Context
Things Ain’t What They Seem: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life
Gilbert Sorrentino
In most of Frank Capra’s important pictures—Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life—a decent, honest, yet always slightly forbidding "America" that is in the grip of ruthless capitalistic forces, aided and abetted by corrupt, venal, or cynical politicians, is corrected or rescued by a hero protagonist. When things are at their lowest ebb, and the ghouls of profit seem to be on the verge of triumph, the protagonist, with the help of various "little people"—hardworking, honest, and, quite often, endearingly ineffective—saves the populist day. The good is rescued from the forces of cynicism and betrayal by a hero who is simply yet incorruptibly himself: his guilelessness is a kind of saving grace. But Capra’s greatest film, It’s a Wonderful Life, is a curious example of a work that means precisely the opposite of what it seems to say. Its true message is, in the context of Capra’s oeuvre, a surprising one: Money is everything. Although the film is usually read as the pinnacle of the Capraesque ideal of grassroots optimism, I would argue that its subtext calls this optimism into serious question. In effect, the film encapsulates a disgust and anger with modern American life that are barely hidden, and often glaringly foregrounded.
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The final scene of the film is ambiguously eerie, and its strangeness
is emblematized in George Bailey’s near-maniacal grin, one that is
equally composed of shame, fear, gratitude, and self-loathing. It is a
grin that, once seen, can never be forgotten. Money is everything is what that grin says, what the scene says, and what the film says. In
this final moment, the truth of the film strikes at us with metonymic
power through the stilted images of celebration and victory and joy.
Part of the awfulness of George’s grin grows out of the fact that he
has seen the Other World, the world as it would have been had he never
lived—so the conceit of the film instructs us. In that Other World he
has seen his friends and neighbors, even his wife, as lost, despairing,
brutal, and corrupted. The town is but a decayed, honky-tonk version of
the company town, with everything and everybody in it owned by Mr.
Potter, the rapacious banker (and the town itself is, of course,
Pottersville). It is important to keep in mind that this town has never been the Bedford Falls of George’s life, that this unhappy town is not the
one that George has virtually created at the expense of his own
happiness. It is a town of the Other World. When George returns from
this world, it is quite impossible for him to forget what he has seen
there, and this is made absolutely clear. The neighbors and friends and
customers who press in upon him and his bewildered family in the last
scene, fistfuls of money in their hands, are but the "doubles" of the
despairing souls he has just encountered. He can no more put their
other reality out of his mind than can Young Goodman Brown forget what
he saw in the forest. Hawthorne writes, "Had [he] fallen asleep in the
forest and only dreamed a wild dream? . . . Be it so if you will; but,
alas! It was a dream of evil omen for Young Goodman Brown. A stern, a
sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he
become from the night of that fearful dream." George Bailey has
learned, in the briefest moment, what he has spent his life
denying—that human beings are not brave and steadfast creatures who are
good at the core, but weak and utterly corruptible. One of the reasons
that Mr. Potter has for despising George, who has spent his life in the
"penny-ante" world of his nobly selfless building-and-loan business, is
precisely this smug belief in his own and everyone else’s intrinsic
goodness. Potter knows (and the film tells us as well) that George
self-righteously refuses to accept the fact that he deals in the same
money that Potter does, that he lends this money at interest; he
believes that his business is somehow pure. (There is a
wonderful moment when Potter, getting his own back after George
castigates him, tells George that he is a "warped, frustrated young
man." He’s right, but we don’t know it yet.)
That joyful, comradely, and cooperative Bedford Falls should "become"
debased Pottersville because of the absence of one man does not
actually bespeak that man’s beneficent powers, although that is what
the film seems, or more importantly, wants to say. But George knows, as
they say, what he knows. Pottersville, that is, also exists, and might well exist even had George lived there, rather than
in Bedford Falls; that is to say, although George may well have brought
goodness and light to his town, he has brought it to no other, and
there is no proof that he ever would have. The angel, Clarence, who is
the engine that drives the central conceit, is given us as a simpleton,
if not an absolute moron (we are told, early on, that he has "the IQ of
a rabbit"), and he is a clue to Capra’s conflicts as the film’s maker.
Clarence is too dumb to understand the effects of his rehabilitative
act, and George buys the whole routine. No wonder, of course, since for
George to acknowledge the actuality of what he sees in the Other World
would be to acknowledge the awful emptiness of the materialism of
American Life, even as it is lived in happy Bedford Falls. Better to
think of Pottersville as a corruption of capitalism, not its norm. He
must, then, accept Clarence’s simpleminded gesture as one of wisdom.
Yet the final scene, as I have suggested, overpowers all preceding
rhetoric. Mr. Potter, who is the dark center of the film, is triumphant
in George’s triumph. The cardinal tenet of the film prevails: Money is everything.
Wainwright’s telegram, read to the assembled celebrants in the Bailey
living room, promises George, should he need it, $25,000. Tears come to
the eyes of many of those present, and there are shouts of approval and
delighted laughter. This incident sends us two messages. Wainwright, a
capitalist like Mr. Potter, is a good capitalist, because he is
George’s capitalist, and his cash is clean. The second message is, of
course: Money is everything. There is also an odd sourness to Capra’s use of Wainwright’s wealth in
this scene, since Wainwright, the rejected suitor of Mary Bailey’s
youth, here subtly supplants the powerless (or impotent) George as a
surrogate husband.
George’s journey into the Other World is, in truth, his journey into
the actual, that is, he sees, at last, and not through the lens of his
insufferably self-righteous altruism. His role, far from being that of
the redemptive champion (the role that the film is intent on
constructing), becomes meaningless. The ramshackle sentimentality
implicit in scenes of small-town life reveals itself as sophomoric,
and, tellingly, is subverted by the same iconography that is meant to
support it. From the moment that George sees, that is, the reality of
his life, he will live, he must live as the willing recipient of the
money and largesse he has long affected to despise. The film, from the
moment George returns to the world of Bedford Falls in laughter and
Christmas snow, becomes cold and distant, even though these last few
scenes are presented as triumphant and warm: George has escaped from
bankruptcy, disgrace, death, and hell. That Capra has disguised his
true meaning inside brilliantly manipulated "Capraesque" clichés lifts
those cliches to epiphanies. And we see, how clearly we see, the bitter
irony of the title.
George’s marriage is presented to us as idyllic, its love persisting in
the midst of a genteel hand-to-mouth existence, endless
disappointments, etc. Yet an early scene prepares us for the hateful
Christmas Eve scene that occurs just before George flees the house. In
the earlier scene, George becomes nearly hysterical as he shakes Mary,
his future wife, wildly shouts at her of his need for freedom, tells
her that he will never marry anyone, and so forth. He marries, then,
unwillingly, just as he, on his wedding day, unwillingly disappoints
Mary’s expectation of a honeymoon trip. (Capra is careful always to
make George a little wishy-washy; well, he has no money.)
George’s marriage, the contemplation of which, earlier, drove him wild,
absolutely thwarts all his dreams, and reinforces his stasis. The
earlier, neurotic scene neatly lays the groundwork for the amazingly
mean and cruel Christmas Eve scene, which, in turn, has been prepared
for by George’s frantic attack on Uncle Billy (one of Capra’s beloved
bumblers), after the latter has allowed the crucial bank deposit to
fall into Potter’s hands. George says unforgivable things to the
adoring Billy, calling him a silly, stupid fool (we know, instantly,
that this is how George has always thought of him), and screaming that
Billy and not George will go to jail for embezzlement. (My son once
pointed out to me that George’s attack on Billy is not only cruel, but
is gratuitously so, and that no happy resolution can prettify it.
Billy’s relief in the final scene, as he stands grinning among the
rescuing townspeople, is horribly servile, since he now knows precisely
what George thinks of him.) This leads us into the scene at the Bailey
house, wherein George rails at his entire family, mocks one of his
children, allows the hatred he has for his house and job and life to
surface, and, at one point, angrily asks Mary why they have to have so
many children. Capra’s putative "family values" are badly battered in
this scene, and are instantly followed by a mechanical, tearfully
maudlin interlude between George and his daughter, with George seen as
the doting, worried, remorseful father. It is utterly hollow, and not
only fails to defuse the previous scene, but acts to portray George as
shallow and selectively mature. All this chaos of bitter anger
and insult and recrimination comes about because of the loss of
George’s bank deposit: it is his first great test—essentially, his only
test—as a man, and he fails it. After this failure, it is no surprise
that his look into the abyss of Pottersville (and its look back at him)
is so terrifying. Pottersville has always "really" been there, and it
has plenty of room for George. The George who never realized a single
one of his ambitions, who never became, is after all, a "double" for
the George who never was at all.
The journey into the Other World of Pottersville may be thought of as
George’s confrontation with the reality of his thwarted life: this
ineffective man is who he really is. George’s existence in Bedford
Falls has not precluded Pottersville’s existence, it merely permits us
to see that Bedford Falls and its George are located on another plane.
So then, in Pottersville, where George is not, money is all; and in
Bedford Falls, where George most definitely is, we have just seen, and
will see again, that money is all. The people of both towns, uncanny
doubles, show George what really matters, and the final scene, with
cash everywhere, is a not-so-subtle allusion to Zasu Pitts’s blanket of
gold coins in von Stroheim’s Greed.
The film, then, is a masterpiece of paradox, a great sacred monster. It
insists, again and again, on being read as a testament to honesty and
simplicity, the essential goodness of the everyday man and his everyday
family in an everyday town. It may, if its urgent subtext is denied, be
read that way, but its darkness is everywhere, as is Capra’s distrust
of "the people." It is no surprise that postwar audiences (it was
released in 1946) rejected it. They must have seen its phony optimism
plain, and, after four years of war, were not having any. George’s
problems and their snap solution must have seemed frivolous in the
aftermath of the unimaginable bloodshed and destruction and death that
was the Second World War.
