Abolish Christmas
I have just finished watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”. The quintessential Christmas family movie was shot wonderfully — really — by Frank Capra, the acclaimed director of pieces of pure art, such as “It happened one night” and “Mr Smith goes to Washington”. Oddly, “It’s a Wonderful Life” was bashed by critics and received poor public attendance when released in 1946. Yet, in the ensuing decades, it has become one of the most-watched movies of all time, and an unmissable family movie, especially for American families.
The movie is technically remarkable for the perfect black&white Joseph Walker’s cinematography and the audacious close-ups on James Steward as he feels his life is broken into crumbs. Semantically, it is a scorching allegory of the extreme, kind-less, individualist capitalism that would soon have taken over from the community-based equalitarian system that came out of the years of the New Deal.
Wiping my tears as the movie rolled its end credits, I reflected on how our society has changed since then, how communities have broken up. How do people invoke their rights to a concept of freedom that does not exist and forget about our obligations before all the others.
In his wonderful long study on the sources of the Western world — A Secular Age — Charles Taylor describes the importance of carnival in medieval times, a day when common women and men…
