The holiday season has passed. Now we can gleefully look
back at the “myth of the holiday blues,” to see where that myth started. In an article that
I wrote for the December 2012 issue of SoHo Life magazine (“Beating the
Holiday Blues”), I speculate that a specific movie inspired that myth. That
movie led us to believe that the December holiday season brings sadness and
even suicide, when, in fact, suicides drop to their lowest levels in December,
and are lower in this month than any other. Unfortunately, news articles have
perpetuated that myth, as documented by the CDC website.
Which movie prompted such misinformation? It was Frank Capra’s
classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1945), starring Jimmy Stewart. This wonderful
movie shows a hapless man, drunk and depressed, teetering on the brink, ready to
end it all on Christmas Eve. Then an angel appears, and shows him how the world
was a different, better place--because of the lives he touched.
Stewart’s acrophobic
character in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)
becomes all the more credible because of his unforgettable performance as a deeply disturbed man in the
Capra classic.
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| Jimmy Stewart (1958) |
Just because the film exercises dramatic license, and includes
misinformation, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a most wonderful film.
After all,
there’s a reason this film replays each Xmas season.
