The Gospel According to Frank Capra By Rod Bennett
At Christmastime in the year 1974, when I was 14
years old, I saw an old black & white movie on television called It's A
Wonderful Life. It was a very cold sunny afternoon as I remember; I was
home from school on two weeks of Christmas vacation. I had been randomly
turning the TV dial and just happened to get interested in a scene -- about
ten minutes into the picture, as it turns out -- in which a young boy had
just saved a drunken druggist from accidentally poisoning a sick child. At
the first commercial break, the "Armchair Theatre" announcer told me the
title.
Wracked as I was at the time with all the usual terrors and traumas of being
fourteen years old, I wasn't at all sure that it was, in fact, a wonderful
life here on Planet Earth. But I watched the movie anyway. And the longer
that old picture went on the more the sound of that title (which had seemed
at first so pat and sugary) began to change in my doubtful ears. It's A
Wonderful Life. Standing there so unashamed in the face of
everything going on all around it, that simplistic, illogical phrase began to
sound... I don't know... defiant; like a challenge being flung at me
or even an attack.
I had no way of knowing at the time that this was supposed to be a corny old
Christmas "feel-good" movie. It began to make me feel pretty bad, in fact.
Certainly I saw that It's A Wonderful Life is full of wonderful
things: charm and humor and unforgettable characters that have since become
like a second family to me. But the longer the movie went on, the bleaker
and blacker things got. George Bailey, the hero (played by James Stewart),
the dreamer who was going to see the world and lasso the moon, struggles to
get out of the dead end job that keeps him chained to the hick town where he
was born. It soon becomes obvious, to us and to him, that he never will get
out of it.
And yet, somehow, with every commercial break, that announcer kept repeating
It's A Wonderful Life. I myself had dreams very like George Bailey's:
dreams of accomplishment, dreams of romance. But the plain reality was that
I was failing in school, my first real romance was ten years away, and I was
lonely, alienated, and ugly with that unique ugliness only possible to
fourteen year olds. And yet with every commercial break, over and over at
eight-minute intervals, the "Armchair Theatre" man insisted It's A
Wonderful Life. Before long, George Bailey (because of a meaningless
accident -- his lovable, doddering old uncle has destroyed his business by
absentmindedly losing a packet of money) stands on a frigid overpass ready to
drown his whole thwarted, aborted dream in an icy black river and we're not
so sure we blame him. I stood there with him -- my own dreams seemed (and
sometimes still seem) just as hopeless. And still the man says It's A
Wonderful Life.
I guess the repeated words of that corny title -- proved surely to be a lie
by the very story to which they had somehow been tacked -- made me feel a
little like Nero must have felt, listening in disbelief to the joyful hymns
the martyrs sang as he fed them to the lions.
And then the final act of the movie began.
With a cosmic zoom the whole scale of the story changes -- our perspective
becomes eternal. George Bailey's plain homely little life is suddenly
revealed (by a frightening side-trip to a dark alternative universe) to have
been all along part of a reality which includes within its boundaries
vistas so vast and dangers so deep that the thought of it seems, by turns,
far too god to be true and far too frightening to entertain. George
receives, in the words of an angel, "... a great gift... the
chance to see what the world would be like without you." It's a gift of
gravestones, a gift of dark and desperate glimpses into "awful holes;" but
when the vision has passed, our minds have been expanded.
We realize we have sinned. We have agreed with George Bailey; his shabby
small-town existence is a bore. And thus when the sheer bottomless
profundity of every tiny detail of that life yawns before us -- Zuzu's
pitiful flower petals, for instance -- we are ashamed. We suddenly
know forever that George Bailey really was "the richest man in town." We see
what we should have see all along; that five minutes in the presence
of such as Bert the Bop, Ernie the Taxi Driver, Cousin Eustace and Uncle
Billy... one drink at Martini's bar, one kiss from Mary Hatch, one hug from
little Zuzu -- each of these things has been a staggering unmerited honor
worth any price.
To me it was a staggering vision. The man had been right. It was indeed, by
God, a wonderful life.
I remember sitting stunned -- battered by a bewildering rush of conflicting
emotions as the closing credits finished and for some reason the TV station
wanted to go on now and show something else. What the hell had just happened
to me? Why was I crying? Was I happy? Was I sad? Was this love or despair
or what? I looked slowly around the room; everything looked the same as it
had two hours before. But I knew I wasn't the same. Maybe I had taken the
whole thing too seriously somehow. Maybe I just hadn't seen many movies yet.
Maybe when you get older you get used to being slapped around like this. And
probably that old movie doesn't show life as it really is. There probably
aren't any angels and when the George Bailey's of the world get to the end of
their ropes they just go ahead and drop off. IT occured to me that probably
the whole thing was just a Hollywood fantasy. But then I found another voice
rising up inside me -- "Then Hollywood has paid us a compliment we don't
deserve; it has made man seem far more grand and sad and glorious than he is.
But if this is so, then who, if not a man, made this old movie?"
I wandered somehow into the family room of our house and collapsed into a big
brown wing-backed chair. I'm sitting in it now as I write; I've kept the
scarred old thing long after my parents discarded it because of the memory of
that moment. It had gotten dark outside whle I was watching the movie and so
I sat there quietly, the room lit only by the rainbow twinkling of our
Christmas tree and the warm yellow blaze in our fireplace. Before long, my
folks came in, engaged in the usual Christmas hustle and bustle. I'm sure
the look on my face must have been precisely the look George Bailey wears as
he sees Tommy and Janey and Pete again for the first time after returning frm
"Never-Born-Land." After all, I had gone there with him. I had lost my
family when George lost his family and regained them when, with George, I
realized that it is, in very point of fact, a wonderful life. I hugged both
of my parents as if I hadn't seen them in years. I didn't even try to
explain what had happened to me; how could I? I'm sure they thought I was on
drugs, which I felt like I was. Yet with the joy It's A Wonderful
Life brought there came a new fear. Or perhaps it would be better to say
a new challenge.
Some people say (they've been saying it since 1946) "It's A Wonderful
Life shows that every person's life turns out okay in the end." It
doesn't. It's A Wonderful Life shows that George Bailey's
turns out okay in the end; and George Bailey is really not such a common
"common man." After all, if Mr. Potter (or even the man who pushes Mr.
Potter's wheelchair) had been shown Bedford Falls as it would have been if
he'd never been born, he'd have seen a far different picture than George sees
(which, by the way, is the plot of Dickens' A Christmas Carol). I saw
clearly that George Bailey's life was wonderful because he was
wonderful -- wonderfully and exceptionally good. It's not circumstance or
fate that keeps George chained to his "shabby little office." He has had one
grand opportunity after another to leave town: a ticket to college. $2000
for a honeymoon. Sam Wainwright's "ground floor in plastics." Mr. Potter's
$20,000 a year. George stays stuck in his hick town for one reason only --
he cannot bring himself to sell his soul to get out of it. Though he doesn't
know it (indeed, he can only see himself as a sucker for having done it)
George has sold his dreams to keep Bedford Falls from becoming Pottersville.
It's A Wonderful Life is a passion play; George Bailey's sufferings
have saved all those he loevs best; he loses his dream so that Martini and
Mary and Violet Bick and Uncle Billy may have theirs. George Bailey's love
has been his defeat and his defeat has been his victory. When the tests came
"Slacker George... the miserable failure" was able to do the Greatest Thing
in the World; Greater love hath no man than this -- that he lay down his
life for his friends.
So there was the new fear -- the haunting question that frightened and
facinated me as I sat there with the tears welling in my eyes and the strange
look on my face and my parents blaming the whole thing on hormones. "What
about me? What about my life? What would I see if Clarence the Angel
showed me what the world would be like without me?" I knew that I was not
good; I wasn't much like George Bailey at all. "When this young life of mine
is finished, will it turn out to have been as wonderful as George's or as
pointless as Potter's?" And the answer seemed to come back -- "It will be
whatever you most want it to be. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst
after righteousness for they shall have what they desire." That cheesy,
corny title really had flung me a challenge -- there's a sense in which my
whole life has been an attempt to live up to that cold December afternoon in
1974.,p.
At any rate, the purpose of this little bit of autobiography has been to
point out that I was, as you may have noticed, rather badly shaken up by this
old film that everyone else seems to find so mild and safe. I had no way of
knowin, in my simplicity, that It's A Wonderful Life is old-fashioned,
sentimental, and preaches an easy, cheap optimism. It seemed to me a rather
horrifyingly costly optimism: ;take up your cross -- for whoever clings to
his life will lose it, but whoever lays down his life will save it unto life
eternal.
As I sought and encountered these films over the next four or five years, my
own experience of Capra remained just as comically at odds with his sweetsie
reputation. Bosley Crowther of the
Capra had and has his defenders, of course, but it seems to me that, as
Chesterton said of Dickens, his reputation has suffered less from his enemies
than from the enemies of his enemies. Their point always seemed to be that,
after all, along with our usual diet of important, harsh, questioning films,
there is room for soothing, pleasant, reassuring pictures like these. Capra
is to be appreciated as a classic Hollywood entertainer -- a manufacturer of
slick, funny, technically brilliant crowd-pleasers. But if Capra is nothing
more than an expert confectioner of highly effective but admittedly
artifical "feel-good" movies, then his films are not merely unimportant but
contemptible, because the joy and tears they stir up are produced by trifling
with our deepest longings and most delicate hopes about courage, faith, God
and our own ultimate meaning. There may be some point in saying that to show
Jimmy Stewart goaded into committing suicide and rescued only by divine
intervention is manipulative and melodramatic; there is none in calling the
experience of watching it "soothing."
Just why thes pictures inspire this stupendous polarity of opinions is a
question I've struggled all my life to understand. I now believe that the
answer is to be found within the very fabric of the theme being explored.
If one had only Capra's reputation to go by, without knowing the man or
seeing the films, I suppose that one might come to creat a mental portrait of
him as some smiling white-haired sentimentalist, perhaps a retired
Congregationalist minister, with his eyes full of easy tars and possessing a
fondness for quoting Norman Vincent Peale. In reality, Frank Capra was not
only a hard-nosed, up-from-poverty immigrant with a rather acidic sense of
humor (the biggest laughs in his films are cynical cracks from jaded
sophisticates mocking the callow Capra hero), he was actually an intellectual
-- almost a rationalist. He was certainly every inch the Cal Tech Chemical
Engineer of his school years. In fact, in Capra's unique background I've
found what has been, for me, the whole key to the mystery of his films and
their strange fate at the hands of the critics.
Frank Capra was raised a Catholic in a devout family of Sicilian peasants.
He grew up watching these peasants live out a pathetic and backbreaking life
of everyone working three jobs and going hungry anyway. The considerable
happiness they found together in spite of these circumstances was largely
sustained by their religious beliefs. Frank's father Salvatore also believed
strongly in the old fable of "America as the land of opportunity." He died
in a machine accident trying to improve their lot. Thus Capra was raised to
believe in two ideals; democracy and the dignity of man -- with the Christian
Faith as the way to understand man and his destiny. Within this framework,
he was encouraged to find the meaning of their humble lives and their very
considerable troubles. Within this framework, Capra saw that his father,
Salvatore Capra, though he was a dead, iliteratre peasant buried in a hole,
had been made in the image of God; he had mattered and still mattered.
In other words, Capra was raised a "true believer" and we can certainly find
in this upbringing the origins of It's A Wonderful Life and what
became known as "Capra-corn." Had these ideals never been challenged, he
might well have gone on to become just the simple, faithful optimist he is so
monotonously labeled. That is probably just what Frank Capra would have
liked to have been; like Clarence the Angel -- the simple, happy American
untroubled by doubt. But his two ideals were challenged.
The young Frank Capra had another side. He wanted nothing more than an
education; he saw it as his only way out of the peasant life of poverty he
hated. He scratched and clawed his way into college and worked twenty hour
days to stay there. Those eager to paint Capra as the Apostle of Easy
Answers don't often see the need to draw attention to this thirst for
knowledge and the hard won literacy and learning it brought him. Once in
college, he studied not religion or poetry but chemistry -- the science of
what things are made of if you take them apart and boil them down. This
sudden plunge into the world of natural science, this schooling in the
scientific methoc in an atmosphwere of skepticism and insistence on hard
proof ensured that Capra would be denied the untroubled life of the "true
believer." For the first time, he was presented with the possibility that
Salvatore Capra was not an angel in heaven but a sack of bones in a box -- so
many grams of carbon and calcium. Of course, I don't mean to imply that all
chemists are nihilists, but all chemists do deal, in their own various ways,
with the specter of nihilism. They have all glanced into that pit and come
up from their microscopes wondering, if only for a moment, whether it isn't
all just a random arrangement of molecules after all and all their ideals
just so much wishful thinking. Add this dose of rationalism to the
street-wise persona he'd acquired as a short man growing up in the Italian
ghetto (his first job offer as a Chemist, by the way, was the chance to make
a quick killing designing stills for the mob), and you will get an idea of
the forces that turned Capra into a skeptic. These things ensured that the
cinema of Frank Capra would be the cinema, not of blind faith, but of doubt.
In fact, Frank Capra's skeptical outlook is so unmistakable that one can
profitably consider the whole filmography of the scientist-turned-motion
picture director as a series of scientific experiments. Out of his lifelong
experience wrestling with this conflict in his heart, Capra has devised a
series of demonstrations -- demonstrations designed to present his
hypothesis, apply his method of testing it, and proeuce his challenging
result.
Far from finishing in that "happy-ending-land" of Mom and God and Norman
Rockwell that he has been supposed to inhabit so blithely, Capra actually
begins there. That world of family and democracy and human dignity is
his hypothesis. Can it be believed? It is certainly warming and attractive
but is it sound? Does it correspond to reality? We want to know. We need
to know before we can be asked to stick our necks out for it. ANd so,
faithful to his training, Capra the Chemist begins dispassionately and
systematically turning up the Bunsen-burners of doubt, despair, and tragedy.
He turns them up until that hypothesis is boiling in a beaker of betrayal and
disillusionment so hot that the test simply cannot fail to uncover whether
this "Capra-corn" he grew up believing can actually stand as a viable picture
of the way things really are -- or whether it will be revealed to have been,
as Copernicus revealed the Ptolomeic cosmology to have been, nothing but a
comforting fantasy.
This does not, of course, mean that Capra is suggesting that there really is
any such town as archetypically perfect as Bedford Falls or that the whole
world is full of John does and Jeff Smiths. He has isolated the qualities he
seeks to examine and presents them in their chemical purity. His cast of
characters always falls into two simple and elemental categories -- the
idealists and the cynics. The idealists are the salt of the earth and the
cynics are the acid. The Chemist exposes the two substances to each other:
Mr. Deeds goes to town, Mr. Smith goes to Washintong. And then Capra stands
back and records the explosive result.
Our curiosity to see how the experiment will turn out is the engine that
drives these stories along so compellingly. What will happen to Peter Warne,
the newspaper poet, now that he's stuck his neck out to love a runaway
heiress -- and she has taken im for "a buggy ride with all the trimmings?"
What will billionaire munitions magnate A. P. Kirby do now that his heartless
maneuverings have killed and old friend -- a friend who died with the warning
"you can't take it with you" on his lips? What will Longfellow Deeds do when
he finds out that "Mary Dawson" his "lovely angel" is acutally wisecracking
ace reporter "Babe" Bennett who has been making love to him for a month's
vacation with pay? And what will she do when he finds out? You see,
we are just as inerested in Capra's hypothesis as he is... and just as
dubious.
As we noticed of George Bailey earlier, these Capra heroes could have gotten
off this funeral train at any time; their high ideals have brought them
nothing but the defeat we foresaw from the beginning. But somehow we don't
feel like saying, "I told you so." We have become morbidly facinated. This
hero has courted the worst of the chaotic forces that hammer our dreams into
the ground. He has challenged them to single-combat, as it were. This fool
has positively dared them to come out and prove to us what we've always
feared most; that our ideals are just wishful thinking... self-maintained
fantasies that we cherish in order to keep our sanity. But now that he's
done it we are eager to watch the scene play out. The hero's life, dedicated
to Capra's twin pillers of faith and human dignity, is to be tested in the
chemist's furnace because we need to know the truth -- we need to know
whether that life or any life so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.
And so, as we watch these martyrdoms, we come to the essence of Frank Capra's
message.
These things have been exhaustively testd, tried, fired in the crucible. I
-- Capra the Scientist, Capra the Skeptic -- have tested them for you in my
cinematic laboratory.
I have mocked the gentle Vermont poet Longfellow Deeds until he could do
nothing but mutely suffer, silent like a sheep before its shearers, while his
"lady-in-distress" made him such a laughingstock that they finally railroaded
him off to an insane asylum.
I took Robert Conway, the world-weary dreamer, to the top of the world where,
in the Valley of the Blue Moon, I raised his hopes so high that when I
finally yanked the Tibetan rug from under his feet he fell so far and so hard
he vowed never to get up again.
I tricked a hobo named Long John Wiloughby into believing he was somebody and
had something to say and then I pelted him with rotten fruit for saying it.
Then I drove him back out into the hobo jungles where I have him his choice
between jumping off a skyscraper roof on Christmas Eve or going insane.
I sent young Jefferson smith, the Boy Ranger who "can tellyou what Washington
and Jefferson said -- by heart!" to the U.S. Senate where I had him
jeered at, lied about, unjustly condemned and betrayed by those whom he most
admired. I slapped him down every time he raised his head and spat on him
until even his friends begged him to give up his lost cause and I left him
looking up at an empty sky and silently crying out "My God, my God! Why hast
thou forsaken me?"
And most of all, I made a visionary and a genius and named him George Bailey.
I gave him a roaring wanderlust and set his heart aching for the stars. And
then I put him in that hick town and never let him out and I never will.
I did all these things. Then I, Capra the Doubting Thomas, stood back to
record what would happen --
Deeds, going down for the last time with his faith gone, was caught and
rescued by city slickers on the way up, city slickers in whom he had created
faith without knowing it.
Conway saw with his own eyes the infallible proof that turned him back to
Shangri-La and transformed him into a raging superman who turned all Asia
upside-down.
John Doe, the aimless drifter who had cared for nothing but baseball, found
within himself the strength to fling his life away for the people who had
rejected him and they, in turn, found in his sacrifice the strength to
believe when belief is so very, very hard.
Jeff Smith never gave up his lost cause. Jeff was saved because his enemy
finally threw up his hands and was converted -- his towering fortress of
cynicism breached by the staggering proof of Jeff's words.
And George Bailey was sent the miracle for which so many, many people were
praying that snowy Christmas Eve.
And having seen all these things, I record my testimony. This is my witness;
this is the good news -- the Gospel According to Frank Capra. These heroes
bet their lives on what they believed... and what they believed was
true. And now I now and am persuaded that their faith was not in
vain. This is a true saying and worthy of all men to be received. It's A
Wonderful Life.
Not many years ago, I was directed by a friend to another traditional
Christmas movie, the 1948 comedy Miracle on 34th Street, starring
Maureen O'Hara and young Natalie Wood: "You'll like it" he said "It's very
Capra-esque." I appreciated the tip, but after watching the film I had to
tell him that it was not Capra-esque at all. In fact, I had to tell him that
Miracle on 34th Street is the exact and precise opposite of It's A
Wonderful Life. The contrast between these two films has helped me to
undrstand the uniqueness of Capra's challenge ever since.
Miracle on 34th Street is about a charming old fellow named Kris
Kringle (marvelously played, by the way, by veteran Edmund Gwenn), who works
as a holiday Santa Claus at Macy's Department Store. Trouble is, he claims
there really is a true Santa Claus and he's it. Some people believe him and
some don't; Maureen is inclined to have faith and little Natalie decidedly is
not. The whole cast (idealists and cynics) spends the entire running-time of
the picture attempting to prove or disprove Kris Kringle's claims. There's
even a trial in a court-of-law. SOunds just like a Capra movie, doesn't it?
Actually, no. Miracle on 34th Street never does tell us whether the
old chap really is Father Christmas himself or just a jolly old nut. As a
matter of fact, the film makes a point of denying this information.
Miracle makes a point of saying that it doesn't matter whether Santa
Claus really exists or not. What matters is that, if we all got together and
decided to believe in Santa (whether he's real or not), the world would be
much happier and sunnier and we'd treat each other better and I dare say we
would. But Frank Capra is a hard-headed, unsentimental realist. He'd rather
know the truth than be happy and sunny. The Capra hero has already seen
Miracle on 34th Street; when the curtain rises on a Capra hero, he is
already the sort of person who believes in Santa. George Bailey is a Santa
Claus man from way back. But it isn't enough. With a cruel realism, Capra
knows that our hero must be handed over to sinful men and crucified if we are
to know whether his cherished beliefs are worthy of him. If Santa Claus is a
myth th en our faith is in vain. If George Bailey's guardian angel hadn't
jumped into that river to save him, George would have drowned himself in it;
we are not encouraged to accept that believing in Clarence whether he is real
or not would have done just as well.
And there is the whole difference between these two classic Christmas
movies... between these two universes. Miracle on 34th Street is
polite. It tactfully let's us off the hook. Because of this, many critics
see it as by far the more sophisticated -- the more "mature" -- of the two;
just because your father fell down dead and worms ate him is no reason to
lose your sunny disposition. But Capra is rude. He presses us on the point.
Either be a cynic or be an idealist if you can, but don't be an idealistic
cynic. Either rage away at the idiot forces that obliterated your father or
go and listen -- really listen -- to the case for Democracy, Dignity,
and Faith and see if you can really believe it.
The essence of Capra's unique challenge is his claim to have made that choice
and come away from that search convinced that the case for these things
really can be be believed... that there are good and sufficient reasons for
maintaining that it's a wonderful life. I think this is the reason his films
are dismissed with derision by so many critics. Capra believes he has faced
his doubts and been true to his doubts by wrestling with them honestly until
the doubts were resolved. It's that resolution that puts him out of step
with the modern mind. His claim to be satisfied -- to have looked for
answers and gotten them -- invalidates Capra's message for those who
disbelieve that such certainty ever comes. When one has decided fromthe
outset that there are no ultimate answers to be had, Capra's vision can only
seem grotesque and mawkish. Capra's films require a more open mind. If a
person has made up his mind that there are no answers, then any answers at
all are easy answers, even those purchased with the blood of martyrs.
But now that I think of it, probably most viewers of It's A Wonderful
Life and these other Capra movies don't have such doctrinaire o bjections
to what they see. After all, if Frank Capra sides with Socrates, Aquinas,
Descartes, and Pascal (not to mention Shakespeare, Lao Tse, and T.S. Eliot)
in daring to suggest that there are answers -- glorious answers -- to man's
questions, than surely his reasons for adopting this philosophy are not
subjects completely unworthy of treatment on film. Probably most of the
people who are skeptical about It's A Wonderful Life actually like the
film -- even love it deep down inside -- or wish they could; at any rate,
they have the good sense to be troubled by it. I suspect that many of these
folks might express their feelings by saying that Capra's picture of the
universe is simply too good to be true. God bless them, I don't half blame
them myself sometimes. Perhaps they know why they are so convinced of this
and perhaps they don't but certainly they know the stakes involved. Capra
calls us to stick our necks out and that call is so very frightening. He is
offering us a ticket into the wor4ld we would all most like to believe in --
a world where eveyr person matters and where no one is alone -- but the price
of admission is commitment. Capra is wooing us and, like shy country brides,
we are afraid of him. Every instinct in modern man urges us to hedge our
bets. "Remember," we tell ourselves, "if you don't expect much from life,l
nothing can hurt you very much." And this is very true and very sensible.
But if we take this attitude we will also have prevented life from being very
wonderful. It may be still manage to be comfortable, safe, even pleasant --
but it can never be truly wonderful in the deepest, most ancient and
"Capra-esque" sense of that word. In order to prevent the world from
bursting our beautiful balloon, we will have taken our own needles and burst
it ourselves. If we cling to this frame of mind -- if we refuse the call to
stick our necks out for something -- Capra's wholesome, healing vision will
only cause us pain; his sweet songs will only torment us and we will have to
stop listening.
Yes, it's true that if we hitch our wagon to George Bailey's star we will be
crucified with him and buried under $8,000 worth of bitter defeat. But the
director insists that if we are crucified with him then we will be raised
with him. If we share in the Capra hero's dark night of the soul, we will be
rescued by hard evidence and the fruit that will have sprung up from the
seeds of faith he has planted. George's $8,000 defeat will be swallowed up
in Bedford Falls' avalanche of victory poured into that old hat passed around
in his drafty old house on Christmas Eve and by a telegram from London
Yes, George Bailey, there is a Santa Claus. You have proved it to us now.
You were right. You were right all along. It is a wonderful life.
You have weathered the storm and we who went along for the ride have been
taught the Gospel... "To him that overcometh I will give to eat of the
tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God." Now, only
now, can we have our happy ending, the happiest in Hollywood history, the
happiest of all happy endings.
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