Here is perhaps the nicest scene in it, certainly my favorite song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrCsyN-fZ94
These sorts of movies, filled with silly stereotypes, witty humor, nice song and dance numbers, elegance, decency, evoke I think for many a bygone era of greater simplicity, innocence, clarity.
But in the same sense that I have said numerous times that Fundamentalism consists in the INVENTION of a past that never existed, I think this nostalgia is misplaced.
Here is what clarified things for me: ponder the lives of your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and those of your friends, to the extent you know any of these stories.
I look at the stories I have been told [and by the way, I would strongly encourage you to videotape your parents and grandparents and ask them to tell you their life story. They tend to like doing it–although of course you can likely expect some major gaps and dishonesty–and it is interesting], and they are filled with anger, jealousy, infidelity, alcoholism, child abuse, violence, frequent disruptions and heartbreaks, abandonment, poverty, unemployment, drug abuse (remember valium used to be prescribed easily, and speed was available more or less over the counter for a long time, as were other drugs), and despairs which were inconvenient.
This is the era when what we tend to call now depression was called pain and sadness. It was called Life.
Get these stories, if you don’t have them–ask your parents and grandparents to discuss the things they don’t want to talk about, as it’s possible you may succeed (I have found often that blunt requests for honesty sometimes yield blunt and actually true answers)–and ask yourself if that sounds like an easy life.
Ask yourself if these people were genuinely innocent. Was this a Golden Age? Was it really that different from our own era, other than that we have much more time to contemplate our problems, and much more space within which to work them out?
Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies make you happy. They make me happy, at least. They were and remain perhaps more useful than the entirety of the current psychochemical arsenal.
What do you want? This is perhaps the question. This is my question. Do not think about what you want to avoid, but where you want to go. Who I am? Who I choose to become. This is the existential reality.
I choose Goodness, as I conceive it. This is my life’s mission.