But I digress.

Well said, fafaroo.
May I just add:

(T)he film’s only two direct representations of the state — the sheriff and the military, in the form of Harry bailey — are present in the final scene. For all the money that pours in from friends and family, George’s fate is ultimately in the hands of the state as a warrant has been issued for his arrest. It’s significant that the sheriff tears up that warrant and tosses it on the pile of cash.

Isn’t it also significant that the other (unmentioned) representation of the state-the bank auditor- also adds a couple of bucks to the pile?
If I follow your line about Capra’s thinking, would this not indicate a, however small, helping hand from the state?

“George Bailey, a man who pretty much did it on his own.”

Try to imagine IAWL with Potter as the protagonist. Imagine further that he makes the same appeal wishing he’d never been born. Then imagine his utter shock when nothing really changes all that much without him.

I’m sorry I just read through more of Matt’s comments. Are you an idiot? The central message of the film is the power of community and the interconnectedness of all our lives. We see how much George’s life has impacted the lives of everyone around him and then we see how those people, ultimately, rush to George’s aid in a time of extreme crisis. The only real individualist in the film, that is the only person in the film who could be said to have “done it on his own,” is Potter, not exactly the film’s paragon of character. You have to be completely blind to suggest that George Bailey is an individualist. Hell, he didn’t even found the Building & Loan, his father did. He certainly never built it into anything more than it always was at the beginning of the film. He could barely make ends meet both at the office and at home. By the usual yardstick of capitalism, George Bailey was a failure, not a triumphant individualist. But that’s exactly the film’s point: The individualist, every-man-for-himself values of capitalism are corrupting and need to be brought in line with a more human, community-centered view of life.

His endless penchant for “Liberals Good, Conservatives Bad” doesn’t fit in with IAWL. There’s no liberalism there, just good and evil.

I’m sorry, but this is just the stupidest thing I’ve read here in a long time. Matt, you seem to think that you’re clarifying something here but you are actually obfuscating and obscuring the truth. This is what’s so fucking wrong with this babble about “good and evil” they obscure the specifics of the situation and the problem. This kind of “analysis” short circuits rationality and thought. It’s strictly emotionalism that gives rise to the worst sort of blundering public policies.

Both representatives of state power in the film explicitly endorse George’s path of a tempered, regulated capitalism yoked to the service of friends, family and capitalism.

Matt’s was a pretty long and rambling rant but I’d like to just point out just one of his glaring idiocies. The incident that triggers the film’s climactic crisis is, indeed, entirely beyond George’s control. Unless you think he should have fired Uncle Billy for incompetence years before, George had nothing whatsoever to do with the loss of the $8,000 that brings the auditors and the law down on his neck.

It’s fascinating that Matt is at such pains to suggest that government has nothing to do with George’s success. Indeed, it doesn’t because government has no direct representation in the film until the very end in the form of the sheriff and the military, in the form of George’s brother Harry. The institution’s of capitalism, however, are directly represented through out the film through both Potter, the banker, and Sam Wainright, the industrialist. Within the symbolic structure of the film, these institutions set in opposition to the institutions of family and community.

George’s tragedy is that despite the joys of his family and the great good he does for the community, he still considers himself a failure because he lives in a drafty house, he doesn’t have the best dressed kids in town and he can’t travel the world doing big things he always wanted to do. He is an Everyman who can’t see the beauty of his own life because of the dominant values of the culture around him. Those values are embodied in Potter and Sam Wainright, who represent the two faces of capitalism. Potter is obviously the darker side of capitalism in which the ruthless pursuit of profit erases all else: friends, family, community. Wainright, on the other hand, represents the positive aspects of capitalism as much as Sam helps to build community (he reopens a factory in Bedford Falls on George’s advice) and he appears relatively happy with his trophy wife. Sam is happy but also shallow. His pleasures are superficial.

Because George has bought into the materialist values of capitalism, George feels hemmed in and tied down by friends, family and community. He aspires to Wainright’s superficial happiness but when thwarted by the bonds of family is tempted to become Potter, by taking the job in the bank.

The figure of Sam Wainright is evidence enough that the film is not anti-capitalist. It nevertheless recognizes that capitalism left unchecked has a negative influence on society as witnessed in Pottersville. The name of this nightmare town binds its condition to the policies and practices the figure who most explicitly represents unbridled capitalism in the film. It’s hilarious that Matt would praise Ma Bailey for turning her home into a boarding house when in the film, this is clearly presented as a capitulation: the ultimate destruction of the family sphere by an unchecked capitalism. Any one who could read this any other way understands absolutely nothing about films or how they function.

Ultimately, George recognizes the value of his life but even more, he recognizes the value of the path he has chosen which stands as a middle way between Potter and Wainright. His path represents a capitalism made responsive to friends, family and community. It is a capitalism brought down to size and put in the service of values other than the values of pure profit or fleeting pleasures. It is, in other words, a regulated and tamed capitalism which was the central goal of FDRs New Deal. This is in keeping with Capra’s own personal politics. He was a New Deal supporter but he was also no communist or socialist.

Anyone that wants to claim this movie is conservative in nature not only has to deny the explicit critique of capitalism in the film, as does Matt and Jay Tea, they also have to ignore Capra’s own politics were closely aligned with FDR and the New Deal left.

In short, they have to be idiots.

Last time I checked, liberalism existed. Too bad, so sad. Of course, this does fit in with the conservatives unhinged hatred of modern fiction (Harry Potter, One Piece, etc.).

Zython, 6:16 a.m., December 27:

Besides, Jay was the one who dragged the conversation to Harry Potter.

Response 1: Zython, why do you hate the truth so much?

Response 2: Zython, why are you such a lying sack of shit?

Response 3: Zython, are you so stupid that you couldn’t remember you brought up Harry Potter first, or do you think everyone else so stupid that they couldn’t simply read up and see that simple fact?

Choose any or all of the above.

J.

But I did find it interesting that when Chappaquiddick comes up…

Look, thats kinda the point. Why is Chappaquidick brought up at all? Good lord it happened before I was even born. Know what else happened before I was even born? Bush’s three arrests. That right there is the first time in five years I’ve even brought them up. Know why so infrequently? Because they don’t really matter too damn much. By contrast, how many times this month alone have you made or heard a Chappaquidick “Joke,” counting the two in this thread alone?

George Bailey, a man who pretty much did it on his own.

For a town full of people that otherwise couldn’t. That’s been the whole point that you’ve been struggling to avoid this whole time you’ve been building your ridiculous strawmen(abortion loving, homosexual, work-avoiding, god loathing, etc etc etc throughout the litany that is as long as it is tediously predictable). In a town that seems to have no other significant social welfare programs George Bailey effectively was the social welfare program. And you think he’s a “good” person? Hardly surprising coming from such a damned godless gay welfare loving socialist as yourself, matt!

Also, Haruhi-ism is a false religion. Kona-chan the benevolent will destroy the false God Suzumiya. The reckoning will come. None will be spared, not even the children.

You say conservative, I say Eric Rudolph.

More than you did, before your laser focus was pulled into the Harry Potter Universe.

Conversations change topics. Besides, Jay was the one who dragged the conversation to Harry Potter.

And I brought a lot more to the table than he did.

Not really, unless we count your hatred for America. *Sigh* when will you conservatives just give up and admit that you hate this country more than anything?

But I did find it interesting that when Chappaquiddick comes up, Teddy’s just a guy who “did a schmucky thing in 1970,” but do yourself a favor – try Googling “liberal lion of the Senate” and see which name you get all over the front page.

Hmm…I could link the phrase “conservative bear of the senate” to Larry Craig, and spam it across a ton of sites. It’s very easy to alter Google this way.

You know, the party of S-CHIP and the New Deal,

Translation: I hate children and poor people.

Not suprising.

we-know-better-than-you

This is coming from a guy who’s political affiliation claims to be descendant from God himself (or herself if you believe in Haruhi-ism, which you undoubtably don’t and elitestly label a “fake religion”).

Poor matt, why do you hate America so much?

That’s like using war in the Middle East to create peace in the Middle East.

Oh. Okay. Never mind.

That because you think that Ted Kennedy didn’t save a drowning woman in 1970, no liberal could?
Of course, you’re a conservative. What was I thinking?

Fuck off.

Right. Because all liberals are alike? Because Ted Kennedy did a schmucky thing in 1970, no liberal could possibly be any different ever, right?

Seriously, fuck off.

All in all, a classic.

And one that didn’t even become associated with Christmas until it fell into public domain, and more and more stations started running it during Christmas.

Thank you, Frank Capra. Thank you, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed and Lionel Barrymore. Thank you, Philip Van Doren Stern and Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and everyone else who helped give this great gift to all of us.

J.

In a year featuring anti-war box-office smashes like “In the Valley of Elah,” “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs,” and “Redacted,” that’s a pretty bold statement.

It’s either a tribute to Oliver’s ignorance of the world or a testament to his sadly warped view of it, that he can make such an absolute statement like that and expect it to stand up.

Potter as Dick Cheney, the prototype of moviehouse eeeeeeeeevil. Personally, I prefer Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, but to each his own.

What’s missing in the partisan myopia, is that the generation-long battle between the Bailey family and Henry Potter is not a battle between liberal and conservative but between good and evil.

It’s no surprise that Oliver’s Army would miss the distinction; good and evil are apparently mere quaint abstractions in their eyes. Except when a political distinction can be inserted – then, according to their particularly twisted take, we have the wholesome goodness of liberalism and the irredeemable evil of conservatism. And may Mother Earth rain volcanic ash upon your house should you ever confuse the two.

But is that what IAWL shows us? That Oliver’s Neanderthal grunting of “Liberals Good, Conservatives Bad!” is but a shadow of Frank Capra’s 1946 prescience?

Not at all.

As in all of life, the tale is never as simple as the “nuanced” liberals would have us believe. There’s barely a lick of liberal philosophy to be found in this film. It is only Oliver’s twisted vision, equating apparent good to liberal principles and apparent evil to conservative principles, which allows him to argue such a thing at all.

Is it a liberal film? Well it might be…

If we believe that the Building and Loan would go to the government for a bailout after Uncle Billy’s blunder…

If we agree that Freddie Othello is justified in opening the gym floor swimming pool to give George and Mary a dunking because it’s not his fault he’s a crushing bore, George stole his girl! Freddie was just an innocent victim…

If we agree that George Bailey’s ultimate happiness depended on his personal fulfillment and self-esteem, and not on grasping that which had always been right in front of him, if only he had the wit to reach out and take it…

If we agree that none of George’s problems were his fault, but instead were unpreventable, inevitable, insolvable, due to “circumstances beyond his control…”

If we understand that Pottersville’s main drag is a precise re-creation of the means by which government keeps the poor from improving their lot by catering to the lowest common denominator: Dancing girls, lottery tickets, pawnshops, and plenty of booze to dull the pain; all heavily taxed, no doubt, to keep the government coffers overflowing, if not simply to redistribute Potter’s unchecked wealth…

Maybe Oliver is right. That’s what you get with liberal government – the illusion that life is supposed to be always fair and always happy. If you hold to those peculiar definitions of “fair” and “happy.”

No, this is not a liberal film. What IAWL is, is a film that celebrates several things: the benefits of foresight, hard work, saving, self-reliance, perseverance and thinking of the other guy first; the notion that happiness is not a destination to be reached just over the next hill but a flower always blooming beside the road, just waiting to be picked and enjoyed; and finally, that divine intervention and the hand of God are real.

Not precisely aligned with the traditional liberal canon, these.

What do we see in Bedford Falls that causes us to celebrate liberal philosophies?

Clean, decent, affordable government housing! Oh, wait…Bailey Park was filled with houses built with funding from a small business, not by the government.

Government subsidized work programs! No… the Baileys owned their business and ran it well without government intervention… Gower’s Drugstore & Emporium… Martini’s Bar… where is the hand of the state in the success of these and all the other small businesses in Bedford Falls?

Perhaps the separation of church and state! Well, yes… because the film opens with a montage of prayer, but not a single government official can be heard. Only prayerful concern lifted for a man who’s reached the end of his rope, by a town full of all the souls who have reaped the benefit of that man’s goodness and generosity for a generation. I believe Oliver would call these folks, as he has in the past, “religious nuts.” Certainly they are not the preferred poster children for Oliver’s liberal dystopia.

What about George Bailey himself, liberal crusader for truth and justice? Hardly! Is it by the power and benevolence of the government that George acts and gives and sacrifices to save his brother’s life? No. To prevent Emil Gower’s life-threatening mistake? No. For the Building and Loan after his father’s death? No. So that his brother can go to college? No. So that selfish bastard Harry can pursue his own marriage and his own dreams? No.

Is it with the power of the government, or by the sacrifice of his own honeymoon stake, that he again saves the Building and Loan from Potter’s hands?

Is it the power of government, or George’s own position as head of the Building and Loan, which ushered in a period of growth, prosperity and personal gain for Bedford Falls which so galled Potter that he finally was reduced to offering George a job in an effort to end the Building and Loan’s encroachment on the Potter empire?

Was it government regulation, or free-market entrepreneurial capitalism, that allowed the Building and Loan and Bailey Park to thrive?

George’s self-reliance and self-determination guided him in every case, in every crisis, with never an expectation that a New Deal program or a government dole, or even the person he helped would come back around to bail him out.

Even Ma Bailey, without husband Peter, never-existing son George, or long-deceased son Harry, made her own way. She converted her home to a boarding house. Where is the government to provide her cushion?

And was George himself a religious man? The evidence is unclear. In Martini’s bar, just before the final thread snaps, a desperate George Bailey, about to be arrested, picks up the phone and calls the government to bail him out, right?

Nope. Like a universe full of desperate men before and since, when there is no other help to be had, whom does he seek?

“God…Oh, God…Dear Father in Heaven, I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there, and you can hear me, show me the way. I’m at the end of my rope. I… Show me the way, God.”

George admits he’s not a praying man… in the middle of a prayer. We learn from Joseph, the narrator (an angel in heaven, but surely that’s a mere cinematic storytelling device, not a true representation like the evil conservative Henry Potter!), that on V-E day, George wept and prayed, and on V-J Day, he wept and prayed again.

Turning to God before the government? A liberal champion like George Bailey? Just another atheist in another foxhole.

Oliver, what movie are you watching?

But what do you gain with conservative financial principles like planning and foresight, with a plan to save money and avoid debt?

If you want to, you can put off going to college for four years, work, save and earn enough to pay for college without borrowing. Or send your brother if your father’s untimely death leaves you to take over the family business.

If you plan, work and save, you can gather enough cash to go on a lavish honeymoon and not have a crushing debt follow you home. Or you can save your family’s livelihood.

Because, damn, you just can’t plan for these sorts of disasters in life, can you? Unless, of course, you do.

If you save money, if you exercise foresight and planning, you can buy a big, old, drafty, rundown mansion and spend years slowly painting and hanging new wallpaper and building a showplace (eventually you might even be able to fix the finial atop the newel post at the bottom of the stairs), and not risk losing it to the bank. Wow, that’s a lesson that endures, isn’t it?

What about happiness? Was George ever going to find happiness outside Bedford Falls? Why should he? It took him 25 years to see it, but he finally realized everything he had overlooked – a devoted wife and loving family, a war-hero brother who after all his accomplishments understood that his big brother was a better man than he, a town full of friends and people who loved and respected him with such feeling that they emptied their collective coffers for him in a time of need.

It was not what he did or didn’t do, not what he had or didn’t have, not who he knew or didn’t know that made George Bailey a happy man; it was nothing more than who he was, a man of strength, character and values. A man who in the final moments saw how the little efforts he made had the greatest effect, saw not the world he wished for but the world he lived in. He finally understood that his happiness had been there underfoot all the time, and his endlessly delayed chase for the end of the rainbow would have only taken him farther from it.

And of course, the framing device in the film, opening with a town’s prayers for a lost soul, and ending with a redemptive miracle that not only saves a man’s eternal soul but earns an apprentice angel his wings?

Have you been touched by his noodly appendage? George Bailey certainly hasn’t.

George Bailey, a liberal?

I must admit he did have that irritating habit of wishing for a million dollars every time he walked into Gower’s drugstore. That’s a pretty liberal trait, but George also had that annoying work ethic and habit of saving that betrays the liberal faith.

But, George Bailey, a liberal?

He jumped into a river to save a drowning man. Would Ted Kennedy have done the same?

Rowling herself, however, is clearly more liberal than most of the GOP base. Dumbledore wasn’t out until the books finished, of course, but her critique of homophobia is present all the way back in Book 3, disguised as the magical community’s distrust of Lupin–a werewolf–”teaching their children.” Her villains were all opposed to any sort of “race-mixing,” and the curses that inflicted torture were marked as Unforgivable.

Notably you dont try to argue against my point as much as you sort of go “oh yeah?” and point at something else that looks worse. You aren’t arguing that the MoM doesn’t behave in the way I characterize or that the WBush Admin doesnt either, rather that “TEH LIBS R WERSE AND HERS A FEW TIMES THEY WERE THAT PROVES IT SO MUCH!!1!ONE” and that implicitly makes Bush okay, but not the MoM, who are therefore like Liberals by default since Bush am the awesomesauce super happy number one.

Notably too you seem so hungry to force an argument where there isnt much of one and shouldnt be in the first place that you outright ignore the common ground we both seem to be sharing in our cases, namely that authoritarianism, be it liberal or conservative, is inherently anathema to personal freedom, privacy, prosperity, life, liberty, the professor and mary-ann. That any government that tries to forcibly consolidate power and influence in the way Palpatine does, or to use that power to manipulate public perceptions the way the MoM does, is a morally flawed one. I’m curious if you were oblivious to the concept when I suggested it, or if you actually think conservative authoritarianism is inherently good, and liberal authoritarianism is inherently bad.

Admit it, Rex. The Ministry of Magic was put forward as a “the government can fix all the problems” kind of thing

I saw it more as a “There is no problem here, move right along, everything’s fine, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia,” kind of thing, myself. If Rowling has publically stated that her intent was as you say though, then I will admit it, of course, as being true. If this is not the case though, then all I have to admit to is allowing myself to argue with someone who thinks their personal interpretation of a work is the empirically correct one, other variations and authorial intent be damned. Which, I am given to wonder, do you suppose I will have to admit to?

Final point to close on: It is not in “blaming” Bush for 9/11 that I say that he largely ignored the threat of terrorism (possibly to the same extent that Americans did in general, possibly moreso) for other, “more important” projects such as tax cuts and Social Security reform. In much the same way, the MoM ignored the threat posed by Voldemort, telling itself desperately even that He who must not be Named must not even exist.

Here’s the rub. When confronted with the empirical fact of Voldemorts existence during his attack on the Ministry itself, and I may be misremembering this, the ministry head resigned in disgrace, Uxbridge was jailed, and in general the highest ranking people were punished and held accountable for allowing the threat to go ignored as long as it had done, and no one dared call their imposed ignorance of the truth defensible. Alternately, conservative pundits and politicians publically thanked God that we have George W Bush’s powerful, charismatic, wise, verile thunderpenis as president in these troubled times that were surely the fault of the previous administration (to say nothing of Falwell’s litany of pagans, gays, etc.) and for which no blame can be placed on our leader’s head so let’s give him carte blanche and a half. I just think its interesting, in this discussion of parallels, of the curious places where they diverge completely.