The richest man in town

STIPIMM: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”

As you may recall, I’ve been reading a hefty biography of the director Frank Capra. Very good read. I just finished the chapter that examines the time during which he made the classic It’s a Wonderful Life, one of my favorite of his movies.

According to the book, It’s a Wonderful Life (IAWL) was made at a turning point in Capra’s career. World War II had just ended, and the movie marked his return to Hollywood after making propaganda films for the Army. Before the war, Capra was coming off the peak of his career, which lasted from 1934, when he made It Happened One Night until 1939, when he made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trying to get back into the swing of his career after the interruption of the war was tough for Capra; indeed, IAWL was the last great film he made. It wasn’t until I read this book that I realized how it represented not only the beginning of the end of Capra’s creative powers, but also his last coherent statement on the kinds of values that we today call “Capraesque.”

There were lots of reasons for this precipitous downfall: the Red Scare made Capra hesitant to make films that supported the “little guy;” Capra ended his partnership with his longtime collaborator, Robert Riskin (who wrote most of his best films of the 30s); he left Columbia, a smaller studio where he had a fair amount of freedom, for Paramount, where he had more resources, but less wiggle room. But fortunately, before his style became a parody of itself in the 50s and 60s, he made one last great film, one that will live on longer than any of his others.

But as I read about the movie, I kept asking myself, “Why do I love this movie so much?” It is, as the author of the biography contends, one of the sappiest pieces of supernatural fiction you’ll ever have the pleasure of seeing. On the believability scale, it falls somewhere between “A Christmas Carol” and “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The last 10 minutes pull on every known heartstring this side of a Hallmark card commercial.

And yet it works. It works exceptionally well. I cannot watch the ending of that movie, even if I haven’t watched the rest of the dang thing, without crying. No chance. Even if I fight it, the tears will well up without my consent. Hell, I don’t even have to watch it to get choked up. When I was talking about the movie with Bridget a few nights ago, just thinking of the key moments started to get me weepy.

There are lots of reasons that the film is so effective. First and foremost is the story, which takes an uncommonly good man, whose lifetime of dutiful self-sacrifice finally catches up to his underlying ambition and throws him into a deep despair, before lifting him back up through the supernatural revelation of how much an impact his sacrifices have had. In terms of character development and story arc, they don’t get much simpler and purer than that.

And then there’s Jimmy Stewart’s uncommonly good performance in a role that could have easily been overdone and sappy. The story goes that Stewart, who like Capra, had given up a lot of career momentum by serving during the war, had to be convinced to return to acting after his discharge. After the seriousness of the war, he thought it odd to be returning to something that was, in essence, so trivial. Lionel Barrymore (Mr. Potter) convinced him otherwise and Stewart went on to continue a long, illustrious career.

But to my mind, IAWL will always be one of his best performances. Everything from the enthusiasm he shows as a young man, to the moments when he breaks down in front of his family, saying that his wife and children kept him from living out the life he wanted, to the heartbreaking moment (the one that starts the tears up for me) when, captured in beautiful closeup, he begs God to bring him back to his family. In this potentially sappiest of movie moments, Stewart sells it, and sells it big.

Another level that makes this movie work is that quintessentially “Capraesque” element of David vs. Goliath. You’ll note that I avoid saying rich vs. poor, because it’s not really about that. Indeed, none of Capra’s films outright criticize wealth in and of itself, it criticizes the affectations and attitudes of those who happen to have that wealth. Several of his greatest heroes, be they Longfellow Deeds or Jefferson Smith, are actually well-off men (yes, even Jefferson Smith was a bumpkin businessman), are men who use their power or wealth to benefit the poor. So too with George Bailey; in the eyes of the Bedford Falls Chamber of Commerce, he’s just as much a business-owner as Mr. Potter. But he’s not a self-centered capitalist; he’s an enlightened capitalist who believes that the best gains are brought by spreading the wealth as much as possible.

It’s funny that today, we consider this movie to be a celebration of American ideals like community, because in the 40s and 50s, after this movie was made, Capra was paranoid about how the Red-baiters would look upon it. He needn’t have worried too much; after all, the hero is a banker. But several of Capra’s friends who testified under subpoena to the House Un-American Activities Committee made a point of defending the film even if it wasn’t being attacked. Those were dodgy times to be making movies where businessmen were the villains.

But besides all the plot points and arcs, it’s really the ending that slams you in the gut. Every plot element that precedes it leads up to the climax that occurs in the Bailey living room, when half the town shows up to rescue George in his time of crisis, just as he had helped them when they were in trouble. My three favorite moments of this (neither of them the “bell rings” stuff):

1) “Remember, George: No man is a failure who has friends.” Bad Yoda-like grammar, but a snappy moral that says it all.

2) The moment when Sam Wainwright’s telegram is being read in which he forwards George more than enough money to cover the lost cash. And it’s all in the oh-so-cinematically-perfect look that George and Mary exchange at that time – remember that Wainwright was George’s rival for Mary and, when he lost her, ran off to live the big life in the city that George longed for. Living thereafter with residual envy and bitterness over Sam’s success, it all drains away from George as the telegram is read. “Hee haw and Merry Christmas.” He looks over at Mary, who looks back at him, and he recognizes that this longtime foe was a friend all along.

3) And the capper to end it all: Harry’s toast to his brother. Realize that throughout the entire film George’s measure of his own worth has been through money. He needs it to get the things he wants, whether it be leaving Bedford Falls to pursue his dreams, or to go on his big honeymoon, or just in comparison with Potter. And there, amongst all the real riches that his life has brought him (family, friends, joy), his little brother, the winner of the Medal of Honor whom everyone, most of all George, admires fiercely, raises his glass in admiration to “my big brother George: The richest man in town.”

See… just typing this stuff has my eyes watering. Damn good movie.

Intellectual impatience

STIPIMM: U.S. Marine Corps Hymn

As regular readers of this blog (all four of you) will notice, it’s been over a week since I’ve blogged about anything, and even then it was about something no one but me cares about (underage poontang). Truth is, my mind has been quite scattered all week. I’m in that annoying state of mind that happens when you haven’t quite finished one project, but have long since mentally moved on from it. Specifically, I’m in my last couple of weeks at H&R Block, and the tax form grind has slowed down to virtually nothing; I’m basically having to scrounge for things to do (So, I can’t hide behind the excuse of “I was too busy to blog,” but I will just say instead, “I didn’t freakin’ feel like it.”). I’ve been calling it senioritis, and it certainly feels like it. The end date for this job (the 31st) is fast approaching and it can’t get here soon enough.

The problem is, I don’t know what I’ll be doing afterwards, and that has me jittery and restless. I’m applying for jobs, but it’s not like any of them that would start soon are dream jobs or anything. Part of me doesn’t want to get a job right now and be able to dedicate myself to something of my own. But unfortunately, I don’t have any money to pay myself.

But part of me feels like if I really wanted to do other things on my own (e.g., writing scripts, ramping up for “Indian Girl”) I’d do it on my own time anyway. If I freed up all my time, it would only mean that I’d find more ways of wasting time instead of applying myself. I want to do these things, but a large part of me is too lazy to actually do the work required to get there.

Sorry to bring him up again, but Ibsen lamented this intellectual impatience as well. At one point he wrote something akin to: “By the time I start actually writing a play, I’ve gotten tired of thinking about and working on it.” And so it is with me; the process of writing and creating is oftentimes like pulling teeth. I find that, in general, I don’t like creating as much as I like having created.

Related to all of this is another kind of intellectual impatience, and that’s been tied to the reading I’ve been doing, or trying to do. Right after I finished my Ibsen biography, I picked up a hefty biography of Frank Capra that Susan Loving gave to me some time back. I’m giving Capra the full treatment: reading the bio and watching his major movies as they appear in the book. I’m loving it, and I’ve been trying to squeeze in as much reading as possible (so far: Capra, contrary to his image, was a royal, class-A asshole.)

There have been a few things standing in the way, and it’s only heightened my frustration. Bridget has been off of school up until this week, and so I’ve felt guilty about reading when I could be spending time with her in the evenings. She’s back in school now, but I have a special project I’m editing for her in the evenings, and that’s been keeping me from what I really want to be doing… reading. Also, since we split up our Netflix so that I only get two movies at a time (and she gets one), the turnaround for watching the Capra movies has been painstakingly slow. In the book, I’m already in the 1940s, while I’m still waiting on a movie from the early 30s. Again… frustration and impatience. I need to learn some Jedi meditation tricks or something.

But not being able to read is a minor thing. In the grander scheme, it’s my impatience with having something constructive and interesting to do with film and video. It would be one thing if I really felt that I was sure to have something in the next couple of months, something other than a crappy support job at some video house or something equally uninspiring. Or, if I could be sure that I would have enough money to do “Indian Girl” this summer (still a very questionable proposition). Or just anything. Anything other than sitting at another desk all day, writing in my blog…

(And just to head it off now, any comments including the phrases "something will come along" or "if one door closes, another one opens" or anything similar, will either be promptly deleted or openly mocked.)

The furry Norwegian

STIPIMM: “Sit on My Face,” by Monty Python

I finished another 650-page biography of a playwright last week, so I suppose it’s time for another book report.

Oh, quit your damn whining.

Actually, although I do have plenty to say about Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian playwright, I will try my best to keep it short. Which means it should only take an hour to read this post. Ahem.

When I read a nice hefty biography of Bertolt Brecht in support of Bridget’s Brechtian Brouhaha last summer, I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed the glimpse into an artist’s personal life, and how it related to his work. It inspired me to seek out and read another playwright’s biography while reading his plays as they come up in the book. But when I told Bridget that I wanted to find and read a book about Henrik Ibsen, her natural reaction was, “What the hell for?”

I didn’t really have a good answer. My only real reason was that I knew virtually nothing about him but suspected that he was worth knowing about. Before this fall, the only thing I knew about him was that he was a Scandinavian playwright; I couldn’t even tell you definitively what specific country he was from.

That changed when Bridget was assigned to read A Doll’s House for her Modern Drama class and asked me to read it with her. The play is probably Ibsen’s most influential and famous for a lot of reasons: in a time of strict roles for men and women in the home, it portrays a woman who strikes out on her own, abandoning her family; it is one of Ibsen’s best examples of the realist style he championed. After reading it, my interest in finding out about Ibsen was solidified, and so I sought out and bought the definitive biography on him, written by Michael Meyer – a hefty 650-page tome.

Two or three months later, I finally finished it. And here’s what I got to say about Henrik Ibsen.

1) He was one ugly motherfucker. And yeah, it’s all about those damn muttonchops. I can only be thankful that I did not live in a time when those furry extensions were fashionable. It’s not as though he couldn’t grow the rest of a beard – in his youth he had a big full bushy thing that buried most of his face. But later in life, he wanted to be able to see his chin and mouth. Perhaps he got tired of cleaning food out of it. Perhaps the missus didn’t like the itching on her naughty bits. Who knows? The biography gives no clues as to his facial hair motivations.

2) He was a snob. His family started out relatively well-off, but then his father was “ruined” in the Victorian sense and the family had to live meagerly. And after he left home, he certainly wasn’t living high on the hog for a while. He started out as an apothecary’s apprentice, making a pittance, and then worked as the artistic director of small theaters in Norway. No great salary there either. But even then, and especially as his star grew after his plays began to get noticed, he was an aristocrat without an aristocracy. He distrusted what he considered to be the under-educated masses. One of my favorite quotes of his is from his play Enemy of the People:

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.

Though it will certainly pain my democratic and socialist friends to hear me say it, I can’t help but agree with him. I guess I’m becoming a snob too.

3) He was a crusty old grouch. He didn’t like being in large groups of people, even when he was famous, and his mood reflected it. He much preferred being in smaller, intimate groups, and even then he preferred the company of younger men and women. He was very big on the energy of the youth, rightfully believing that it was they who appreciated his plays the most. He also had very set rituals in his day that he liked to follow, such that his friends and family would joke that they could set their watches by him. And yes, go ahead and think it, him being a grouch is another thing he has in common with me. Go fuck yourself, you damn proletarian.

Emilie Bardach, the first hot young piece of ass to get Henrik's dick hard

4) For most of his life, Ibsen lived within the sexual mores of the time. Indeed, with the exception of a fling with a maid that begot an illegitimate child when he was a teenager, he didn’t seem to do anything untoward or deviate from his marriage. The (for the time) frank content of his plays belie his true sexual nature, which was quite repressed. Oddly enough, it all changed in his 60s, when (prepare ye for an “Ewww”) he fame brought him in contact with women in their upper teens and early twenties who were all too willing to return the affections of a furry old man. He had three major “affairs,” which weren’t so much affairs as they were severe flirtations. At least, that’s all that the biographer can find – none of his young “mistresses” ever admitted that anything beyond kissing happened and even then, only one admitted to kissing at all. The biographer doesn’t definitively have an opinion whether these women were being modest in their advanced age, but he does speculate that Ibsen’s self-control would have stemmed from his genuine devotion to his wife, who was around his own age and to whom he had been married for decades. This gives me an out when, thirty years from now, Bridget finds the letters my way-too-young groupies have written to me: “But Bridie, I never touched them… just look at Ibsen!”

5) Plays? Oh yeah, when he wasn’t fantasizing about fucking 20-year-old Swedish stewardesses (or whatever they had in the late 1800s), he wrote plays. What was so special about them? Well, two primary things: 1) he was one of the first to write about "regular people" in a prose that reflected the way that "regular people" really spoke; 2) his subject matter was often controversial and took directions that other plays hadn't taken (e.g., the aforementioned A Doll's House, and Ghosts, which was much banned because it (gasp!) talked about venereal disease) Rather than give you an extensive history, let me just share a couple that I liked:

a. Peer Gynt: One of his earlier plays, it was a hefty piece that in a lot of ways reminded me of Brecht’s free-wheeling Baal. In it, Peer Gynt, a young libertine, basically lives life to the fullest, shirking responsibility, and using family, friends, and lovers, to get the life he desires. It’s a very episodic play, moving from year to year, locale to locale, with an imperfect character arc. But it is certainly interesting and, at times, fun. Two favorite moments: one where he escapes being forced to marry a troll princess through a little bit of luck (guys, haven’t we all been there?); and another when, after a shipwreck, Peer and a cook cling to a capsized lifeboat, and Peer decides to literally kick the cook off because otherwise the boat will sink. This play, because of its visual elements, would make a very fun movie – it was made into a film in the 50s, but I doubt then they had the visual sense or the filmic sense of humor needed to make it really take off.

b. Enemy of the People: A very political piece that revolves around a public crusader’s efforts to expose a town’s primary source of income – a public bath – as being dangerously polluted. While the liberal elements of the town at first rally to his side, the politicians who want to shut him up (including his brother, the mayor) demonstrate that the news getting out would ruin the town, including the businesses of the liberal folk. After that, the crusader’s support dries up and he’s painted as a loon who’s only trying to destroy the town. Painfully topical and fully of juicy and fun quotes, including the one above and another favorite, which will be a perfect way to abruptly end this post: “One should never wear one’s best trousers when going out to fight for freedom and truth.”

I have measured out my life with coffeespoons

STIPIMM: “Battle Flag,” by Pigeonhed, remixed by the Lo Fidelity Allstars

Today is the one-year anniversary of my giving up caffeine. From Jan. 2, 2005, to now, I have had only five caffeinated sodas (including a celebratory Dr Pepper I had yesterday), and one was a rum and coke, so it doesn’t quite count (maybe?). Yay for me.

It was only accidentally a New Year’s Resolution: Jan. 2 coincided with two things that made it easier (if only marginally so) to give up the sauce: 1) it was the end of the holiday season, during which it would have been hard to resist delicious caffeine; and 2) it was during a break in school. So, after returning from Texas, I went through two weeks of headache hell, just in time to be pain-free for the first day of the my final semester at AU.

Now, it’s Jan. 2 again, and both Bridget and I find ourselves facing another accidental resolution. Sometime in November, we both decided to hunker down and try the Weight Watchers program again. We had done it once before when we lived in Maryland, with mixed results, and now, tired of our paunches, we were going to go for it again.

We did pretty well, I think. We allowed ourselves 1,000 Flex points (more on those below) for Thanksgiving, so that was okay, and we were able to keep it up, more or less throughout December. But the holidays were too much temptation, and we pretty much knew that going into it. And so, plied with cookies and candies and all kinds of yummy foods, we let our diets fall by the weigh-side during the holidays.

The holidays are now over, and it’s time to go back on the diet. Accidental resolution number two.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with how Weight Watchers works, I’ll give a brief explanation. The entire concept revolves around the idea of points: different foods are assigned a set number of points per serving size. There’s a formula to it (more on that below), but it basically translates to 1 point for every 50 calories you eat. Because of our weights, both Bridget and I are allowed 24 points of food per day. In addition to those 24 daily points, every week you are allowed 25 Flex points, which you can use any time you want, in whatever combination you want. For instance, you can spread your Flex points out over the week, adding three or four points to your daily total; or you can save them up and then go out Saturday for McDonalds and ice cream, using all 25 points at once.

If you’re a good Weight Watchers person, and pay their fees and all that, you get the benefit of weekly support groups and a weekly weigh-in that helps track your progress. Bridget and I have each other and we own our own scale, thank you. Moreover, since Bridget has done Weight Watchers off and on since she was a tween, she’s got a veritable library of books and guides, which allow us to do it all without feeding the WW industrial beast.

I’ve never been a fan of the idea of diets. When I was growing up and watched my parents diet, I could always detect the misery in my father at having to eat a grapefruit every morning or other such wonder diet. It was one of the early promises I made to myself as a teenager that while I would certainly not mind consciously curtailing my food intake, I would never, as an adult, go on an outright organized diet.

But then, I promised myself I’d never get rid of cable either…

My decision to go on WW this time and last comes from two motives: 1) the desire to, yes, weigh less and be slimmer; and 2) to support Bridget in her striving to be good about food. Besides, how could I, in good conscience, slop down on greasy food, while my beloved has to sit across the table from me eating lettuce?

Diets are supposed to make it easy to make good eating choices. But of course, being an intellectual (defined by Bill Cosby as being a person who thinks about and analyzes things that normal people do naturally), it’s not enough for me to just do the program and smile. I have to break it down to brass tacks. And so I did.

The first thing that made me intellectually engage with the Weight Watchers program was mathematics, believe it or not. The tallying of food using numbers just lends itself to mathematical analysis, and me being me, I was happy to oblige. When one is trying to find out the amount of points a particular food has, there are two resources: 1) one of several books showing the point values of common food items, as well as the point values for name brand foods and stuff you’d find at popular restaurants; and 2) a paper sliding scale (that I call “the slide rule”) into which you input calories, fat grams and dietary fiber grams to get a point total.

For all you math-literate people out there, the presence of a slide rule suggests a simple linear relationship between the three variables and the point result. And indeed, there was. It took about, oh, 30 seconds to figure out the points formula once I sat down to figure it out. It’s actually disappointingly easy:

Points per serving* = (Calories / 50) + (Fat grams / 12) – (Dietary fiber grams** / 5)

*rounded to the nearest whole number
**for purposes of the formula fiber grams can be no higher than 4 per serving

So now, with this simple formula in mind, I no longer need the slide rule to figure out a point value. Bridget will often use me by calling out the variables from the kitchen. It gives the program a geeky element which provides me an itty bit of satisfaction while I’m starving away.

Of course, it’s not enough for an intellectual to just break down a simple linear formula. Bah! Now it was time to analyze the whole program and how it works. Here’s what I determined:

1) The Weight Watchers program is really little more than a psychologically cushioned way to literally count calories. Look at that formula again: the big swing element in that formula is the calories. Fat grams rarely get up that high, and even if they did, it would only make one point of difference. The same with fiber. If I ate a low-fat diet with a daily intake of 1200 calories, I would be doing pretty much the same thing as what I’m doing with Weight Watchers. The difference, like I said, is psychology and convenience. Not only is it easier to count points up to 24 and keep track of foods based on small number amounts, but it also makes it not quite as daunting when one thinks about numbers like 7 points or 3 points, instead of such monstrosities as 365 points/4 grams of fat/6 grams of fiber.
2) You might look at the formula (like I did) and wonder “why are the fiber grams limited to four”? Through a little online research, I found out that it actually used to be unlimited. But sometime in the late ‘90s, they changed it. Why? Think about it this way: fiber grams are the only way to bring a point total down in a particular food. What’s to stop an clever dieter from mixing a can of Metamucil into his ground beef to bring that bacon cheeseburger down to a total of –4 points?
3) Having a mathematician in the house to figure out the Weight Watchers program is a mixed blessing for Bridget. Sure, she may like to get instant point values from her human calculator, but that human calculator has taken his mathematical examination of the program a bit too far for her tastes. The WW program works on estimation. The types of foods that can be, say 4 points, range from those with 176 calories to 224 calories (assuming no fat and fiber). Now, let’s say we wanted to triple our serving of whatever that four-point food was. According to the program, that would mean simply tripling the point value to 12 points. Okay, fine, but Mr. Mathematician points out that tripling the calorie value gives you a different result: ranging from 528 to 672 calories, which (by the formula) ranges from 11 to 13 points. So, instead of keeping it simple, having a guy knowing the formula in his head just complicates things and, frankly, frustrates Bridget when I go questioning the basic principles of the program. Indeed, Bridget is right: the program works on estimation because the rounding up of points (on average) will even itself out over the course of a day. You either have to break down everything you intake to point values out to two decimal places, or you have to surrender to the logic of the system. And so we generally do the latter.

So far so good. One thing from the program that we don’t do is weigh ourselves every week, partly from superstition, partly from the desire not to simply measure success in terms of pounds. The real end goal, for both of us, is feeling better about the way we look, and, maybe, fitting into smaller clothes a little better. In the meantime, we will continue to measure out our lives, one point at a time.