So, what's special about IAWL?

Well, The Forager and I had a fun discussion of Capra last month (in which we agreed that George Bailey had a better than even chance of going postal someday, and I argued that Capra's endings aren't endings at all but "wrap parties"--we were also on about "eye-level aesthetics" at that time) and you might want to take a look at that, but tonight I want to discuss a part of the film that we didn't get to--the Pottersville Sequence, a neglected item in the catalogue of great film noir.

The definitive book on Capra is Ray Carney's American Vision ... It's more than just the only decent book ever written about the greatest of auteurs, it's one of the finest works of scholarship I've ever read--my understanding of American culture owes almost as much to Carney as it does to Perry Miller. Believe me, that's the highest praise I could possibly muster...

Carney's broad take on the film is that it "documents the painful, slow, difficult, unending labor of wrestling the smallest impulse of personal genius into some marginal, minor, inevitably flawed and unsatisfactory practical representation." (sounds kinda like this blog...)

On the subject of Pottersville (which he calls Nighttown), Carney writes:

the episode... makes explicit the issue that has been implicit in the whole preceding film: the consequences of the surfacing of energies that cannot be placed or represented in the forms of conventional life or Hollywood family film lighting, photography, dialogue, dramatic progression, or narrative eventfulness. What was walled off into isolated moments in the preceding narrative and contained by the narrative and social ceremonies that surrounded it eventually bursts all social and formal walls erected to control it and emerges enlarged, deformed, disastrous... George Bailey finally breaks free of the society that has hedged him round up to this point in the film, just as Capra breaks his own film free from the family drama organization of the preceding narrative... The dreamland sequence moves the viewer into a world of visionary ineffability and emotional intensity. Pictures and music replace words and dialogue. Operatic and melodramatic outbursts of intense feeling replace gradual, chronological, sequential narrative exposition. Low-key lighting effects, expressive close-ups, and emotionally powerful orchestrations communicate imaginative disturbances that have no social form of expression in the previous film or in George Bailey's ordinary life. (417)

I think the man's got somethin' there, but, naturally, having seen the film at least fifty times in the past 15 years or so, I've got some thoughts of my own to offer on this subject...

Early on in his chapter on the film, Carney dismisses James Agee's oft-invoked characterization of IAWL as merely an updated version of Dickens, and of course he's right to do so, because Agee was blowing off both works, and his "critique" is worthless (I like Agee--Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is fascinating--but not when he's in snark mode, as he generally was whenever he discussed Hollywood product)--but I think Carney makes a mistake by not looking at the genuine continuities between the two pieces, the better to understand where they diverge. Here's what I mean. (a lot of this stuff is adapted from my first novel, actually):