George Bailey and the Darkness on the Edge of Town
There's a particularly terrifying moment very late in the totemic and chronically misunderstood It's A Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey rings the bell of Ma Bailey's boarding house in Pottersville, the alternative upstate New York town riddled by vice because the good eldest Bailey son had never been born to save them all from Satan's power.
Stomping all over town searching for someone who'll recognize him, George arrives at his childhood home and his mother, played by Beulah Bondi, answers the door and looks on the thin, unshaven, sweating crazy man on her porch with a mixture of suspicion and fear:
MA BAILEY: Get over what? I don't take in strangers unless they're sent here by somebody I know.
To its critics, and they are legion, Frank Capra's story of the angel Clarence and his rescue of George Bailey from suicide and scandal is a sappy Christmas bromide, a far-too-pat (and religious) morality play that glorifies a stilted middle class ideal and an American myth of family, military, commerce, class structure and real estate.
Yet, It's A Wonderful Life has a dark, brooding heart and it openly questions in brutal terms the complaisance of small-town life just after the world's worst-ever conflict, a war that snuffed out tens of millions of people. And it descends directly, just more than a century onward, from the other horrific Yuletide morality tale of greed and redemption: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Sure, the stories share happy endings, God bless us every one.
That moment on Ma Bailey's porch has so many earlier echoes in Dickens, but the one that always jabbed at my American middle class consciousness was the moment when the hale fellow Ghost of Christmas Present opens his resplendent robes and reveals the horror hidden just below their luxuriant folds.
"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
"Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Ignorance and Want are their names, of course, and Scrooge is reminded of his earlier flippant crack about workhouses and prisons to keep the poor off his streets. As much as we shop and decorate, sing the old songs and stuff ourselves, this is a season of the roughest contrasts - and has long seemed that way to me. We're reminded of the places "where no one asks any questions or looks to long in your face," and this year in particular the tinsel seems dulled and while the lights still shine, they do not shine unadorned by the nagging realization that something has changed, some false assumption about our own small town lies exposed.
In a brilliant essay for The Times this week, Wendell Jamieson re-examined It's A Wonderful Life and plumbed its nasty soul, remembering the first time he saw it as young student in film class - and the fear it evoked.
It is also a story of the built-in power of corruption and the rewards for motivated avarice; no doubt, reminders of our current banking scandal reverberate for many who'll watch it tonight. Jamieson admits to a lump in his throat, and I'll admit to mine, even on a yearly basis. What's moving about the Capra classic and A Christmas Carol is the notion that people can change - that they can be moved to action in the cause of others. That theme will always have the power to stir genuine emotion.
For the last year, I've been studying what moves people - particularly young people - to take nominally selfless action online. And I've found, to some modest relief, that the generation behind mine does indeed believe in making societal benefit part of their daily lives. Yet, critics who have reminded me that my CauseWired movement can be light on deep involvement beyond a few clicks among Facebook friends are onto something. The virtual crowd of Bedford Falls townfolk crowding into George Bailey's house with cash for rescue from jail and disgrace does occur online, and quite often. I've seem the enthusiasm. Yet I often wonder if these same enthusiastic activists see the broken lives just down the block - and the huge economic and moral challenge just now becoming apparent as the financial myths that sustained a paper boom collapse around us. The New York media critic M.A. Peel captured that sense of a reluctant merrymaking nation before she headed off on a holiday jet:
It's as though Pandora revisited the earth, undetected, with another box of ills to punish us anew for that primal theft of fire.
Yes, it feels like we're going through the motions, driven by cultural and commercial duty to make that deadline under the mistletoe. The always darkened mood of Jim Kunstler (and clearly his World Made By Hand is the novel of 2008's economic crisis) reached a particularly gloomy corner this week, stringing his Chanukah Kwanzaa Creches with the twinkling light of the of the Madoff scandal and the society-wide realization that this little downturn has the cold depths of Old Man Potter about it:
My Dad, whose health has been uncertain this year, has been talking quite a bit about his memories of the Great Depression - particularly his still-sharp remembrance of sharing his lunchtime sandwich with the WPA workers building sidewalks in the Yonkers of his youth. I'll see if I can draw out a few more 1930s memories when we gather around the tree again tonight and tomorrow. Perhaps in his tales, like the scenes from Dickens in the 1840s or Capra in the 1940s, there will be echoes - or shadows as Scrooge might've put it - of the America of 2009.
And maybe, there will be some redemption as well.
Darkness on the Edge of Town isn't George Bailey's song, but it's redolent of the last period of sharp American decline, the 1970s - and it's the Christmas carol I'm humming this week:
Other folks get it anyway, anyhow,
I lost my money and I lost my wife,
Them things don't seem to matter much to me now.
Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop,
I'll be on that hill with everything I got,
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost,
I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost,
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town.
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Aren't you supposed to give credit to Bruce Springsteen for his lyrics? I know who wrote DARKNESS and thousands of others do as well but I suppose it would be a nice gesture to let people know who wrote the song that made this Huffington Poster cry... (Springsteen's name is in the tags; is that enough? Does anyone else read the tags besides me?!)
Hey -- nobody's mentioned that Bruce has an angel named Clarence and between the two of them, they've rung a bell or three. Maybe they really will save us all. Religion, smeligion, It's a Wonderful Life and Darkness on the Edge of Town are works of art so deep and so profound that everyone can find in them something worth thinking and talking about. Both come from originally Catholic artists and that is interesting, but not final. Thanks for noting the connection. Since Capra and Springsteen are artists of enormous importance to me, I really enjoyed the comparison.
On a personal note, the name of the profoundly decent orthopedic doctor who performed radical surgeries on my little child's legs and hip in the post war 40s (which allow me to still walk today, at age 64) -- his name was Guy George Bailey.
If you're someone like me who doesn't like sugar-coating the pill, go over to another post on this same page, same column: Christmas Day in a Louisiana Dungeon by Ira Glasser. It's not Christmas in the Angola prison, it's a crucifixion as he says.
And just like Its a wonderful life we will be alright.. I always heard, when God shuts one door, he always opens a window, just, sometimes its hell in the hallway...
Saint by example.
To sum up, Clarence demonstrates that GEORGE BAILEY is himself has been unwittingly God's Agent in Bedford Falls even as Henry Potter has unwittingly been the Agent of Satan. That Bedford Falls existed and Pottersville did not was testament to George's overall victory over Satanic influence. That "Pottersville" is a more swingin' joint is irrelevant to the substance of the argument, what is of substance is that BEDFORD FALLS is what (Capra's) God wants for America and POTTERSVILLE is NOT!
Wendell Jamieson did not write a "brilliant" essay of any kind. It was shallow and obtuse and written by someone who has completely misunderstood the intent of the movie and its basic symbolism -- as RELIGIOUS (Catholic) ALLEGORY!!!
It is established right from the opening frame of the film that this is a movie about how and what kind of people get into Heaven and become angels. The story is NOT ABOUT GEORGE BAILEY! The story is about HOW AN ANGEL EARNS HIS WINGS!!!!
To earn his wings Clarence must convince George Bailey to stop from jumping off the "bridge" to the Pearly Gates, and thereby ruining a lifetime of "Good Works" and personal sacrifice. In his 39 years George has lived a Saintly existence -- minus one thing -- FAITH! He has spent his life doing God's work but not for the Glory of God, he's done it out of individual conscience. Clarence's task is to SAVE George's soul by provoking him into a declaration of faith (which George finally does after returning to the bridge).
The alternate reality of "Pottersville" is what Bedford Falls would have become if George had not spent the last 20 years unknowingly doing the Lord's work. To show his indebtedness, God sends Clarence to show George that He is not unappreciative of those who lived their lives by the Gospel without quite appreciating that they have done so. As witness to the Divine, George Bailey becomes a Saint in fact, not just a
Movies can be read in different ways. Yours is interesting and valid, but you cannot claim that others "completely misunderstood the intent of the movie." To say that is a tad ignorant and arrogant.
The social message of the film is pervasive and obvious: Americans need to continue to make sacrifices like they did during the depression and the war. A return to individual greed will lead to Pottersville. A story about religious redemption could have been framed many ways, but Cabra chose to tell the story within a socio-economic frame.
Sacrifices for the common good? No wonder the movie flopped when it was released in 1946. George W. Bush completed the building of Pottersville. Let's see if we can tear it down.
The movie failed in 1946 because it was TOO religious. That war left a lot of people jaded and the much more humanistic THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES was the smash hit at the Box Office and the Awards shows. The bombadier played by Dana Andrews is an outright atheist -- which was unheard of for the protagonist in a Hollywood movie then, especially since nothing happens to him which can pass for religious redemption.
I am 100% correct about IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Note that the final dialogue between George and Zuzu is an affirmation of faith -- the existence of angels and, therefore, God. During his time with Clarence, George was incredulous of the miracle being shown him even after most believers would have accepted it (witnessing the undamaged tree would have sold most, but the complete recreation of "Martini's" into "Nick's" mere hours after having left it?). George Bailey has spent his adult life as a minimalist Christian because he never got any of the self-interested things he would pray for -- yet the opening scene of the movie has THE PEOPLE OF BEDFORD FALLS PRAYING FOR GOD TO HELP GEORGE BAILEY! God responds by sending an actual angel whose mission is to show George that GEORGE was himself the answer to the prayers of all the people he had befriended and aided over the years.
No analysis of that movie is valid which does not address the religious aspect of its framing.
Every time a bell rings, a bank gets a bailout and their executives get a bonus!
Ha! Very nice :-)
I initially thought you wrote "Every time a bell rings, a HANK gets a bailout..."
which is true, too, in a 2008 way. ;>
We live in a apocalyptic age; most like myself were born into it by the sins of the past.
There generally is not much one can do as can individual; because the great beast; sits so obnoxiously on his thrown, and he has the loudest voce (the media)-- he has the strongest body (the militant armies) too do whatever he wants.
Man made all these things, and only man can stop it -- if he so wishes. which he has not as of yet.
Now that I think of it, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE has an element of postwar existentialism, like the later movies IKIRU and THE SEVENTH SEAL. (They're all about a man evaluating his own life.)
For contemporary audiences, the movie's dark side was a bit too disturbing: it was a box-office disappointment.
Seems to me that Pottersville was a lot more of a human place to live in than the stifling, stagnant, and dreary society of Bedford Falls. "A Wonderful Life" was the product of a traumatized post-war military mind that generated the orderly Levittowns and is still evident in the mobs of flag-waving moralists (and that includes "liberals") who have be one desire: to rid the world of "sinners" (i.e., all those who don't act and think as they do). An aside: if Scrooge had no money to begin with his "conversion", just as that of George Bailey, would be of neither interest nor effect.
Unfortunately, you are correct, Stirner. There are a lot more Pottersvilles's out in America than Bedford Falls's. It used to be only "bad ol' big cities" that were full of vice, crime, gambling dens, drug houses, whorehouses, and corruption. Now it's "li'l ol' small towns" that have been "Potterized" too. In fact, it's hard to find any city or town that hasn't been "Potterized" in some way. Even the Heartland of America (Iowa) has a state lottery and Vegas-style casinos (and the prostitution, the drugs, the crime that go hand-in-glove with them). Maybe George Bailey was a "sappy, bleeding-heart liberal" for wanting to help immigrants and small-town naifs and keeping Bedford Falls a little old-fashioned; but I'll take him over mean, corrupt, cold-hearted Henry Potter (and his vision of what America should be) any day.
Vice is in the eye of the beholder. I suppose small towns were better when they consisted of all white citizens who lynched with impunity and strung up Darwin on the lawn. The narrow-mindset of small town America has had far too much influence for far too long. It is time we leave God and his angels to Milton and put the Bible back on the shelf next to Greek mythology.
Capra might have been telling a story about God and redemption, but its time we told the truth today.
"... liberals ... have one desire: to rid the world of ... all those who don't act and think as they do."
The stunning amount of projection that conservatives exhibit never ceases to amaze me.
It is liberals and the liberal ethos that has allowed and facilitated all of the social advances in the last hundred years - from suffrage to the new deal's social safety nets to civil rights to name only three of many. The exact OPPOSITE of forcing everyone to act according to one rigid set of beliefs/rules. Nope, that mentality is the exclusive province of conservatives and the right wing. The liberal ethos is to embrace diversity and a wide range of viewpoints and beliefs. And if you, "Stirner", seriously want to try to debate that last statement, go right ahead. I'm ready for a good laugh.
THE REBEL JESUS
by Jackson Browne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCsLtsn_Z70
(starting with second verse)
Well they call him by 'the Prince of Peace'
And they call him by 'the Savior'
And they pray to him upon the seas
And in every bold endeavor
And they fill his churches with their pride and gold
As their faith in him increases
But they've turned the nature that I worship in
From a temple to a robber's den
In the words of the rebel Jesus
Well we guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why there are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus
Now pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgement
For I've no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In a life of hardship and of earthly toil
There's a need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus
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