An Archaeology of Sympathy

The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema

James Chandler

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226034959
• eBook ISBN: 9780226035000
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being.

 

In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra's It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It's a Wonderful Life. Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work.

 

Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, An Archaeology of Sympathy casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.

PART 1

The Capraesque

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the government rescue of banks deemed “too big to fail,” a new and focused populist movement arose in the United States to urge a specific course of coordinated action. Backed by economist Robert Johnson and media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington, the movement encouraged Americans to divest from large multinationals like Citibank and Chase and instead give their banking business to small community firms. From its inception in early 2010, the movement’s website has had a header that features a merged image on a broad horizontal banner bearing the words “Move Your Money.” On the left side of the image, facing right, is a photograph of the CEOs of five major banks in an appearance before Congress. On the right side, facing left—facing them, as it were—is the familiar image of a man in a fedora. It is James Stewart playing George Bailey in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

“Move Your Money.” Promotional image from Huffington Post.

The image captures Bailey looking deeply concerned. The year is 1932, and he is about to address the worried townspeople of Bedford Falls during the run on the Bailey Building and Loan. He and his newlywed bride, Mary (Donna Reed), have just halted the taxi that was to have taken them on their honeymoon, and taken George Bailey out of town after his several previous frustrated attempts to escape its confines. What happens when George Bailey arrives at the savings and loan constitutes an iconic episode in American cinema: his opening of the doors that had been closed by the dim-witted Uncle Billy, his attempt to calm the anxious crowd about the security of their investments, his brief lecture about how banks work, his exposure of the chicanery of Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), Mary’s offer of the $2,000 fund intended for their honeymoon to help soothe nervous customers and tide them over, and finally the nick-of-time arrival of the bank’s closing hour while two dollars yet remain in the coffer. For many Americans, the whole episode from Capra’s film is instantly recalled by the image of Stewart on the Move Your Money home page, where he appears to be facing down the bankers depicted across from him, in a way that the US Congress itself did not.

Both of the images that form the composite photograph on the website header appear in the short film that was made to launch the movement’s work in late 2009. Eugene Jarecki is a documentary filmmaker who had already invoked the spirit of Capra in his borrowing of the title Why We Fight for an antiwar film that won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2005. For the “Move Your Money” film, he remixed scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life and footage from news coverage of the financial crisis to produce a four-minute-plus quasi-documentary that was released on December 29, 2009.¹ The film is introduced by an archaic-looking set of title frames, captioned by a series of similarly archaic intertitles, and accompanied by the sound of an old projector. The simple narrative recorded in the intertitles runs like this:

Once upon a time in America, men like George Bailey ran small community banks.

They made a living, but they also made people’s lives better.

But elsewhere, men like Mr. Potter had another idea.

The greed of men like Mr. Potter led to the Great Depression.

They built bigger, less regulated institutions, with little regard for their customers. When panic struck Potter & Company seized the chance to exploit people’s insecurity.

But the Bailey Building and Loan stood by its customers, tiding them over through the crisis.

To make matters worse, Mr. Potter and Company even stooped to stealing taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

But the people of Bedford Falls had another idea.

After this last intertitle we see a bit of the famous finale of It’s a Wonderful Life, when George’s friends and neighbors enter his home bearing handfuls of cash and securities. The final intertitles of Jarecki’s film issue an appeal that acknowledges the enormous annual holiday viewership for Capra’s film:

This year don’t just watch “IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE,” make a resolution.

If you love George Bailey, get your money away from Mr. Potter.

Move your money.

On the Huffington Post website alone, this short film had almost half a million viewings in the first month and a half after its release.

Though Move Your Money received less press than the Tea Party movement, or the later Occupy movement, Huffington’s alternative brand of populist activism can boast some early success.² It attracted a certain amount of attention, as did Jarecki’s film. About two weeks after its first appearance, the political satirist Stephen Colbert interviewed Jarecki on his television program, first screening clips from Jarecki’s film. He also issued a comic challenge to Jarecki with a film of his own, another remix of scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life.³ Colbert’s film was shaped and retitled in behalf of the view that Mr. Potter was technically the only “community banker” in Bedford Falls and that George Bailey was an unstable young man with a tendency to fly off the handle at colleagues, family, and even schoolteachers. That Colbert could so easily remix the film to produce a very different affect and tendency is an index of what a diverse mix of moods Capra’s film comprises to begin with, a feature not lost on the film’s many commentators. Indeed, the Colbert jeu d’esprit gets at something important both about Capra and the sentimental tradition in which I wish to set his work. The sentimental is most often characterized by markedly mixed emotions, by an abiding ambivalence in both its tendencies and its norms.

The Jarecki episode demonstrates how readily Capra’s cinematic work can be mobilized for public use in our time, a point reinforced by a second example from these same weeks at the turn of the twenty-first century’s second decade. Not long after Jarecki appeared on The Colbert Report, President Obama and his Democratic Party suffered a major defeat in Congress when Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican who had once posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine, was elected to the US Senate seat held for nearly half a century by Ted Kennedy. This shocking defeat cost the Democrats the sixty-seat “supermajority” that had briefly afforded them protection from Republican filibuster of legislative initiatives. In particular, it seemed at the time to have cost Obama and his party the chance to produce what they billed as the country’s first sweeping overhaul of health care in nearly a century.

Numerous commentators compared Brown to a character played by James Stewart in another Capra film, seven years before his turn as George Bailey: the eponymous Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a neophyte appointed to the seat of a recently deceased senator. William Kristol’s editorial in the Weekly Standard (February 1, 2010) was just one of dozens of articles to appear under the title “Mr. Brown Goes to Washington.”⁴ Many of these, like Kristol’s, came from the political right: Sarah Palin, for example, used the formula for a piece about Brown on her Facebook page. This spate of comparisons also called forth responses from the left, denying Brown the Capra aura. An editorial in a local alternative newspaper in Massachusetts bore the title: “Scott Brown—No Mr. Smith Goes to Washington! More Like: American Idol Comes to Massachusetts.”⁵ Invoking Capra’s 1939 film was nothing new in Washington, and it did not stop with Scott Brown. A year later Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced a piece of legislation, widely called the “Mr. Smith Bill,” to tighten Senate rules on the use of the filibuster by requiring those who want to stage a filibuster to appear on the floor and speak, as Stewart’s Mr. Smith famously does in Capra’s film.⁶

This is just the tip of a very large cultural iceberg. I wouldn’t know how to begin to number the occasions on which the formula “Mr. [or Ms.] X Goes to Washington” has been invoked in American public discourse over the last several decades.⁷ Nor would I know how to list the many allusions to It’s a Wonderful Life. In early 2012, New York Times columnist David Brooks discussed the “core American debate between ‘On the Road’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’” in terms of itinerancy and rootedness as alternative paths to happiness.⁸ Nor indeed are these the only Capra films that seem to have become fixtures in the political and cultural landscape. In June 1992, the Los Angeles Times published a long article that analyzed the emergence of Independent Party candidate Ross Perot and his political movement’s effect on that year’s presidential campaign by way of an extended meditation on Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941).⁹ A similar comparison, with a similarly detailed account of the film, was made fifteen years earlier in a piece for the Soho Weekly News: “Jimmy Carter: John Doe Born Again.”¹⁰ The year 2011 alone saw prominent invocations of Capra not only in the “Mr. Smith Bill,” but also in the protests against antilabor legislation in Wisconsin and in coverage of the European banking crisis.

“Maybe there never really was an America,” John Cassavetes, a Capra admirer, once wrote in a Hollywood trade journal: “Maybe it was all Frank Capra.”¹¹ How did Capra’s films come to achieve such a status? Robert Sklar once argued that Capra is alone among Hollywood directors in his effort “to construct a large-scale model of American society in his films.”¹² This observation is helpful, though it both goes too far (is there really such a large-scale social model in Capra’s films?) and fails to go far enough (how does one distinguish the pervasive influence of Capra from that of John Ford, whose Westerns also offer a social, and indeed a political, model?).¹³ The question about Cassavetes’s speculation eventually points to issues that lead beyond Capra, and beyond Hollywood. A part of the answer certainly lies in the sheer scope and power of Capra’s reputation in the 1930s, and indeed his extraordinary productivity from the end of the silent period of cinema through to the beginning of the television era. But another part of the story lies in the vexed history of Capra’s relation to television itself, and another in the widely read literary renditions of his life, first by himself and then by Joseph McBride, in a biography that set out to dismantle piece by piece Capra’s careful self-mythologization. One of the most surprising twists comes with the turn to Capra’s work on the part of a host of serious directors in the 1990s. Looking beyond the present chapter to the two that follow, I’m going to be arguing that the Capra phenomenon, including that late turn to Capraesque filmmaking, has to do with three moments or phases of recursivity in which his work participates, three ways in which his project in cinematic world-making was reflexively constituted.¹⁴ The first has to do with his status as a director with larger than usual responsibilities for his product; the second, with his relation to the medium of Hollywood cinema itself; and the third, with a longer tradition of themes and practices associated with sentiment and the sentimental.

The first moment of recursivity has to do with how Capra established himself as a director with a claim to cinematic authorship: an auteur, as we now say, following the later theoretical discussions of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s.¹⁵ Capra was, as we will have occasion to explore here, one of the first American directors to declare himself the author of the films he directed, and he came to be quite preoccupied with a doctrine he early on called “one man, one film.”¹⁶ His claim to having his “name above the title” was, I will argue, inextricable from a reflective practice he developed in the two decades of his dominance in Hollywood, from 1928 to 1948, when he came repeatedly and increasingly to fashion a new film as a return to one or more of his own prior achievements in cinema: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), for example, invokes and rethinks Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). These films were remakes not in the narrow sense that we associate with cinematic genres but rather in a more ambitious and far more elusive sense of cinematic self-fashioning that, for better or for worse, made him the director he was at his most signature moments. Capra’s work over these two decades shows a pattern of recapitulation, remaking, and self-allegorization that lends it an increasing sense of reflexive coherence. One of the great ironies of the account I will be offering is that when Capra finally undertook a strict remake of one of his early films, in the narrower and more common sense of the term—Riding High (1950), a remake of Broadway Bill (1934)—his career was effectively over. His second such effort—Pocketful of Miracles (1961), a remake of his Lady for a Day (1933)—had a cast that included Bette Davis but proved to be the nail in the coffin.¹⁷

The second moment of recursivity has to do with Capra’s increasing self-consciousness about what, in the chapter of his autobiography about Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he calls “The Power of Film.” The mid-1930s was a pivotal moment for Capra’s self-consciousness about his relation to fundamental elements of Hollywood narrative filmmaking as shaped two decades earlier in the transformative period of D. W. Griffith. The early thirties was a time of more general awareness of Hollywood’s moral codes, of course, as these were instantiated under the leadership of Will Hays, bureaucratized in the Hays Office, and formalized in the 1934 document A Code to Govern the Making of Motion and Talking Pictures.¹⁸ Capra’s allusion to the new mode of censorship—the Hays Code—is evident in Clark Gable’s toying with decorum in the celebrated auto-camp scenes with Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934) and of course in the film’s famous device: the blanket hung between the beds to form the Walls of Jericho. This much is acknowledged in the best commentaries on the film. Not acknowledged, however, is Capra’s increasing self-consciousness about another sort of codification of “the making of Motion and Talking Pictures.”

The debate about the Hays Code was part of a larger debate about film as a m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Sentimental Mode
• Part 1. The Capraesque
• Part 2. The Making of Literary Sentimentalism
• Part 3. Against Sentiment
• Coda
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index