Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2012-12-18 06:35 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2012-12-18 06:35 pm
[ SECRET POST #2177 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2177 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 058 secrets from Secret Submission Post #311.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: Episode morals that make you mad? (tw: suicide)
(Anonymous) 2012-12-19 07:18 am (UTC)(link)My English class watched It's a Wonderful Life a few days ago. I hated it. Not because I thought it was narmy, or because I'm not religious (though I'm not). But it was too... easy.
Like, when George is staring down at the water and contemplating jumping in, right before Clarence saves him - I've been there. I know what that's like. It hit so hard for me that I actually started crying, though luckily no one noticed (I think), as did the line, "You're more use dead than alive!" It was awful but I identified with him so, so much right there, because I know how easy it is to get there and how hard it is to get back.
And then George's problems are solved in the next fifteen minutes and all I could do was sit there numbly and think, "But that wasn't even his problem."
His reason for feeling so awful had nothing to do with what he'd done in the past forty years. "I wish I'd never been born" sounded like an idle comment, a way to emphasize, "Yes, I feel that my life has gone so badly that there is no way it could get better." "I wish the last day hadn't happened," might have been more accurate.
Likewise, everyone banding together to raise 8,000 dollars had nothing to do with George's epiphany, and that was what actually solved the problem. Clarence was a selfish, reckless idiot who only cared about getting promoted, not actually about George Bailey. The one thing he did right was stopping George from jumping.
I just... it felt cheap. It felt as though the narrative had suddenly become a stereotypical teenager, wild hyperbole and all. I get that it's a Christmas movie and it's not supposed to be too heartbreaking, but fuck it, the guy got this close to committing suicide and there's no fallout whatsoever? At the very least, after the euphoria of being safe and free has died down, he has to explain everything to Mary. He has to confront the fact that he almost did kill himself and he would have been wrong in his reasons for doing so.
From a more dryly narrative point of view, it's been my experience that a good story swings back and forth between happy and sad, light and dark, triumph and failure. Like a pendulum, and in the same vein, the harder the swing to the dark, the more potent and fierce the swing back the other way. When those two things don't match up - the story just keeps on getting darker, with no swing back or very little lightness going on for the protagonists, for instance - then the overall effect is that the viewer has been cheated out of something.
George's euphoria, to me, is a very hard swing to happiness after a relatively milder swing to despair. Based on how he acted before he appealed to God, I would have expected quiet relief and joy on realizing that everything is better now, maybe wonder as he walks through the town. Based on how he acted in the last five minutes of the movie, however, I would have expected him to be almost completely broken just before the climax. His joy is frenzied and rapturous and too shiningly bright to have not come from a darker place.
TLDR: George Bailey's revelation that his life is wonderful felt cheap and hollow to me and his emotions felt unbalanced from a storytelling point of view.
Re: Episode morals that make you mad? (tw: suicide)
(Anonymous) 2012-12-19 07:56 am (UTC)(link)I think maybe this is one of those movies where the way events "come off" or "feel" to the viewer and the angle and lens which the viewer uses to see the big picture and the connections and interpret the implications of the events is very important.