Syllabus

WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?

POST-WAR VISIONS OF AMERICA AS

SEEN IN "IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, " "THE FOUNTAINHEAD," and "HIGH NOON"

"There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

"The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions."

Thomas Jefferson

"The people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived."

Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

This class explores how "the public" or "the people" are characterized in some of Hollywood's most important post-World War II films as a way of better understanding what makes a society function. In "It's a Wonderful Life,"(1946) the people of Bedford Falls rally to save George Bailey, whose generosity over the years has won him numerous friends. Society is viewed positively in this film, but it also sends the message that for the people to rise to the occasion they need to be inspired by a man (and a woman -- George's wife Mary) who provides them with an example of moral leadership. In the 1948 film vesion of Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead," we get an entirely different and far more negative view of "the people." The people in Ms. Rand's screenplay are the enemy of the heroic and courageous individual; they demand conformity and punish anyone who seeks to excel. Rand's message, formed by her youth in the Soviet Union, is that the masses are apt to fall under the control of malignant leaders and exploiting opportunists. Only the individual can be trusted; the masses are the great threat to freedom. Finally, in "High Noon,"(1952) we see painfully dramatized the failure of society to come to the aid of its valiant defender. The people of Hadleyville demonstrate at every turn their own unworthiness and it is left to Marshall Will Kane to stand up alone against the forces of lawlessness and evil. This story ends with Marshall Kane throwing his marshall's star into the dirt after dispatching the bad guys and leaving town with a look of disdain for the people, who did not deserve the kind of high-minded and courageous defense of honor that he represented.

In many ways, these movies (perhaps unwittingly) captured America's own deep seated distrust of itself: Was Margaret Thatcher right -- there is no such thing as society -- or did it really take a courageous leader to make the people believe not just in their ability to do great things, but, more fundamentally, in their very existence? Again and again, whether on the playing field or in the political arena, America, like ancient Athens, must face up to the fact that "the people" are -- in the final analysis -- truly "a people" only when they act under the leadership of a strong individual. In these three movies, we see one successful leader, one man who refuses to lead and a third man who tries but fails to inspire the people to overcome their fears and suspicions and save their town.

I hope that by viewing exerpts from these movies and by discussing what I see as some common themes in them that we can obtain a profounder understanding of both our own times and, beyond that, of some of the challenges that democracies have always faced.

Prof. Michael G. Anderson

Course Schedule

Wednesday, May 7

View and Discuss Excerpts from "It's a Wonderful Life"

Excerpt One:	George organizes the other boys -- "make a chain" -- to save his brother Harry after he falls through the ice.
Exerpt Two:	Henry Potter denounces the people -- "a discontented rabble." George responds: "This rabble you're talking about . . .[does] most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community." And: "People were human beings to [his father, Peter Bailey], but to you . . . they're cattle."
Exerpt Three:	Run on the bank scene. Potter -- cynically offering help to George -- refers to the people as a mob and asks if he can send the police "Well, mobs get pretty ugly sometimes, you know, George."
Excerpt Four:	George pleads with the people who own shares in the Building and Loan not to go over to Potter and sell their shares at 50 cents on the dollar: "Now, we can get through this thing all right. We've got to stick together, though. We've got to have faith in each other."
Excerpt Five:	George goes to Potter (again) to ask for help. Potter responds: "Why don't you go the riff-raff you love so much and ask them to let you have eight thousand dollars? You know why? Becasue they would run you out of town on a rail."
Excerpt Six:	George is saved by the generosity of his friends: "No man is a failure who has friends." In this final scene, far from running George "out of town on a rail", "the people" show their essential goodness.

Wednesday, May 14

View and Discuss Excerpts from "The Fountainhead"

Excerpt One:	Howard Roark has brought his drunken and disillusioned former mentor Henry Cameron to his office. Cameron tries to dissuade Howard from pursuing his hopeless quest to be an architect who works only on commissions that he himself controls entirely. He has to conform to the standards set by the public as shown in the pages of that rag The Banner. Speaking of the paper's cynical editor, Gail Wynand, Henry says: "Gail Wynand gives people what they want. The common, the vulgar and the trite." But Howard is defiant: "I don't care what they [the people] think of architecture or anything else."
Excerpt Two	Howard gets a commission to design a modern "Luxury Apartment House" from a self-made millionaire, Roger Enright. The Enright House becomes the excuse for one of The Banner's rabble-rousing campaigns, orchestrated by the paper's architecture critic and the film's arch-villain, Ellsworth Toohey. The paper denounces it as a dangerous structure (it appears to be top-heavy) that will cater to the whims of the wealthy few instead of the housing needs of the masses. Dominique Francon is enthralled by the drawings she has seen of the proposed building and admires the architect (who she does not know is the man she met at the quarry) for his fearless independence. She denounces Wynand's (and Toohey's) campaign against the building: "You are willing to destroy it [the Enright House] just to amuse the mob. Just to give them something to scream about."
Excerpt Three	Surprisingly, Howard thinks that he and Wynand have much in common: "We're alike, you and I," he unexpectedly tells Wynand after Wynand has asked him to design a new home for Dominique and himself. He observes that Wynand, like he, "had the strength and spirit to rise by his own effort" from his boyhood in Hell's Kitchen (a notorious New York slum), but, Howard observes, Wynand had "made a bad mistake about the way he chose" to express his will to power.
Excerpt Four	Lying in her hospital bed recovering from the loss of blood she suffered when she slit her wrists after the dynamiting of Courtland Homes, Dominique assures Roark that in their pettiness the people "hate you for the greatness of your achievement." But, she declares to Howard, "I'm not afraid of them [the people] any longer."
Excerpt Five	Toohey haranguing the crowd at a protest meeting as part of the campaign against Roark and The Banner, which is now supporting Roark: "Who is society? We are. Man can be permitted to exist only to serve others. He must be nothing but a tool for the satisfaction of their needs. Self-sacrifice is the law of our age. The man who refuses to submit and to serve, Howard Roark, the supreme egoist, is a man who must be destroyed." The crowd roars its approval.
Excerpt Six	Wynand heroically defends Roark as a man who refuses to sacrifice himself to popular opinion, but in the end, he realizes he can't win: Exhausted and defeated, he tells Dominique: "I can't save him (Howard). I have no power. I never had any power. I wasn't the ruler of the mob, I was its tool. I never ran The Banner, they did. The men in the street. It was their paper, not mine." In the next scene, the paper's Board of Director's tells Wynand that he will have to give in, rehire Toohey and come out against Roark, or the paper will have to close. Wynand gives in.
Excerpt Seven	At his trial for blowing up the housing project, Howard makes a long and impassioned defense of his actions. It was his creation and he had the right to destroy it to save it from the corrupting changes that had been imposed upon it and him. He rejects the notions of self-sacrifice and altruism and defends the rights of the individual against society. Surprisingly, the jury, moved by his words and courageously defying public opinion, acquits Howard.

Wednesday, May 21

View and Discuss Excerpts from "High Noon"

Excerpt One:	Judge Mettrick, packing his law books and preparing to flee, tells Will that the people will not support him when the outlaws appear. He cites a story of fifth century Athens in which the people welcome back a tyrant who they had recently overthrown when he returns with a mercenary army and then stand idly by as he executes the leaders of the revolt. Also cites the case of the town of Indian Falls from which he had fled some years before because the people supported the bad guys against him. Ironically, he was helped to escape by a "lady of somewhat dubious reputation" who had more courage that most of the town's supposedly reputable citizens. (Compare to Helen Ramirez in Hadleyville. Helen, Will Kane's former mistress, told his new Quaker wife Amy that "If Kane was my man I would never leave like this. I would get a gun and fight." -- which, in the end -- is exactly what peace-loving Amy does.)
Excerpt Two:	Will goes to the saloon to try to enlist some men for a posse to confront the returning Frank Miller and the other gunmen. He encounters one of the outlaws who had just visited the saloon to replenish his liquor stock. Earlier, we see the outlaw being warmly greeted in the saloon by the town's drinking class. When Will enters the saloon, he encounters a solid wall of cynicism. Most of the men expect Kane to be dead before the day is done and want no part in the trouble. His request for deputies is met by silence and then, after he leaves, by derision.
Exerpt Three:	Will then goes to the church, where services are in progress. The parson wonders why Will is coming to the church now, since he failed to get married in the church. Will explains that his new wife is a Quaker and would not be welcome (or would not enter) the church. At first the men in the church seem ready to join Kane in facing the gunmen, but then doubts start to surface and finally the mayor gets up to speak for the town. After praising Will for cleaning up the town, he frets that another gun fight could tarnish the town's reputation with "folks up north," who evidently are thinking about investing in various developments that would be good for the town's economy. The mayor ends by pleading with Will to leave town before Frank Miller arrives so as to save himself and the town a lot of unnecessary trouble.

"Maybe down deep they [the people] don't care. They don't care." -- The Old Marshall

Wednesday, May 28

Summing Up

I. America as the first "peoples' Republic" with a constitution that starts with "We the People . . . " The meaning of "republican virtue"

Hobbes vs. Locke

II. America as the escape from society: Daniel Boone and the urge to achieve "elbow room"

III. Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman and the cult of "myself" and "self-reliance"

IV. Social Darwinism and "Rugged Individualism"

V. The Great Depression and the celebration of "The Common People"

VI. Post-War America: The Search for Community