As the lines between Hollywood and Washington have blurred while reality flickers uncertainly in our living rooms, we have become decidedly nervous about whether our politics are scripted by some bizarre combination of Jim Carrey and Oliver Stone. As Susan Sontag once perceptively observed, “reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” So we should not be surprised to learn there is a Hollywood formula that has shown an amazing ability to predict American presidential election winners. This crystal ball has been wrong only once–in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican party.
Ronald Reagan understood the formula almost as well as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But then Reagan was an actor. Jimmy Carter understood and then forgot. Hubert Humphrey may have grasped it as well as any post-World War II politician, but had trouble translating it from his state to a national stage and then at crucial moments lost sight of it. John Kennedy went to Dallas hoping to recover a formula he feared losing.
Even before anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker dubbed Hollywood the “dream factory,” the connection between screen images and the American character was well established. We have never needed academic researchers or public opinion pollsters to tell us what we all know intuitively. Who has not at some point in your life modeled how you dressed or some personal mannerism on something you saw on the screen? Expressions like “he did a John Wayne” have become part of our vocabulary. Fads from flapper dresses to white disco suits have been spawned by the movies.
There is perhaps no movie that is as intimately linked with who we are as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. As John Cassavetes once said, “Maybe there wasn’t an America, maybe it was only Frank Capra.” It’s a Wonderful Life is a piece of Americana as familiar as the opening of the Gettysburg Address. Certainly, as every holiday season reminds us, the film is an American treasure whose lines and scenes have become as familiar as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Most of us know the plot by heart: played by Jimmy Stewart, George Bailey is a man who has given up his dreams of exploring the world to run the family building and loan in Bedford Falls. To put it in public service terms he has sacrificed his own self-interest for that of the larger community. Capra, for all his sentimentalism, does not portray this as an easy decision. George still regrets the life that might have been. In a flashback sequence, we see him telling his girlfriend that he wants to “shake the dust from this crummy little town and see the world.”
On Christmas Eve, the day of a crucial bank audit, George’s Uncle Billy, a scatterbrain who ties strings to his fingers to help him remember, loses $8,000, leaving the bank facing ruin and George in danger of going to prison. Despondent over his inability to find the money or get a loan from the Scrooge-like Henry Potter, George decides to commit suicide.
When George goes to Potter to ask for help, Potter cynically paints George’s situation in monetary terms, telling him that his life insurance makes him worth more dead than alive. In his despair, George wonders about the value of his life. “If it hadn’t been for me, everybody’d be a lot better off,” he says. “I wish I’d never been born.” Rescued by an apprentice angel who is trying to earn his wings, George gets a chance to see what the world would have been like had he not lived.
Where Charles Dickens’ was concerned with showing the values that transcended the bleak drudgery of an industrial system that threatened to rob people of their humanity, Capra sketches a world in danger of losing its balance. Like the westerns of John Ford, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, and the poems of Walt Whitman, Capra’s film draws it power from a vision of America as seeking a balance between regimental order and unbridled individualism. What maintains that balance is a belief in a level playing field in which neither brutal criminals or impersonal organizations can tilt things in their direction.
To understand why this formula represents the quintessential American story, drive to the video store and pick anything–comedy or drama, newest hit or something from the bargain shelf. As long as it’s American, it follows the same script. If the movie is a comedy, the star will struggle with folks who want them to play by nitpicking rules or others who bully them. If the movie is a drama, the star will fight to keep outlaws or street punks in line or combat the machinations of a megalomaniac.
On the screen, dramatic tension and slapstick jokes come from how well the plot walks a fine line between order and disorder, impersonal organizations and unlicensed individualism. This script has played equally well in American mythology. The Constitution arose because the Founders of this nation sought to create a level playing field between the lawlessness of the frontier and the aristocratic drawing rooms of Europe. We made the frontier-dweller’s struggles with big ranchers and brutal outlaws a national epic.
It’s a Wonderful Life shows how deep these conventions lie in our collective psyches. When George Bailey is given the chance to see Bedford Falls as it might have been without him, we see a place that has lost its balance. Without George, the town has become a world where all the negative forces that have been held in check now spiral out of control. We know the script because it has threatened us so many times in our history. This is Dodge City without the sheriff, the frontier left to the cattle barons and outlaws, the Gilded Age without the progressive movement, the Depression without the New Deal.
In a Bedford Falls where George Bailey never existed, banker Potter ruthlessly rules the town. The idyllic main street has become a garish strip of neon lights advertising dance halls, striptease joints, and bars. Sirens echo in the background as regularly as they do in New York City. The tavern with the kindly bartender has turned into a wild saloon where, “We serve hard drinks, for men who want to get drunk fast.” The jovial cop Bert and his friend the cabdriver Ernie have a hard edge (yes, they inspired the Sesame Street characters).
In a still contemporary-sounding passage in his autobiography, Frank Capra himself said he wanted to make:
A film that said to the downtrodden, the pushed-around, the pauper, “heads up, fella.” I wanted it to shout to the abandoned grandfathers staring vacantly in nursing homes, to the always-interviewed but seldom-adopted half-breed orphans, to the paupers who refuse to die while medical vultures wait to snatch their hearts and livers, and to those who take cobalt treatments and whistle–I wanted to shout, “You are the salt of the earth.”
The man who made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington explains that It’s a Wonderful Life is about equity, about the level playing field. George Bailey’s whole purpose in life is to help keep the paying field level in Bedford Falls, where the ruthless Potter is only interested in controlling everything.
This mythology also influences presidential elections. In an ideological sense Iowa-born Herbert Hoover was more middle-of-the-road than patrician Franklin Delano Roosevelt. However, Hoover’s “stay the course” prescriptions for the Depression were as uncaring as any scheming banker’s. Missouri’s Harry Truman had the opposite problem of FDR. Trying to overcome the image of a rural rube, Truman might have lost to anyone but New Yorker Tom Dewey. A decade later, Richard Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow made him resemble a western badman and personified his “Tricky Dick” image. On the other hand, John Kennedy’s New Frontier could not have been more evocative of American mythology.
His successor, Lyndon Johnson engineered his own face lift. Perceived as an uncouth frontier gambler with a marked deck, Johnson played the right card by proposing civil rights and other progressive legislation. It was an adroit and effective performance–until Johnson let Vietnam tear him apart.
A decade later, peanut farmer and nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter’s blend of folksiness and competence contrasted with Gerald Ford’s pratfalls and his pardon of Nixon. By 1980, Carter’s battle with a “killer rabbit” symbolized his reversal as surely as Lyndon Johnson’s pulling the ears of his pet beagle. Ronald Reagan successfully convinced the American people that the Carter Administration, instead of maintaining a level playing field, had become the tool of special interests. In 1988, Bush went Texas while Dukakis went taxes.
While it may seem easy with the wisdom of hindsight to discern the level playing field, the trick lies in identifying how it has shifted, because it is never static, always moving. This ebb and flow is the central tide in American history. Look at the difference between Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. Wayne’s characters were less lawless, less violent, and less ruthless than Eastwood’s. Wayne could have never been credible in Unforgiven.
The task today’s candidates and their handlers face is to define where the playing field has shifted politically. While it is still too early to predict who will win in November, one thing is clear: whoever wins will not be trying to follow the script of the past, but will be trying to write one for the future. When Clarence tells George how his life has touched so many others he is also providing a lesson for our candidates and for us. As much as the landscape has shifted, we still yearn for someone who will show us how they connect with real people, how they have made a difference for others.
We seek someone who will provide a vision of America in an age where the frontier has become electronic and conglomerates wrestle for territory like cattle barons. As America struggles to define itself in a time of profound transformation, we seek candidates who will help to define a new level playing field and not follow the latest poll results.
UPDATE:
I wrote this in January. In a few weeks we will be electing the next President. So of the two candidates–John McCain or Barack Obama–who does the movie predict will win?
I believe the movie predicts an Obama victory, but a narrow one. Why? At his worst moments John McCain exhibits a striking resemblance to banker Potter in the movie, a grouchy old know-it-all. Potter clearly regards Jimmy Stewart with contempt, which he tells him in the famous scene where Stewart comes to him asking for help after his uncle has lost the bank’s funds. McCain’s contempt for Obama has been clearly visible on camera and in his answers to questions.
McCain’s negative campaigning also is pure Potter, who is shown in the movie as willing to do anything to bring down Stewart’s Building and Loan. When Stewart comes to him for help, Potter calls the police.
As for Obama there is about him some of the qualities Jimmy Stewart showed in that movie. Stewart is shown as a dreamer, someone with big plans for the future. Obama seems to project Stewart’s qualities of being a dreamer, of youthful exhuberance along with a practical side. In another key scene in the movie, he manages to avert a run on the Building and Loan by giving an empassioned speech about how banks work. Obama has that same quality.
What makes the election is a bit close is what people refer to as Obama’s reticence. I believe his “calm in the middle of the storm” will be needed in the coming months, but Obama needs to show more of Stewart’s emotions.
In the end, though, we cannot ask the man to be something he is not. Barack Obama is not George Bailey, but he is a lot closer to him then John McCain.
So It’s a Wonderful Life predicts Barack Obama will win.
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