Frank Capra's Trip to Sicily: A Few Thoughts

Joseph McBride's biography of film director Frank Capra (1992's Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success) begins with an episode from near the end of his life--his U.S. State Department-arranged trip back to the village in Sicily where he was born (Bisacquino). The project is half-baked from the very beginning (indeed, reading the chapter I was aghast that taxpayer money was squandered on this foolishness), but what really interested me was what in McBride's account Capra said afterward about the experience: "I felt nothing."

Looking at what others have said about the event, and Capra's attitude toward it, it seems common for them to emphasize Capra's alienation from his "roots," bespeaking his truly horrible childhood, and the discrimination and anxieties he experienced as a Sicilian immigrant to America in that time. Yet one can see another aspect to it, especially when you look at the rest of his statement. "I felt nothing," he said, continuing "Who the hell cares where you were born?" and criticizing the whole idea of "roots" and pride in them (using what good old Commandant Lassard would have called "many, many bad words").

While alienation is not the most desirable of emotional states, it does sometimes bring with it clarity, enabling one to see straight through muddle and lies, with the idea of "roots" an instance in this case. That "people are so proud of their roots it's sickening" as Capra put it is a matter of their romanticizing their ancestry, a behavior that has pretty much always been in the service of an agenda. As anyone who has seriously bothered with the history of these matters is aware, in reality nations are not born, but invented, and those who become their people encouraged and even forced to "imagine" themselves a community by an elite for its own reasons, which never fails to use that imagining to take advantage of them for its selfish purposes (in the deflection of demands for freedom and equality from below, the deflection of attention to socioeconomic differences with images of "national unity," the call to lay down their lives in war that has made nationalism so much a tool of reaction, and internationalism so much the standard borne by progressives).

All of this, of course, can seem the more forced when it is a matter of identifying not with the country where you had your upbringing and lived your life but a place you left so early on as to not remember it, and had no real ties to it afterward (a place that was their parents' world rather than their own), as was the case with Capra. It does not help that those who care very much about where they were born, and others knowing it, have generally expected to derive social advantages from it--and to subject others born less advantageously to that disadvantage amid a status politics running amok and twisting the nation's life in all sorts of ways, such that many of those being told "Be proud!" are told to be proud of something that had brought them nothing but pain. Certainly Capra fell into that category--with the result that whatever else one may say of his emotional baggage and the way in which it twisted his life and his thinking (as McBride put it, "Capra dealt with it by becoming a reactionary and a terrible bigot himself," and writing an autobiography that in Barry Gewen's words "appears to have been a lie practically from beginning to end," with all that implies), romance about those roots was one delusion for which he never fell, a bit of clarity that deserves a lot more attention than it has got in this regressively roots-obsessed era, the more in as where the obsession was concerned Capra in '77, when Roots was helping to begin to make this fashionable hadn't "seen anything yet."