We went to see the story in a live play at a local theater. The anti success message was quite disturbing to me, as was the thought that the movie (that I hadn’t seen) has been around long enough to draw social security. One of the comments in the linked story suggested that it was just a story, so sit back and enjoy it. How do you do that when your values are being attacked?
I think the movie has mixed messages, probably because people don’t logically think through the implication of their premises. As a counter to the evil banker, there’s George’s friend Sam Wainwright, who has made some big bucks, which allow him to come to George’s rescue at the end. (Reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s statement that no one would remember the Good Samaritan if he hadn’t first acquired the money that allowed him to help the guy he found on the road.)
George lives for other people. George’s life is meaningless.
I always like the SNL alternate ending that Dana Carvey did.
hahaha I’ve seen the movie a zillion times and never noticed that Potter still had the 8 grand!
I think the point of the movie is that we all have dreams in our youth that we will become an astronaut and lead the first crewed mission to the surface of Mars, and sometime in our middle age we find ourselves in some soul-draining occupation marking time until the kids leave home and we can take a retirement of some kind.
We ask kids “what do you want to be when you grow up” and what we end up as when we grow up is something that just happened to us rather than anything set out to do.
Even the college and grad school admissions process encourages this fable that we are masters of our destiny if we would only dream big and work accordingly hard. The sciences perhaps offer the greatest opportunity of working at something that will make a person immortal (I mean this metaphorically in terms of being credited by the ages with pivotal scientific discovery). But even there, what a person ends up doing is an accident of a graduate school acceptance and the availability of a faculty member with funding who happens to want to work with you. What you end up doing as a scientific discoverer is not something of your choosing but something that chooses you.
The reason for this is that we are all part of society, and whereas social conformity was denigrated in the 60’s, it was feared by my fellow grad students in the late 70’s (the expression was the “station wagon with mud flaps” — a more modern version is “who will end up owning a minivan”). But social conformity it is, often at considerable personal sacrifice, and who is able to be a parent to children in any generation without more personal sacrifice than can be imagined by a person just entering adulthood?
So “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a metaphor for the many of us in middle age with unfulfilled ambitions and dreams, that our worth is defined by our social relations and our role as spouse, parent, small business person, worker, community member.
And yes, Clarence was indeed a DMV-counter Guardian Angel — that was the whole point of the story, that the guardian angel was as much a schlump as the person we was supposed to guard.
And as to the ending of Potter keeping the money, isn’t that how it works out in real life, that people with no morals (keeping another man’s property) get away with it and the good and innocent suffer — many atheists observe this as a proof that God does not exist; many believers see their faith tested. The SNL spoof ending was more a knock on more modern movies which are focus-group tested and would have an SNL-style ending.
Yes, it’s defeatist claptrap designed to keep people in their social position working for the benefit of others. Stop trying to chase your dreams and just feel wonderful about yourself. Your community needs you, isn’t that wonderful?!
Fictional depictions in art and popular culture seldom stray far from the author’s life experience.
Director Frank Capra, a Sicilian immigrant, as it turns out held a degree from Caltech but was unable to fulfill his personal dream of becoming a research engineer on account of the Great Depression and such jobs not being open to him. Instead, he found work in the nascent movie industry and notoriety as the director of It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and similarly over-sweetened moral fables that earned derisive title “Capri-Corn” from contemporaries.
For all of the unfulfilled dreams that I could sit back and feel sorry for myself about, I am in fact living out one childhood dream, that of being a research engineer.
But even as an engineer, or especially as an engineer, I still dream childhood dreams of great rocket ships, but I find myself instead engaged in the more dreary scholarly pursuit such as worrying about how many assembly configurations of some robot linkage that no manufacturer would ever want to build can match their tool configuration space to the surface of a pin in the Lie Group SE(3).
But were I living the dream of being on a team of engineers designing some great rocket launcher, I am thinking I would also be focused on some dreary piece of a much larger problem and maybe unhappy with management for cutting back on Christmas break so as to make a deadline for a dog-and-pony show for some VC or some other such thing.
First, I wonder if Michael Graham bothered to watch it recently. His brother didn’t marry into a cushy corporate gig, he joined the U.S. Navy after college and won the Medal of Honor saving a troop ship from a kamikaze attack. That is what creates the excitement as his brother is coming home to a hero’s welcome. And he seems to think that George Baily’s middle class small town lifestyle was living in poverty… I am sure that would be news to the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire who enjoy similar lifestyle today that they are wasting their lives in poverty in “Hicksville” And he doesn’t seem to understand that $8,000 in the 1940’s was the same as $150,000 in current buying power. But I guess that its only pocket change for someone as successful as Michael Graham…
Yes, it teaches such bad lessons.
Like its wrong to stay home to take care of your widowed mother and siblings and give up your chance to go to college and make a fortune – someday.
Its wrong to help your siblings go through college, let the bums pay their own way.
[[[Show me George in his New York penthouse, with that hottie Violet dressed to the nines, talking about the new dam he’s building in Central America, bringing power to an entire country. Show me his plans for a big-city skyscraper that will house thousands.]]]
Yes, much better to get rich on big government contracts and exchange trophy wives whenever you get tired of the current one rather then staying faithful and raising a family.
So much for the hype by the Tea Party on family values.
[[[After years of dreaming of going off to college, traveling the world and becoming a top engineer or architect, his life is spent scraping by, and helping others do the same.]]]
Let’s see, so its also wrong for a financial institution to invest in the community its depositors live in, far better to gamble the money on Wall Street.
[[[drops the daily deposit into Potter’s lap and guess who happens to show up that day but the bank examiner.]]]
Yep, nothing wrong with destroying your competitors by stealing money from them, as long as you are able to get away with it.
Yep, in Michael Graham’s world America is not a nation build by neighbors working together, it’s a nation built by cheating and stealing…
No wonder the Tea Party has to cloak itself in the Constitution and family values, it has to hide how alien it actually is to values of American.
I guess in the next Tea Party rewrite of history Jim Taylor and Joseph Paine will also be recast as the heroes and Jefferson Smith will be the villain. After all what better measure of success than being able to buy and sell members of Congress at your whim… 🙂
Yes, it is wrong to waste your potential looking after family members who should be looking after themselves. If community is so damn great, why does it require human sacrifice to survive?
Well I guess it depends on your definition of success. George sacrificed his dreams only to find in the end they were not going to make him successful. He realized at the end that he was successful by his own definition (which Clarance opens Georges eyes to). Me…if I am able to have a positive impact on 1 or 2 lives (and not negatively impact any) then I feel like I will be a success. I don’t need millions of dollars (wouldn’t complain if I had them though) hearing my daughter shout “daddy!” when I get home is worth far more than money. Do you now what it is like to live in a bamboo hut with nothing to eat other than some rice and leaves? Yet still be happy with your family there beside you? I’ll take that anyday over the life of Kobe Bryant. Thats just me of course. Does that mean I am against trying to earn more to make life easier? No it just means that just being rich does not ensure happiness.
I’m saddened that you still define “success” in terms of other people. Isn’t your life worth anything to you? If, God forbid, your family were to die suddenly, would your life be empty and worthless? As common as it may be for so many men to answer a resounding Yes! to this question, that’s what makes one a parasite living vicariously off the joy of the family. I’ve seen noble men switch overnight to the illogical blindness of paternal instinct, sacrificing forever their own life for the opportunity to breed. It’s truly a sight to behold. Do you remember when it happened to you?
I wouldn’t be so happy in that hut eating only rice and leaves with my family beside me because, for one thing, my family would presumably also be trying to survive on rice and leaves — a diet that isn’t exactly full of the complete daily nutritional requirements. Especially if I’d have had the brains and opportunity to become an architect and make some real money so I could move out of that hut and buy my family steaks.
Yes, better to dump your family on society to care for (i.e. taxpayers) so you may pursue your own self-gratification. That so many of the folks posting here think this is good brings to mind this Robert Heinlein quote.
“The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of “loyalty” and “duty.” Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute — get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.”
Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus long
Yes, George Baily was a fool and a failure for showing loyalty to his family and town and doing his duty by them. Better to follow the path of self-gratification like old Mr. Potter. I wonder where we would be today if the G.I. Generation felt that way?
I agree with Thomas Matula and with Trent Waddington. Brain, what are you doing to me?
Okay, what I agree with from TM: being a small town family guy is fine — not everyone can be the big man with big money and big ideas and the hot wife and the flashy apartment in the big city. What I agree with from TW: stifling your own dreams and ambitions to “take care of family” when those family members are neither sick nor too young to care for themselves is stupid, and actually does harm to the community — because you are depriving them of your full potential. And actually, come to think of it, TW wins by a large margin over TM, because as usual TM had to bring up his favorite bugbear, the Tea Party. I might as well tell you all now, the Tea Party plans to take Santa hostage and keep him from giving out toys for free to those undeserving brats, who should be working in the mines instead.
As for the move: I’ve only managed to watch it all the way through once. I found the constant hysteria-pitched acting by most of the characters to be a little much.
And actually, come to think of it, TW wins by a large margin over TM, because as usual TM had to bring up his favorite bugbear, the Tea Party.
George’s renovation of the old deserted Granville House doesn’t strike me as a liberal Democrat-type activity. And Potter isn’t Tea Party material – see my comment below.
The film is a mixed bag. George Bailey was there in various persons’ times of need, and the community was at his. The problem is that word “wonderful.” His life was somewhere in between wonderful and Pyrrhic. He had friends, family, an above-average house, but he missed out on the big dreams. George Bailey put parts of himself on hold permanently. That is no trivial affair.
On another note…while some view the film as a slap at capitalism, I kinda wonder if Capra is slapping somethign different (perhaps by accident). In the alternate timeline, Potter seizes the Bailey S&L (evidently at the time of Peter Bailey’s death), and thus monopoly over Bedford Falls’ finance markets. The kind of person who can talk city hall into renaming a town after himself strikes me as someone who has a big talent for rent-seeking. I suspect that alternate-timeline Potter was able lace his pockets with political means not available to the regular-timeline Potter.
Alan,
You need to remember when the the film was made, in 1946, after an entire generation put their lives on hold to do their duty by their family, community and country. And Jimmy Stewart was part of that generation, putting his movie career on hold to fly combat missions over Germany. Talk to any member of that generation and you will hear them tell you it was their greatest accomplishment.
You didn’t say anything that contradicted any of my remarks. The film is about both success and tragedy.
Did the evil banker Mr. Potter (Mr. was apparently his first name) also have a wonderful life? If he had never existed, would the banker with a heart have frittered away the capital of the townspeople? Did Mr. Potter make it possible for a town with a healthy economy to rescue Bailey’s bank?
His name is Henry F. Potter. I’ll leave to your imagination what the “F” stands for.
Yes, that is the flip side of the whole thing. If Clarence came to Mr. Potter and showed him what Bedford Falls would have been like without him, do you think he would have shown him a prosperous town with unicorns dancing in the fields? I think he would have seen a dilapidated ruin of a town with dying industry, dwindling means of support, the youth abandoning it, and only the hopeless dregs left behind. Basically, your typical Rustbelt town.
Love = Sacrifice. Success = Love. That’s the message — and it’s a good one.
“Jesus, I’m saddened that you still define ‘success’ in terms of other people. Why should a talented carpenter and healer like you waste your potential looking after beggars, fishermen, Roman soldiers, and deadbeat family members who should be looking after themselves? If mankind is so damn great, why does it require human sacrifice to survive? Isn’t your life worth anything to you? To hell with the human race! Stop trying to save the world and just feel wonderful about yourself. Your mother and your best friend John need you, isn’t that wonderful?! Now come down off that cross!”
If it’s wrong to punish a man who has done nothing wrong then why is it right to reward a man who has done nothing right?
Human sacrifice is nothing to be proud of.
Meh. I liked Donnie Darko better. It’s the anti-IAWL.
And B. Lewis beats Thomas Matula for Irrational Superstition post of the Day. Way to go, B! Outdoing Matula in the claptrap department is no mean feat!
Yep, the concepts of Loyalty and Duty are indeed gone for the Libertarian generation. This society is doomed if they ever get into power. The current Republican Congress is just a taste of what it will be like as they transform the country into Potterville.
@Bilwick: If Everett’s theory of the universal wavefunction is true, there exists somewhere a universe in which I care what you think.
Andrea wins. Does anybodies life match their ideology?
It’s useful to pick apart that which is often unexamined even if the wrong conclusions are drawn. Being wrong is part of the process and one of the things that makes Rand’s blog a success (other than his laser like ability to express his own thoughts so well… nobody has ever explained solar sails as well and countless other examples) is that he attracts so many that are so wrong. Plus their is no better defender of individual liberty (which is why it’s so funny when people define him as a republican.)
Even an uber zealot like myself can appreciate such a place.
George ended up happy regardless of his choices, good or bad. We should all be so lucky. I’m jealous.
Does anybodies life match their ideology?
I think I come fairly close. The key is having efficient code — ideological bloatware is like including a 10Mb .dll because you need two lines of code.
It occurs to me that despite the town raising all that money for George, in the end he still goes to jail. The money isn’t in the bank, and just because George now has the werewithal to pay it back isn’t going to stop charges from being brought against him…
Yes I know….nitpicking….
Perhaps, but its very likely in the trial it would come out that Mr. Potter stole it. Don’t forget his care taker saw him and a reward for information on what happen to it would likely make him turn state’s evidence to avoid jail time, as given Mr. Potter’s personality there is probably no reason for him to be loyal. Add to it that Mr. Potter was the one that tipped off the bank examiner there ‘might be a shortfall” and its most likely Mr. Potter would be the one to spend his final years in jail.
I keep seeing this. He wasn’t going to jail. Didn’t you all notice the bank examiner tearing up the warrant and putting it in the bowl?
The heretical review has an excessively grim (and unrealistic) speculation about George Bailey’s future. An investigation could not prove embezzlement, since it would have to discover that the money was transferred rather than lost (which is unprovable); failing to meet the burden of proof, the investigation must assume that Uncle Billy lost the money. He is in trouble, not George. The 25K bank wire lets off the hook whomever issued the surety bond on Billy (a requirement for a banking official who handles large sums of cash), but I bet Billy’s bond will be revoked and he’ll have to get another job.
Something obvious slipped my mind in my assessment of Potter. He is richer in the alternate timeline not only because he is able to monopolize the town’s capital markets, but also because he doesn’t lose his slum monopoly. The film clearly states that Potter is a slumlord who charges high rents. Logically, if he can get away with charging what is insinuated to be above-market prices, that means he has no competition – until Bailey Park.
Assuming Capra understood economics better than J. K. Rowling (her wizarding world’s economic model has more holes than James Dean’s Porsche), Alternate Potter used that extra capital to bring some new industry to town. Nightclubs and pawn shops are not the economic base – they emerge when the base industries increase – new manufacturing, new army base, etc.
Capra’s generation also remembers its parents’ tales about the excesses of the Roaring 20s. I suspect Capra had this somewhere in the back of his subconscious. Bedford Falls is the Protestant Work Ethic, Pottersville is The Great Gatsby.
We went to see the story in a live play at a local theater. The anti success message was quite disturbing to me, as was the thought that the movie (that I hadn’t seen) has been around long enough to draw social security. One of the comments in the linked story suggested that it was just a story, so sit back and enjoy it. How do you do that when your values are being attacked?
I think the movie has mixed messages, probably because people don’t logically think through the implication of their premises. As a counter to the evil banker, there’s George’s friend Sam Wainwright, who has made some big bucks, which allow him to come to George’s rescue at the end. (Reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s statement that no one would remember the Good Samaritan if he hadn’t first acquired the money that allowed him to help the guy he found on the road.)
George lives for other people. George’s life is meaningless.
The review succeeds in getting people to think of that which is not seen. As such, I believe this is relevant http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
For another contrarian view, see http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=12835
I always like the SNL alternate ending that Dana Carvey did.
hahaha I’ve seen the movie a zillion times and never noticed that Potter still had the 8 grand!
I think the point of the movie is that we all have dreams in our youth that we will become an astronaut and lead the first crewed mission to the surface of Mars, and sometime in our middle age we find ourselves in some soul-draining occupation marking time until the kids leave home and we can take a retirement of some kind.
We ask kids “what do you want to be when you grow up” and what we end up as when we grow up is something that just happened to us rather than anything set out to do.
Even the college and grad school admissions process encourages this fable that we are masters of our destiny if we would only dream big and work accordingly hard. The sciences perhaps offer the greatest opportunity of working at something that will make a person immortal (I mean this metaphorically in terms of being credited by the ages with pivotal scientific discovery). But even there, what a person ends up doing is an accident of a graduate school acceptance and the availability of a faculty member with funding who happens to want to work with you. What you end up doing as a scientific discoverer is not something of your choosing but something that chooses you.
The reason for this is that we are all part of society, and whereas social conformity was denigrated in the 60’s, it was feared by my fellow grad students in the late 70’s (the expression was the “station wagon with mud flaps” — a more modern version is “who will end up owning a minivan”). But social conformity it is, often at considerable personal sacrifice, and who is able to be a parent to children in any generation without more personal sacrifice than can be imagined by a person just entering adulthood?
So “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a metaphor for the many of us in middle age with unfulfilled ambitions and dreams, that our worth is defined by our social relations and our role as spouse, parent, small business person, worker, community member.
And yes, Clarence was indeed a DMV-counter Guardian Angel — that was the whole point of the story, that the guardian angel was as much a schlump as the person we was supposed to guard.
And as to the ending of Potter keeping the money, isn’t that how it works out in real life, that people with no morals (keeping another man’s property) get away with it and the good and innocent suffer — many atheists observe this as a proof that God does not exist; many believers see their faith tested. The SNL spoof ending was more a knock on more modern movies which are focus-group tested and would have an SNL-style ending.
Yes, it’s defeatist claptrap designed to keep people in their social position working for the benefit of others. Stop trying to chase your dreams and just feel wonderful about yourself. Your community needs you, isn’t that wonderful?!
Fictional depictions in art and popular culture seldom stray far from the author’s life experience.
Director Frank Capra, a Sicilian immigrant, as it turns out held a degree from Caltech but was unable to fulfill his personal dream of becoming a research engineer on account of the Great Depression and such jobs not being open to him. Instead, he found work in the nascent movie industry and notoriety as the director of It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and similarly over-sweetened moral fables that earned derisive title “Capri-Corn” from contemporaries.
For all of the unfulfilled dreams that I could sit back and feel sorry for myself about, I am in fact living out one childhood dream, that of being a research engineer.
But even as an engineer, or especially as an engineer, I still dream childhood dreams of great rocket ships, but I find myself instead engaged in the more dreary scholarly pursuit such as worrying about how many assembly configurations of some robot linkage that no manufacturer would ever want to build can match their tool configuration space to the surface of a pin in the Lie Group SE(3).
But were I living the dream of being on a team of engineers designing some great rocket launcher, I am thinking I would also be focused on some dreary piece of a much larger problem and maybe unhappy with management for cutting back on Christmas break so as to make a deadline for a dog-and-pony show for some VC or some other such thing.
First, I wonder if Michael Graham bothered to watch it recently. His brother didn’t marry into a cushy corporate gig, he joined the U.S. Navy after college and won the Medal of Honor saving a troop ship from a kamikaze attack. That is what creates the excitement as his brother is coming home to a hero’s welcome. And he seems to think that George Baily’s middle class small town lifestyle was living in poverty… I am sure that would be news to the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire who enjoy similar lifestyle today that they are wasting their lives in poverty in “Hicksville” And he doesn’t seem to understand that $8,000 in the 1940’s was the same as $150,000 in current buying power. But I guess that its only pocket change for someone as successful as Michael Graham…
Yes, it teaches such bad lessons.
Like its wrong to stay home to take care of your widowed mother and siblings and give up your chance to go to college and make a fortune – someday.
Its wrong to help your siblings go through college, let the bums pay their own way.
[[[Show me George in his New York penthouse, with that hottie Violet dressed to the nines, talking about the new dam he’s building in Central America, bringing power to an entire country. Show me his plans for a big-city skyscraper that will house thousands.]]]
Yes, much better to get rich on big government contracts and exchange trophy wives whenever you get tired of the current one rather then staying faithful and raising a family.
So much for the hype by the Tea Party on family values.
[[[After years of dreaming of going off to college, traveling the world and becoming a top engineer or architect, his life is spent scraping by, and helping others do the same.]]]
Let’s see, so its also wrong for a financial institution to invest in the community its depositors live in, far better to gamble the money on Wall Street.
[[[drops the daily deposit into Potter’s lap and guess who happens to show up that day but the bank examiner.]]]
Yep, nothing wrong with destroying your competitors by stealing money from them, as long as you are able to get away with it.
Yep, in Michael Graham’s world America is not a nation build by neighbors working together, it’s a nation built by cheating and stealing…
No wonder the Tea Party has to cloak itself in the Constitution and family values, it has to hide how alien it actually is to values of American.
I guess in the next Tea Party rewrite of history Jim Taylor and Joseph Paine will also be recast as the heroes and Jefferson Smith will be the villain. After all what better measure of success than being able to buy and sell members of Congress at your whim… 🙂
Yes, it is wrong to waste your potential looking after family members who should be looking after themselves. If community is so damn great, why does it require human sacrifice to survive?
Well I guess it depends on your definition of success. George sacrificed his dreams only to find in the end they were not going to make him successful. He realized at the end that he was successful by his own definition (which Clarance opens Georges eyes to). Me…if I am able to have a positive impact on 1 or 2 lives (and not negatively impact any) then I feel like I will be a success. I don’t need millions of dollars (wouldn’t complain if I had them though) hearing my daughter shout “daddy!” when I get home is worth far more than money. Do you now what it is like to live in a bamboo hut with nothing to eat other than some rice and leaves? Yet still be happy with your family there beside you? I’ll take that anyday over the life of Kobe Bryant. Thats just me of course. Does that mean I am against trying to earn more to make life easier? No it just means that just being rich does not ensure happiness.
I’m saddened that you still define “success” in terms of other people. Isn’t your life worth anything to you? If, God forbid, your family were to die suddenly, would your life be empty and worthless? As common as it may be for so many men to answer a resounding Yes! to this question, that’s what makes one a parasite living vicariously off the joy of the family. I’ve seen noble men switch overnight to the illogical blindness of paternal instinct, sacrificing forever their own life for the opportunity to breed. It’s truly a sight to behold. Do you remember when it happened to you?
I wouldn’t be so happy in that hut eating only rice and leaves with my family beside me because, for one thing, my family would presumably also be trying to survive on rice and leaves — a diet that isn’t exactly full of the complete daily nutritional requirements. Especially if I’d have had the brains and opportunity to become an architect and make some real money so I could move out of that hut and buy my family steaks.
Yes, better to dump your family on society to care for (i.e. taxpayers) so you may pursue your own self-gratification. That so many of the folks posting here think this is good brings to mind this Robert Heinlein quote.
“The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of “loyalty” and “duty.” Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute — get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.”
Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus long
Yes, George Baily was a fool and a failure for showing loyalty to his family and town and doing his duty by them. Better to follow the path of self-gratification like old Mr. Potter. I wonder where we would be today if the G.I. Generation felt that way?
I agree with Thomas Matula and with Trent Waddington. Brain, what are you doing to me?
Okay, what I agree with from TM: being a small town family guy is fine — not everyone can be the big man with big money and big ideas and the hot wife and the flashy apartment in the big city. What I agree with from TW: stifling your own dreams and ambitions to “take care of family” when those family members are neither sick nor too young to care for themselves is stupid, and actually does harm to the community — because you are depriving them of your full potential. And actually, come to think of it, TW wins by a large margin over TM, because as usual TM had to bring up his favorite bugbear, the Tea Party. I might as well tell you all now, the Tea Party plans to take Santa hostage and keep him from giving out toys for free to those undeserving brats, who should be working in the mines instead.
As for the move: I’ve only managed to watch it all the way through once. I found the constant hysteria-pitched acting by most of the characters to be a little much.
And actually, come to think of it, TW wins by a large margin over TM, because as usual TM had to bring up his favorite bugbear, the Tea Party.
George’s renovation of the old deserted Granville House doesn’t strike me as a liberal Democrat-type activity. And Potter isn’t Tea Party material – see my comment below.
The film is a mixed bag. George Bailey was there in various persons’ times of need, and the community was at his. The problem is that word “wonderful.” His life was somewhere in between wonderful and Pyrrhic. He had friends, family, an above-average house, but he missed out on the big dreams. George Bailey put parts of himself on hold permanently. That is no trivial affair.
On another note…while some view the film as a slap at capitalism, I kinda wonder if Capra is slapping somethign different (perhaps by accident). In the alternate timeline, Potter seizes the Bailey S&L (evidently at the time of Peter Bailey’s death), and thus monopoly over Bedford Falls’ finance markets. The kind of person who can talk city hall into renaming a town after himself strikes me as someone who has a big talent for rent-seeking. I suspect that alternate-timeline Potter was able lace his pockets with political means not available to the regular-timeline Potter.
Alan,
You need to remember when the the film was made, in 1946, after an entire generation put their lives on hold to do their duty by their family, community and country. And Jimmy Stewart was part of that generation, putting his movie career on hold to fly combat missions over Germany. Talk to any member of that generation and you will hear them tell you it was their greatest accomplishment.
You didn’t say anything that contradicted any of my remarks. The film is about both success and tragedy.
Did the evil banker Mr. Potter (Mr. was apparently his first name) also have a wonderful life? If he had never existed, would the banker with a heart have frittered away the capital of the townspeople? Did Mr. Potter make it possible for a town with a healthy economy to rescue Bailey’s bank?
His name is Henry F. Potter. I’ll leave to your imagination what the “F” stands for.
Yes, that is the flip side of the whole thing. If Clarence came to Mr. Potter and showed him what Bedford Falls would have been like without him, do you think he would have shown him a prosperous town with unicorns dancing in the fields? I think he would have seen a dilapidated ruin of a town with dying industry, dwindling means of support, the youth abandoning it, and only the hopeless dregs left behind. Basically, your typical Rustbelt town.
Love = Sacrifice. Success = Love. That’s the message — and it’s a good one.
“Jesus, I’m saddened that you still define ‘success’ in terms of other people. Why should a talented carpenter and healer like you waste your potential looking after beggars, fishermen, Roman soldiers, and deadbeat family members who should be looking after themselves? If mankind is so damn great, why does it require human sacrifice to survive? Isn’t your life worth anything to you? To hell with the human race! Stop trying to save the world and just feel wonderful about yourself. Your mother and your best friend John need you, isn’t that wonderful?! Now come down off that cross!”
If it’s wrong to punish a man who has done nothing wrong then why is it right to reward a man who has done nothing right?
Human sacrifice is nothing to be proud of.
Meh. I liked Donnie Darko better. It’s the anti-IAWL.
And B. Lewis beats Thomas Matula for Irrational Superstition post of the Day. Way to go, B! Outdoing Matula in the claptrap department is no mean feat!
Yep, the concepts of Loyalty and Duty are indeed gone for the Libertarian generation. This society is doomed if they ever get into power. The current Republican Congress is just a taste of what it will be like as they transform the country into Potterville.
@Bilwick: If Everett’s theory of the universal wavefunction is true, there exists somewhere a universe in which I care what you think.
Andrea wins. Does anybodies life match their ideology?
It’s useful to pick apart that which is often unexamined even if the wrong conclusions are drawn. Being wrong is part of the process and one of the things that makes Rand’s blog a success (other than his laser like ability to express his own thoughts so well… nobody has ever explained solar sails as well and countless other examples) is that he attracts so many that are so wrong. Plus their is no better defender of individual liberty (which is why it’s so funny when people define him as a republican.)
Even an uber zealot like myself can appreciate such a place.
George ended up happy regardless of his choices, good or bad. We should all be so lucky. I’m jealous.
I think I come fairly close. The key is having efficient code — ideological bloatware is like including a 10Mb .dll because you need two lines of code.
It occurs to me that despite the town raising all that money for George, in the end he still goes to jail. The money isn’t in the bank, and just because George now has the werewithal to pay it back isn’t going to stop charges from being brought against him…
Yes I know….nitpicking….
Perhaps, but its very likely in the trial it would come out that Mr. Potter stole it. Don’t forget his care taker saw him and a reward for information on what happen to it would likely make him turn state’s evidence to avoid jail time, as given Mr. Potter’s personality there is probably no reason for him to be loyal. Add to it that Mr. Potter was the one that tipped off the bank examiner there ‘might be a shortfall” and its most likely Mr. Potter would be the one to spend his final years in jail.
I keep seeing this. He wasn’t going to jail. Didn’t you all notice the bank examiner tearing up the warrant and putting it in the bowl?
The heretical review has an excessively grim (and unrealistic) speculation about George Bailey’s future. An investigation could not prove embezzlement, since it would have to discover that the money was transferred rather than lost (which is unprovable); failing to meet the burden of proof, the investigation must assume that Uncle Billy lost the money. He is in trouble, not George. The 25K bank wire lets off the hook whomever issued the surety bond on Billy (a requirement for a banking official who handles large sums of cash), but I bet Billy’s bond will be revoked and he’ll have to get another job.
Something obvious slipped my mind in my assessment of Potter. He is richer in the alternate timeline not only because he is able to monopolize the town’s capital markets, but also because he doesn’t lose his slum monopoly. The film clearly states that Potter is a slumlord who charges high rents. Logically, if he can get away with charging what is insinuated to be above-market prices, that means he has no competition – until Bailey Park.
Assuming Capra understood economics better than J. K. Rowling (her wizarding world’s economic model has more holes than James Dean’s Porsche), Alternate Potter used that extra capital to bring some new industry to town. Nightclubs and pawn shops are not the economic base – they emerge when the base industries increase – new manufacturing, new army base, etc.
Capra’s generation also remembers its parents’ tales about the excesses of the Roaring 20s. I suspect Capra had this somewhere in the back of his subconscious. Bedford Falls is the Protestant Work Ethic, Pottersville is The Great Gatsby.