Meet John Doe

I haven't been to the movies in a long time, so I thought about some of my favorite ones, most being of the old Hollywood school of B&W films. I remembered a film I had seen a couple of times which I think has a great deal of relevance to what we've been discussing in class. The film is "Meet John Doe", starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, directed by Frank Capra. Briefly, the main female character, Ann (played by Barbara Stanwyck) is threatened with being fired by the new owner of the newspaper she writes for because her columns are too boring.

She sends a fake letter to herself from a non-existent person, calling him John Doe, who, unemployed, says because of societal, political and economic injustices, he will commit suicide on Christmas Eve. After this is printed in the newspaper there is a huge outpouring from the masses asking him not to kill himself. The new Publisher is blown away by this response and seeing a big profit stemming from the increased circulation, wants to continue publishing letters from John Doe. However he finds out about the ruse by Ann, but still ony can see the profit he can make socially, economically and politically from this phenomenon. He gives Ann her job back with a raise but only if she'll continue the charade. It comes to a point where they actually have to produce a real person as John Doe...enter Gary Cooper. Cooper is an unemployed baseball player, a pitcher, due to injury, and lives with his friend under a bridge as a tramp. He interviews for the "job" and agrees to impersonate John Doe. He (Ann) writes about how people should care about their neighbors, be more charitable, how the average man is the working masses and has the power to change society's ills, and to fight against the big corporations and dirty politicians, etc. This whole John Doe philosophy starts a new movement (or ideology) .

The fraud is exposed by the very Publisher who is benefitting from it to further his aspirations in political circles. The John Doe movement is destroyed...However Gary Cooper's character decides to vindicate himself and actually commit suicide as promised on Christmas Eve. I remember this last scene being very powerful. On Christmas Eve, John Doe writes a suicide letter and mails it to a writer he can trust to print it. He goes up to the roof of City Hall where he climbs on the ledge waiting for midnight. The greedy publisher is already there with his cronies telling him to reconsider what he is doing. He said something like it will be all for nothing. The mayor and police are on the ground waiting to take all I.D. off his body. He will be buried in a potter's field having died for nothing. then of course, as only Hollywood can do it, Barbara Stanwyck gets to the roof and pleads with him not to jump, that she loves him, yatta yatta yatta, but most importantly still believes in the "John Doe Movement" . Other friends turned enemy, turned friends again coax him off the ledge. Cooper's trusted friend tells off the greedy publisher in the end, fists raised and all. The message was that the people united were stronger that any social, political or economic machine, and will always prevail.

In Balibar and Macherey's discussion of Fiction and Realism : The Mechanism of Identification in Literature they say "Brecht was the first Marxist theoretician to focus on this ( the identification effect) by showing how the ideological effects of literature materialise via an identification process between the reader or the audience and the hero and the anti-hero, the simultaneous mutual constitution of the fictive' consciousness' of thew character with the ideological 'consciousness' of the reader. This theory can easily be applied in "Meet John Doe".

Additionally, Balibar and Macherey state that "According to the fundamental mechanism of the whole bourgeois ideology, to produce subjects ('persons' and 'characters') one must oppose them to objects, i.e. to things, by placing them in and against a world of 'real' things, outside it but always in relation to it. The realistic effect is the basis of this interpellation which makes characters or merely discourse 'live' and which makes readers take up an attitude towards real ones, though undangerously.

I agree with Lesley's response using "It's a Wonderful Life" as a film to relate to what we've been discussing in class. Interestingly, Frank Capra also directed It's A Wonderful Life. It seems to me that he was proficient in showing audiences the common man and the tests they must endure to keep their integrity and what they value in life. He appealed to the common masses. Another Capra film I could throw into the mix is "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" . Again it's the common man against the corporate and political machines. Of course the common man wins in the end...very Capraesque.