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This world is one of such pervasive
systems of control and interpretation that there is simply no way for
John to break free into an assertion of mere individuality in the final
movement of the film, no matter what he intends or does. Personal intention
counts for little or nothing in this world (perhaps as little as it counts
for in a modern bureaucracy). The machine inscribes individuals within
its own alternative "intentional" structure, independent of
their will or wishes. It gives their acts meanings and values beyond their
personal knowledge or control. How radically and profoundly at odds this
is with the traditional Hollywood film, grounded in its sentimental post-Romantic
exaltation of the autonomous ego, needs no comment.
 Capra's
most powerful image of the pervasiveness of the systems of control
and
understanding around John is contained in the scene in which John attempts
to tell the truth, to speak personally and as a mere individual to
the
John Doe Convention (though the utter impossibility and meaninglessness
of merely personal and individual speech in this situation–in
a convention, on a stage, in front of a crowd of thousands of people–is
the point of the scene). Having just had Norton's effort to use the
John Doe movement
for his own political purposes revealed to him (and the passivity of
his role in the discovery is relevant–he does not seek out
the truth but simply has it disclosed to him by Connell), he leaves
Norton's mansion
and rushes to the field where thousands of his followers have assembled.
His intention is to talk to them man-to-man, to tell them the truth candidly
and personally, but Capra's narrative, photography, and editing tell
us
how radically displaced the individual presence or personal voice is
in this institutional universe. One cannot talk to a convention man-to-man;
one cannot talk to thousands of people personally and intimately. Capra's
layered visual field reminds us one final time of all of the layers of
technological and bureaucratic packaging that contain and control discourse
in this world, from the radio announcers looking down on the stage from
their sound booths above the crowd to the public-address system that
strips
the intimacy from the tones of one's voice. (The irony of this taking
place in the first baseball field we have seen John actually present
in
the film needs no underlining; but a baseball player, especially, should
realize that self-expression on the diamond is possible only in terms
of obedience to impersonal rules and regulations.) Capra's layered sound
track and contrapuntal editing demonstrate that the technologies of knowledge
and understanding are as completely in place in the field as they were
during his speech in the radio studio earlier. The technology that allows
Doe's voice potentially to reach thousands of individuals by the same
virtue necessarily robs him of a personal presence. Every technology
is
precisely as repressive as it is expressive.
Doe makes his way through the
crowd in the stadium to the stage, only minutes ahead of Norton's men,
who are determined to stop him. Many of the shots of the convention are
deliberately not direct shots of John or of the crowd but are shots
of others–for example, radio announcers–looking at and describing John
or the crowd to us and to their listeners. That is one of the things it
means to say that experience is always repressively mediated in this world.
The alternation of close-up shots with shots from the radio booth and
the use of a layered sound track remind us that these contents are always
contained. Both the visual and the acoustic effects are presented as layer
after layer of packaging and merchandising. We are reminded of how the
human figure and voice exist here only insofar as they are transmittable
by a technology of information processing. In this study of visual and
acoustic "perspectives" (in both the cinematic and the Nietzschean
sense), events acquire significance only insofar as they are put in perspective''
by these technologies.
John is only a step ahead of
Norton's henchmen, and every second counts, but even once he has pushed
his way through the crowd and arrived on stage he cannot speak. He has
to wait for the ovation greeting him to die down. Then a patriotic anthem
has to be sung. Then a minister rises to offer the benediction and a silent
prayer for "all of the John Does in the world."
Crowds of people, a national
anthem, a prayer: The film metaphorically equates the hordes of ordinary
citizens, the state, and the church as cooperating, interlocking forms
of repression. All three are surrogates for and extensions of the moral,
intellectual, and social repressiveness that Norton and his storm troopers
represent. They keep John from speaking just as effectively as Norton
does. Just as he is finally about to speak, Norton and his men arrive
and move into action. They are at least as adept at the technologies of
control as are society, the church, and the state. Newspapers denouncing
him as an impostor have been printed up in advance, just in case of this
eventuality. Cries are sent up by stooges in the audience to shout John
down, and the instant he begins to speak and to accuse Norton from the
stage, in the final coup de grace, the wires to the amplifiers are cut.
This last event is one of the
most powerful in all of Capra's work. Capra's close–up on the wire cutting
makes it almost as tangible and painful as if we were watching
John's vocal cords being cut before our eyes. Deeds and Smith were at
least in control of their own voices. Whether or not anyone listened,
they could at least hoarsely, hesitantly, passionately talk–to remind
us that individual speakers were at least hypothetically still at the
center of institutions, to restore an eccentric personal voice and tone
to a system of discourse otherwise mechanically normalized and denuded
of personality. That is what has changed in this film. This is a world
in which even the individual human voice becomes inaudible except insofar
as it can find a way to patch itself into the licensed networks
of knowledge, to plug itself into the power system. With that almost surgically
painful severing of John's vocal cords, the film might just as well have
ended. The self is too small and weak to escape the systems (both cinematic
and institutional) that create and regulate expression in this film.
In effect, the self as a free
and autonomous agent does not exist. The technology has done it in,
erased or replaced it, as it will again, perhaps even more finally
and definitively, in Capra's last important film, State of the Union.
That is why every possible ending to Doe represents a form
of suicide for John. Whether he literally kills himself by jumping from
the top of a building or only symbolically erases himself by becoming
part of Norton's network of faceless, personality-less puppets, or by
becoming the symbolic head of the John Doe movement, the individual, eccentric,
quirky, personal self has been written out of life and the film. Even
suicide is superfluous or redundant insofar as "John Doe" has
never lived, and "Long John" Willoughby has already committed
suicide by an act of self–erasure long before.
The argument has been made
that in Doe Capra is parodying the mythopoetic structures of his
earlier work, playing with the filmic, as well as the social technologies
of creating instant heroes. To talk about play or parody presumes a degree
of detachment, control, and ironic bemusement that the film and Capra's
account of the worried, anxious making of it nowhere communicates. Rather
than being characterized by playful detachment, Doe is Capra's
most disturbed work and the one most torn by conflicts of feeling. It
is his most troubled and out-of-control work, and there is no reason to
doubt his own account of his confusion about and dissatisfaction with
the final film and with each of the five endings he made for it. It is
possible, however, to feel that this confusion was a creative one. Capra
brings all of the basic assumptions of the immediately preceding films
into question. His form inadvertently overwhelms his characters' powers.
The master of the depiction of individual imaginative energy and creative
social performance, for the first time in his career, recognizes and is
able to depict a system of social, institutional, and psychological controls
that is fully as powerful as his individual performers and able to frustrate,
absorb, or rechannel into its own repressive systems of relationship all
of their free energies. Doe is a crisis film in which everything
Capra had previously taken for granted is worried and puzzled, even the
technologies of his own filmmaking, since, as I have already argued, the
most pervasive of the systems "John Doe" is inscribed within,
even more than the John Doe Club network and the political and journalistic
systems, is the cinematic matrix of knowledge and interpretation that
Capra's layered sound tracks, deep-focus photography, contextual editing,
and complex narrative create around him. Out of that crisis of confidence
in his own organizations of experience, as well as that new acknowledgment
of the potential power and pervasiveness of the world's systems and arrangements,
comes Capra's greatest film, It's a Wonderful Life....
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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