Capra

The populist right is a tragicomic opera, a dozen movies, a hundred novels and a thousand history books. We are living the narrative, darker than any noir. On the screen it would be a B-movie. In fact, I think I saw it as a kid. With some major editing it could be a Frank Capra film.

Director / actor John Cassavetes (of all people) praised Capra with these words. Maybe there really wasn’t an America; it was only Frank Capra. He created an idealized myth of the small-town in the heartland, so persuasive even city-dwellers adapted that vision as their own. In his movies tragedy would be no more than a temporary state. Let it be so.

Capra had a feel for the common man. He knew them but didn’t entirely trust them. He depicted their gullibility, how easily the masses could be duped and led. Sometimes they were an undifferentiated tribe, reinforcing each other with little room for dissent. They moved in waves from a mindless mob to an idealized hardworking and wise collective. He heard the vox populi, the voice of the people.

He could also spot a phony; the disingenuous flimflam man, the corpulent miscreant with greed as his creed. He would have cast the villain as Edward Arnold back then. Today Trump would play himself.

Capra is best-known today for his post-war box-office failure, It’s A Wonderful Life but he was in his heyday in the late 1930s and early 40’s. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington spoke to those times when fascism was an existential threat. Capra took on that force, albeit simplistically and sentimentally, but he caught the zeitgeist.

Americans accept political enfranchisement in lieu of economic democracy. Folks have a way of voting against themselves. A true democracy demands an informed electorate but we are famous for electile dysfunction.

The great enigma of our political carnival (as in carnivores) is the pulse of the body politic. Political party operatives have tried to manipulate it, pander to it and capture people's grievances and fears. Instead of well-meaning Everyman we are witness to a mindless demotic cult led by a stuffed, hollow man. (T.S. Eliot).

In Capra’s day we numbered 132 million; today we have an uber-mass of 334 million each with a mobile phone to confirm their beliefs and concoct new fables to chew on. The paradox is that the greater the connectivity the stronger are the centrifugal forces pulling us apart. 

It would take Capra on steroids to find the common threads in the American tapestry. Perhaps in the last reel Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur would knock some sense into the knuckleheads so they will stop shooting themselves in the foot till they haven't a leg to stand on. He would also remind them why we fought WWII.