Frank Capra’s Autobiography of a Great Court Jester
Hollywood is, as everyone knows, kitsch, glamor, technical perfection, sentimentality, fake tears, and fake teeth – and it has been enormously successful for more than 80 years. The grandiose dream machine of capitalism runs like clockwork and produces imaginations for the world on an assembly line; not with the rigid compulsion of propaganda and its lies, but with the tempting power of the offer and its lies. But it cannot be money alone that has made Hollywood great. And it can’t just be the technical tricks that repeatedly melt the minds of viewers. The power of Hollywood does not lie in the fact that we succumb to sophisticated manipulation, but rather that we see through it and let it get to us anyway, while being brilliantly entertained and paying money for it. The power of Hollywood is perhaps the oldest art, the fairy tale, translated into the form of “technical reproducibility” (Walter Benjamin). But even in this modern technological form, there can be no fairy tale without a storyteller.
Many books have been written about Hollywood, but few by its great storytellers themselves. Frank Capra was an exception, and his autobiography is, as John Ford said, “not only the best, but the only book ever written about Hollywood.” This judgment is by no means exaggerated. When Capra, already more than seventy years old, wrote down the almost thousand pages of this magnum opus published in 1971, he not only recounted his own life, but the history of Hollywood itself as one big fairy tale: “Everything we movie people are, have and do comes from the movies, the magic carpet! I was allowed to grab the fringes of this magic carpet, swing myself up and ride towards adventure.” This book contains all the strengths and weaknesses of Capra’s films, and it could also be seen as a “movie” itself, which has to pass the test of credibility.
From beginning to end, Capra unashamedly shows everything that makes up the vices and embarrassments of Hollywood: he talks pompously, postures like a lucky man and superman, and strikes boastful poses like a pubescent ghetto youth. Capra as Napoleon in the wars of the film industry, Capra showered with awards, Capra the greatest! At the same time, he is maudlin to the point of pain (or beyond) and sprays the famous “Capra-corn” by the kilo, pathetic like an itinerant preacher and Roman Catholic to the bone: “Someone should keep reminding the average man,” the unctuous Capra moralizes from his self-made pulpit, “that he is a child of God and an equal heir to God’s rich gifts and that goodness means wealth, kindness means power and freedom means glory.”
If it were only this and nothing else, Capra’s films would have been simply unenjoyable and his mammoth biography would have been unreadable. But in the films, as in the book, the pace is breathtaking, and “the cardinal sin, boredom” doesn’t stand a chance. How is this possible? Perhaps through a single great virtue that the storyteller needs: a stunning naivety! In spite of all his sophistication and bravado, in spite of all his tricks and ruses, Capra, the mischievously grinning little peasant boy from Sicily, always retains bits of Simplicius Simplicissimus. Capra remains naive, which is why he can remain as honest as the innocent boy from the countryside. No sooner has he blown the trumpet of his own fame than he sees himself standing there “with all the composure of a man standing on ice skates for the first time in his life,” and immediately after the triumph always comes the disillusionment: “Reality crashed down on me like a falling sack of sand.” You have to believe his honesty, even if it’s just to make the big slogans come out better.
Capra’s credible naivety would remain one-dimensional if it were not bizarrely offset by the almost opposite virtues of humor and self-irony, the cinematic technique of which he had learned as a gag man in Mack Sennet’s studio, where slapstick was cultivated and the flying cream pie was invented. In his social comedies, Capra has, as he himself says, “merged the heroes and the jokers” from the classic figures of drama “into a single person.” He was well aware that he and his heroes fulfilled a similar function as the “court jesters of the distant past”: “These jesters were usually dwarves or grotesque nobodies who wore jester costumes […] as well as thin marottes (‘slapsticks’) or air-filled bladders as a sign of their special status. The sarcastic talk of the jesters would, the kings hoped, serve as a safety valve and prevent the seething cauldron of the common people’s misery from exploding.” And yet Capra believes in the liberating power of laughter: “In terms of interpersonal relationships, comedy is the complete abandonment of one’s defenses. […] When someone acts superior or when you are afraid of them – you put up your shields. You won’t laugh – neither with him nor at him. […] Dictators can’t laugh. Hitler and Stalin didn’t find themselves funny, nor did the others find them funny.” If anything remains of Capra and his fairy tales, it is the laughter. In Germany, Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), an ingenious work of embarrassment, has become his best-known film thanks to its trademark “black humor.”
Capra’s third great trump card is something that could be described as precision or an eye for detail. Of course, this attention to detail has a technical dimension. Not for nothing was Capra a trained scientist and graduate engineer, a friend of the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble (the discoverer of the red shift of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe), holder of several patents and inventor of various machines; skills that always helped him in his work as a director. Beyond the technical, however, it is Capra’s feeling for the colorfulness of a situation in both the literal and figurative sense that also distinguishes him in his autobiography; for example, when he, as a member of a film delegation to Moscow, describes the giant demonstration in Red Square on May 1, 1937: “We walked between endless rows of Red Army soldiers, between whole canyons of red flags and through roadblocks of controlling, stamping and frisking secret policemen. […] The choleric color was reflected in the eyes and on the faces of the people and made the bayonets flare. The city was red, the mood red. […] Far outside, on the outskirts of the city, the police lines ended abruptly. The sun was setting. In front of us we saw a cloud of dust in an open field. Those marching in front of us stepped out of line and ran towards the cloud. […] And there, under the cover of that gloomy cloud of dust, the biggest mass pissing of all time took place.” A scene from a Capra movie!
Here, the artist’s irony turns against the form of propaganda, against the general and abstract gaze directed at humanity, against the great machinations of social transformation. His gaze is aimed solely at the individual, not only in the sense of the American political ideal, but even more as a method of his own art. For Capra, this is a program: “The mass is a herd concept – unacceptable, insulting, belittling. When I see a crowd, I see a collection of free individuals: each a unique person, each one, in his human dignity, an island unto himself. Let the others make movies about the great storms of history, I would make mine about the guy who gets swept away by the storm. And if this guy is one big bundle of contradictions, […] then I think I can understand his problem.”
Capra takes the side of the individual artistic subject against critical philosophy, of experience against theory: “My films will penetrate the heart not with logic, but with compassion.” If you want, you can recognize an echo of Adorno’s critique of “identity logic” in this, an insistence on the “non-identical” in people that is not absorbed in the determinations of the social structure and its “constraints.” But if this attitude remains one-sided and unreflective, you soon can’t see the forest for the trees. For Capra, there are only the individual trees, and in this he is strictly liberal. Precisely for this reason, however, the social context can only be saved by his heavily applied sentimentality, and the solutions must come abruptly from the miraculous, as if by the “hand of God.” The storyteller feels the ground wobble beneath his feet and the “Capra-style cheesiness” threatens to turn rancid.
What keeps Capra among the greats, however, is his historical position. For even if his fairy tales are sentimentally transfigured, they retain their credibility as films that record reality: as fairy tales of the New Deal and anti-fascism. With his “message of encouragement,” he was able to sing the praises of capitalism and at the same time “the praises of the hard-working people, the cheated, those who were born poor, the beaten-down,” because in the Great Depression there seemed to be a kind of capitalist self-awareness and, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the hope of social renewal. If Capra himself experienced the “American Dream” of rising from poor immigrant child to millionaire and mirrored this in his naive heroes, it was because he wanted to represent the social containment of the capitalist machine rather than the triumph of money and the unfettered market. The New Deal, to which he was committed, ushered in the era of Keynesianism and deficit spending; and only in this political climate was it possible for Capra to lead his provincial Parzival from the deepest despair to the happy ending of a victory over malice and corruption in films such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1937) or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). The naivety of his social fairy tales was covered by a real social campaign, which even thirty years later led the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas to believe that capitalism was now fundamentally civilized by the welfare state.
Capra’s moment of anti-fascism was also real and authentic. In this respect, he was also able to credibly mobilize the naivety of his critical statements or affirmative critique, because Western capitalism was really fighting a great battle against the worst spawn of its own logic and wanted to prevent its ultimate consequence. Capra turned his back on Hollywood and volunteered to join the U.S. Army to put his skills at the service of the anti-Hitler coalition. After seeing Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, he recognized this “horrifying film” as a propagandistic “stroke of genius” with a message “as naked and brutal as a lead pipe” that heralded the Holocaust. As counter-propaganda, “Colonel Capra” created the film series Why We Fight (1942-45), in which his aim was to use “the enemy’s films” documentary style “to make their enslaving aims clear. Our boys would hear for themselves the Nazis and the Japs shouting their master race nonsense – and our fighters would understand why they were in uniform.”
The fact that Capra’s career only glowed dimly after the war remains incomprehensible to him even decades later. And it is strange how his autobiography becomes weaker in terms of language and thought as soon as he approaches the description of the time when the storyteller’s voice was taken away. Suddenly, the naivety becomes stale and the momentum flagging. Parzival has lost his innocence. Against the youth revolt of the 1960s, he now only barks as a conservative old man and sees “hash-smoking, parasitic parent-haters,” rails against “deviants and masturbators,” uses the denunciatory language of prejudice to attack “homosexuals, lesbians and junkies” and rages against “childish protests with puerile banners” of “spineless hordes.” However, Capra also takes himself to task when he describes the failure of his last film Pocketful of Miracles (1961): “For me, the real cause was a deeply personal one, a deeply moral one: someone who has the incredible power to speak for two hours to hundreds of millions of his fellow human beings, in the dark, must not speak with forked tongue. What he says must come straight from his heart and not from his wallet.”
In reality, the era of capitalist morality was over because the historical resources of Keynesianism were exhausted. Even Kennedy’s myth no longer had a real social equivalent, and Clinton’s show today cannot even be considered a caricature of the New Deal. But it is not the people who have become weaker, but the development of capitalism that has made the personal hero irrelevant. Social critique has disappeared from postmodern art as a whole and the tear of sentiment can now only be shed for animals or extraterrestrials. Conversely, evil can no longer be individualized either: “The villain,” complains old Frank Capra, “began to transform himself from a person into an idea, a state of mind or a condition of life.” Or likewise into an alien. Structuralism has caught up with Capra. But that is no reason to rejoice. He himself suspected it: when the social kitsch of Hollywood’s belief in the personal good in capitalist man has finally degenerated into ridiculousness and become merely boring or a historical genre picture, then “the man-eater masks that children wear on Halloween will reveal reality.” Its last fairy tales must be just as stupid and malicious as unlimited capitalism.
Originally published in Folha S. Paulo on 05/18/1997
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