| Frank Capra's "social films," a tetralogy consisting of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and It's A Wonderful Life (1946), use characters and events described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces to retell an ancient "monomyth" in a modern setting. Each of these films separately repeats the plot, but when interpreted as a tetralogy each hero can be seen to represent respectively Campbell's stages of separation, instruction, initiation/annihilation, and return. The latter reading may be seen as a metaphor for what C. G. Jung describes as the process of individuation. A Jungian interpretation restores a sense of agency lost in recent Capra criticism, especially Kaja Silverman's Althusserian interpretation of It's A Wonderful Life. |
