In preparation for Christmas, the New York Times has offered two different interpretations of It’s a Wonderful Life in the last week. Both rightly give emphasis to the disturbing, much darker hues of what is only an intermittently sentimental movie. Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey spends most of his adult life being” frustrated and warped” (as Potter acidly observes in his hour of need) by bad luck, at times ugly and destructive resentment, and the tendency of others to rely too quickly and easily upon his real capacity for self-sacrifice.
It goes too far, however, to claim that the movie shows Bedford Falls to be a staid, economically doomed place, that would have been far better off aspiring to be a flashy, fairly sleazy resort town like Pottersville. It may well be true that there is far more easy indulgence to be had in Pottersville, and that gambling towns are the only towns that are now thriving in largely rural corners of once- industrial areas of the country like upstate New York. In the long term, of course, turning over rural areas to become gambling centers is self-defeating (if every other town has a casino, the corruption will spread abundantly but the profits will spread thin– the Freakonomics argument, as always, proves itself to be shallow even in economic terms by neglecting the moral assumptions that make a- or immorality profitable as an exception to more general moral rules). If theology is off limits for sophisticates of this kind, they should at least have to read Daniel Bell, or in certain moments, Kant.
The movie shows how an exalted and almost oppressively material enjoyment is purchased with human dignity, and how turning over a whole community to material prosperity and pleasure not just as a good, but the good, is never worth doing, because it takes the energies and imperfections of citizens and debases them to the point where they lose their dignity and their freedom. Once Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville, the most prominent man in town ceases to be an assertive businessman and becomes something close to a despot; the no-nonsense bartender becomes a violent cynic; the flirt becomes a prostitute; the problem drinker becomes the homeless town drunk. It’s the kind of place where people like to “get drunk fast” as the bartender puts it. In Bedford Falls, these same predilections are either morally neutral or only mildly pernicious. Yes, George Bailey is understandably eager to leave such a limited place; but the movie tells us that its limitations have a certain purpose that gives them beauty. That is, they keep people connected to one another in a way that allows for genuine citizenship, rather than the immediate material pleasures of living in a plutocratic pleasure dome, where self-governance, in every sense of the term, has vanished. George’s heroism– what makes him “the richest man in town”– is that he has, at great cost, governed his own desires, and thus kept Bedford Falls a free town. (With, granted, the real consolation of being married to a beautiful and supportive Donna Reed.) That this argument may appear paradoxical or illiberal to some is a reflection upon the ambient utiltarian ethos abroad in our culture (and in Freakonomics), not upon the argument itself.
