It’s cold out, you are depressed, and you are supposed to be depressed. In the old days you would be rounding up people to shove into wicker cages to set them on fire and end the solstice. When it got warmer you would be a little embarrassed, but hey it worked and that’s what counts.
Nowadays you watch television and eventually you wind up watching a movie that tells you that happiness comes from owning your own house or maybe a restaurant and that the neighborhood banker is your friend in a kind of sad dependent manic depressive irresponsible sort of way. This actually explains a lot. There’s even a scene where the Baileys decide to buy their impossibly dilapidated fixer upper. Years later, George is bitter about his wasted life. I know what happened, he spent it working on that damn house, but they don’t show you that part.
Each of Stewart’s movies attempts to justify emotional disability and each is popular for precisely that reason. Who amongst us can’t identify with emotional disability?
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is perhaps the worst. To this day American voters always choose the candidate who most closely resembles Jefferson Smith. The point of the movie is that naiveté is a sin. This is precisely the worst person you want to represent us. It doesn't matter. I don’t know if anyone has actually watched the movie from one end to the other. The lesson taken has been that our elected leaders should look and sound like Jimmy Stewart regardless of their other abilities.
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