|
 From
its opening week at Radio City Music Hall almost exactly fifty years ago,
Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town broke box office records of
all kinds and even threatened to eclipse the success of the greatest cinematic
hit of the era, Chaplin's contemporaneous Modern Times. What makes
the extraordinary appeal of both films of more than merely commercial
interest is that each represented a daring departure from its respective
director's past work. For whatever complex personal or political reasons,
in the spring of 1936 both Chaplin and Capra, hitherto known more or less
as directors of fantasies, farces, and romances, released films that emphatically
engaged themselves with practical political and social events. Modern
Times and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town both take as their explicit
subject the expressive predicament of the individual almost lost in (or
a semiotician might say "spoken by" or "inscribed within")
the technologies and bureaucracies of the contemporary world. This represents
a radical complication of the situation of the individual in both Capra's
and Chaplin's work. No longer is he on his own socially or expressively.
He is embedded everywhere in a system of alien structures and pressures
that make individuality itself a problematic concept. There is no space
here for a consideration of Chaplin, but this is the shift in Capra's
work that I would like to explore in the following pages, a shift that
changes everything about the nature of personal expression in Mr. Deeds
Goes to Town and Capra's subsequent work.
Early in Mr. Deeds Goes
to Town there is one particular scene that summarizes the newly threatened
situation of Capra's protagonist. Having just inherited $20 million from
a distant relative and moved from Mandrake Falls, Vermont, to a mansion
in New York, country mouse Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) is being outfitted
in new clothes by a group of tailors while his lawyer and executive secretary
talk at him. Capra uses a series of medium-distance shots to take it all
in: the tailors measure, pinch, prod, and gather him; Deeds' lawyer, sitting
on one side of the room, offers him advice on his estate and the financial
responsibilities of his new position; and his personal secretary warns
him about the press and public that will assault him. Meanwhile, a series
of visitors and butlers come and go from adjacent rooms with requests
for Deeds' opinion or claims on his time. There is nothing quite like
it in any of Capra's earlier films, but it is a scene that significantly
will be repeated in one form or another in all of the major films from
Deeds on: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe,
It's a Wonderful Life, and State of the Union. Both visually
and narratively it succinctly figures the embattled social and expressive
situation of the central characters in all of those films.
Longfellow is being warned
about the predatory and invasive inclinations of the populace by his staff,
but the warnings are themselves forms of predation and invasions of privacy.
There is no escape from pressures for Deeds, not even in his own home.
He will never be able to avoid being under public scrutiny. Even his subsequent
"courtship" of Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur) will have to take
place in public-in front of nosy reporters snapping photographs and writing
stories about it and, in a courtroom, during a public hearing on his insanity.
Performances have become public events as never before in Capra's work,
and one can perhaps see a veiled autobiographical reflection of Capra's
own changed situation in the thirties as he became a director who was
himself, after the success of It Happened One Night in 1934,
an increasingly sought-after, preyed-upon public figure.
The image of the tailors working
on Deeds expresses another more specific and sinister threat to the self
as well. The individual is liable not only to bureaucratic pressures and
social scrutiny, but is actually threatened with being made over into
something or someone else. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Capra's later
films raise the harrowing prospect of losing control of one's own identity.
A tailor (or in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a "Taylor")
goes to work on the individual's identity, beyond either the explicit
control, consent, or sometimes (in Smith and Meet John Doe)
even the awareness of the character. It is a nightmare erasure of
the self about which much of Henry Adams' or Sam Shepard's work might
be said to be an extended meditation. The individual comes perilously
close to being refashioned in someone else's image of him or of being
absorbed into the cultural styles around him. (Meet John Doe, most
obviously, and It's a Wonderful Life, most subtly, are in effect
feature-length nightmares about the consequences of such an event.)
If this represents a new fear
in Capra's work (as I believe it does), it should not be surprising that
Capra's dramatic metaphor for his characters changes between his earlier
and later films to reflect Capra's new perception of the situation of
the individual. The earlier films imagined the principal characters as
being, explicitly or implicitly, the "artists" and "authors"
of their own identities. Capra's central characters up through It Happened
One Night were authors of their own independent roles. Like Clark
Gable and Claudette Colbert in that film, they were brilliant and daring
masters and mistresses of self-improvisation-of improvised dramatic postures
and tones, stances and styles, which they tried out, manipulated, and
discarded as audacious actor-directors of their own autonomous selfhoods.
But in the later films, the major characters have ceased to be the makers
of their own identities and destinies and have become instead characters
acting in a script of someone else's authoring, directing, and producing.
They are no longer the authors or directors of their own parts, but the
players of parts prescripted by someone else. They perform not as self-pleasuring
dramatic improvisers, but as actors playing roles within which they have
only the narrowest margin for free interpretation.
On the basis of Mr. Deeds
Goes to Town and the films that follow it, there is every reason to
believe that Capra's conception of his own situation as an "artist"
in film has ominously changed as well. The central figures in Capra's
films almost always represent alter egos for the director himself and
figure his conception of what it is to be a filmmaker, an artist like
himself. The later films are no different from the earlier in this respect.
But while the earlier films imagine creation to be an act of largely solitary,
individualistic, and autonomous authorship, the later ones imagine the
writer-director-producer to be much more like an admittedly idealistic,
but also extremely practical and pragmatic politician. The director-figure
in these films must involve himself with a tangled web of interpersonal
relations, group decision making, and bureaucratic compromises. Capra's
ideal of artistic achievement has changed. The artist/filmmaker is less
a visionary-dreamer working cut off from the world in a "studio"
(in the sense in which a painter or sculptor works in a studio) than a
man trapped in the confusion of the other sort of "studio"–in
the middle of a crowd of people, down on the floor making endless snap
decisions, expressing his dreams not outside of or as an alternative to,
but within and by means of, resistant institutional and social structures.
Capra's earlier films esteemed
states of reverie and idealism as positive ends in themselves, but his
later work rejects such states of dreamy disengagement. George Bailey's,
Jefferson Smith's, and Longfellow Deeds' idealistic dreams are imagined
to be just dreams, worthy of being patronized by other characters or by
viewers of their films as long as they fail concretely to engage themselves
with the bureaucratic and social realities of their worlds. It is imperative
that they convert their dreams into practicalities. To be adequate as
an artist in these later films is to be capable of expressing oneself
in the practical forms and structures of institutional and social life.
The Deeds, Smith, and Doe trilogy is, in the largest sense,
an extended study of a central character's capacities of performance in
these changed circumstances: in public, in front of an invariably hostile
or indifferent audience from which he is unable to turn away or to remove
himself imaginatively, in a situation in which the authorship and interpretation
of his particular role is largely out of his hands. The central character's
inchoate, yearning dreams and ideals must be translated into alien forms
and structures of social and linguistic expression that he is unable to
escape or alter.
With his regular crew-cameraman
Joseph Walker (with whom this was Capra's sixteenth collaboration), set
designer Stephen Goosson, and sound engineer Edward Bernds-Capra brilliantly
uses the expressive resources of cinematic space and sound as ways of
registering Deeds' social and bureaucratic embeddedness and of measuring
his marginal capacities of performance in the film. He plays with the
volume and resonance of Deeds' voice and the scale of his figure in the
various vast institutional spaces through which he moves in the course
of the film, contrasting his small, quirky movements against the static
massiveness of the sets. No scenes more comically capture Longfellow's
(and, by extension, Capra's) capacity to remain undaunted by, to perform
within, and therefore to humanize an otherwise inhuman cinematic, social,
or institutional space than the episodes in the foyer of Deeds' New York
mansion. The hall is impersonally enormous in scale, stone-cold and colorless
in its marble appointments and neoclassical severity, and forbiddingly
chilly in feeling, but, recalling a similar scene in Platinum Blonde
in which Stew Smith plays hopscotch on the floor of the Schuyler mansion,
Capra shows Deeds refusing to be intimidated into frigidly decorous behavior
within it. He slides down the marble banister; enters into a sexually
suggestive relationship with a nude statue at the base of the stairs (perhaps
half identifying with its conspicuous exposure and vulnerability), and
tries out the echo of his voice within its cavernous space. Before our
eyes and ears, Capra demonstrates how to master and domesticate an otherwise
overwhelming space, how to make it into a possible home for the individual
human body, spirit, and voice. Deeds then attempts to liberate the hired
help by forming an imaginative community with the butlers, whom he playfully
encourages and coaches in testing the echoes of their voices in the hall.
His behavior is, by any possible
interpretation, rather nutty, but for Capra such zaniness and eccentricity
are always a healthy sign insofar as they represent a step toward freedom
and creativity in the midst of oppressive expressive circumstances and
daunting social surroundings. When Deeds behaves childishly (by sliding
down the banister or later by locking his would-be bodyguards in a closet),
impulsively (by punching a poet who patronizes and insults him at an Algonquin-style
gathering), or whimsically (by running to the window when he hears the
siren of a fire engine and declaring "That's a pip!"), Capra
is celebrating the possibility of Deeds' making room within the structures
of his role and the social constraints on his behavior for such quirks
and idiosyncrasies. He is also reveling in his own directorial ability
to break his scenes away from the potentially repressive or predictable
structures of narrative in the direction of the unforeseen and unsystematizable.
The parallel between Deeds encouraging his butlers to experiment with
the sounds of their voices in performance in the foyer and Capra encouraging
his actors to improvise on the set of a sound stage should not be missed.
Like a film director working with his actors, Deeds teases, taunts, and
cajoles those around him into a freer, more spontaneous performance. With
the possible exception of Hawks, no director of his era had a more Emersonian
distrust of predetermined, prefabricated, predictable styles and relationships,
or was more interested in making room for apparently oddball routines
as long as they might be productive of fresh human insights or pleasure.
That is why both Capra and Hawks encourage their narratives and actors
to go a little crazy at times-letting scenes and impromptu bits of stage
business run on slightly longer than expected, eliciting improvised flourishes,
or letting the camera become distracted by a minor character longer than
strictly necessary for the requirements of maximally parsimonious narrative
exposition.
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town effects,
in large part, a deliberate comparison of two contrasting styles of behavior,
acting, theatrical blocking, and photography. On the one hand, as I have
suggested in a general way, Deeds represents a series of stylistic choices
involving personal, theatrical, and photographic improvisation, eccentricity,
decentering, and centrifugality, while on the other hand his opponents
in the film, most notably the lawyers who try to bilk him of his newly
inherited fortune, represent styles of personal, theatrical, and photographic
overcentering or overdetermination, concentricity, and centripetality.
Capra explicitly contrasts the imaginative, social, and dramatic idiosyncrasy,
pointlessness, and open-endedness in many of Deeds' scenes with the scenes
at the law offices of Cedar, Cedar, Cedar, and Budington, which are as
overdetermined and overfocused as the scenes with Deeds are shaggy and
loose.
Capra initially ushers us into
that other dramatic world with a complex fifteen-second tracking shot
showing the entrance of the shyster lawyer John Cedar (Douglas Dumbrille)
into his firm's law offices. It is the sort of virtuoso set piece of camera
movement down a winding corridor and past and around a dozen different
characters from which directors like Hitchcock, De Palma, or Kubrick generate
entire scenes. But it is typical of Capra's suspicion of cinematic or
verbal tendentiousness and of photographic or social overdetermination
that he uses this passage of cinematic virtuosity as a summary expression
of the inhumanity and insensitivity of Cedar's world. The calculated mechanics
of the camera's movement communicates the calculated mechanics of human
movements and relationships in the world in which Cedar exists. The angular;
impersonal tracking movements of the camera dolly tell us how impersonal,
rigid, and confined physical, social, and psychological movement is in
these law offices.
In short, while Deeds represents
an opening, Cedar and those allied with him in the film represent a dramatic
narrowing of performative possibilities. They limit human movement to
prescripted destinations that are mechanically blockable and trackable
within such virtuoso camera movements. They yoke imagination and desire
to the expression of a prefabricated purpose and point. That is why their
scenes and relationships can be acted, blocked out, and photographed this
way. To the extent that human movement is expressible, analyzable, and
trackable in this intricately mechanical way, Capra suggests that it can
not be free, entertaining, creative, or profoundly interesting.
The middle-distance camera setup that Capra uses to photograph Longfellow's
eccentric carryings-on in the foyer of his mansion is a recognition of
the impossibility of understanding and photographing his unpredictable
quirkiness in a similar way. For Capra, the performance of a truly creative
character will never be regimented or restricted by the movements of the
camera or cinematically followed or analyzed in such a mechanical or abstract
way. The camera and the director must learn simply to just stand still
and watch and make room for Deeds' (and Cooper's) delightful, inventive,
unpredictable, performative eccentricity, just as a viewer must learn
to sit still and watch such a performance without preconceived notions
or schemes of understanding that would define or limit it in advance.
In fact, it would be hard to
imagine a clearer contrast than that presented between the cinematic practices
of Hitchcock and Capra. Hitchcock's subscription to his "actors are
cattle" philosophy of writing, directing, lighting, photography,
and editing is totally of a piece with his reliance on cartoonish personal
confrontations and characterizations, virtuoso camera movements, and the
subjugation of a character's (or an actor's) possibilities of free dramatic
performance to the requirements of the inexorable eventfulness of the
plot. Nothing could be further from Capra's aesthetic.
A film which takes as its dramatic
subject the study of a character's attempt to inhabit, humanize, and master
the social and physical spaces around him, and which consequently puts
such a premium on the per-formative subtlety of the actor who plays him
to express such complexly changing relations between himself and the spaces
and persons around him, asks at least as much sensitivity of its director,
supervisor of photography, and editor. The performer must withstand the
repressiveness of the technologies and bureaucracies of filmmaking as
much as the repressiveness of the technologies and bureaucracies of society.
The filmmakers must be aware of all the performative constraints they
inevitably place on a performer and the potentially repressive and frustrating
relationship between their institutional and discursive technologies of
control and his attempts to keep his performance free from outside control.
It would be a betrayal of the central character and leading actor even
greater and more devastating than Cedar's betrayal of Deeds within the
film if the filmmakers, in their technical decisions about lighting, blocking,
camera placement, and editing, unconsciously worked against or defeated
the actor's efforts to make a free space for eccentrically creative and
unprogrammatic human performance. It is in this respect that Capra, Walker,
Goosson, Bernds, and Gene Havlik (co-editor of the film with Capra) not
only live up to the performative example Gary Cooper sets as Longfellow
Deeds, but in some respects even set a higher standard for free and unsystematic
performance than that which he represents. At moments they de-institutionalize
the visual space of the standard academy frame and the rhythms of Hollywood
editing even more inventively and audaciously than Deeds works to de-institutionalize
the mansion he lives in or Gary Cooper works to de-institutionalize (that
is to say, to de-Hollywoodize) the gestures and tempos of his acting.
This frequently takes the form
of opening up the frame space in unexpected ways, allowing unorthodox
bodily positions within it or tolerating surprising movements and unconventional
bodily repositioning during the course of a single shot or scene. There
is a striking moment in a scene that takes place in a park between Bennett
and Deeds. They are sitting side by side on a park bench talking when
at one point Jean Arthur pivots her body ninety degrees away from the
camera's line of sight to turn to speak to Cooper more intimately. There
isn't one director in a hundred who would not have yelled "cut"
and taken this opportunity to cut on motion to make a new camera
setup at a right angle to the first. But Capra stays with the take, and
the uncanny effect is of the character having momentarily freed herself
from the confining grid of the filmic gaze itself, exercising a capacity
to move independently of the camera or the frame space, turning away from
the potentially imprisoning technology of the well-composed shot to share
a private moment, as it were, with the other character in the scene. (This
turn away from the camera–and therefore from the audience–to, in effect,
withdraw from the shot into an unphotographable privacy is comparable
to Ellie Andrews' turn away from, and flight from, cinematic scrutiny
in her final scene in It Happened One Night.)
There is a slightly different
effect in an even more unorthodox shot in an earlier scene in Mr. Deeds
Goes to Town. Babe Bennett is sitting in the foreground of the shot
to one side of and in front of her newspaper editor's desk, talking to
him about Deeds, whom she has been following and writing stories about
for the paper. Meanwhile, as is her habit throughout the early scenes
of the film, she performs a series of meaningless little magic tricks
to keep her hands busy while she talks. In the midst of a trivial coin
trick and in the middle of this fairly complex conversation with her editor,
Jean Arthur accidentally (or deliberately?–could this have been planned
and rehearsed?–it seems extremely unlikely) drops the coin she has been
fooling around with. While the dialogue continues and the camera keeps
running, she casually feels for it in her lap. (As an experienced trouper,
Arthur undoubtedly assumed she could pick it up, resume the trick, and
finish the take without a break.) But this is where the scene starts to
get weird. The coin isn't in her lap. So still keeping up her scripted
dialogue while she rises from her seat a little, she discreetly glances
down while she talks and looks for the coin on the chair. Still not finding
it, she gets down on her knees on the floor and searches under the chair.
With this last movement she not only drops entirely out of the editor's
sight-line behind the desk, but almost lowers herself out of the sight-line
of the audience of the film, almost but not quite entirely out of the
bottom of the frame space. But the coin isn't under the chair either.
Searching around some more, she finally discovers that it has rolled under
the seat cushion of her chair. She picks it up, sits back down, and completes
the scene. It is one of the strangest and most astonishing moments in
film. Long before the analogous late work of Antonioni, the frame space
is revealed as being the merest convention. It is an artificial grid that
provides a necessarily partial and imperfect view of a reality that seamlessly
extends beyond its range of comprehension. One can move around in
it improvisatorily, spontaneously, almost at whim, even to the point of
threatening to ignore it or drop out of it in pursuit of an impulse.
One more scene might be mentioned
as yet another example of Capra's iconoclastic use of cinematic space.
A little later in the film, having fallen in love with Bennett, Deeds
calls her on the phone from his bedroom. Capra photographs Cooper lying
on his back in bed from the level of the bed, with the camera looking
down the length of his body from his head to his sprawlingly crossed legs.
There are few shots like it in film, unless one thinks back to a similar
shot of Loretta Young eating an apple in bed and talking on the phone
flat on her back in Platinum Blonde, a film not coincidentally
about the same subject–the capacity of a character and his director to
establish a free and creative relation to both the physical and social
and the cinematic and formal spaces around him. The shot strikingly captures
Deeds' vulnerability and false sense of security when talking to Bennett
(who, unknown to him at this point in the film, has been using him as
a pawn in a scheme to advance her journalistic career). But even more
than that, it conveys the possibility of an innovative relationship between
an actor and the positioning of the lights and the camera. In a film concerned
with the ways society strait-jackets the individual (metaphorically and
literally, as in the scene with the tailors) and limits free movement
and expression of imagination and desire (in the first place with bodyguards,
but subsequently with even more insidious forms of psychological, social,
and moral control), Capra is working as hard as his central character
and his starring actor to explore possibilities of freedom. By opening
up and de-institutionalizing the space of the frame and the pacing of
the acting in such scenes, he establishes a cinematic level of performative
freedom and creativity that his central characters will have to attempt
to live up to socially and bureaucratically.
The previous examples are
all from the first hour or so of the film. Although Deeds and Bennett
begin
the film with significant but admittedly marginal possibilities of free
movement, they lose even that marginal performative mobility as it
proceeds.
They become increasingly trapped in a more and more confining visual
matrix that corresponds to the increasingly confining social force-field
working
on and through them. Possibilities of creative movement become less available
as the increasing number of close-ups and the accelerated pace of
Capra's
editing progressively immobilize them in space or restrict their movements
within the frame. This paralysis of creativity then becomes one possible
definition of the essential dramatic situation Deeds and Bennett must
cope with in the final half-hour of the film. They must find a way
of
expressing themselves in the changed visual and temporal situation in
which they are plunged by Capra's changed camera work and editing,
just
as they must find a way of asserting their freedom within the oppressive
and nearly overwhelming bureaucratic structures of Deeds' insanity
hearing.
But there is a crucial point
yet to be noticed. In each of the scenes I have mentioned, freedom and
creativity have become assertively public and interpersonal achievements,
qualitatively different from the sorts of activities Capra's earlier central
characters indulged in, such as painting a painting, writing a play, or
staring off a balcony into the distance (in Ladies of Leisure, Platinum
Blonde, and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, respectively). Deeds'
or Bennett's positionings and repositionings within the spaces of these
shots are exciting and challenging precisely because they are not solitary
individual acts of vision or imagination. They are social achievements
shared with another character or characters, which must take into account
the actions and feelings of those other characters. Deeds works to communicate
his playfulness to his butlers; Bennett turns toward Deeds on the park
bench to share an intimate revelation with him; Deeds lounges on his bed
while talking to Bennett on the phone. These are moments essentially different
from and more difficult to achieve than the still, silent, visionary communings
with the stars and the landscape favored by many of Capra's early figures.
And that leads one to recognize
the immense importance of the fact that the entire mimetic organization
of Capra's work shifts from visual to verbal structurings of experience
around the time of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The films of the early
thirties–most obviously Ladies of Leisure, Forbidden, and The
Bitter Tea of General Yen, but also The Miracle Woman, Platinum
Blonde, and Lady for a Day–concern themselves almost exclusively
with acts of visionary possession and shared visionary communities,
as expressed by predominantly visual strategies of scenic representation
within the films themselves. But–and the importance of this change cannot
be overstated–the films of the middle and late thirties (in this respect
It Happened One Night is a transitional work) and the forties (Capra's
final two important films, It's a Wonderful Life and State of
the Union) juxtapose modes of verbal and social communication
against modes of silent visual and visionary possession.
It is as if Capra were engaging himself with and re-enacting, in the very
trajectory of his career, the split in the experience of film itself between
the rival claims of the eye and those of the speaking voice, or more generally,
as if he were fighting in himself and his films the war between the two
ways of knowing that has been waged for two centuries in American literature
and art.
The essays of Emerson and the
poetry of Robert Frost represent perhaps the most obvious examples of
bodies of work which, like Capra's later films, have incorporated into
their own nervous systems the dialectical conflict between the claims
of the visionary eye and those of the social speaking voice. The final
stanza of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" might almost
be read as an explicit reflection on this central tension in American
art:
The woods are lovely, dark
and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The artist is tempted to lose
himself entirely in his visionary vision of loveliness, "dark and
deep" but is simultaneously called back to himself and the world
by the claims of society and all of its syntactic, metrical, social, and
spoken "promises to keep." What Frost recognizes in his sly
performance in this poem, and what many of Emerson's essays might be considered
to be an extended meditation upon, is a situation of inevitable doubleness;
to live in vision is necessarily to see through the claims of time, space,
and society, to exempt oneself from interpersonal entanglements, burdens,
and obligations; while to become a vocal performer is inevitably to make
the opposite movement–to reach beyond the self to recognize and honor
one's enriching, troubling, stimulating social connections and verbal
entanglements with others. The distinctive achievement of both Frost's
poetry and Emerson's essays is not merely to meditate on this split in
the American consciousness in the content of the writing, but actually
to embody it in style and form. Both are visionary writers-who in their
most audacious work attempt to express moments of vision in the voice
tones of ordinary social speech. They attempt to speak the sublime
in the tones and styles of social intercourse. They in their work, like
Capra in these late films, embrace and embody the division of consciousness
they are writing about. They made it their own and live with it and through
it in their style. If vision represents dreams and desires, dialogue is
duty and responsibility. The true daring of Capra's work, like Frost's
and Emerson's, is its attempt to hold both realms in one thought while,
I would argue, the comparative irresponsibility and insipidness of most
avant-garde expression, from Maya Deren in film to Lee Breuer, Julian
Beck, and Robert Wilson on stage, result from its failure to test desire
against duty and vision against the counterpoised claims of society and
interpersonal verbal expression.
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe, not to mention
the two postwar films, powerfully argue that vision alone, however inspiring
or exalted, is not sufficient. The principal characters in these later
films, however grand their imaginations, however compelling their ideals
and dreams, must learn to talk persuasively, passionately, and effectively
to each other and to hostile characters around them. They frequently begin
these films as if they were dreamers left over from Capra's earlier work,
but in the course of the films they must learn how to translate dreams
into deeds and ideals into words, speeches, and other social forms of
expression, and relentlessly to negotiate the space between the realms
of duty and desire. That, I take it, is the explicit subject of both Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Characters must learn to convert their imaginative and visionary capacities
into practical worldly forms of verbal and social performance. Deeds'
and Bennett's progress in the course of the film will be measured in their
development of the capacity to use their voices socially, to talk, talk,
talk, as social performers in front of public audiences.
One should not need to explain
why film, of all twentieth-century art forms, is perhaps uniquely suited
to exploring the difficult relation between visual and verbal impulses.
What Deeds and Smith have to do in the course of their films, in learning
to translate back and forth from one sort of impulse to the other–from
private vision to public expression, from intangible ideals to institutional
embodiments of them–is what Capra had to do as a Hollywood filmmaker
every time he made a movie. He had to negotiate the gap between his own
private imaginations and inchoate desires and the assertively public forms
of the film in which they might be expressed. And even more important,
he had to stage the transaction between these realms in a medium that
in and of itself repeats this division of realms in its own formal division
of allegiance between communicating through pictures and through words.
To make a standard Hollywood narrative feature film is to be forced relentlessly
to compare visions and words: to weigh the power of immediate, compelling,
cinematic visions against the social responsibilities and obligations
built into the time-bound, social forms of dramatic dialogue and conventional
popular narrative exposition.
It is precisely because of
the overwhelming importance of social and verbal performance in the film
that one finally has to judge the specific social and verbal performances
presented in the first hour or so of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
(including most of the scenes already mentioned) to be of a trivial
if not downright irresponsible sort. Longfellow's acoustic high-jinx with
his butlers in the hallway of his mansion, his "Swanee River"
duet with Bennett on the trash can in the park, and her coin and rope
tricks for her editor may be expressions of a generally desirable individuality
and originality, and examples of healthily creative, improvisatory muscle-flexing,
but they can hardly be the expressive basis for a mature relationship
or an ultimate strategy of survival in the world in which Deeds and Bennett
live. They must convert heavenly labials into practical and worldly gutturals.
They must translate their own yearning but inarticulate echoes, hootings,
and musical and poetic effusions into the forms of common, syntactic speech.
Capra's cross-cutting from
scenes of the romance growing up between Deeds and Bennett to scenes of
plotting and scheming going on in the law offices of Cedar, Cedar, Cedar,
and Budington reminds us that the pair cannot live in a world of their
imaginations. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, Meet John Doe, It's a Wonderful Life, and State
of the Union will each rely on similar cross-cutting between scenes
of play or idealistic dreaming involving the principal characters and
scenes of Machiavellian scheming involving another set of characters to
place and implicitly criticize the impracticality and irresponsibility
of pure dreaming and idealism in the films. Dreams and ideals must be
less pure and more socially expressible. The dreamers are forced to confront
the schemers, and more than that, they are forced to convert their own
private, impractical dreams into schemes of practical, public action and
social expression. That process of conversion is the central drama of
all of the late films.
In the course of the film's
narrative, the two central characters in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Deeds
and Bennett, are forced to enact this process of translation of dreams
and ideals into actions and words. They are, as a result, forced to leave
behind the styles of gesturing, speaking, and consciousness with which
they began the film and to invent other styles in their place. One style
of acting breaks down and gives way to another in the course of the film;
Capra abandons one cinematic style for another.
But since this change takes
place entirely differently for the two central characters, I want to deal
with them one at a time. Let me consider Bennett first and then Deeds.
In a special, rhetorical sense of the term that I want to define, Capra
moves Bennett and his work into the realm of modern melodrama about halfway
through the film. By melodrama, however, I don't have in mind particular
kinds of dramatic stage properties, events, or character types that appeared
most notoriously on the Victorian stage–scheming villains and innocent
virgins, titanic combats between Good and Evil, deathbed confessions,
thunder and lightning, and duels in the night–but a state of consciousness
and an especially heightened and uniquely post-Romantic style of expression
that sometimes, especially in its more popular or debased forms, has
included such things. In his Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks
has gone farther than any other contemporary critic to define the melodramatic
utterance as a style in itself and to differentiate it from the lurid
stage events and tawdry emotionality that are usually mistakenly taken
to be the essence and not the accident of melodramatic expression:
Melodramatic rhetoric, and
the whole expressive enterprise of the genre, represents a victory over
repression. We could conceive this repression as simultaneously social,
psychological, historical, and conventional: what could not be said
on an earlier stage, nor still on a "nobler" stage, nor within
the codes of society. The melodramatic utterance breaks through everything
that constitutes the "reality principle" all its censorships,
accommodations, tonings-down. Desire cries aloud its language in identification
with full states of being. Melodrama partakes of the dream world. .
. and this is in no wise more true than in the possibility it provides
of saying what is in "real life" unsayable. . . . Desire triumphs
over the world of substitute-formations and detours, it achieves plentitude
of meaning.
The triumph of desire over
repression and the speaking of what cannot be said in the codes of society
are, I think, the key concepts to keep in mind when one attempts to describe
what happens to Bennett and to this film in its second half. Insofar as
social and narrative forms and manners are repressive, in the sense in
which Brooks uses the word the melodramatic (or operatic) moments in this
film and in Capra's subsequent work are efforts to break through what
is defined and bounded by mere manners and social forms, to release powerful
moral, imaginative, and passional energies that cannot be expressed in
other ways. In the tradition of American transcendental expression, Capra
attempts to liberate intensities and mobilities of feeling and imagination
that are fundamentally opposed to all psychologically or socially normative
forms of expression. The transcendental impulse at the heart of Capra's
work is its most ignored aspect. His films have altogether more connection
with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expressive traditions of American
gothicism, romanticism, and transcendentalism than with the twentieth-century
forms of American populism and nationalism in terms of which they are
usually described. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is only trivially and
unimportantly about a political or social problem and solution. It is
a profound exploration of an expressive problem that runs through most
of American art–the problem of the expression of the free imagination
and the imagination of freedom in the inevitably compromising and repressive
structures of bureaucratic, social, linguistic, and narrative organization.
That is why what happens in
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is only quite trivially described by saying
that Bennett and Deeds fall in love with each other. Rather (under the
guise of the rather sketchily presented romantic development) in the character
of Bennett, the film discovers and attempts to make a place for the expression
of desires that, in Brooks's phrase, "[break] through everything
that constitutes the 'reality principle all its censorships, accommodations,
and tonings-down." The style of the work itself disrupted
in an attempt to make room for the energies and movements of a desire
that is at odds with all "realistic" or "classical"
narrative representation, just as it is at odds with structures of social
organization and expression.
Brooks' description of the
stylistic world of melodrama is an almost letter-perfect description of
the change in Babe Bennett's (and Jean Arthur's) style of performance
in the second half of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town:
The desire to express all
seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode. Nothing
is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on stage
and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize
through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole
lesson of their relationship. . . . Life tends, in this fiction, towards
ever more concentrated and totally expressive gestures and statements.
To understand how Babe's personal
styles, Jean Arthur's acting styles, and Capra's cinematic styles change,
one needs only to compare the scenes I described earlier with those in
the final hour of the film. In the first half of the film Jean Arthur
idly ties knots in a rope, does coin tricks, and plays witty little verbal
games in her conversation. There is an appreciation of the accidental,
the unfocused, and the casual in life, acting, and film in these scenes
that reminds one of the comparable relish for the improvised in Renoir's
Boudu Saved from Drowning and The Rules of the Game or in
much of Hawks' work. But with the second half of his film Capra moves
in a direction Renoir never did and one that Hawks could only fleetingly
glance toward. Capra turns decisively away from an interest in the casual
and random to an entirely different sort of scene making for Bennett.
Beginning with the unfinished telephone call between herself and Deeds
about halfway into the film, she and he (in a different way) are transported
into a stylistic world the opposite of the random, unfocused, and relaxed.
It is a world of "totally expressive gestures' in Brooks' phrase,
in which every facial expression, glance, and movement is freighted with
an emotionally almost overwhelming "plentitude of meaning?"
Medium and long shots are replaced
by medium-close shots and close-ups of her face agitated by violent emotion.
Bennett's expressions and gestures are magnified into powerful significance
on screen, and her speech becomes as powerfully charged with passion as
her gestures, so that, as never before, every word she speaks and, even
more important, every pause or hesitation between words becomes fraught
with passionate significance.
Brooks talks about the fullness
or "plentitude" of significance in melodramatic expression,
but as he well understands, this fullness is at the same time a profound
emptiness in another respect. As gestures and words are increasingly burdened
with significance and charged with emotion in one way, they simultaneously
empty themselves of significance in other ways. That is to say, as Babe's
(and Capra's) style becomes more imaginatively and emotionally intense,
more melodramatically meaningful, it becomes less expressive, coherent,
or meaningful by realistic or social standards of narrative expression.
Where earlier in the film Babe was coolly voluble, articulate, witty,
and verbally poised to a fault, her speech now becomes hesitant, stuttering,
and hysterical, or simply ceases altogether for long periods. The language
of society becomes inadequate to express her overcharged feelings. In
short, as her speech becomes fuller of a private, melodramatic, tonal
richness of significance and depth of feeling, it becomes less and less
publicly intelligible by the standards of realistic, classical, or institutional
codes of discourse. Tonal meaning displaces semantic meaning. (Which is
why the more passionately' she speaks in Deeds' defense during the hearing,
the more the fair-minded judges–and not merely the rival shyster lawyers
who oppose Deeds–fail to understand her.) The movement into a world of
melodramatic significances is a movement into an expressive realm that
denies itself adequate translation into institutional or social forms
of expression. In the nightmare of the liberated consciousness enacted
by Bennett during Deeds' hearing, to speak a language even partially answerable
to the intensity and liability of imagination and desire is irrevocably
to cut oneself from the discourse of society. By all social or legal standards,
she proves herself "insane" at his insanity hearing. Her language
and performance are deranged beyond any social or legal utility.
But film above all other narrative
forms has the capacity of offering an alternative visual "text of
muteness" to supplement (or at times even replace) the verbal or
linguistic "text of muteness" represented by a character's spoken
language. Film, unlike a novel, can offer us the experience of pictures
in addition to the experience of words, pictures that have an impact and
intensity that allows them to replace the words spoken and to substitute
their fullness of visual meaning in place of the emptiness of verbal meaning
of the newly impoverished or "crazed" language of the characters.
This unique expressive potential of film is not lost on a filmmaker who
began his career with silent pictures. During the second half of Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town, Capra's lighting, photography, and editing offer
a visual spectacle of powerful pictorial silences and super-meaningful
inarticulatenesses that in intensity and expressiveness frequently surpass
Bennett's verbal melodramatics. The final half-hour of Deeds is
a visual extravaganza of briskly intercut close-ups of her agitated gestures,
glances, facial expressions, and bodily movements, which succeed in "speaking"
visually more powerfully and poignantly than anything earlier in the film,
in ways that dialogue and social or legal discourse cannot. Capra forces
a viewer to remain simultaneously aware of both kinds of utterance–the
melodramatic and the non-melodramatic, the sublimely visual and the classically
verbal, by choosing to have the switch to melodrama occur first over the
telephone in a conversation with Deeds and then in a courtroom in his
defense–two forums in which linguistic decorum and highly conventionalized
codes of discourse reign. He wants a viewer to be able to hold in one
glance both the stimulating private expressive power and the frightening
public expressive limitations of melodramatic utterance.
In the love poem Deeds reads
to Bennett before he discovers her real identity, he has a line that might
summarize the changed conditions of expression for Babe herself later
in the film: "My heart longs to cry out, if it only could speak?'
Language in any public, conventional use of it proves inadequate to "speak"
the feelings of her "heart." Bennett's intensities of desire
cannot be "spoken" in any more direct way than between the lines,
in her pauses and stutterings, in the hysteria of her tones, in the silence
of her agitated gestures and looks. Capra's expressive lighting effects,
photographic close-ups, and accelerated editing rhythms pick up the burden
of signification that verbal language cannot bear. We and she have moved
the maximum distance from the world of journalism in which she and the
film itself began, where all human events can, by journalistic definition,
be verbally articulated in coolly coherent, emotionally neutral sentences,
paragraphs, and narratives. For Capra, from this point on in his work,
significant human experience and filmmaking begin where journalism, realism,
or naturalism leaves off.
But let me now switch from
Bennett to Deeds. The voice Longfellow Deeds arrives at by the end of
the film is equally different both from what he starts with and from what
Bennett ends with, and is at least as complex a stylistic achievement
as hers. Like Bennett, Deeds is reduced to silence and inarticulateness
as a result of his confusion when she betrays him and the lawyers entrap
him, but when he eventually emerges from his silence in the final fifteen
minutes of the film, his voice is entirely different from hers. Most accounts
describe the process of Deeds' regaining his voice in reductive psychological
terms similar to those they apply to Bennett. For example, a recent synopsis
of the movie describes his progress as follows: Deeds begins the film
in a state of beatific innocence, undergoes a period of doubt and despair,
and finally emerges from it when Babe professes her love for him during
the hearing. At that point he regains the idealistic voice and vision
he had temporarily lost and wins the court over with his country-boy reasonableness
and down-home common sense. But such an approach is as inadequate to the
understanding of Deeds' progress in the film as a description of Bennett's
movement from journalistic cynicism to romantic infatuation would be.
Both Bennett and Deeds lose the voices with which they began the film
and eventually regain their voices in the hearing room, but the voices
they regain at the end are neither the ones they started out with, nor
merely voices of romantic innocence, idealism, naivetÈ, or common sense.
How are we to understand the
stylistic possibility embodied by Longfellow Deeds? Most past critics
apparently would have answered by saying that Capra is (quite simple-mindedly)
suggesting that the meek can and will inherit the earth, that innocence
and gentleness will succeed over all opposition. But I would argue that
the contrary of innocence is being displayed by Deeds (and Capra, who
collaborates with him) in Deeds' final, climactic courtroom performance.
His incontrovertible accomplishment in the concluding section of the film
is to shed every vestige of whatever "innocence" he might be
said to have originally had and to demonstrate one of the most stunning
displays of verbal and social sophistication in all of film. Deeds becomes
a kind of literary textual critic par excellence, a critic apparently
subtler and more profound than any of the critics who have tried to understand
him. When he rises to speak during the final minutes of the insanity hearing,
Deeds is the opposite of innocent. He shows himself the master of all
social and legal attitudes and manners, to the point of, in strict literary-critical
parlance, wittily and playfully flaunting his ability to "deconstruct"
the utterances of all of the witnesses and lawyers working against him
at will. He systematically takes up each of the major pieces of testimony
that have been used against him in the hearing and (most brilliantly and
exuberantly in the case of the testimony of the Faulkner sisters) reveals
the essential textuality of the discourse–tracing and explaining to the
court the particular set of arbitrary codes, assumptions, and consistencies
that generate the text and that attempt to control and limit its interpretation.
Deeds explicitly treats each of the principal pieces of testimony against
him as a system of rule-governed discourse, temporarily entering into
and explaining each "author's" particular set of discursive
assumptions and parodically adopting his vocabulary prior to suggestively
indicating the limitations of each one.
To do this once is to liberate
oneself from the expressive tyranny of a particular text, but to do it
more than once, to realize that it can be done to every possible text,
sooner or later, is to do much more. It is to recognize the structurality
of structure. As every deconstructionist is aware, this process of "entering
into" and sympathetically comparing a series of texts in such a way
is potentially a strategy of escape from the force-field of all texts.
Deconstruction, that is to say, notwithstanding its suspiciously trans-Atlantic
origins, is thoroughly consistent with and eminently convertible into
an all-American assertion of freedom (which is why the Gallic theorists
have received such a resounding welcome in Baltimore and New Haven). Deeds'
activity of deconstruction is a prototypical American way of levering
himself outside of all texts, of asserting the artificiality of
all systems, institutions, and codes of understanding. It is a
form of mastery and an audacious assertion of the reader's/speaker's/critic
critic's recognition of, and consequent ability to escape, the shackles
of all linguistic entrapment.
It is not accidental that Deeds
initiates the whole process with a brief, witty Derridean jeu. He
prefaces his initial act of critical prowess over a specific text with
a short exordium about the nature of all texts: he talks about ecriture
and the necessary gap between experience and verbal expression figured
in a playful discussion of what he calls "doodling" and "o
(or "oh!"?) filling" and other forms of extralinguistic
"playing"–like his "playing" the tuba to help him
write. Deeds may be a country boy, but it is sometimes forgotten
that he is also, like so many of Capra's other central figures, an artist–a
musician and a poet–one who, all evidence suggests, has thought as long
and hard about the nature of verbal, social, and artistic expression as
his creator.
But there is really no need
to invoke fancy French pedigrees for Deeds' performance. Deeds is a performer
in the mainstream native folk tradition of Mark Twain and Joel Chandler
Harris. He is teasing society and parodically playing with the rules,
customs, and conventions of his own and others' speech in a thoroughly
American way. As his elaborate digressions, witty asides, and assertively
rustic illustrations and metaphors communicate, Deeds is toying with the
rules and forms of testimony, stretching them, and testing their capaciousness.
(And when I say Deeds, I mean Capra and his co-writer Robert Riskin,
of course.) But as in all of Capra's films, one kind of "playing"
is inseparable from another. Deeds is having fun, and he is poking fun,
but perhaps most important of all, he is "playing" in the dramatic
sense of the word as well. He is turning the court into a stage for a
consummately entertaining, improvised performance that expresses his own
unsystematized and unsystematizable imaginative energy. Which is, in the
very eccentricity of his performance, to escape from those who would demand
a more systematic form of behavior and style of testimony and self-defense
from him.
As one watches and listens
to his delightful and self-delighting verbal and social performance in
the courtroom, one remembers that Deeds is by avocation a performer on
the tuba who plays with it in the same contrapuntal way that he plays
with tones and styles here–making his presence felt and heard not by
blending into the melodic line, but by tracing an innovative counterpoint
to it in the apparent comic clumsiness of his oom-pah-pahs. It seems hardly
accidental that one of the most touching scenes in the first hour of the
film explicitly celebrates this contrapuntal aspect of his playing. At
the farewell party hastily thrown together for him at the Mandrake Falls
train station, Deeds plays the sole tuba in the band that sees him off.
As the train slowly pulls out of the station, the band breaks into the
strains of "Auld Lang Syne" (a tune that was virtually a signature
piece in Capra's later work). Deeds stands with his tuba on the back platform
of the train as it pulls away from the crowd in the station, and, in a
directorial masterstroke and a coup de theatre of sound engineering,
Capra and his sound man, Ernest Bernds, create the illusion that, in between
passionate waves and shouts of farewell to the lifelong friends he is
leaving behind, Deeds is still playing the tuba accompaniment to his own
farewell party. That offbeat performance on his own behalf (and yet also
selflessly for the benefit of his listeners), in its syncopated mixture
of earnestness and quirkiness, is an affecting visual and acoustic anticipation
of something very much like the offbeat verbal and social performance
he stages later in the courtroom.
In effect, Deeds' achievement
in the courtroom is that he demonstrates his ability to "play"
in society, with linguistic tones, styles, and metaphors, as creatively
and wittily as he showed himself capable of musically playing for and
to himself on the tuba all along. To be able to play this way in a courtroom
one has to recognize that a social institution like a court, and the discourse
that is admissible or speakable within it, is as artificial and arbitrary,
yet as complex and potentially stimulating a creation of the human imagination,
as the theory of musical harmony and counterpoint. In the earlier films
Capra's protagonists tried simply to rebel against society and its arbitrary
rules and codes or to leave them behind; here there can no longer be a
question of taking or leaving them. Codes are everywhere and everything
is encoded. There is no nature, or reality, or realm of pure idealism
to run away to. Any momentary leverage over social discourse must be achieved
from within the system. If one is to survive, these styles and systems
are what one must emphatically learn to play on, play with, and play against.
This is the truly radical shift in awareness in Capra's work that is announced
by Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, although it is a radicalism which, because
of the nature of its insight, possibly appears to be a new conservatism.
If Capra's heroes no longer
attempt to flee from the repressive forms of society into a world of the
imagination and romance (as most of Capra's earlier protagonists, including
Peter and Ellie in It Happened One Night, aspired to), it is because
for the first time they recognize that the society they flee from is itself
an artificial, arbitrary creation of the human imagination and that any
other society they would bring into existence outside of it would be no
less artificial and arbitrary. If that sounds like something discovered
by Wallace Stevens and elaborated by John Ashbery, it is in fact an American
insight that can be traced from at least as far back as the writing of
those deconstructionists before the fact–Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and William James. There can be no escape from artificial relations.
The fact that the outcome of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town turns not on
solitary transactions between a transparent eyeball and a landscape, a
shared vision, or a silent glance or romantic embrace between lovers,
but on the result of public testimony in a hearing in a
courtroom is Capra's insistence that there is nowhere to run to,
no "world elsewhere" outside of artificial, social, or linguistic
codes of expression.
But Capra recognizes that the
structuralist awakening can sanction several distinct kinds of response,
as different from each other as the differences between European and American
understandings of the deconstructionist enterprise. One possible response
is the kind of affectless anomie or devil-may-care nihilism demonstrated
by Bennett at the beginning of the film. As a reporter she has become
aware of the structurality of verbal and social structures and of the
pervasiveness of artificial codes, and is liberated to be indifferent
to all of them. As she says at one despairing moment during the hearing:
"it's all a game"–life, language, and all expression is all
only a game with codes and rules like any other sufficiently inclusive
game, and consequently, in her despairing formulation, one might as well
abandon all beliefs and simply, indifferently, amorally play out one's
turn. A second possible response to the recognition of the pervasiveness
and artificiality of these structures might be called the Iago response,
epitomized by the lawyers in the hearing room. They have seen the fictionality
of the reigning fictions and they respond with cynical opportunism and
ruthless manipulation. If it is all an artificial game, then one plays
to win and any tactic that will succeed suffices. A third response, represented
by the crowd of despondent and disenfranchised farmers who attend the
hearing, is another kind of alienation or despair different from Babe
Bennett's, in which one feels oneself to be utterly powerless, shut out
from any capacity of authorship within the system within which one is
inexorably inscribed and trapped. Since no one authors the systems that
oppress us, no one can change or affect them, and all attempts at action
are necessarily futile and pointless.
It is instructive and important
that Capra incorporates these three distinct responses within the dramatic
structure of the courtroom scene because, if I understand what he is doing,
he is articulating a fourth response in the figure of Deeds himself. It
is, however, one that is so easily confused with these others that we
need their simultaneous presence in order to be entirely clear about how
importantly different it is. To what might be called these European responses
to deconstruction, Longfellow Deeds might be said to offer a uniquely
American vision, that, even as it recognizes the artificiality of all
received forms of experience, offers the possibility of a performance
that is neither despairingly nihilistic, manipulatively opportunistic,
nor despondently alienated. Deeds offers the per-formative possibility
of an optimistic aesthetic of parody, play, and artistic mastery that
revels in its ability dramatically to tease fun out of the old forms and
to play meaning into new forms of its own imaginative creation. As a result
of the utter and absolute decentering of his world, Deeds is finally released
not to despair, opportunism, or nihilism (stages that he passes through
in his hour of silence), but to true creativity (which he arrives at in
the courtroom in his final performance). He is able to tease and toy with
forms (the forms of legal testimony in the courts, for example) as he
never could if they were grounded on the bedrock of God, King, and Truth.
Deeds is progressively alienated from the social and moral structures
in place around him and from his own experience in the course of the film,
but his alienation is converted into a joyous principle of mastery and
free movement as he finally rises to address the court. Alienation is
discovered to be a mode of freedom. Life and expression do become a game
of sorts, but it is not a game of manipulation, anomie, or cynicism. It
is an adventure in the creation of a margin of free movement to be used
in maneuvering through the institutional and formal structures in place
around him. It is interesting that William James' pragmatic philosophy–of
which I take Deeds' courtroom performance to be the supreme dramatic example–was
itself accused of being all of the other things Deeds' performance comes
so close to being mistaken for, a form of cynicism, opportunism, alienation,
or valuelessness. In his writing James had to work as hard as Deeds and
Capra do in this film to steer a free course among these shoals–and was
perhaps as unsuccessful in being generally understood as they are here.
This is a form of deadly serious
play that dares to assert that we can create our margin of freedom as
we go along. The capacity to play for these high stakes is exactly what
Deeds' adversaries, formidable as they are, lack. To their artificial,
de-centered, ungrounded tones and styles Deeds or Capra does not oppose
something more natural, centered, or grounded (since there can be nothing
and the search for it will only lead to disillusionment or cynicism),
but a mobility and quickness of movement among the various social structures
and intellectual force-fields that they lack. This is the point of Capra's
parade of the eight witnesses who testify against Deeds. It is not that
any of them is especially evil, deceitful, or even stupid, except insofar
as a person locked into one style or tone of speech and consciousness
is all of these things. Each witness embodies a system of thought and
relationships. That is each one's only limitation, but it is an enormous
one, and in presenting their testimony in a series of quick vignettes,
Capra makes us acutely aware of the structurality of each witness's structures.
The bodyguard gives a Mickey
Spillane-like tough-guy version of events. The sentimental Irish pushcart
owner tells his tenderhearted tale of man and horse. Madame Pomponi turns
on her operatic affectations. Psychiatrist Emile Von Haller offers–what
else?–a psychoanalytic analysis of Deeds' behavior. And the
lawyers raise their objections and cross-examine the witnesses within
the rigid and
repetitive codes of legal behavior. Capra's comic target is not opera,
or psychoanalysis, or the legal system, but is rather all of these
things
insofar as they would systematize understanding and experience. The Freudian
psychiatrist, for example, is not the butt of the usual string of
heavy-handed
Hollywood jokes about Viennese accents, men with goatees, or infantile
psycho-sexual determinants of behavior. Capra's objection to him
(as to
any one of the others) is that he would squeeze the life out of a human
being and the scenes he makes by making him accountable to the sort
of
abstract system of interpretation from which Capra labors so hard to
free his most interesting characters and his entire film. When he
finally does
rise to speak, Deeds begins his response to all the testimony he has
heard with a humorous discourse on "doodling" because
it is just this sort of expressive individuality and eccentricity
that these systematic
understandings would either prohibit or, in the case of psychoanalysis,
absorb into a systematic technology of knowledge.
But one final possible response
of the self to this imaginative situation needs to be mentioned. One way
of breaking free from what Hawthorne called "the world's artificial
system" is to retreat into silence, stillness, and passivity–to
attempt to withdraw from all expressive systems and insulate oneself
in one's own privacy and inscrutability. That is what Deeds initially
does (and many of Hawthorne's own characters do). It is a prototypical
American response that can be traced from Hawthorne to Cassavetes. Hawthorne's
work in particular is a virtual anthology of ways in which the puny and
beleaguered self, threatened with being absorbed into an alien system
of relationship or understanding, can, in a last-ditch effort, assert
its putative freedom by means of an act of self-defense that is almost
indistinguishable from self-annihilation. In danger of being "spoken
by" an impersonal expressive system, it can, as its final free action,
perform an act of self-erasure on itself. Reverend Hooper, Sylph Etheridge,
Ilbrahim the "gentle boy," and Prudence Inglefield, like dozens
of other Hawthorne characters, not only withdraw from the social communities
of expression within which their narratives situate them, but ultimately
withdraw themselves from the expressive environments of the works in which
they appear. They become ghostly expressive presences in their own stories,
with almost no social or linguistic form of self-expression available
to them. In the scenes of his initial psychiatric confinement and his
stony silence during the first part of his trial, Deeds momentarily embodies
that imaginative hazard. Ironic detachment, social disengagement, and
imaginative withdrawal represent recurring' threats to Capra's characters,
just as they do to Hawthorne's. Deeds, Smith, Doe, and George Bailey (and
Frank Capra himself) all wrestle with the ever-present temptation to beat
the system by dropping out of it, to prevent the expressive erasure of
the self by means of an act of self-erasure.
But Deeds, I would emphasize,
finally arrives at another response. He shapes a performance out of a
simultaneous engagement and detachment–out of shifting movements of susceptibility
and withdrawal, of passionate involvement and slightly ironic removal,
of alternating stylistic vulnerability and mastery– in the American tradition
of the greatest imaginative performances of Hawthorne or Whitman, which
is why in the largest sense the voice he arrives at by the end of the
hearing, like these other American voices, deliberately eludes all systematic
understandings or descriptions of it. He begins the hearing in vulnerability
and weakness and ends in a modest, humble, grateful, folksy mastery. In
between he is alternately or simultaneously playful and preachy, puckish
and moralistic, sternly logical and digressively anecdotal, warmly comical
and morally indignant. But as he fashions a performance by means of parodically
deconstructing the tones, styles, and forces that would otherwise oppress
him, he is nothing fixed, systematic, or predictable. What William James
would have called the "fluxional" qualities of his voice and
his stylistic performance are its essence. Of course, as Deeds clears
a small free space for the movements of the self, one cannot forget that
he is really only acting as a stand-in for his polymorphically performative
creator. It is Capra's lovingly comical and parodically ventriloquistic
demonstration of a performative mastery of social tones and verbal styles–not
only in the scripting and directing of the testimony against Deeds and
Deeds' final masterful courtroom performance, but in every preceding scene
of the film–that represents an American ideal of free and creative performance
even greater than the one Deeds embodies. It is Capra the filmmaker who
is most free and powerful here, making others free with the exhilarating
example of his own stylistic capaciousness.
Deeds is, in his essence, an
exploration of what can be made of a situation of irremediable performative
marginality. That is why, in the first scene in which we meet him, he
is lifted out of Mandrake Falls, taken away from family, friends, and
all past social connections. He is a homeless alien, as are Smith and
Doe who follow him. Each is uprooted from his old world background and
identity and suddenly set adrift in a brave new world of uncharted paths
and relationships. Yet Capra's argument is that, powerless and alienated
as he is, the modern hero can shape a performance that is more than a
match for anything he faces. The power of a marginal performance is the
only power available to Deeds, and yet it is enough. Capra imagines Deeds
first, last, and, always as an outsider to the systems he negotiates.
He has no inherent institutional authority, cachet, or constituency. He
can never overcome his essential powerlessness, alienation, and marginality,
and in fact the performance he shapes must not deny those realities of
his existence, but be shaped out of a profound acknowledgment of them.
This is the profound performative metaphysic of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
and the reason an analysis of it either as a screwball comedy of manners
or as a "realistic" or "populist" courtroom drama
is so inadequate. The working title of the film script was originally
A Gentleman Goes to Town, but what I am suggesting is how far beyond
the definition of mere gentleness, gentility, or gentlemanliness Capra
and Gary Cooper move Deeds' performance in the process of making the film.
It is precisely as far as Bennett is propelled from being a mere "lady"
in distress, as she is referred to initially, to being the heroine of
the most suggestive sort of melodrama, with a richness of consciousness
and intensity of feeling that beggars language and social expression.
In the melodramatics of Bennett
and the performative playfulness of Deeds, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in
effect outlines two distinct and profoundly contrasting responses to the
individual's radical loss of personal or institutional authority and power.
One is a "happy" possibility (Deeds' masterful performative
puckishness) and one is sad (Bennett's stammering melodramatic anguish),
but both accept as the fundamental state of affairs the marginality and
alienation of the individual in a society that he is unable imaginatively
to leave and within which he must therefore shape some sort of public
expressive performance. In the Deeds-Smith-Doe trilogy and the
two major films after the war, Capra will seesaw uneasily between endorsing
Bennett's melodramatic, doomed, stuttering inarticulateness and hysteria
and Deeds' poised, confident, performative volubility and mobility as
the outcome of this marginality that he most believed in. There is no
doubt which he preferred, or for that matter which outcome any of us would
prefer to imagine our lives in terms of. But the happy outcome is perhaps
a whistling in the dark. In Capra's subsequent films, he will repeatedly
explore the happy possibilities of verbal and social performative prowess
of the sort Deeds displays in this film as a response to institutional
disenfranchisement, social powerlessness, and the unavailability of possibilities
of visionary transcendence; but he significantly will not be able to exorcise
the convulsed ghost of Bennett from his work. In various transformations
her character, her melodramatic gasps and stares, and her trembling voice
will increasingly haunt the later work, gradually but inexorably displacing
the spirit of Deeds from his confident position of eminence. Bennett represents
an imaginative unappeasibility and inexpressible ardor that Capra will,
against his own will, increasingly come to be possessed by, as he loses
faith in Deeds' possibilities of social and verbal performance in the
world.
In Capra's earlier films it
was enough if the central character exercised a purely visionary and meditative
power. But these later films ask that the self attempt to fashion a public
identity and find a speaking voice for itself with which it can express
itself in a social community that lives up to its dreams of imaginative
freedom and mobility. That was the dream of America and it is the daring
dream of these films. Longfellow Deeds is a character who manages in the
courtroom scene to find an actual social voice and form of performance
in which he can fully and completely express his imaginative originality,
independence, and extravagance. But the majority of the characters that
follow Deeds will not be so lucky. Capra will find himself distrusting
Deeds' perhaps too easy success and instead almost inadvertently substituting
the figure of Bennett in his place–a figure with all the imagination
and passion in the world but no way socially to express it, a figure forced
to be content with stunned melodramatic gasps, glances, silences, and
gestures in an artistic and social world where all happier more public
forms of linguistic power and social expression prove inadequate. Jefferson
Smith, John Doe, and George Bailey, in all of their expressive hysteria
and anguish and pain and inability socially to speak their most vital
dreams and desires, will follow in the footsteps of Bennett and not Deeds.
This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's American
Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. To obtain the book from which this
discussion is excerpted, click
here.
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