Better Left Unsaid by Gilbert Nora;

Author:Gilbert, Nora;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 8 Capra’s film noir. James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.

As grotesque as the businessmen’s financial discussion of Scrooge’s death may be, however, their grotesqueness is one-upped by the scene that follows. In it, Scrooge watches his servants pawn the possessions of his that they have managed to steal away from his death chamber (and, indeed, from his dead body—the charwoman has gone so far as to rob him of the clothes that he had been dressed in for his burial). Scrooge regards the actions of these servants as examples of profiteering taken to a diabolic extreme. “[H]e viewed them,” we are told, “with a detestation and disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself” (102). To soothe his sense of moral revulsion, Scrooge asks the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come to take him to see “any person in the town, who feels emotion caused by this man’s death” (103). In response to this request, the Ghost brings Scrooge to the home of a kind young couple and their children, who have nothing “monstrous” or “demonic” about them. But even in this house of warmth and goodness, the pressures imposed by Victorian England’s economic system cause the family to have a reaction to death that is no less callous than the business merchants’ or less profit-driven than the servants’. Because it means a timely delay in the repayment of their debt, the family morbidly delights in the news of their creditor’s passing. “Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter. The children’s faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this man’s death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure” (106).

In both the Pottersville section of It’s a Wonderful Life and the futuristic fourth section of A Christmas Carol, then, we are shown the darker, seedier, uglier results of capitalism. Interestingly, however, neither section aroused much disapproval from the moral censors of its time. Indeed, when looking through the pages and pages of objections that Joseph Breen raised in response to the various drafts of Wonderful Life that were submitted to his office, one is struck by the near-total absence of complaints directed toward the content of the Pottersville sequence. (Breen’s very first letter warns that any “indication of Violet as a street walker is unacceptable,”71 but the objection is never mentioned again, in spite of the fact that Capra did nothing to alter Violet’s Pottersville dialogue or characterization between the screenplay’s first draft and the film’s final cut.) Similarly, one would be hard-pressed to find so much as a sentence written by one of Dickens’s contemporaries that finds fault with the sociopolitical implications of his Christmas Yet To Come. All in all, both Dickens and Capra seem to have been extremely successful in achieving the goal of inoffensiveness that Dickens specifically describes in his

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