Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

I have an insatiable need to tell stories.

I write because I recognize writing is my greatest talent.  But writing is such a broad term that encompasses everything from journalism to poetry, from writing instruction manuals to writing radio spots, from writing short stories to epic novels.

I write stories because I'm power hungry.  I love taking my hand and reaching into a reader's soul to pinch at emotions he may have never thought possible.  Not from a story, anyway. 

I discovered this power existed on the floor of my college dorm room very early one May morning, with nothing but Jimmy Stewart standing on the floor of the Senate illuminating my face.  "You think I'm licked.  You all think I'm licked.  Well, I'm not licked!" he yelled, and it woke me up.

I'd seen "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" once before, and I liked it well enough.  It was the usual crowd-pleasing Capra-corn, and I thought nothing more of it before.  But I had to see it again.  It was on the list.

The AFI list of the 100 Greatest American Movies became public the summer before I started college, and I set a goal to watch every film on the list before I completed my first year.  And I did that.  All one hundred.  It became a way to cope with the loneliness of being one hundred eighty miles from home with no car and no friends at school. But as school year drew to a close, I needed a new goal.  Ownership, I thought.  I wanted to own all the movies.  Forever an escape.

The list hung tacked to my cork board, beside the Dilbert calendar and below the "A Clockwork Orange" poster.  It was a picture from the scene inside the milk bar near the beginning of the film.  Alex held his milk, and his eyes menaced the audience as he glared.  I lost the poster, but I always meant to hang it in my bathroom so I could literally scare the shit out of everyone who entered.  "A Clockwork Orange" was also on the list.

I could hear my physics book cry, "Open me!" from beneath the clutter of my overflowing desk.  I guess the microeconomics papers stifled its cries, because after one peep I heard no more.  And as much as it pained me to ignore my physics studies, as it pained me to ignore them every other night of that expiring semester, I had to watch the movie.

Two in the morning, Channel Four.  The local CBS affiliate for Champaign/Urbana, same as St. Louis.  "Mr. Smith" aired as part of the channel's "Late Night Cinema," so I set to record it.  I didn't plan on staying awake to watch it, but that's how it happened.  I leaned into my plaid reading pillow with a Dr. Pepper from the mini-fridge the television sat upon, careful not to spill it on the carpet Karl, my roommate kept neurotically clean, and watched my movie.

"You think I'm licked.  You all think I'm licked.  Well, I'm not licked!"  Those words always stick out in my mind.  An undisciplined student too smart for high school laid on that carpet.  I coasted through that year on the fact that I was a 4.5 student at one of the best schools in St. Louis and my failings so far in college was just a phase of adjustment.  I could dig myself out of this hole.  I was smart, a near genius, people told me.  You'll make a great engineer.  You're good at math, do something with that.  But I couldn't do anything.  The desire to learn had left, and in May, during finals week, I was stuck trying to dig myself out of a hole with a spoon while someone poured the dirt back in with a bulldozer.

"You think I'm licked.  You all think I'm licked."  Jimmy Stewart ruffles through those letters of lies Claude Rains brought into the Senate.  Jimmy pushes his exhausted face up to Jean Arthur in the press gallery, and then he turns to Claude and utters those remarkable words.  And at 5 AM, those words hit a nerve.  An ecstasy filled with goosebumps ran up my spine.  I felt something.  An epiphany.

My life changed in that moment.  Storytelling, not engineering, was my calling.  I felt the despair in Jimmy Stewart's voice.  It penetrated deep inside and clutched at my own feelings of loneliness and misery.  The movie ended and the credits rolled, and I sat on the floor dazed.  My deepest desire, one I didn't even know I had until that moment,  had been pulled from me and thrown at the wall so I could do nothing but stare at it.

I think of that moment every time I plan a new story.  It's my goal.  I want my readers to feel for my characters the same way I felt for Jimmy Stewart's Jeff Smith.  I want them to realize they aren't licked.

--mdu