Late this summer an open casting call went out for a Flaming Lips video shoot happening at Mt. Tabor Park near my house. After work on the day of the shoot I rode up there, hoping to be a semi-naked extra, but that was all over by the time I arrived. Even so, I managed to snag a few amazing shots as the sun set, and the completed video (with a ton of nudity!) is available here. Enjoy.
While watching the Director’s Series DVD for Michel Gondry this weekend I discovered the music video for The Chemical Brothers song Star Guitar, which I somehow had never seen before. It’s such a simple idea, executed so seamlessly, that it might just be my favorite video of all time.
A while back I decided that my living room walls were looking a little stark, so I went out and bought a bunch of 36″x48″ canvases, some paint, and am now in the process of painting them with scenes and characters from some of my favorite movies. The first one I’ve finished was from Pulp Fiction, and now I’m moving on the The Big Lebowski.
“I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Coliseum. Then, I’m comin’ back here to go to college and see what they know. And then I’m gonna build things. I’m gonna build airfields, I’m gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high, I’m gonna build bridges a mile long…”
- George Bailey, It’s a Wonderful Life
George (played by Jimmy Stewart) doesn’t know it yet, but none of that is ever going to happen. Not the travel, not the education, not the skyscrapers, not the bridges. Instead, George will end up working a job that he hates, living in a town he’s tired of, and raising children he never really wanted. Even being married to Donna Reed can’t prevent him from trying to kill himself.
Although It’s a Wonderful Life may seem like a heartwarming post-war fable about appreciating what you have and recognizing how each life affects every other, it’s really a depressing tale about rationalizing regret and the virtues of being a victim. I realized recently that another film deals with similar subject matter while cleverly disguising itself as a satire of televison culture and celebrity. That film is The Truman Show.
Like George Bailey, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey, whose inspiration to become an actor, coincidentally, was Jimmy Stewart) is an everyman who has lived his entire life in the town of his birth. Both men dream of seeing the world, and both rightly recognize that their place in their falsely idyllic communities is what prevents them from realizing those dreams. Like Truman with Seahaven, every time that George attempts to leave Bedford Falls he is presented with a new obstacle. First his father has a stroke the night before George is heading off to college. Later, with his new bride in tow, George cancels their honeymoon because of a run at the bank. Like Truman, it’s almost as though someone or something is plotting to keep them from leaving. The key difference between the two men (and between the films) is the response to these adversities.
This may seem strange, but I like It’s a Wonderful Life a lot as a film. It’s a well acted, well produced, extremely effective piece of work. But that effectiveness is dangerous considering its subtle celebration of failure.
What bothers me most about the film is the fact that it begins making justifications for George’s inaction at the exact point in The Truman Show that Truman’s quest for liberation intensifies. Imagine if, after being thwarted by a broken bus, forest fire, and nuclear meltdown, Truman simply returned home, went back to work, had kids, and, in a moment of clarity about the difference between the life he lived and the life he wanted to live, jumped off the eternally unfinished bridge near town. And then, after a whole lot of moralizing about his sucker’s bet really being a jackpot, the ending has the whole town showing up to congratulate him for how much of a victim he managed to be. Sound inspirational and heartwarming? Not to me. But that’s exactly what happens in It’s a Wonderful Life. The film makes it very clear that George’s sacrifices allowed many other people’s dreams to come true. But what about George’s dreams? Why is the film so intent on glorifying the consolation prize?
Even the “villain” in It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter, is annoying because George is presented as being the only person willing or able to stand up to him. Is no one else in the town of Bedford Falls responsible for what happens to it? A person could argue that George behaves nobly by staying for the good of the community because so many people are depending on him. But is that any less true with Truman? Literally thousands of actor’s livelihoods are dependent on Truman remaining trapped in place, as well. Both films also present a pretty wife and the prospect of children as reasons to stay put. At one point Truman’s wife Meryl, in response to his desire to see the world, insidiously remarks, “Honey, you wanna be an explorer. This’ll pass. We all think like this now and then.”
So one major difference between the two films is the way that the individual’s responsibility the community is presented. It’s a Wonderful Life was released just a year after World War II ended, and the story of personal sacrifice for the good of the community was no doubt intended to resonate with returning soldiers who had done just that. But the film bombed at the box office, so maybe those same soldiers saw a little of themselves in the tragedy that is George Bailey’s life, and weren’t interested in the reassurances about “it all being worth it” that the film provides.
The Truman Show, on the other hand, allows its main character no such excuses. As the show’s creator Christof admits, “If his was more than just a vague ambition (to leave), there’s no way we could prevent him.” George Bailey, for all his talk about “shakin’ the dust off his feet”, never shows anything but vague ambition, and so never succeeds in controlling his own destiny. As he stands on the bridge contemplating suicide, we are supposed to feel sympathy for a man put upon by the Bailey Savings & Loan and Mr. Potter, but George has no one to blame for his regrets but himself. So another major difference between the two films is the tenacity of their main characters.
One of my favorite scenes in The Truman Show comes near the end, after Truman has faced his fear of water and has quite literally weathered the storm. As the clouds break overhead, Truman sits peacefully on the edge of his boat, eyes closed, allowing the (artificial) sun to warm him. He is a man who is past suicide, past death, past regret. His state of mind has been earned through struggle, and Carrey does an excellent job making Truman’s inner peace palpable. It’s a Wonderful Life contains no scene analogous to that one, so there’s another big difference. At the end of the film, George is accosted by everyone telling him how great he is, “the richest man in town”. George even appears to believe them. But he’s the same man he always was, and we’re given no reason to think that after the party’s over, those same regrets won’t return the moment his friends stop telling him reasons not to have them. Unlike Truman, George never earns the right to be satisfied. He’s still a victim of circumstance, and the moral is of the film is to like, or at least accept it.
If It’s a Wonderful Life is a primer on developing a victim mentality and the rationalizations necessitated by it, The Truman Show is its antithesis. One film allows the protagonist to bask in platitudes right up to the end, while the other argues that there is no virtue in regret, that there is no one to blame but oneself, and that the punishment for living one’s life in constant fear of losing it is dying in a cage with a lifetime worth of vague ambitions, a prisoner by choice.