I am currently attempting to write a second consecutive chapter on sermons, which is the reason for my prolonged absence from the increasingly competitive Substack space. I have therefore been in search of distractions (a joke), though it would be hard for anything to compete with the great court preachers for excitement and moral instruction (despite appearances, not a joke). One of my distractions has been tinkering with the tandem my fiancée and I bought together earlier this year, which was not quite as big a commitment as engagement, but in the same ballpark, so that later events were not too much of a surprise. This has brought my manual incompetence into greater and greater focus, reaching its apotheosis yesterday when a long session fitting mudguards ended with me riding away with a loose rear wheel. At the end of the bike and my mutual ordeal, one of the mechanics said that my hands were dirtier than hers had ever been, which I think we can generously interpret as conveying mildly bemused respect.1
Given all the sermons, my tolerance for didactic moralism is pretty high, so it seemed the perfect time to revisit the greatest of Christmas films, It’s a Wonderful Life. This film is a perfect depiction of my previous blog post, a crotchety defence of small-minded suburban values against the modernising rush of travel, experience and pluralism. George Bailey longs to leave his dead-end small town, but his plans to travel the world and become a skyscraper architect (it is perhaps significant that these twin aims are for both for extension and expansion, outwards and upwards) are repeatedly thwarted. At two moments of crisis, he decides to miss the crucial train out of town and bow to duty, staying in Bedford Falls as he is the only person able to preserve its crucial institution, the Building & Loan Society.
The most significant of these crises, and for me the heart of the film, is the 1929 Stock Market Crash, where George misses his honeymoon and uses the money he’d saved for it to prop up the Building & Loan. He gives a speech where he explains why they should not take up the villainous millionaire Mr Potter’s offer of 50 cents for each dollar, which would buy out everyone’s deposits in, and therefore destroy, the Building & Loan. George settles the crowd’s anger and persuades each person to take not what they are technically owed, but only what they need to get by until the crisis passes.
This all prefigures the film’s conclusion, fittingly set on Christmas Day. Here George’s investment in human relationships pay off as the people of the town all chip in to fill an $8,000 hole in the company’s accounts. Everyone gathers and sings ‘Auld Lang Syne’ around a huge pile of money. This final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life makes a perfect modern Christmas: instead of gold, frankincense and myrrh being offered to an infant, we have money, money and money offered to a heap of money.
There is, however, a warm heart behind all the cold cash. These averted crises, the 1929 stock market crash and the Christmas Day denouement, together convey the spontaneous benevolence of the common man. The connection is underlined by a repeated shot of George running down the main boulevard of Bedford Falls: at the Stock Market Crash on a clear day but full of anxiety; on Christmas Day in the snow and full of joy, his will to live having been restored by his guardian angel.
The film’s darkest shades are rather pallid. The War is distant and serves mainly to make George’s brother a hero. George contemplates suicide not out of despair, but to spare his family financial hardship (exactly the kind of misplaced altruism which soon-to-be legal euthanasia will make commonplace), preserving his essential goodness. But there are other traces of death-drive throughout the film, especially in the vision of the world if George had never been born, where men drink themselves to death and the millionaire villain funds a housing development called Potter’s Field, the site of Judas’s suicide, and also where people are buried when they have no living relations. This alone makes much of the film’s point: raw profit-motive is both fatal and anonymising. Still, this fate is averted, and George’s will to live restored.
Nonetheless the film’s conclusion, singing hymns around a heap of cash, is not one of unalloyed blessings. The villainous Mr Potter remains off-screen, his scheme to have George arrested for misappropriation of funds thwarted, but perhaps only temporarily, as Potter’s role in orchestrating the loss of the $8,000 remains unrevealed. Admittedly the investigating attorney joins in the singing and adds his money to the pile, but if the case were picked up after the holiday season, Potter would still have the full force of the law on his side.
Most strikingly, the collective benevolence of the people of Bedford Falls is rendered irrelevant by a last-minute announcement. Via telegram from Europe, George’s former schoolmate Sam Wainwright, implausibly enriched by a scheme to make plastic out of soybeans, offers $25,000 to help the Building & Loan out of its predicament, more than triple what the townspeople have been able to cobble together. The joy that we see on screen is underwritten by a sense that real power lies elsewhere. The threat of the 1929 stock market crash scene is realised at the conclusion, as an off-screen presence holds all the cards.
It's a Wonderful Life dramatizes a brief moment in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when an alternative way of living almost seemed possible: one based not on the individual hoarding of wealth, but communal solidarity of the kind necessitated by wartime privation. That this was only ever almost possible is conveyed by Sam Wainwright’s last-minute donation, an act which buys out the whole town, making their spontaneous kindness an anachronistic irrelevance.
We now live in the world controlled not by ‘frustrated’ misanthropes like Mr Potter, but by Sam’s eponymous heirs (the Altmans, the Bankman-Frieds) who make plastic out of soybeans, money out of either pure or implausible technological sleights-of-hand. These millionaires are far from brooding real-estate villains, but instead full of exuberance. The echoes of the 1929 Stock Crash in the Christmas Day reprieve make the point that a new set are in charge, as Sam essentially buys out everyone’s individual contributions: where Potter fails, Sam Wainwright succeeds. This new set are not trapped by old resentments in old towns (nor, in a more dubious piece of moral coding, trapped in wheelchairs, as Potter is) where they seek to build old-style slums, but are young, hypermobile, keen to build high. This makes them all the more dangerous. The skyscrapers still got built, just not by George Bailey.
And with them, the communal life supported by small, local institutions like the Building & Loan gradually died. A world where the people of even the smallest town might donate money to support the local banker is long gone from America and Europe. It may have survived slightly longer elsewhere. The film’s final scene of mass donations to support a crumbling financial institution had its echo in South Korea in 1998, when a campaign of mass donations helped the government pay off its debt to the International Monetary Fund, a scene captured here in a promotional image:
The text across this image celebrates the ‘gold collection campaign highlighting the will of the people to overcome the IMF crash’.2 This helped South Korea to escape its dire financial straits, collecting 227 tons of gold to help pay off $304 billion in foreign exchange debt, precipitating the end of a financial crisis which had seen male suicides increase by 50%. The people’s will, like those of the Bedford Falls townspeople, is to resist servitude to an off-stage actor (in this case the IMF) and to preserve local identity against the anonymising power of capital. But what the image actually shows is the homogenisation of capital in action: an old woman gives up her jewels, a pair of Catholic nuns give up their devotional aids, and all that is solid melts. Much like the conclusion of It’s a Wonderful Life, the very act of resistance is a capitulation. This makes the timing of the collection campaign rather striking. It was launched on 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany, when we remember old men giving gifts to the new King.
Thank you to Herin for the translation, as for so much else.
lovely reading paul! i've not seen the movie but i will make sure to this holiday.
'This final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life makes a perfect modern Christmas: instead of gold, frankincense and myrrh being offered to an infant, we have money, money and money offered to a heap of money.' - this is provocative! wondering what modern means, or why its there but not 'contemporary', for example. much to ponder