Part III of Corn: Propaganda for Caring About People is Rad as Hell

An Apparatus Approach to Meet John Doe (1941)

[content warning: mention of suicide]

Poster for Meet John Doe (1941) via IMDb

Meet John Doe (1941) – Apparatus

Welcome back to another week of Frank-Capra-Palooza on Review Roulette, my star spangled or stars-and-stripes-curious friends!

We’re going to jump right in with breaking a misconception about propaganda. Propaganda is not inherently a dirty word. Propaganda is simply a dissemination of information to influence public opinion; ideas, arguments, facts, sometimes manipulated truths, and/or lies that are broadcast to influence the masses. When we think of propaganda, we often think of war posters and Uncle Sam calling your number for the draft, “Keep Calm and Carry On”, anything from the mouth of that horrendous Berlin Barbie Karoline Leavitt. While those are types of overt propaganda from political entities, the vast majority of propaganda is covert. It’s music like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” or “American Skin (41 Shots)”; it’s literature like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; it’s plays like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or Death of a Salesman; and it’s movies like Miracle on 34^th Street (1947) or The Lorax (2012). Some of those are more directly about politics, some are allegorical, some are fable-esque warnings, and some are simply reflections of ideas about society that were produced to be distributed to reinforce those ideas in society (e.g. Miracle and promoting consumerism). Propaganda is ideas that are written, produced, sculpted, crafted, manufactured with the intent of getting some people on board with your position.

Now, why am I harping on this? Because it’s incredibly important to be aware, especially when you’re passively watching something with covert propaganda, that ideas are powerful and penetrating things that can build up over time and impact how you think.

Okay, but we’re talking about Capra, there’s nothing covert about him or his films, that’s the whole point of this month of Capracorn? Yes, thank you for following along, I appreciate you, but this Capra film is all about (as many of them are) the power of propaganda in the press. So, buckle up, buttercup, we’re deconstructing the ways in which an overtly propagandistic Capra film, Meet John Doe (1941), approaches the construction of propaganda in an Apparatus review.

Meet John Doe follows a newspaper columnist, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), who, in order to save her job, pitches the idea of having a John Doe everyman type character host a column in the paper in which he announces he will commit suicide due to the state of society. The column is an attempt to drum up political debate and controversy to increase circulation of the newspaper by playing into people’s emotional response to a man’s distress. The John Doe they choose is a man who bears a striking resemblance to Jon Hamm named John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), an unemployed, homeless man who is happy for the cash upfront to pose as a mouthpiece for the columns and eventual speeches Ann writes, but who then struggles with his role and ultimately grows into the kind of average man who believes in the civic duty to fight for the common man. The spirit of this Capra film is not terribly far from the post I started this series with about my own journey towards understanding the obligations and responsibilities of being an American everyman.

As a reminder, an Apparatus approach means we are looking at how the film depicts or interprets the ideological structures of society (media, church, schools, etc.) that offer up their own propaganda (conveyed ideas intended to influence public opinion). In this film’s case, the structure that Capra analyzes at its center is print and broadcast media.

Capra overall feels very positively about the concept of print and broadcast media across his films so long as they are in the right hands. The fear of mass media corporations falling into the hands of oligarchs (or, rather, being purchased, monopolized, and abused by oligarchs) is a big theme in several Capra films including Meet John Doe and last week’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

In Meet John Doe, the sinister plot of the oligarchs is foiled by our common man hero because it is of course a Capracorn populist film, and I think this is incredibly important messaging for this moment in particular, so I want to do something a bit different with this review and implore you to watch or listen to an excerpt of the film before we continue. It is 7 minutes long, and those 7 minutes are worth your attention. You can also read the text of the speech here if watching/listening is not an option.

This first speech that John Doe gives on a radio broadcast is the moment he starts to realize that the words written by Ann and spoken by him have meaning. You can hear (or see in the transcription) the strength rousing in John Doe as he begins to believe the words he’s reading and speaking for the first time. In the clip you can see the oligarchic characters getting nervous about his calls for the everyman to rise up with kindness for their fellow average John and Jane Does, and you can see their fear as the workers in their kitchens huddle together around the radio to hear this message of the strength of average working individuals on whom society relies. This is propaganda at work. This radio broadcast that the oligarchs thought would merely be good media exposure for their ratings is actually a vehicle for a movement rooted in kindness and respect and empathy that money could never kill.

This propagandistic speech is also very effective, and in response to John Doe’s calls for Americans to be good neighbors and members of their community, John Doe Clubs spring up around the country. This is an active response to a single speech, not unlike how many people were inspired to join the Hands-Off protests after Senator Cory Booker’s marathon speech in early April, or how Booker was inspired to make that speech because of the public outrage and calls from his constituents demanding he do something in this moment. I know many people discount these things as performative and ineffective, but they are patently wrong if even one person is inspired by the performance. If you are moved to be even a little bit nicer, to hold the door for a little longer than you normally would or to help someone with groceries when you’d normally walk past them struggling or to be just a tiny bit more actively kind, thoughtful, and engaged in your community, then the performance was a success. Because what is politics if not the performance of our proclaimed values? What is propaganda if not a performance of our politics?

We are all in this society, and as I said in my first Capra post, if you are an American, you have an obligation to be an active citizen, an active member of this system that relies on all of us to be engaged and informed. As John Doe and I learned, being an active citizen means understanding the power of community. John Doe reflects on this moment of realization:

You know, I never thought much about people before. They were always just somebody to fill up the bleachers. The only time I worried about them was if they didn't come in to see me pitch. You know, lately I've been watching them while I talked to them. I could see something in their faces. I could feel that they were hungry for something. Do you know what I mean? Maybe that's why they came. Maybe they were just lonely and wanted somebody to say hello to. I know how they feel. I've been lonely and hungry for something practically all my life.

I think it’s easy to go through life this way, and oftentimes in this century it’s very encouraged to be so focused on the self and individualism that community becomes at best an afterthought. At worst, community can be actively vilified. I’ll always remember the time I came home from college for the first time as a freshman and spoke excitedly about the learning community I was part of, and a family member said, “so you drank the Kool-Aid?” as though wanting to belong to a kind group of like-minded individuals was a bad thing, a murder-suicide cult I was tricked into joining. Being part of a community is actually the raddest thing you can do, caring for people you care about, sharing resources and supporting one another through hardships and accomplishments. It rocks having people love and care about you simply because you are a good person to them, and that’s a message that should be produced, promoted, and proliferated to the masses. That’s cool as hell.

So, I guess I’ll close with this: propaganda is everywhere and morally, ethically neutral as a concept, and it is your job to identify it, parse it, ask it challenging questions, figure out if you agree with the message it is trying to convince you of, and then decide how you want to react to it. John Doe’s message is one of kindness and populistic Capracorn goodness that I wholeheartedly agree with: oligarchs can drink their own Kool-Aid and leave us all the fuck alone to tear down the fences and play some good ol’ fashioned American ball.

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Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am

Shameless Self-Promotion

As a film scholar whose career is built on propaganda in Christmas films specifically, it would be illegal for me not to highlight that John Doe finishes his first speech of hope, inspiration, and unity for the working class with a reminder that we do practice all of those things once a year at Christmas. This Yuletide spirit used in such a propagandistic way is very similar to Miracle on 34^th Street’s use of the increased spirit of goodwill for all as a marketing strategy which I have written about here.