Movie quote from: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) – Louise ‘Babe’ Bennett (Jean Arthur)
Our culture is stuck. In 1936, the film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town featured the pop media and cultural elite's preference for making fun of basic goodness and optimism. Seventy years later, we show no progress. We continue to prefer critical perspectives over thoughts that are more constructive and substantial. How can cynicism and civic disinterest continue to be so cool?
Longfellow Deeds is a poet from Mandrake Falls who inherits $20 million from an uncle he has never met. He’s not too excited by the news. Money is not a central focus for his life, unlike the nearby urban socialites who are obsessed with accumulating wealth and looking wealthy. He visits NYC to resolve issues with the estate. Along the way, his naïve optimism is greeted with distain and ridicule from those gossips posing cool within their culture.
This preference for criticizing positive perspectives continues today. Perhaps there have been too many ‘free’ things offered to us to trust any individual who appears to be interested in the welfare of others. Maybe our experiences in adulthood have buried the hopeful intentions of our youth. We may have even embraced our culture’s critical inclination, in the name of being cool. Whatever the cause, we must fight the prevailing winds of being ‘smart alecks’ like the rest. It’s a “crazy competition for nothing.” What good does it do?
We need a new definition for cool. Real cool is remaining relaxed in any group of people. It is the ability to be comfortable in your own shoes. Truly cool people are not concerned with what others think and do, they effortlessly follow their own drumbeat, no matter what the crowd has to say. Criticism and cool are opposites, one caring too much and the other hardly caring at all. By this definition, critical can’t be cool. The minute you try to be cool, you no longer qualify. You are being someone else.
The character Longfellow Deeds would never be called ‘cool’. He cares too much about being good, being his true self, and making a contribution. He would be called ‘happy’, not caught up in the social obsession with cumulating more things. In my dream society, the cool people would leave the happy people alone, saving their commentary for more significant matters. It is wiser to judge people by their deeds than by anything someone else might have to say.
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