Welcome to Pottersville

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

America: Once it was ‘a wonderful life’
By Ritt Goldstein
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Jan 3, 2011

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We have changed, America has changed, and strangely, it was only this year that I saw the film’s very simple, very unsettling, illustration of how and why. Perhaps Capra’s already long acclaimed work may find further recognition.

There is a scene, one where an anguished James Stewart runs through what had been his town, but is no longer. He had been granted a wish of simply not existing, but in horror he ran through a place where his absence from the community had allowed it to become a loathsome caricature of itself, a place marked by cheap vulgarity, the casual cruelties so often bred by it. The Bedford Falls Stewart had left was replaced by the nightmarish ‘Pottersville,’ its name derived from a sadistically ruthless businessman, one whose mercenary presence moves through the film as the viper in his community’s garden.

Funny, until this year, I never took a moment to examine Mr. Potter, to see how Capra had portrayed what seems like a simple, modern day, laissez faire neoliberal. Of course, Capra did so decades before the term neoliberal even existed, decades before neoliberalism became synonymous for so many with societal pain.

Gone from Bedford Falls’ main street were the prosperous shops and civil society’s local landmarks, disappeared were those people that seemed more like part of one’s extended family than neighbors. But the film’s vision of Mr. Potter’s progress did include the harsh glare of too many bars’ cheap neon, the light itself casting an almost demonic haze over Main Street. . . .

Source link: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6753.shtml