You Can’t Take It With You

About 25 years ago or so, my local PBS station showed PBS's own production of the play You Can’t Take It With You, which had already come out as a popular movie back in the 1940s. “My” version starred Jason Robards as an aging retiree who lived with his eccentric family. “Eccentric”, because this family’s philosophy was quite special: let each member live their lives the way they want to. Even to the extent of not working, if that is what they wish. Robards’s character had been working as a highly paid-but stressed out business executive who one day decided that he had experienced enough of the rat race and abruptly walked off his job, never to go back. Robards instead chose to spend his life completely with his family, as well as going around chatting with various people about this or that. The movie centered around his daughter’s struggle to overcome her own reluctance to introduce her fiancé to the rest of her family, especially to her father. And the laughs abound in this hilarious examination of what it really means to live well. The title expresses the family’s weltanschauung: when you die, you can’t take the personal wealth that you’ve struggled to obtain with you. Best to live each day the fullest as it comes.

It was refreshing to see this take on life, but I also recognize that there are two important things to consider:

--One, the world runs on money, and in order to obtain it, one must either consciously strive to get it or be in a position to receive it from another. If you belong to the latter group, then I suppose you can conveniently adopt the attitude of being “above” the money-grubbing rat racers and instead do whatever you want. But if you don’t have such an “effortless“ source of income, then that leaves you with the necessity to venture out and work to get the money you (along with your family) need to live on.

--Two, even someone with misanthropic tendencies as myself recognizes that being able to do “what I want” eventually requires someone else to clock in to work and perform the labor necessary to provide the goods or services that I “need” for my glorious self-fulfillment. A sense of social ethics within me rises up in objection to the idea of everyone in society just doing their own thing. That scenario would imply the existence of a submerged and neglected subclass in servitude to everyone else. Like the slaves over the course of history or the elves in Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Better that each does his/her own part in doing the necessary-but-not-necessarily-fulfilling tasks for the good of the whole society as free people.

Still, I can accept part of the movie’s premise by making sure that I set aside a portion of my daily life to my own projects that I enjoy doing and the people whom I love. And to not get carried away with the stressful moments of my job, either.

After seeing the PBS production of You Can’t Take It With You so long ago, I kept trying to find it on televised programming schedules or rent it out on DVD/VHS. But the best I could do was find and watch the original movie, which starred Jimmy Stewart. And I was disappointed in that movie, having been spoiled by the great performances in the later version. So I’m still looking for the PBS You Can’t Take It With You. I’m optimistic that I will eventually come across it; in this era of the Internet, you never know what old treasures will resurface!