There\u2019s a quote about Carl Jung that I\u2019ve come across a couple of times and shamelessly stolen every chance I’ve had: \u201cWe live a double life whether we know it or not. We live our own life and we live the life of our time.\u201d\u00a0 Economists are now warning of a double-dip recession, even though most people can\u2019t tell we\u2019ve reached the heights that make the second dip possible.\u00a0 A lousy economy is no longer news \u2013 it\u2019s just mundane reality.\u00a0 For some, it\u2019s an excuse to argue political and economic theory, for others, it\u2019s too much of an individual concern to even worry about a larger national context.\u00a0 I\u2019m somewhere in between: a bit worn out by the back and forth, but still hungering for something that blends everyday life with \u201cthe life of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s led me to start inventing an odd little bit of theater.\u00a0 I\u2019m a big walker, and lately I\u2019ve been making a deliberate attempt to make eye contact with and smile at people passing by or just sitting on their stoops.\u00a0 Usually they smile back \u2013 what else would they do? \u2013 and I later turn that common gesture into evidence that people are becoming softer during hard times.\u00a0 I was stuck in downtown traffic yesterday and waved over several cars with their turn signals on.\u00a0 The drivers waved thanks, and I felt comforted: clearly, humanity is rising to the occasion.\u00a0 We\u2019re all in it together; we\u2019ll beat these economic times after all.\u00a0 I create the fantasy and let unsuspecting others play a role in that story.\u00a0 When you\u2019re trying, evidence is everywhere: a nice server in a restaurant, a conversation in a grocery store line, any daily courtesy becomes proof <\/em>that people are returning to a simpler goodness, neighborliness,<\/em> to weather the storm.\u00a0 Of course, I\u2019m not na\u00efve, and on a more fundamental level I know I\u2019m inventing the narrative.\u00a0 People are the same as they were before 2008; they just have less money and more stress.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing: we\u2019re about to enter year 3 of this\u2026 recession?\u00a0 depression?\u00a0 and we still don\u2019t have the cultural expressions that both reflect the anxieties of our time and provide the hope to deal with them.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have our Frank Capra.<\/p>\n

I go through a bit of a Capra kick every couple of years even though, ironically, the only movie of his I really love is \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life.\u201d \u00a0He had a few others that I liked, some that I thought were terrible, and some that were pleasant enough if forgettable.\u00a0 Mostly, I like the Capra myth, the use of his name as shorthand for gentle Americanness \u2013 not the oft-referenced \u201ccan-do\u201d American optimism that, in national lore, won us a World War and took us to the moon, but the more pedestrian American goodness that prized hometowns and simple people, generosity and idealism and upheld a reverence for non-martial American symbols.\u00a0 There are many who argue the \u201cdark side\u201d of Capra films.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fair point; even his most upbeat films dealt with some very downbeat themes.\u00a0 But the dark side is almost always defeated and the audience is allowed to get caught up in sentimentality without being made to feel ashamed for buying in.<\/p>\n

The Capra genre<\/em> has outdone the talent of the man himself, with later non-Capra films like Field of Dreams, Jerry Maguire, and Seabiscuit more Capra-esque (and frankly better) than were most actual Capra films.\u00a0 TV shows like West Wing may have been preachy at times, but also allowed the audience to envision a government led by honest, patriotic, and idealistic people \u2013 and it debuted a year after the conclusion of the Lewinsky scandal.\u00a0 Sometimes, timing is everything.<\/p>\n

That sense of timing is what separates actual Capra from most of the later entrants in the genre.\u00a0 Jerry Maguire might have declared in his wife\u2019s living room that \u201cwe live in a cynical, cynical world,\u201d but in 1997 when the movie opened, concerns about cynicism were somewhat lost in national prosperity and a sense of complacency.\u00a0 Audiences liked the movie, but our need for a national hero living the life of our times wasn\u2019t in high demand.\u00a0 As for Seabiscuit (or Cinderella Man for that matter), the filmmakers didn\u2019t even bother reflecting the life of the times of the audience, but instead reached back to Capra\u2019s own depression era to draw out the old Capra lessons.\u00a0 Field of Dreams may have the best post-Capra claim on the meeting of the message and the times; premiering at the conclusion of the Reagan years and only a couple of years after Gordon Gekko preached the gospel of greed, Terrence Mann announced that it was \u201cmoney they have and peace they lack.\u201d\u00a0 That peace, of course, could be found by returning to a timeless innocence \u2013 not rooted exclusively in the depression years as with Seabiscuit, but stretching back and touching every period of American history from 1919 to the characters\u2019 own time.\u00a0 And as with Capra\u2019s corniest \u2013 and best \u2013 endings, Field of Dreams gave its audience a full serving of sentimentality without needing to temper it with a last-minute dose of reality.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s actually a documentary on Capra, called appropriately \u201cFrank Capra\u2019s American Dream\u201d that I watched recently.\u00a0 His first film that dealt explicitly with the depression, Lady for a Day, was made in 1933, three years into the depression that time-stamped his most famous films.\u00a0 A series of hits over the next decade and a half followed and exhibited similar themes: money corrupts, American ideals will triumph over greed, common people are made of good moral stock.\u00a0 Capra\u2019s last film that could truly be considered \u201cCapra-esque\u201d was 1948\u2019s State of the Union.<\/p>\n

In the \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d documentary, Martin Scorsese pointed out that one reason Capra\u2019s works lost relevance in the late 1940s was that his movies depended on a broadly unified audience that shared universal \u201cAmerican\u201d values.\u00a0 Once that ceded to the political and ideological polarization of the McCarthy era, common values were harder to recognize.\u00a0 HUAC even investigated Capra over State of the Union.\u00a0 Imagine that – Frank Capra, un-American.<\/p>\n

Maybe that\u2019s the case today as well, and why, 3 years into this economic mess, there has been no revitalization of the genre.\u00a0 Could a movie or TV show be made in today\u2019s climate that celebrates the goodness of America and expresses hope without being considered either Left-wing or Right-wing schlock?\u00a0 About the only recent hit movie that has even come close to the genre was The Blind Side (really much more of a generic feel-good movie than a Capra-esque commentary on the American people during a specific time) and that did run into an ideological wall with the \u201cbenevolent white lady helps impoverished black youth\u201d criticism.\u00a0 I guess it\u2019s tough for any film about Goodness and overcoming adversity to also be noncontroversial.\u00a0 If it seems to promote faith, if it seems to make villains of the greedy, if it seems to promote tolerance or peace or patriotism or duty or anything else which could have at one time been considered shared values, well, that film is now suspect.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a chicken-egg question whether fragmented audiences led to a breakdown of shared values or whether evolving values led to fragmented audiences.\u00a0 For whatever cause, the result is that our entertainment reinforces differing (and sometimes opposing) definitions of goodness and reflects different kinds of anxieties that can\u2019t possibly speak for the life of the times of anyone beyond its little segment of the population.\u00a0 None of that is new and the flip side is that it does allow for more niche entertainment that doesn\u2019t have to contend with the burden of pleasing the masses.\u00a0 Maybe in another era, when times are better, I\u2019ll have more of an appreciation for that niche entertainment.\u00a0 For now though it just seems oddly juxtaposed with reality.\u00a0 For the first time in a long time, there actually is a national mood and people are actually living through shared problems.\u00a0 It\u2019s a little disconcerting that there hasn\u2019t been a comforting cultural outlet to guide us through.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a quote about Carl Jung that I\u2019ve come across a couple of times and shamelessly stolen every chance I’ve had: \u201cWe live a double life whether we know it or not. We live...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":194,"featured_media":301595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11158,11165,10876],"tags":[99,3677,66,925,102,1090],"class_list":["post-17579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","category-religion","category-tv-and-movies","tag-culture","tag-depression","tag-movies","tag-philosophy","tag-religion","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/194"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ordinary-times.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}