The Apprentice: Frank Capra or Double-Down

When I was in high school, my friend Heather and I watched Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life on VHS. I was (and am) a huge Jimmy Stewart fan. When I found the tape for $4.00 at Kmart, I bought it. It is a fairly long movie, and Heather and I gave up when George was staggering through the snow, lost and suicidal.

Not only does this movie suck, I thought, but the title is so, so wrong.

The next morning, my mom asked what I thought and I told her we didn't finish it because it was too depressing.

She was surprised. "You need to see the end," she said.

So I did and then I was like "Ohhh. Now I understand  the fuss."

The weekend, I watched The Apprentice, a bio-pic about the current president. I watched it in bits and pieces. For the first half, I really felt sorry for Donald growing up with demeaning father who constantly belittled his son. I felt bad for Donald as he was encased by Roy Cohn and his manipulative and cheating methods. 

When I was two-thirds through the movie, I was feeling hopeful, waiting for Frank Capra to take over. Maybe Donald would see the error of his ways, repent and reform. Maybe he would realize that he didn't need to be the king of the world, that he could just be a good husband and father and a successful businessman who cared about New York City. He wanted to take a shitty, run down hotel and make into something special. What is wrong with that? Nothing, really.

Instead of playing fair, he doubled-down on the anger and the diet pills and the manipulation and the lying and the cheating. The strangest and sadness part of the movie is when he turned on his friend, Roy Cohn, playing Roy at his own game. I was reminded of the movie War Games. The game they were playing is one that you really can't win in the long run, but yet he continues to double-down on the same strategy. So far, he's on top, having won consecutive coin tosses. How long can this luck last?

The laws of probability suggest that this can't last much longer, but thing with probability is that the improbable can happen. Is he "winning" this game because he is so bold and brazen that people are in shock, that they don't know how to deal with the devil? Imagine a flock of defenseless bunnies never having seen a real predator, and here comes the coyote, ready to dive in for a snack. As a group, bunnies are fast, but individually is it easy to pick them off one at a time until the group is depleted.

How would Frank Capra end this movie? What is the script? What is the path forward?