Still Wonderful

 Last night I watched It's A Wonderful Life again. I see that I last watched it at the start of this year, and wrote about it here, under the title 'It's a Wonderful Film'...

'This wretched flu continues to toy with me mercilessly, one day giving every indication that it's coming to an end, the next surging back with renewed vigour, draining me of all energy. It's been quite a ride. And somewhere along the way, in keeping with Christmas tradition (one not observed for several years), the decision was taken to watch It's a Wonderful Life. This was not wise: I had overlooked the state of emotional frailty the flu had plunged me into. The result was that the titles were barely over before liquefaction set in, and by the end I was a wrung-out emotional wreck of a man, beyond help. The film is notoriously one that can wring tears from the stoniest heart, so a man in my condition was asking for trouble...
  What is it about It's a Wonderful Life? Like A Christmas Carol – with which it has clear parallels, not least in the Scrooge-like character of Mr Potter and in its time-shifting vision of what might have been – it has the power of fable, and it has a Dickensian simplicity. Essentially both A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life dramatise the same conflict, between a view of the world (Potter/Scrooge's) in which the 'bottom line' is everything and human beings merely interchangeable economic units, and one in which bonds of social and familial affection, custom and ceremony count for more than profit-and-loss and create something of infinitely greater value. George Bailey is a man at the point of breaking under the relentless pressure to surrender to the grinding logic of Potter's ruthless accounting and betray the community that he has done so much to build. Of course we know how it will end, but Frank Capra's storytelling and (in particular ) Jimmy Stewart's performance are so compelling that the film gains power as it goes along, building such a head of emotional steam that by the end... well, there won't be a dry eye or an unwrung heart. Okay, it's sentimental, it's hokey and all the rest, but It's a Wonderful Life is also a cinematic masterpiece of rare potency. 
  By the way, when George Bailey is granted a vision of how 'Potterville' (the former Bedford Falls) would have ended up but for him, the pleasure-crazed asocial dystopia – all cocktail bars and gambling dens and low dives – seemed, mutatis mutandis, sadly reminiscent of the centres of some of our depressed English towns today. This represents, I suppose, the triumph of 'limbic capitalism' – capitalism relentlessly titillating the pleasure centres to keep us coming back for more of what does us no good at all.'  

I had forgotten that I had a festive flu at New Year, and had forgotten also the useful phrase 'limbic capitalism', which I shall recommit to memory. All I have to add is that It's a Wonderful Life gets better – richer and deeper – with every viewing, and that it seems to me now that Potter's brand of capitalism could also be characterised as 'crony capitalism' – he has everyone in his pocket, up to and including at least one Congressman (who is told to wait outside while Potter holds a meeting) – and as 'machine capitalism', in which the mechanical engine of market forces careers blindly on, regardless of social context, regardless of human costs. Both of these dehumanising forms of capitalism, I need hardly add, are characteristic of our time – more so, in fact, than of the times portrayed in the film, where in the end the benign, humane form of capitalism represented by Bailey, a form based on mutuality and affective social bonds, does in the end prevail. Never mind – now we have limbic capitalism to keep us happily sedated while the machine rolls on. 

But enough of these mournful numbers. Today is also the 160th birthday of that wonderful painter and printmaker Felix Vallotton (and tomorrow will be the centenary of his death). Here is a summery still life featuring an appetising melon and a beautiful little bunch of nasturtiums –