why I don't like a lot of the sixties melodramas - I think they just miss the point of both art and life, which is that you have to find meaning for yourself despite all the intrinsic disappointments of life. But it's also why I liked It's a Beautiful Life, even though it is admittedly sentimental. Because life itself has sentiments in it, and I don't know that it's gooey sentiments are any less accurate than, say, A Single Man's quiet desperation, or Laughner's paranoid anger.
Now, before I get to my central thesis, I should provide a little bit of background: I've never seen It's a Beautiful Life. Partly, that's because my involvement with old movies is fairly recent, but part of it is that it just didn't seem like a movie I'd like. I'm not big on Christmas, and it has a reputation for being saccharine, which isn't a problem per se, but which also doesn't recommend it. However, after recently watching Frank Capra's other films like Mr. Deeds Goes To Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I had realized that his films might be unabashedly sentimental, but that didn't mean that they were bad - in fact, I found them to be legitimately heart warming.
When I was barely a few minutes into Life, I realized that the film isn't really that sentimental at all, and that's by necessity. The plot is about convincing a man not to commit suicide so there has to be some reason for him to want to commit suicide. The deck is a little slanted towards the human decency side at the end of the film - it lays the war hero stuff on a little thick in the World War Two section - but it also doesn't make any bones about some of the harsher parts of life. Barely five minutes in we see that George Bailey's employer has lost his son to the influenza and he takes his sadness out on young George, boxing his ears, and he's deaf in one ear because of a bad infection he got as a kid. It's a world where there's bad people, sickness, arbitrary death, money problems - a lot of legitimate ills which are not really wished away inside the film.
However, what was most telling to me is that the film doesn't really cover up George's domestic problems. It starts with his parents: he's desperate to leave town, but then he has to stay to put his father's affairs in order after he dies. Then he ends up missing out on college to run the family business. He continually does the right thing for his family, but at a great personal cost. The film doesn't knock his wife and children, but I don't know that it paints a sympathetic picture of them, either. When he comes home at his most distressed his kids, being kids, can't appreciate that and keep interrupting him to tell him that they just burped. It's a comical scene, in a way, but one that I'm sure most parents appreciate as true. Kids have no patience for your problems and won't give you any peace. He needs a minute to think, and he's not going to get it at his house, not with four rugrats, one of whom is sick.
What struck me during the middle portion of the film is how different the World War Two generation looked at life from the Vietnam Generation. Films like Beautiful Life and Grapes of Wrath and Mrs. Miniver don't really sugarcoat a lot of their protagonists problems - especially Grapes of Wrath - and are vehicles meant to convince people that while life can be harsh, it can still be inspiring, and it generally does so by arguing that there's still a lot of compassion in the human heart. But a lot of baby boomer films take the opposite tack: they present an idealized facade and then expose the sickening emptiness behind it. It's not just The Graduates and their stories of aimlessness; it's not just the Shampoos which suggest a certain world weariness; it's an entire legacy that lives on today in films like Revolutionary Road or tv shows like Mad Men - revisionists histories which are meant to express that despite the superficial trappings, the boomers had to fight to find meaning in their lives.
I don't know that it could have been any different. The so-called Greatest Generation couldn't very well have ignored the Great Depression or World War Two, but there was no point in illuminating how much those things sucked - no one had any doubts about that. But they had to struggle on despite those things. The Boomers, on the other hand, inherited a world which should have been better, but humans aren't wired to be happy on a base level. Despair is probably pretty consistent, regardless of how merited it is... It's a yin and a yang. People who are down and out need to believe they can be happy again; people that are affluent need to understand that affluence can't buy money.
Now why I mention Gabrielle Giffords might be more obvious. Nobody has really denied how senseless that shooting was, but a lot of the best speeches about it - especially Jon Stewart's speech on Monday and Barack Obama's speech tonight - are based around the idea that while one man was crazy enough to start shooting, there were far more people who were willing to sacrifice themselves for the other people who were getting shot. In other words, the basic message of It's a Beautiful Life applies to what happened in that Safeway parking lot in Arizona: it's a given that senselessly cruel things happen, but it's also a given that compassion exists, and that as sure as night follows day, pointless score-keeping and bitter accusations will follow something like that - but so will calls for us to listen to our better angels. The point at the end of It's a Beautiful Life is that we touch those around us and I think that's the point of what happened with Giffords, whether that's for the ill (Sarah Palin's rhetoric, which she seemingly never thought someone would take seriously) or for the good (Giffords herself).
I understand that this will sound insane, but what It's a Beautiful Life ultimately reminded me of the most was Children of Men. And I say that not because both are basically thought experiments about the value of one individual life - I say that because they both have a strange mixture of optimism and cynicism. In Life, there are people who put profit before their fellow men, and in Men, there are plenty of men who are heartless killers. But the scene at the end of Life where the good George Bailey has done comes back to him (which is a bit too literal, but whatever) and the scene in Men where the battle stops after the baby comes out confirms something that I think is important - even in the middle of unnecessary pain - in the face of purposefully created disasters - compassion is not just possible, it is kind of inevitable. 9/11 is not just a story of senseless tragedy - it's a story about firefighters sacrificing their lives for strangers.
I suppose that's ultimately why I don't like a lot of the sixties melodramas - I think they just miss the point of both art and life, which is that you have to find meaning for yourself despite all the intrinsic disappointments of life. But it's also why I liked It's a Beautiful Life, even though it is admittedly sentimental. Because life itself has sentiments in it, and I don't know that it's gooey sentiments are any less accurate than, say, A Single Man's quiet desperation, or Laughner's paranoid anger.