I originally posted this at the very end of 2020 and have been sharing the link to it every year since. It remains as relevant now – in 2023 – as ever.
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The first thing to understand is that we do our family Christmas celebrations on Christmas Eve. It’s a German custom that I grew up with and that our household adopted when we started doing our own Christmases. This means that our Christmas Day to do list typically includes: sleeping in, baths, having naps, enjoying our gifts, eating leftovers, and having more naps (and what can I say, we absolutely conquered our todo list this year!). In fact, we were just wrapping up the sleeping in portion of the day’s work, having morning coffee, when we turned on the TV. In black and white, a young boy falls through the ice on a pond and another older boy jumps in to save him. Cue the moralistic flashback narration… It’s a Wonderful Life was on and I determined to watch it again, for the first time in several years.
This movie is celebrating its 75 anniversary next year, so it has long passed the Spoiler Alert statute of limitations. If you haven’t seen the film, you probably still know the plot just through cultural osmosis: Protagonist George Bailey gives up his youthful dreams to stay in his hometown, where his family’s Building and Loan (think Community Credit Union here) gives out mortgages to working class townsfolk so they can stop living in the town slumlord Potter’s shitty rentals. Over time George becomes more and more resentful and weighed down by his responsibilities. Potter continuously plots to drive the Building and Loan out of business so he can own basically everything in town. He ends up stealing $8000 of building and loan money from George’s completely hapless uncle, puts out a warrant for George’s arrest, and drives him to the brink of suicide. Cue the Deus ex Machina, literally, in the form of a comedy relief angel who shows George what things would be like if he had never been born. At the end of the film, George realizes that his life had meaning, his actions huge impact beyond his understanding, and that he had the titular Wonderful Life. George is rescued by all the townsfolk he had ever helped chipping in to make up the $8000. There’s singing and adorable child actors and so forth. Fin.
Now, this film suffers from many of the flaws of its genre. It’s a moralistic holiday tale and therefore full of smarm. It’s an old movie, which always seem to me like they were filmed before acting was invented. It’s preachy and religious by design. And I love every minute of it. First, because it’s a lot darker than its reputation would have you believe (a Christmas movie with suicidal ideation! Bring the whole family!) and second, because Stewart had just returned from combat and his emotions in the film are raw and very real. Plus the twin messages of the film are MORE relevant today than they have ever been:
- No one is poor who has friends: community is both literal and figurative wealth and family and community are the biggest blessings you can have.
- The capitalist system is stacked against the little guy and rich assholes will take advantage of the system if good people do nothing.
Two things that you may not know about the film… first, it received negative attention from the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee because of George Bailey’s socialism (!) and for casting a rich banker as the antagonist. It’s kind of a Christmas Miracle that Frank Capra wasn’t blacklisted. Second, it was nominated for a shit-ton of Oscars, but wasn’t popular with audiences and would have died an obscure movie death except it fell out of copyright. So TV stations saw it as a free way to fill up programming during the holidays and played it, across networks, on repeat until it reentered the time ghost and became hugely popular. It’s a populist, anti-capitalist story that became popular only after it was free to distribute.
But this year I noticed something else. We were just finishing the film (who’s crying? I’m not crying!) and I commented how rushed the ending seems to be. Sure, the entire third act is pretty frenetic (Merry Christmas you good old Building and Loan!) but something was bugging me. And then I realized the problem: Potter never gets punished for his crimes. Not only the legal but immoral crime of basically being Donald Trump without the pussy grabbing, but also the literal law breaking. When George’s uncle accidently hands Potter his deposit envelop Potter not only doesn’t say anything, he threatens George with jail time and then literally gloats over the envelope of cash like the mid-40s movie villain he is. He’s a banker who steals a customer’s deposit and attempts to frame the customer. But he doesn’t get punished.
This doesn’t just feel weird, it is weird. It’s weird because it violates one of the main tenets of the Hays Movie Committee Code, the moral code that studios voluntarily adopted in the 30s to avoid government censorship. It’s a Wonderful Life was made during the height of the committee’s power and one of the core rules of the code was that law breaking must be punished. But nothing happens to Potter. He doesn’t even appear in the climatic scene and he’s not mentioned. He’s the bad guy and he gets away with it. HE GETS AWAY WITH IT.
I did some poking around and discovered something interesting. This wasn’t an accidental omission or poor plotting. In fact, the movie had filmed an additional scene where Potter, realizing that he hasn’t bested George after all, has a heart attack… just in case the censors insisted on it. But it wasn’t what Capra wanted for the film. It was deliberate that Potter not get punished and the filmmaker considered that as a backup plan only if required to get his film made.
This really struck me. Here’s the bad guy, a guy who was a decrepit old Ebenezer Scrooge clone when George was a kid (seriously, he’s like a reverse vampire, absolutely ancient forever), a guy who drove George’s father to have a stroke and attempts to destroy his livelihood and the hopes and dreams of most of the town for decades. But nothing happens to him. He doesn’t fail… and yet George succeeds. He succeeds in bringing the community together, he succeeds in saving the Building and Loan with their help, he succeeds at living and enjoying his own life. He wins… but Potter never loses.
George had his dreams (college, travel, doing big important things in the big world) destroyed by the system and by bad and greedy men. Does this sound at all relevant considering the year we’ve just been through and the year we’re looking ahead to? Does this describe anyone you know right now? Yet George builds a life full of meaning and community and happiness. He does it not by changing the system or besting the system, but by literally building outside the system.
It’s like the secret message of this movie — a message that seems tailor made for today: You can win. But that doesn’t mean the bad guys are going to lose.
Don’t hang your hopes on their punishment. Don’t make your plans dependent on their fall. Eventually they will be bested — I truly believe that. But it may be through attrition and one funeral at a time. It may not be soon enough for us to feel vindicated. It may be after we’re gone. You can fight the system (as George does, over and over) but not by direct attack and not by joining it. You do it by going outside the system. That’s how we create lives full of enchantment and community and joy — wonderful lives. That’s how we win.
