Odd Thoughts on Bizarre Topics

I can always trust Lance Mannion to have a wonderful set of observations on an obscure group of topics that I never considered thinking about before I read his blog. A couple of my favorites include this discussion of the relative appropriateness of a Butch Cassidy vs. a Pulp Fiction poster, and this review of Robots that leads to these ruminations on the meaning of It’s a Wonderful Life:

Millions have cried over It’s a Wonderful Life. They’ve cheered for George Bailey and they’ve been appalled when it turns out that one of the effects of George’s never having been born is that Bedford Falls has been turned into Pottersville.

Millions.

And some of them are now in Congress.

There are plenty of members of the House and the Senate who love that movie and yet who with their votes for the usury bill and against raising the minimum wage and with their positions on wrecking Social Security and bankrupting the Government so that it can’t provide any services to the poor and the working class and the middle class—the people who as George Bailey passionately points out do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country—are busy turning all of America into Pottersville.

And come Christmastime they will sit down with their families and cheer for George Bailey and boo Mr Potter without even a glimmer of an idea that there’s any irony in this.

What brought Lance’s proclivities to mind this morning was a post discussing Walter Kirn’s review of Jonathan Safran’s new book. As Scott is fond of saying, America didn’t have a virgin birth. The entire post is worth reading, but I was especially struck by this passage:

The Black Death killed off fairy tales, Mole, Ratty, Badger, and Toad died in the trenches of World War I, the Blitz marked the end of Pooh, and the Cat in the Hat didn’t make it out of Vietnam.

I didn’t like it at the time and I like it even less now after Abu Ghraib, this notion that we were all somehow so innocent on September 10, 2001.

It seems a pretty stupid idea that a nation founded on slavery and expanded through an attempt to exterminate the Indians, that slaughtered three quarters of a million of its own people in a horrific civil war, that firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, and obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that sent its soldiers to massacre the people of My Lai and dropped napalm on children had any innocence to lose.

It seems to me that one of the things we Americans do better than anyone else is forget, or re-invent, ourselves. I don’t think that I experience the same “loss of innocence moment” in the literature and film of other countries that I so commonly see in American art. How many movies, how many books have that moment; one where the hero finally realizes that he or she lives in the “real world,” and not in some wonderland. The Great Gatsby has it, Quiz Show is all about it, Butch and Sundance has it, David Lynch’s work is built around it. The moment is there even in Star Wars, where the idealism of Anakin/Luke is broken time and again by multiple moments of loss. Kurosawa, Ozu, Fellini, Saramago, Dostoyevsky, they never seem to assume this innocence in their characters or their narrative. Really, the most subversive thing about Leone’s westerns is that there is no illusion of innocence; all of the characters have done dark things, and most can come to terms with them, unlike, for example, Ethan Edwards of The Searchers.

What is it about the American project that evokes this sense?