ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 26, 1995 TAG: 9512270020
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TERENCE MONMANEY LOS ANGELES TIMES
NOTE: Above
GEORGE BAILEY "enables" Uncle Billy's boozing, therapists say. He has issues with his father, Freudians assert. And he's a conflicted neurotic. So what's so wonderful?
You don't have to be a psychologist to appreciate ``It's a Wonderful Life,'' the 1946 Frank Capra movie in which fatherhood is honored, small-town values celebrated, greed thwarted, God's existence validated, a suicide averted and a world war won.
But critics and academics recently have been psychoanalyzing the beloved Christmas story in professional journals, dissertations and interviews. And via the Internet have come many e-mail responses to a reporter's query asking why the movie turns so many sober American adults into tear-sodden wrecks.
Part of what has prompted the recent flurry of psych-minded commentary is that the movie, which turns 50 next year, has gone beyond mere celluloid diversion and entered the heady realm of American Ritual. ``It's an official public event,'' said Richard Jameson, editor of Film Comment magazine.
The movie stars James Stewart as George Bailey, an addled Everyman rescued from despair by a feckless guardian angel who reveals what a wretched world it would be without him. It usually is served up as yuletide cheer. And yet a growing body of psychological literature has discovered cold, dark, even paranoid depths beneath the reassuringly warm surface.
An article in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis last year says that Stewart portrays Bailey as a ``supremely divided neurotic'' plagued by ``incompatible longings.'' Freudian theorists roll their eyes over George's relationship with his father, from whom he uneasily inherits the job of running a building and loan association. Family therapists worry that he's an ``enabler,'' covering up for his Uncle Billy's drinking problem.
Granted, a great deal of psycho-criticism of art is impenetrable and not a little absurd. Describing the moment when George and Mary Hatch (Donna Reed) finally kiss, one critic wrote: ``What makes the erotics of this orgasmic embrace so complex is Stewart's swiftly suppressed urge to murder the Madonna who has just seduced him.''
In his 1971 autobiography, Capra said that ``Wonderful Life'' was not only his favorite of the 50 films he made, but the ``greatest film anybody ever made'' - a boast that might put any psychotherapist on ego alert.
Capra said he wanted the movie to ``tell the weary, the disheartened and the disillusioned'' that ``no man is a failure'' and ``no man is poor who has one friend.''
He accomplishes that, ingeniously and mawkishly, when the angel shows Bailey what his family and hometown of Bedford Falls, N.Y., would have been like if he had not been born. His mother would be a poor boardinghouse widow, his uncle a lunatic, his wife a spinster. And ``home'' would be honky-tonk, vice-ridden Pottersville, taken over in Bailey's absence by the venal financier Mr. Potter.
The ``gift'' that the angel gives Bailey - allowing him to see that he mattered in ways he had never imagined - is roughly analogous to what a person might learn in a successful course of so-called existential psychotherapy, said Todd C. Reiher, a psychologist at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.
``Many people discover through the existential exploration process that the bulk of the meaning in life comes from people and relationships with people,'' he said. ``Based on my own viewing, I believe there is definitely a therapeutic quality to the film.''
``It's a journey to the heart of the self to recognize who one really is,'' said film theorist Harvey Greenberg, a clinical psychiatrist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Stuart Fischoff, a psychologist and screenwriter at California State University, Los Angeles, invoked the mystic Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung to explain Bailey's dilemma. It was Jung's belief that certain needs were ``archetypal'' - as ingrained in our being as the need for hearth and home that Bailey's father says is ``deep in the race.'' A Jungian interpretation, Fischoff said, would be that Bailey is in the grips of the age-old dilemma ``to understand where he fits in in the universe.''
If filmmakers and psychologists have any authentic interest in common, it is human conflict. And there is a wide variety of theories about what's really eating George.
One involves George's relationship with his father, Peter, founder of the building and loan association that is George's ball and chain. Some psychologists say George suffers from a conflicted identification with his paternal parent.
Paternalism and the burdens of American manhood are recurring themes in modern critiques of ``Wonderful Life.'' Kaja Silverman, a psychoanalytic film theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, devoted a chapter of her 1993 book ``Male Subjectivity at the Margins'' to George and his struggle to fit into the masculine role that postwar society expected him to fill.
Another notable drama-within-the-drama involves George and the absent-minded, hard-drinking Uncle Billy, who sets in motion the climactic financial crisis when he loses $8,000 of the building and loan's cash. All along, George seems to tolerate Billy's drinking.
In this heyday of co-dependency, the right thing to do would be for George to bring in a therapist and conduct an ``intervention.''
It is a staple of Freudian theory that whatever a person tries hardest to repress comes back in spades in dreams. And a number of scholars view the Pottersville sequence as a sort of dream, a nightmare perhaps, in which George's submerged desires are garishly displayed.
In Bedford Falls, the character Violet is a mere flirt; in Pottersville, she appears to be a prostitute. That transformation reflects George's long-buried sexual longing for her, said Krin Gabbard, a film scholar at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
More generally, Gabbard said, Pottersville represents America's bubbled-up ``unconscious,'' in which long-restrained capitalism and family values suddenly go mad.
Other scholars have echoed the sentiment that Capra, in effect, failed to resolve the conflicts he let loose. For that reason, ``Wonderful Life'' is actually a ``dark, disturbing tale,'' said Andrew Gordon, director of the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the University of Florida.
Where many see George as just a troubled guy who finally finds happiness, critics such as Gordon argue that he is doomed to self-loathing, his wanderlust and his domestic sides forever at odds.
Over the years, many analysts have viewed Capra as anti-intellectual, a mere ``cockeyed optimist'' and ``populist.'' When ``It's a Wonderful Life'' premiered, the New Yorker magazine condemned it as ``baby talk.''
Ironically, though, some critics today suggest that the key to the power of ``Wonderful Life'' is an intellectual sleight of hand.
Aside from the money showered upon George in the end - a physical symbol of the townspeople's fondness, which also happens to keep him out of jail - everything tangible about his life and hometown remains the same. Potter is still in power. George is still broke. The banister knob in his ``drafty old barn'' is still loose.
``Nothing has really changed for George,'' said Randall Fallows, a free-lance teacher whose 1993 University of California, San Diego, doctoral dissertation was based in part on the movie. ``Nothing has changed except his understanding that his life has gone from meaning nothing to meaning everything.''
And audience members, struggling with their own internal contradictions, sensing that their own skyscraper dreams have been foreshortened, share in George's newfound insight. Thus Capra joins angels and psychotherapists in the art of releasing us from the prison of our old careworn and negligible selves.
``It's a nice time of year to feel that,'' Fallows said.
``But I still wish George got to leave town at least once.''
AP-NY-12-24-95 1542E
LENGTH: Long : 142 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: James Stewart as George Bailey (seated) and Thomasby CNBMitchell as Uncle Billy in a scene from Frank Capra's "It's a
Wonderful Life."