Meet John Doe (1941)

Passed, but this is Capra being as wholesome as he can be.  While it paints journalists as inherently irresponsible with their printing standards, the worst thing that happens is that people get drunk and fight.  The movie does deal with suicide both with the respect that the topic deserves, but that feeling is not consistent throughout the film.  Sometimes, suicide is the worst thing imaginable.  Sometimes, it's the punchline to a joke.

DIRECTOR: Frank Capra

I don't want to write.  I never want to write again.  I am having a rough weekend. But I got to watch a Frank Capra classic.  How often does that happen?  I love Capra.  I love Capra too much.  Having to write about a Capra that I haven't seen should be one of the highlights of my year and I'm just incredibly grouchy.  That's not fair.  I just know that I will fall behind if I am not constantly writing because I still have to write about The Color Purple today and that's a lot.

My biggest question is "What is going on with the rights issue to Meet John Doe?"  I've been a Capra nut for ages.  like, I will lose friendships if they don't like It's a Wonderful Life or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  I have done that, actually.  I'm a very petty and spiteful person. But I've been trying to get a copy of this movie that is watchable for a while now.  It seems like every copy is a bad VHS transfer.  For Christmas, I got a copy of Meet John Doe.  Again, we're looking at a public domain DVD that has a VHS transfer again.  I couldn't.  So I found a decent print on YouTube.  I try not to admit to this because it's sketchy.  I'm just so sick of buying DVD after DVD that is just trash.  I now know that there is a really good print out there.  It was the version that showed on TCM.  I know I'm not breaking any rules.  It's in the public domain.  But what is it going to take to get a really good print of this movie for private collections?  How has Criterion not made Meet John Doe part of the Criterion Collection?  I mean, we have Night of the Living Dead.  Why not Meet John Doe?  It's just a weird history.

I can't help but get political with this one. Meet John Doe is one of the more political movies coming out of an already political guy.  My take on this is that we're living in the Dark Universe where John takes D.B. Norton's idea and runs with it.  Capra knew the common man.  It's why I like his movies so much.  Capra, as an immigrant, had such a love for America.  His America was the people who made the country something special.  He had a distrust of the upper echilons of society and knew that the American Dream was a struggle worthy of fighting.  Often, the consequence of extreme capitalism mean that corporate America stomped on the little guy.  Guess what?  He was right.  But Capra also believed that people were inherently good.  The rich were so blind to morals that they couldn't understand how people could be so moved by simple, New Testament ideals of being good to one another. The very notion of Meet John Doe is that the downtrodden need to be acknowledged.  If the downtrodden are acknowledged and given dignity, they will listen to whomever presents them a common goal.

Donald Trump did that.  By the way, he's D.B. Norton.  I'm not going to hide behind that at all.  He acknowledged that there was a loud, upset, and ignored working class.  He gave them dignity.  Like Norton does in Meet John Doe, that dignity wasn't given out of a sense of duty.  It was for self-promtion. It's weird how prescient Meet John Doe is.  For a good chunk of the movie, I kind of giggled how simplistic I thought the news cycle was.  Ann Mitchell is about to get fired, so she writes a fake news story about a common man who is fed up with the system and about to commit suicide.  I thought it was absurd that the different news agencies fought over coverage for something so small.  Then I remembered Joe the Plumber.  The fact that Joe the Plumber has secured real estate in my long term memory kind of shows that maybe we are easily influenced by an appeal to emotion.  

Man, I miss having Capra's belief in people.  There is something so touching about people finding community over a shared love of his fellow man.  It's what brings me to this story. But I'll tell you what.  Meet John Doe, as much as the second half of the movie really got me, took a long time to win me over.  I suppose the true for the first time that I watched It's a Wonderful Life. But I'm in this place where I have a real respect for real journalism.  It's kind of weird that the movie kind of washes over the yellow journalism that is the foundation of this movie.  The movie starts with Henry Connell rebranding The Bulletin into The New Bulletin.  Capra has this amazing exposition for this movie. The plaque, stressing the importance of honesty and truth, is replaced by a fear of modernism. Okay, Capra is accusing journalists of abandoning principles for selling papers.  But Ann starts the movie as the OG Lois Lane in this.  She's all about principles and the fact that Connell is downsizing his moral reporters for the flashier writers is accusatory towards journalists.

But Ann becomes this corrupted helot pretty quickly.  The odd thing is that Connell is the one who represents a love for America.  It's Connell's involvement in this whole plot that causes him to get drunk and confess his anger towards what the John Doe movement has become.  I love that scene by the way. For all my cynicism about the state of America, the reason that I get so worked up about politics is that I have this Capra idea of America.  America is what Connell is talking about.  It's about going into a war you, at your heart, hate because it means the deaths of innocents.  But it also means going to war because there is an authentic evil out there and it means that people will suffer.  It is the idea that Americans go to war because we are altruistic.  We know that the notion of suffering is terrible and that we'll do the one thing we hate doing for the sake of someone else.  I'm getting worked up because I was thinking about Trump's comments about NATO.  God, this man needs to stop being a turd and to start watching some Capra.  He wants people to pay for their fair share in the fighting for what's right.  He wants Ukraine to kowtow to Russia because it's not our fight.  

But Meet John Doe lives under the assumption that Americans understand the core tenets of America.  It's easy to read the John Doe Clubs springing up over America as "I am claiming what's mine."  It's a rise to say that we're going to take care of each other.  We're going to remind the world that we exist by how good we are, not by what we're owed.  We're living in a world where the John Doe Clubs are all about who we're going to mutually hate and I can't stand that.  Meet John Doe put out this message that Americans are good and we responded with this idea that Americans are the most selfish of the bunch.  What happened? I honestly don't know how we got to this point.  I suppose I do.  Meet John Doe talks about it at length.  There's this whole class of people out there that feel unseen and unheard.  Meet John Doe unites these people under the banner of patriotism.  Instead, the real world was told that America wasn't great anymore.  Meet John Doe, a film from 1941, argued that it wasn't that America wasn't great anymore.  It was a reminder that it was always great if people just cared about one another.

Like, honestly, I'm a naive sentimentalist.  I find beauty in the fact that humanity should be so beyond where we are right now.  Now, I am using a work of fiction created by an idealist to talk about what Americans should or shouldn't be.  I don't know if this was the prevailing attitude in 1941 or if (and I just realized that the war that Connell is talking about is The Great War, not WWII, which was a war fought despite being isolationists) attitudes have changed that much.  I hate that I've been in the Generational tiff that has been posted all over social media.  I hear how much Gen Z hates Millennials (by my students!) and I thought that was all exaggerated.  But I have a genuine frustration with a lot of Boomers, simply because they tend to be the generation who are all for the infighting.  Like, when I see pro-gun bumper stickers advocating the phrase "Come and Take It", that's so anti Meet John Doe that Americans don't look like Americans. "Try that in a small town"?  Meet John Doe is all about how the small town in the friendliest place on earth.  If anything, the dynamics have shifted.

Meet John Doe shows the mean attitudes coming from the cities.  John is going to jump off of city hall, a skyscraper.  There's a general disregard for John's life shy of the headlines it would create and that's why Norton wants to stop him.  But the people from the small towns are concerned about the value of the man. Instead, we're now getting messages from small towns that we're going to mess you up if you try any of that communist nonsense in these small towns.  We saw it during the Civil Rights movement and we're seeing it today.

In the past few years, I've understood that the Rockwellian America never really existed.  There's the message of the self-sacrificing, noble American that MAGA perverted over time.  I've compartmentalized that belief with the notion that Frank Capra, an immigrant, saw the beauty of Americans and how inherently good they are.  Meet John Doe is both a wonderful film, but also something that hurts my heart because the world should be like Meet John Doe.  It should be based on the idea that the love of God and neighbor means sacrificing for the other, regardless of idealogy.  It should be about not needing to worry about politicians because we'll do the right thing, despite race, creed, or color.  Instead, we have the opposite.  We've been put through the wringer and we've come out more bigotted and more like helots than I thought imaginable.  I love this movie, but it makes me more sad than anything else.  We've almost proven Frank Capra to be something too good for this world.