It's a Wonderful Life, Despite Rich Cohen

It's a Wonderful Life, Despite Rich Cohen

It’s ”really the most terrifying Hollywood film ever made, a tale of hunger, greed and a troubled America.”

Only a misanthropic, jaded contributor to Salon.com, or to one of that website’s twisted sister sites, could interpret Frank Capra’s classic film “It’s a Wonderful Life” in such a fashion as columnist Rich Cohen does.

Sadly, some people get up every morning in America and spend a good part of their day, if not their entire day, not in giving thanks for having been born in and for having prospered in our great land but in thinking up ways to denigrate “their” country, to undermine its values and traditions, or to simply poke holes in good things.

While conferring needlessly gratuitous compliments upon the late renouned director Frank Capra as “an Italian immigrant who . . . lived through the Depression, then through the rise of terrible ideologies,” Cohen concludes that Capra ”knew how bad things could get. He knew, too, that the United States was not immune and this knowledge spiked his love with the worst kind of fear. The result was that special melancholy, blue shot through with black, that runs through his films, the best of which are parables that operate on various levels, some of which were probably unknown to Capra himself.”

The supremely arrogant Cohen knows what that ignorant Italian immigrant couldn’t possibly grasp: In Cohen’s warped view, Capra’s philosophy and films were attributable to the fact that he “loved America [but only] because America saved him.” Capra had no appreciation of his adopted country, no patriotism, no innate sense of rectitude and morality, just a debt of gratitude to America.

To Cohen, the protagonist of “IAWL”, George Bailey, isn’t really saved at all. As Cohen writes at the end of his trash piece, Bailey was living in tawdry Pottersville all along and never did live in wholesome Bedford Falls and Cohen admits he relates to the Pottersville tawdriness.

That’s why, to the omniscient Cohen, in the last scene, “George looks at his friends with terror. He’s happy to be alive, but he’s disillusioned, wised up in just the worst way. He finally knows the world as it really is, what his friends are capable of, the dark potential coiled in each of them . . . It’s the sort of vision that makes a person go insane. . . "
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=10438.)