At the side of thousands and thousands of others, I’ll quickly be taking 2 hours and 10 mins out of my busy vacation time table to take a seat down and watch a film I’ve noticed numerous occasions prior to: Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which tells the tale of a person’s existential disaster one Christmas Eve within the fictional city of Bedford Falls.
There are many explanation why this eight-decade-old movie nonetheless resonates, from its nostalgic pleasures to its cultural evaluations.
But if I watch it this 12 months, the collection the place Bedford Falls transforms into the darkish and dystopian “Pottersville” will resonate essentially the most.
Within the movie, protagonist George Bailey, who’s performed via Jimmy Stewart, is on the point of suicide. He turns out to have completed the hallmarks of the American dream: He’s taken over his father’s mortgage industry, married the affection of his lifestyles and fathered 4 excessively cute kids. However George feels stifled and crushed down. His Uncle Billy has out of place US$8,000 of the corporate’s cash, and the city’s resident tyrant, Mr. Potter, is the use of the mishap to check out to damage George, who’s his remaining last industry competitor.
An angel named Clarence is tasked with pulling George again from the edge. To forestall him from making an attempt suicide, Clarence makes a decision to turn George what lifestyles would had been like if he’d by no means been born. On this trade truth, Bedford Falls is known as Pottersville, a spot Mr. Potter runs as a ruthless banker and slumlord.
Pottersville, the darkish, dystopian model of Bedford Falls, is a spot characterised via vice and ethical decay.
Paramount
Having prior to now written about “It’s a Wonderful Life” in my ebook on literary and movie censorship, I will’t assist however see parallels between Pottersville and the U.S. these days.
Consider it:
In Pottersville, one guy hoards all of the monetary income and political energy.
In Pottersville, greed, corruption and cynicism reign ideally suited.
In Pottersville, hard-working immigrants like Giuseppe Martini who had been ready to construct a lifestyles and run a industry in Bedford Falls have vanished.
In Pottersville, homeless addicts like Mr. Gower and nonconformist “pixies” like Clarence are scorned and ostracized, then booted out of the native watering hollow.
In Pottersville, law enforcement officials arrest other folks like Violet Bick whilst they’re at paintings and haul them away, kicking and screaming.
Violet Bick will get dragged away via the Pottersville police as George seems to be on.
Paramount
However what horrifies George essentially the most about Pottersville is how desensitized the folk dwelling in it appear to be to its harshness and cruelty – how they deal with him like he’s the loopy, deranged one for short of and anticipating issues to be other and higher.
That is what the present political second feels love to me. There are days when the newest headlines really feel so jarringly exceptional that I to find myself considering, “Can this be happening? Can this be real?”
For those who assume those comparisons are a bit of of a stretch, believe when “It’s a Wonderful Life” was once made, and the way of thinking Capra was once in when he made it.
Frank Capra, anti-fascist
In 1946, Capra was once simply returning to Hollywood filmmaking after serving for 4 years within the U.S. Military, the place the Place of business of Battle Knowledge had tasked him with generating a chain of documentary motion pictures about Global Battle II and the lead-up to it. Even if Capra hadn’t been at the entrance strains, he’d been immersed within the sounds and photographs of warfare for years on finish, and he had develop into acutely conversant in Germany, Italy and Japan’s respective rises to fascism.
Frank Capra served within the U.S. Military all over Global Battle II.
Keystone/Hulton Archive by means of Getty Pictures
When selecting his first postwar movie, Capra recalled in his autobiography that he in particular “knew one thing – it would not be about war.” As a substitute, he selected to conform a brief tale via Philip Van Doren Stern, “The Greatest Gift,” that Stern had at the start despatched to family and friends as a Christmas card in 1943.
Stern’s tale is on no account about warfare. However it’s now not precisely about Christmas, both.
As Stern writes in his opening strains:
“The little town straggling up the hill was bright with colored Christmas lights. But George Pratt did not see them. He was leaning over the railing of the iron bridge, staring down moodily at the black water.”
The protagonist contemplates suicide as a result of he’s “sick of everything” within the small-town “mudhole” he’s caught in – till, this is, a “strange little man” offers him the risk to look what lifestyles can be like if he’d by no means been born.
It was once Capra and his group of screenwriters who added the sinister Henry F. Potter to Stern’s brief, easy story. The Potter subplot encapsulates the movie’s maximum trenchant, still-resonant subject matters: the prejudice of socioeconomic injustices; the pervasiveness of company and political corruption; the specter of monopolized energy; the desire for reasonably priced housing.
Those subject matters had, in fact, run thru a lot of Capra’s prewar motion pictures as smartly: “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take It with You,” “Meet John Doe” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” the remaining of which additionally starred Jimmy Stewart.
However they tackle a special more or less weight in “It’s a Wonderful Life” – a weight that’s particularly visual at the weathered face of Stewart, who himself had simply returned from a harrowing four-year excursion of accountability as a bomber pilot in Europe.
The idealistic vigor with which Stewart had fought crooked politicians and oligarchs as Mr. Smith is changed via the bitterness, exhaustion, frustration and desperation with which he battles towards Mr. Potter as George Bailey.
George Bailey feels helpless within the face of corruption and cruelty.
Paramount
Existence after Pottersville
By the point George has begged and pleaded his method out of Pottersville, the misplaced $8,000 is not most sensible of thoughts. He’s basically simply relieved to search out Bedford Falls as he had left it, warts and all.
And but, the Bedford Falls that George returns to isn’t relatively the similar as the only he left in the back of.
On this Bedford Falls, the network rallies in combination to determine a technique to recoup George’s lacking cash. Their pre-digital model of a GoFundMe web page saves George from what he’d feared maximum: chapter, scandal and jail.
And even supposing his spouse, Mary, tries to characteristic this unexpected wave of collectivist, activist power to a couple form of divine intervention – “George, it’s a miracle; it’s a miracle!” – Uncle Billy issues out that it actually took place thru extra earthly organizing way: “Mary did it, George; Mary did it! She told some people you were in trouble, and they scattered all over town collecting money!”
The citizens of Bedford Falls come in combination to save lots of George from monetary damage.
Paramount
However the query of whether or not George in reality wins his combat towards Potter is a murky one.
Whilst the standard Capra protagonist triumphs via defeating vice and exposing subterfuge, George by no means even realizes that Potter is the one that were given grasp of his cash and attempted to damage his lifestyles. Potter is rarely held answerable for his crimes.
However, George is in a position to be informed, from his time in Pottersville, what a an important position he performs in his network. George’s victory over Potter, then, lies now not in some grand ultimate act of retribution, however within the incremental tactics he has stood as much as Potter all through his lifestyles: now not capitulating to Potter’s bullying or intimidation techniques; talking reality to energy; and operating a community-centered industry quite than one guided via greed and exploitation.
In contemporary months, there were an identical acts of protest, huge and small, within the type of rallies, boycotts, immigrant help efforts, subscription cancellations, meals financial institution donations and extra.
That doesn’t imply the U.S. has made it out of Pottersville, then again.
Every day, extra head-spinning headlines seem, whether or not they’re about masked brokers terrorizing immigrant communities, the dismantling of anti-corruption oversights, the consolidation of govt energy or the bare show of political grift.
Zuzu’s petals are nonetheless lacking. Clarence nonetheless hasn’t gotten his wings.
However this vacation season, I’m hoping it’ll really feel helpfully cathartic to move with George Bailey, for the umpteenth time, during the darkish abyss of his dystopian nightmare – and are available out with him, more potent and wiser, at the different facet.
