Click Here to Read: Who Was Stephen Paddock? The Mystery of a Nondescript ‘Numbers Guy’ By Sabrina Tavernise, Serge F. Kovaleski and Julie Turkewitz in The New YorK Times on October 7, 2017.
Workers boarded up a window Friday at the Mandalay Bay hotel, where Stephen Paddock opened fire on a country music festival on Oct. 1. CreditChris Wattie/Reuters
Click Here to Read: Gunman Stephen Paddock’s father wanted to start a church in Las Vegas by Arthur Kane and Alexander Cohen in The Las Vegas Review-Journal on October 6, 2017.
This 1979 photo shows Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, the father of Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed dozens of people and injured hundreds at a music festival in Las Vegas on Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017. …This 1979 photo shows Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, the father of Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed dozens of people and injured hundreds at a music festival in Las Vegas on Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017. (Charlie Nye/The Register-Guard via AP)
This is the second of three articles comparing three films, It Can Happen to You (posted October, 2010), The Remains of the Day (posted November, 2010) and It’s a Wonderful Life (to be re-posted December, 2010)
Both It’s a Wonderful Life and It Could Happen to You provide us with gratifying fantasies that allow us to feel, through identification, that we have overcome our limitations. George Bailey and Charlie the cop are trapped by circumstances and conscience. George must overcome his idealization of his father and his reluctance to overcome his male rivals. His father dies, his rivals step aside, and he becomes a hero to the town. Charlie is trapped in a marriage to a woman he does not love by a conscience that will not allow him to be unfaithful. The film allows him to leave his wife and to find the woman of his dreams without his ever having to cross the boundaries of his conscience. There is another solution, the tragic solution. In The Remains of the Day , Stevens the butler is trapped by his position and his idealization of his father and his employer. He loves a woman, but unlike George Bailey he cannot pursue her and unlike Charlie the cop he does not have her thrown into his arms. He remains hopelessly trapped by his circumstances and his character, and we, the viewers, are trapped vicariously with him. Continue reading “The Remains of the Day”: The Tragic Solution
