In the same way that many Americans manage to ignore that all their favorite movies are about defying fascism (Star Wars, Lotr, Harry Potter...), many forget that Trump, Elon, Bezos... are Mr. Potter.
In so many ways, this is my favorite film. "Casablanca" is also in the running. The two have more in common that I thought.
Also, "Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?"
One wishes Stewart were here to deliver that speech to Mr. Bezos-Potter at the site of one of his distribution warehouses...
"Casablanca" is one of my favs too. As with "To Be Or Not To Be," it's still astounding to me that they were made during the course of the war (or in the case of the Lubitsch, the run-up to it) - they have so much relevance to both their own times and subsequent ones.
You are so dead on the mark! Our national willingness to endorse an evil, sick man as world leader, in the name of ridding our country of "invading" peoples and for the promise of more cash in our wallets, etc., etc.,---that willingness and blindness will certainly lead to myriad destructive problems. Could the Christian Right zealots make all aspects of government and society theirs to control? Study the Bill of Rights; what distortions and impingements are happening before our eyes? Human greed and fear overtake any political system eventually; are we living through that societal maturation point right now? Do we have recourse and can we hope? And how do we live our lives?
I'm probably not as sanguine as a lot of people about all of this. I think, as you suggest, that a lot of this – from the ascendancy of the Christian Right (who, as you and I both know, view Trump as divinely ordained in order to deliver America, and the world, over into the hands of Christian rulers) to the general infringements on both decency and the Constitution – are a result of fear. For me, the hope comes as it always does from human ingenuity, but I do worry that right now too much ingenuity is tied up in the tech world; science has no real access to wisdom, and so tech without art and philosophy just becomes a tool for whoever is in power at the time. Long story short, I think we need as a culture to be promoting things like art and civics and the Humanities, to help give us some of the rudder that we've lost.
Great piece, Mr TS. Your take on the loss of communal values hits the mark.
It’s interesting to dig into the layers and limits of Capra’s vision though. His own offscreen actions undermine much of what he celebrates. More importantly - and this is the piece I think about a lot - the racial hierarchy of the film (and all films of the time) reflects a sense of community that leaves so much out.
It’s painful to think that, rather than widen our country’s vision of community, the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent movements towards equity may actually have blown the vision apart. If we believe Capra and other storytellers of the time, White America in the 1940s was capable of glimpsing humanity past wealth and family lines, but seeing past color lines was a bridge too far.
I think we are, and always have been, more tribal than we care to admit.
Thanks for reading, man! I'm glad you found it worthwhile.
As far as Capra goes, I'm not the biggest one for tying together the moral worth of the artist and the judgement of the work. It's definitely an outre stance these days, and maybe I haven't thought it through enough, but I tend to think that the further we move towards thinking that only good people can make good things, the more we're sacrificing the acknowledgement of the baffling complexity of our existence that is exactly the thing that art, as opposed to other human disciplines, has to offer.
The racial side of things is trickier for me. And, frankly, we could throw gender in here as well. I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're after, but I think the idea that the white male communal vision of mid century America was only made possible by the subjugation of certain communities is a troubling one. Again, I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about this, but that idea also doesn't strike me as quite right. The point, as far as I'm concerned, isn't to wax nostalgic but to think through the fact that concepts ideas may have faded out of our culture, regardless of whether or not they were lived on the ground at the time. On top of that, I really do think that the culture of the time was caught between the ideal of social inclusion (as is evidenced in the film by the scene when he gets the Italian immigrant - their cultural version of an undocumented South American, I think - a home) and the reality of racial exclusion. But I think the films of the time mostly support the idea of a grudging expansion of the social circle, almost as a fait accompli. It may be pushing things too far, but I do tend to believe that if anything has eroded the American vision of community, it might be the contemporary focus on identity and self-celebration, which seem to me to be the sheep's clothing for the wolf of a really predatory and atomizing economic disciplne that reduces us to individual units of profit with terrifying efficiency.
Yeah man. I think we're mostly on the same page. It's an astute point that communal concepts may have faded out of our culture. Where we may split a bit is on the why. I don't disagree with on any of your reasoning, I just wonder if there are additional layers.
The center left and right in mid-century America were much closer together than they are today, I think largely because they hadn't been split by the troubling issues of race, gender, etc. There was an established hierarchy that everyone with power agreed to, which left them free to quibble about tax rates and foreign policy. The Civil Rights movement – which followed a strong labor rights movement and preceded other "identity" movements towards equity – tore that polite detente among white Americans apart.
I understand the concern about 21st Century America going too far down the identity rabbit hole, but frankly I'd put most of the onus on those who continue to resist change so fiercely. Self-celebration is a response to marginalization. I don't think identity would be such an issue in this country if race, gender, orientation didn't still make such a big difference in our lived experiences.
I think this is all stuff I agree with; like you, I just wonder if we're coming at it from different ideas of causality. I think I'd argue that money is more central to American ideology (inasmuch as there is such a thing) than race.
I think the argument about mid-century white Americans being able to conveniently ignore racial and gender hierarchies as they went about their politics is spot on, but I also think it faces a chronological problem that a lot of its proponents ignore. This is the forty (or more) year gap between the civil rights movement in the '60s and the fracturing of the center left and center right, which we might be able to pin to the Gingrich revolution or the rise of talk radio in the 90s at the earliest, but doesn't really seem to me to get going until the Obama years. Which is to say that if it was the increase of opportunity for people of color and women in the '60s and '70s that kicked off a radical split between right and left, why did it not manifest in that generation, or their kids, but their grandkids?
None of which is to say that racial resentment doesn't play a huge part in what's going on now (look at the MAGA response to those clowns Musk and Vivek) but just that I think it is economic despair that increases people's susceptibility to racial grievance messaging, rather than increased inclusion being the prime mover.
To me, the dangerous thing about the identity stuff (again, speaking in unjustly broad generalizations) isn't about self-celebration, which, as old Walt Whitman pointed out, is a glorious thing. It's that our new notion of identity tracks so closely with the emergence of the internet, which suggests to me that its deepest roots are economic (inasmuch as it seems clear that virtually everything on the internet is driven by the almighty dollar) rather than as a reaction to the social upheavals of the last fifty years.
And lastly, look at the two of us tossing around ideas. How far we've come from drinking those pitchers of beer at the Foxhead, my friend...
Obviously, we don't have all the answers – arguably fewer than most! – but I'll give one more volley back re: chronology.
The national Democratic Party split apart in 1964 during the height of the Civil Rights era. Two separate Democratic slates from Mississippi showed up at the national convention – one an all-white segregationist group of 'official' delegates, the others members of The Mississippi Freedom Party, led by Fannie Lou Hamer. If that's not the fracturing of the center left, I don't know what is.
Johnson managed to stop the hemorrhaging enough to win the presidency that year, but Republicans flipped the White House in '68 and then – starting with Nixon's Southern Strategy – began the long process of bringing white segregationist sentiment and religious fundamentalism into the center of the new Republican Party.
I'd argue that all the cultural, if not economic, seeds of MAGA-ism were fully present in the Reagan era. Dog whistles were slowly replaced with bullhorns as the GOP steadily chipped away at Civil Rights legislation, much of which is gone today.
Again, I think you're totally right about the toxic role of capitalism – heightened by this new era of internet isolationism and spiritual (if that's the right word?) loneliness – but I think you're underestimating how important race and the reordering of traditional power structures has been in American history.
After Capra, I'm not sure what the great communal films and cultural touchstones were in the '50s and beyond. From what I know, films began to tilt heavily towards the romanticized vigilante violence of Westerns and thrillers in the '50s and '60s, which became grittier, more urban visions in the '70s. (The height of family-over-community on film must be The Godfather?). Other than some one-offs like The Sound of Music what landmark post-40s movies really centered community over family and individualism?
The communal vision of a genre like folk music (which you know is central to my work) has almost always been an outlier in our culture. Even there, except for a brief period in the early '60s when people like Pete Seeger helped popularize a more traditional, "folks' music" incarnation of the style, we've generally celebrated the individual rebel-genius (see: A Complete Unknown) over anything more collective.
If a more communal era ever did exist – or at least if the concept of community was once more widely understood and embraced than it is today – I don't think its downfall began with the Gingrich revolution or the rise of '90s talk radio. I would trace its decline back to the 50s and 60s, which coincides with our country's first really major shift in hierarchical power dynamics.
Of course, in Capra's own time, he was repeatedly accused of sentimentalizing American life beyond reality (they even called it "Capracorn"). As a Sicilian immigrant child, he was eternally grateful to the U.S. for allowing him to have a decent life he wouldn't have had elsewhere, but many of his films have the air of a secular romance with a very idealized version of America that really only existed on the backlots of studio system Hollywood. And guess which film probably displays that to its greatest degree...
I don't think the claim is that the film is an accurate reflection of Capra's America, simply that it represents an idealized vision that was believable in that day - and one can certainly make the same point about Ford's films, or Hawks's, or Lubitsch's - that is simply no longer believable. Contemporary films in a similar vein are no less sentimental ("Everything Everywhere All At Once" is a great example) but their sentiment runs in the direction of glorifying a set of values, our contemporary values, that are distinctly different than were those that existed back then.
In the same way that many Americans manage to ignore that all their favorite movies are about defying fascism (Star Wars, Lotr, Harry Potter...), many forget that Trump, Elon, Bezos... are Mr. Potter.
In so many ways, this is my favorite film. "Casablanca" is also in the running. The two have more in common that I thought.
Also, "Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?"
One wishes Stewart were here to deliver that speech to Mr. Bezos-Potter at the site of one of his distribution warehouses...
"Casablanca" is one of my favs too. As with "To Be Or Not To Be," it's still astounding to me that they were made during the course of the war (or in the case of the Lubitsch, the run-up to it) - they have so much relevance to both their own times and subsequent ones.
You are so dead on the mark! Our national willingness to endorse an evil, sick man as world leader, in the name of ridding our country of "invading" peoples and for the promise of more cash in our wallets, etc., etc.,---that willingness and blindness will certainly lead to myriad destructive problems. Could the Christian Right zealots make all aspects of government and society theirs to control? Study the Bill of Rights; what distortions and impingements are happening before our eyes? Human greed and fear overtake any political system eventually; are we living through that societal maturation point right now? Do we have recourse and can we hope? And how do we live our lives?
I'm probably not as sanguine as a lot of people about all of this. I think, as you suggest, that a lot of this – from the ascendancy of the Christian Right (who, as you and I both know, view Trump as divinely ordained in order to deliver America, and the world, over into the hands of Christian rulers) to the general infringements on both decency and the Constitution – are a result of fear. For me, the hope comes as it always does from human ingenuity, but I do worry that right now too much ingenuity is tied up in the tech world; science has no real access to wisdom, and so tech without art and philosophy just becomes a tool for whoever is in power at the time. Long story short, I think we need as a culture to be promoting things like art and civics and the Humanities, to help give us some of the rudder that we've lost.
Great piece, Mr TS. Your take on the loss of communal values hits the mark.
It’s interesting to dig into the layers and limits of Capra’s vision though. His own offscreen actions undermine much of what he celebrates. More importantly - and this is the piece I think about a lot - the racial hierarchy of the film (and all films of the time) reflects a sense of community that leaves so much out.
It’s painful to think that, rather than widen our country’s vision of community, the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent movements towards equity may actually have blown the vision apart. If we believe Capra and other storytellers of the time, White America in the 1940s was capable of glimpsing humanity past wealth and family lines, but seeing past color lines was a bridge too far.
I think we are, and always have been, more tribal than we care to admit.
Thanks for reading, man! I'm glad you found it worthwhile.
As far as Capra goes, I'm not the biggest one for tying together the moral worth of the artist and the judgement of the work. It's definitely an outre stance these days, and maybe I haven't thought it through enough, but I tend to think that the further we move towards thinking that only good people can make good things, the more we're sacrificing the acknowledgement of the baffling complexity of our existence that is exactly the thing that art, as opposed to other human disciplines, has to offer.
The racial side of things is trickier for me. And, frankly, we could throw gender in here as well. I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're after, but I think the idea that the white male communal vision of mid century America was only made possible by the subjugation of certain communities is a troubling one. Again, I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about this, but that idea also doesn't strike me as quite right. The point, as far as I'm concerned, isn't to wax nostalgic but to think through the fact that concepts ideas may have faded out of our culture, regardless of whether or not they were lived on the ground at the time. On top of that, I really do think that the culture of the time was caught between the ideal of social inclusion (as is evidenced in the film by the scene when he gets the Italian immigrant - their cultural version of an undocumented South American, I think - a home) and the reality of racial exclusion. But I think the films of the time mostly support the idea of a grudging expansion of the social circle, almost as a fait accompli. It may be pushing things too far, but I do tend to believe that if anything has eroded the American vision of community, it might be the contemporary focus on identity and self-celebration, which seem to me to be the sheep's clothing for the wolf of a really predatory and atomizing economic disciplne that reduces us to individual units of profit with terrifying efficiency.
Cheery thoughts for the holiday season! :)
Yeah man. I think we're mostly on the same page. It's an astute point that communal concepts may have faded out of our culture. Where we may split a bit is on the why. I don't disagree with on any of your reasoning, I just wonder if there are additional layers.
The center left and right in mid-century America were much closer together than they are today, I think largely because they hadn't been split by the troubling issues of race, gender, etc. There was an established hierarchy that everyone with power agreed to, which left them free to quibble about tax rates and foreign policy. The Civil Rights movement – which followed a strong labor rights movement and preceded other "identity" movements towards equity – tore that polite detente among white Americans apart.
I understand the concern about 21st Century America going too far down the identity rabbit hole, but frankly I'd put most of the onus on those who continue to resist change so fiercely. Self-celebration is a response to marginalization. I don't think identity would be such an issue in this country if race, gender, orientation didn't still make such a big difference in our lived experiences.
I think this is all stuff I agree with; like you, I just wonder if we're coming at it from different ideas of causality. I think I'd argue that money is more central to American ideology (inasmuch as there is such a thing) than race.
I think the argument about mid-century white Americans being able to conveniently ignore racial and gender hierarchies as they went about their politics is spot on, but I also think it faces a chronological problem that a lot of its proponents ignore. This is the forty (or more) year gap between the civil rights movement in the '60s and the fracturing of the center left and center right, which we might be able to pin to the Gingrich revolution or the rise of talk radio in the 90s at the earliest, but doesn't really seem to me to get going until the Obama years. Which is to say that if it was the increase of opportunity for people of color and women in the '60s and '70s that kicked off a radical split between right and left, why did it not manifest in that generation, or their kids, but their grandkids?
None of which is to say that racial resentment doesn't play a huge part in what's going on now (look at the MAGA response to those clowns Musk and Vivek) but just that I think it is economic despair that increases people's susceptibility to racial grievance messaging, rather than increased inclusion being the prime mover.
To me, the dangerous thing about the identity stuff (again, speaking in unjustly broad generalizations) isn't about self-celebration, which, as old Walt Whitman pointed out, is a glorious thing. It's that our new notion of identity tracks so closely with the emergence of the internet, which suggests to me that its deepest roots are economic (inasmuch as it seems clear that virtually everything on the internet is driven by the almighty dollar) rather than as a reaction to the social upheavals of the last fifty years.
And lastly, look at the two of us tossing around ideas. How far we've come from drinking those pitchers of beer at the Foxhead, my friend...
Look at us! Not drunk or breaking anything. :)
Obviously, we don't have all the answers – arguably fewer than most! – but I'll give one more volley back re: chronology.
The national Democratic Party split apart in 1964 during the height of the Civil Rights era. Two separate Democratic slates from Mississippi showed up at the national convention – one an all-white segregationist group of 'official' delegates, the others members of The Mississippi Freedom Party, led by Fannie Lou Hamer. If that's not the fracturing of the center left, I don't know what is.
Johnson managed to stop the hemorrhaging enough to win the presidency that year, but Republicans flipped the White House in '68 and then – starting with Nixon's Southern Strategy – began the long process of bringing white segregationist sentiment and religious fundamentalism into the center of the new Republican Party.
I'd argue that all the cultural, if not economic, seeds of MAGA-ism were fully present in the Reagan era. Dog whistles were slowly replaced with bullhorns as the GOP steadily chipped away at Civil Rights legislation, much of which is gone today.
Again, I think you're totally right about the toxic role of capitalism – heightened by this new era of internet isolationism and spiritual (if that's the right word?) loneliness – but I think you're underestimating how important race and the reordering of traditional power structures has been in American history.
After Capra, I'm not sure what the great communal films and cultural touchstones were in the '50s and beyond. From what I know, films began to tilt heavily towards the romanticized vigilante violence of Westerns and thrillers in the '50s and '60s, which became grittier, more urban visions in the '70s. (The height of family-over-community on film must be The Godfather?). Other than some one-offs like The Sound of Music what landmark post-40s movies really centered community over family and individualism?
The communal vision of a genre like folk music (which you know is central to my work) has almost always been an outlier in our culture. Even there, except for a brief period in the early '60s when people like Pete Seeger helped popularize a more traditional, "folks' music" incarnation of the style, we've generally celebrated the individual rebel-genius (see: A Complete Unknown) over anything more collective.
If a more communal era ever did exist – or at least if the concept of community was once more widely understood and embraced than it is today – I don't think its downfall began with the Gingrich revolution or the rise of '90s talk radio. I would trace its decline back to the 50s and 60s, which coincides with our country's first really major shift in hierarchical power dynamics.
Of course, in Capra's own time, he was repeatedly accused of sentimentalizing American life beyond reality (they even called it "Capracorn"). As a Sicilian immigrant child, he was eternally grateful to the U.S. for allowing him to have a decent life he wouldn't have had elsewhere, but many of his films have the air of a secular romance with a very idealized version of America that really only existed on the backlots of studio system Hollywood. And guess which film probably displays that to its greatest degree...
I don't think the claim is that the film is an accurate reflection of Capra's America, simply that it represents an idealized vision that was believable in that day - and one can certainly make the same point about Ford's films, or Hawks's, or Lubitsch's - that is simply no longer believable. Contemporary films in a similar vein are no less sentimental ("Everything Everywhere All At Once" is a great example) but their sentiment runs in the direction of glorifying a set of values, our contemporary values, that are distinctly different than were those that existed back then.