if anyone ever puts me in charge of devising torture, i have a great idea, all based on personal experience. let me set the scene.
it's humid, humid summer in a public bathroom. the victim sweats, both from the heat and the absolute agony of an ill-advised late night snack of spicy noodles moving through their system. they curse themselves of yesterday and of the morning, remembering the masochistic quadruple shot latte they had, knowing full well caffeine and lactose upsets their stomach. even though they felt something burn through their large intestines and press against their butthole, all that comes out, in the crowded public bathroom, are loud, wet, and mortifying farts. they're sweating so much that they decide to take their shirt off. feeling like maybe it isn't the time to be embarrassed, they use cheap, thin and scratchy toilet paper to dab at their armpits. the inevitable comes, and they wish they didn't have to breathe as the stuffy air becomes unbearable with the evidence of their dumbassery.
fun fact: i have proof this can go on for nearly 30 minutes :)
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YES.
ALL OF THIS.
THIS is why this film still hits so hard after all these years.
It’s not some sugary BS about “you can think yourself out of suicidal depression by just learning to appreciate what you’ve got”.
It’s about the fact that people who work really fucking hard for their communities experience active, targeted, criminal pushback from exploiters.
About the fact that caring, in all its manifestations, is incredibly physically and mentally taxing and is often done by disabled people - YES, George Bailey is a disabled protagonist. His impairment prevents him from military service and actively causes him chronic pain that, as a person who lives with it, *will* affect his energy levels and fatigue constantly.
Notably, IAWL actually has a bunch of disabled characters. Not only is George disabled, but I’d put money on his uncle who loses the money being ADHD and very possibly having other learning disabilities and the film *actively* flagging that fact to the audience, even if it doesn’t necessarily know what ADHD is.
Which casts a whole new light on its principal villain being disabled. Instead of Old Man Potter being a flat caricature of “disability = evil”, what he *actually* is is a fantastic example of the fact that marginalisation in one axis does not prevent someone being an active oppressor - and wealth and class privilege, in particular, tend to mean a person actively acting to oppress other people who share their marginalisation in order to privilege the interests of their own class as a whole. Sometimes even damaging their own individual interests to do so.
It’s also super interesting that the *material* miracle in the film is not the appearance of an angel to show George what life would have been like if he had never existed, but the *community solidarity* that saves him from jail and his family from penury. The supernatural intervention can change his *mindset*, and that is *incredibly* important, given it *literally* stops him killing himself, but the *material* intervention is mutual aid from his own community that he has given so much to.
Which is incredibly radical as a message. It’s not saying “faith is worthless”; it’s saying “faith can be an incredibly important factor in creating resilience in moments of despair, but we can’t, and *need not*, wait for a supernatural miracle to save us; we have the capacity to save ourselves and each other in our hands right now”.
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the way i see it the supernatural finale could be interpreted as disrespectful and a slap in the face to the characters who fought so hard to create their own story, write their own destiny, define all odds and live their lives outside of gods will in this case but personally to me the whole "this was always gonna end like this", "love was there and it didn't chnage anything. but it still matters that the love was there", and the fact that their story and legacy will live on and the fact that sam and dean died the way they were introduced to us in the very first episode and the way both characters always predicted,, is kind of,, its kind of beautiful,..
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priest: i don't, ah, quite know what to say to you. if you are in such terrible danger, why are you taking it all so calmly?
constantine: hmh! i dunno, father. i had a bloke beaten to a pulp earlier this evening. that sound calm to you?
priest: you did what...?
constantine: i must've been off me bleedin' rocker. i've never done anything like it before in me life, y'know?
constantine: but there's header gets his guts blown out, and george is stickin' his head in the noose, and helen gets ... jesus, then friggin' sarah bites me head off — ! everything's coming to bits in me hands and it's so easy to just see red and now, shit, they could've killed the tosser for all i know!
and now i'm just like the bastards i've hated all me life! kill him! fire him! close them down! piss all over him! screw you, i can do whatever i want! i so much as blink and you're dead, pal! i'm in charge!!
...
constantine: 'scuse me, father. i'm always like this when i don't get me own way.
— hellblazer #81, "rake at the gates of hell pt. 4"
babygirl you are just....so, sooooo offputting. (and grieving, and guilty, and terrified, but yeah: offputting.)
anyway, it's issues like this one that remind me why i kind of hesitate over some of the retcons in the recent spurrier runs, like the one with him now having opened dream's pouch of sand and stolen some before they even met. because like, it's easy enough to look at john constantine now — with 70 years of worst possible choices and unresolved trauma crystallizing underneath his skin to cover up all the soft, hopeful bits where he's used to getting hit — and assign him arbiter of ill intentions, magus of wasted potential, saint of shit choices, but man . . . he was new to this, once. he was still new to this 80 issues in.
80 issues in, and he's not used to losing friends yet; he even has time enough between catastrophes to grieve each individual one. still has enough left to live for at this stage to necessitate running and hiding, instead of bodily throwing himself at the problem like he learns to later, or sitting apathetically by to do nothing except smoke and watch the world fall apart when he finally gives up. fuck, he still apologizes.
and you're telling me this guy, this soppy wet cat motherfucker hiding from the devil in a church basement, so guilty over not knowing what happened to the guy that he paid people (paid chas, so chas could pay people) to attack that the bottle he's holding in this scene isn't even his second or third........this guy's past, more innocent self lied right to the face of DREAM OF THE ENDLESS and got away with it?
hm. i just don't know about all that.
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