It's A Wonderful Life

It's nearly Christmas and even the dry lawyer who is Further or Alternatively feels the need to supply you with some seasonal content. It's A Wonderful Life (IAWL) is the obvious subject for FOA Christmas fare since there are, as we all know, two heartwarming films about a family man and financier called George and I have written the definitive work on the other one (Mary Poppins). 

However, it turns out that Niall Gooch has saved me much of the work of writing about IAWL by this piece, which I recommend to you. I have only a few points to add from a more or less Christmassy angle.

IAWL is openly didactic, from its title onwards. That’s not a criticism: it is, as Gooch says, a wonderful and morally serious film. My point is just that it sets out its stall openly and honestly: it 'does what it says on the tin' just as much as Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. That means that if you are inclined to attack a heartwarming film - and the urge comes across many of us, at least those of the male persuasion (although it normally dissipates by adulthood) - then IAWL's target is pretty obvious: it's not a wonderful life, innit?, hurr hurr. By contrast, as I have written, the moral import of Mary Poppins is more deeply hidden and so the standard attempts to knock it are more superficial (e.g. spotting the dodgy cockney accent). 

Gooch mentions Brief Encounter as an example of another film which is open to sixth-form style 'daring' iconoclasm of this kind, and I'll come back to Brief Encounter below. But he also talks about a more substantial worry in the film, one which is related to its intrinsic didacticism. I think it is worth looking at this point a little more and by reference to some other films (all of which I will assume you have seen).

The point I want to explore relates to what we might call the 'moral economy' of IAWL, i.e. the total morality of the universe in which it is set. IAWL prominently features an angel and invokes broadly Christian cosmology, and the thesis I want to explore below is that it is essential to the moral economy of the film that it is backed by something akin to the Christian God. To put it another way, you might think that, for the purposes of plot, George Bailey's chance to see how the world would have been if he had not lived could have been provided by a mysterious old woman met in a dark wood, or a magic book or amulet, or a secular version of Scrooge's ghosts, or a dream (perhaps with some souvenir turning up to make us question whether it had really been a dream ...), but I don't think any of these would do the job of earning the happy ending that the film forces on us. 

Let's start by looking at another popular (and rather good) film in which a normal sort of man in the middle of his life gets a supernatural wake-up call: Groundhog Day. There are plainly parallels: in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, has the benefit of an intervention which is every bit as supernatural as Bailey's one and, as a result of that intervention, Connors changes his outlook on life. Connors comes to learn that goodness is its own reward and indeed, not just goodness, but excellence in all areas of life, from music to healthcare. He learns to abandon the hope of mere passing pleasure (in the form of Andie MacDowell for the night) for the sake of things which are good in themselves, and is eventually rewarded with lasting pleasure (in the form of Andie MacDowell for the rest of his life). More particularly, what Connors learns to love is George Bailey's life: small town life rather than big city excitement.

There is no need for God in this story. Connors' intervention, unlike Bailey's, is wholly unexplained - it's just a brute and atheistic fact - and that works fine.  The happy ending of the film is nonetheless fairly earned: at the end of his ordeal, Connors is fully redeemed and fully rewarded here on Earth by coming to learn that heaven is small town America. The moral economy of the film is perfect and complete without Christian cosmology. (Indeed, there are a couple of more or less overtly pagan aspects to Groundhog Day: at one point Connors speculates that he might be a god of some kind, and there is, I think, something classically pagan about the fact that Connors learns excellence in every aspect of life, not merely the moral.)

Something similar could be said about Back to the Future, another example of supernatural exploration of counterfactuals: the happy ending in the film - heaven, if you want to put it that way - is, again, contented family life in small town or suburban America.

In IAWL, by contrast, family life in small town America is plainly not heaven. This is the precisely the worry that Gooch points to: Bailey is a man who had "dreams of walking with giants, to carve his niche in the edifice of time", if you forgive the quotation, but ends up stuck in Bedford Falls, living a smaller and more constrained existence than the one of which he had dreamt. The fact that his life has not turned out how he had wished is an important part of the build-up to his crisis and Clarence's intervention: it is not merely that he has had a sudden financial reverse, but rather that he feels his whole life has been wasted.

By rights, therefore, IAWL should be similar to films like Brief Encounter or Casablanca in which the characters choose duty over desire - and pay a price for it. All three films' central characters bear the marks of a small but ineradicable tragedy in the form of the price paid for obeying one's duty. (I note in passing that Brief Encounter, Casablanca and IAWL are all films about the War in their own way, or at least films made for an audience familiar with the experience of war. It is not fanciful to think that the excitements, dangers and temptations of war - if only the temptation to run away or cry - mean that the tension between desire and duty was a more immediate and familiar one to audiences of the day than it is to us in our more comfortable times.) 

But IAWL isn't presented as a parallel to those films. In Brief Encounter and Casablanca, the film ends by giving us the bittersweet sensation that that's just the way life has to be. IAWL could have gone the same way: it might have ended by showing us Bailey a few months later, facing a minor domestic crisis after a trying day dealing with numpties at the savings and loan, about to explode with anger, then spotting something that reminded him of Clarence, and finally sighing, shaking his head, smiling a rueful smile and getting on with things. But instead the film has every bit as much of a happy ending as Groundhog Day and Back to the Future, if not more so. It tries to persuade us that a life like that - an everyman's life that turns out small and constrained because desire has given way to duty - is, all things considered, wonderful. How?

The most obvious way that the film persuades Bailey that his life is worthwhile is by showing him that things would have been worse for his whole town if he had not existed. But if you think about it for a moment, the outcome of that 'but for' comparison has been shockingly rigged: Bailey's life to date has included saving people's lives while he was still a boy and resisting a local tyrant. Bailey is not really an average Joe. Most of the poor souls who feel that life has not gone quite as they planned cannot look back on life-saving exploits and single-handedly maintaining the key institution for housing their neighbours as among their achievements. If you were to see how the world would have been without your life (or the lives of, say, the characters in Brief Encounter, or even Mrs Bailey in IAWL), you would surely be likely to see someone quite similar to yourself taking your job, someone quite similar to yourself meeting your life partner, another family living perfectly happy lives in your house and so on and so on. I do not recommend that you think about it too much: doing so can quickly put you in need of Clarence's attentions, and I don't fancy your chances of getting them.

And if the makers of the film are allowed to weight the scales in this kind of utilitarian calculation of the pluses and minuses of a life then why can't the cynical viewer do the same? What if Bailey had left Bedford Falls: surely a man with his talents and industry would have been able to do even greater things for the world than the petty victories he actually won?

In my piece on Mary Poppins I quoted that bit in Middlemarch about what is "half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs". It is indeed the overt message of IAWL that Bailey has helped people and that's a Good Thing. But looking at it that way, even the Middlemarch way, involves an unattractively utilitarian calculation, and I don't think that kind of calculation is what the film is really about. I say that for three reasons.

(1) I think utilitarinanism is ultimately unsatisfying even within the moral economy of the film: I simply don't think it is enough to bear the ultimate sense of completeness and justification that we see at the end of IAWL. It is open to the cynical questions about rigging the scales that I outlined above.

(2) The film is meant to tell us something about the world outside itself, about other average Joes of the Bailey kind, and outside the film such a utilitarian calculation is even less convincing: many people owe a lot to Bailey's life, perhaps, but, as I have set out above, it would be idle sentimentality to think that that is true of everyone. 

(3) Finally, as Gooch points out, the story of Bailey's life is the story of someone following a sense of duty, not someone weighing up utilitarian considerations. Something would be amiss in the moral economy of the film if Bailey's motivations were not ultimately aligned with the values of the universe in which he exists.

I think the next sentence of my piece on Mary Poppins is closer to the answer: I wrote that "The universe – in the shape of Clarence – notices even the smallest kindnesses". The moral economy of IAWL requires God. The ending of IAWL is perfectly happy, despite the fact that Bailey pays the price for sacrificing desire for duty (as in Brief Encounter and Casablanca), not because he has been fully rewarded in this life (as Connors has in Groundhog Day or Marty McFly in Back to the Future), but because Clarence's work is an assurance that he will be rewarded in the next life. Nothing short of a world of infinite justice beyond this one justifies us believing in the complete happiness of the ending - the wonderfulness of life itself. Utilitarianism leaves us with too many unanswerable questions; and merely to say that goodness is its own reward is to overlook the carefully-rendered fact that it isn't quite, that there is something small, sad and wasted - something unrewarded - about the quiet, circumscribed and frustrated lives of such as Bailey, a smallness unameliorated at the end of the film. 

In short, my view is that the utilitarian calculus is just window-dressing: the heart of the film is a belief that following one's duty is noticed by God.  That, I think, is why it is essential to the ending of the film that we must think of Clarence 'getting his wings' at that very moment: we have to be reminded that the moral economy of IAWL is backed by heaven. 

I am reminded here of a passage from CS Lewis in which (as I recall) someone in heaven is alerted to the arrival of a celebrity, but the celebrity in question turns out not to be someone who was famous on earth, but a forgotten woman who was, say, poor, oppressed and ill, but who nonetheless worked to serve others. The point being that people such as her are the people who are first in heaven. It is that kind of idea that underpins how we are to think of Bailey at the end of IAWL: someone who is guaranteed an eternal reward, someone who is recognised for his goodness in the way that matters.

Further to confirm my thesis, recall another famous feature of the film, namely the fact that the baddy, Mr Potter, goes unpunished for his crime. The baddy in Back to the Future, Biff, is punished; the baddy in Groundhog Day is Connors himself, and he is punished. But Potter gets off scot-free. (I recall that there is a bit of pub quiz-type trivia in the fact that a film as wholesome as IAWL was released in breach of the Hays Code - the moral guidelines governing American films at the time - by allowing Potter to get away with it in this way.) Again, how does this fit into the moral economy of the film? Happy endings in films require baddies to be punished and/or repentent ("The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means"): how can we have a perfectly happy ending to a film of this kind without the baddy paying for his crimes? My answer is that it all works precisely because we are to understand that he will be punished for his crime in the next life, just as Bailey is to be rewarded. 

On reflection, I think Gray’s Elegy is a better comparison for IAWL than Middlemarch. Bailey is "Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast // The little tyrant of his fields withstood" who is sure to die "to Fortune and to Fame unknown". But we know - we have plainly seen - that all is well with him. The reason being that both IAWL and Elergy end with us looking not at Bailey, the anonymous rustic, but at the God who guarantees an ultimately happy ending.

The converse is to this is that if you reject the idea of God, or if you are not prepared to suspend your disbelief for the purposes of the film, then I think you are perfectly entitled to take the view that IAWL does not deserve its happy ending, that Bailey deserved no more than the consolations available to the disappointed lovers in Brief Encounter and that the film is saccharine nonsense. 

It would neat to say that the same is true of Christmas itself, i.e. that if you reject God then you are left with fluff and nonsense. But I don't think that's true, at least it is not true of "Christmas" in the sense of the festivity which has captured the popular and commercial imagination of the Western world. 

There are various reasons why it is Christmas rather than the more important feast of Easter which has taken off in this way: the time of year, the predictability of the date and the absence of gruesome torture and execution scenes from the underlying story are some that spring to mind. But one reason for its appeal is surely that the supernatural details, although picturesque, are strictly extraneous to the story. 

The story is just an unexceptional family making the best of things in difficult circumstances. Just like a typical non-IAWL Christmas film, The Snowman, say, or Love, Actually, Last Christmas, The Apartment or Planes, Trains and Automobiles (yes, strictly a Thanksgiving film, but "Jingle Bells" is strictly a Thanksgiving song), films which may contain supernatural elements but are not unambiguously Christian, the story does not end with any promise that things will be perfect, just that sometimes good things can happen in an imperfect world. 

There is something tediously predictable about people telling us that the Christmas story tells us to be nice to unmarried mothers or refugees or homeless people or whatever, but one reason it is predictable is because it is true: these signs of an imperfect world really are there in the story.

Moreover, the Christmas story is about a baby being happily and successfully born, which is both utterly quotidian and yet powerfully wonderful. (There is a successful TV programme whose very name - One Born Every Minute - captures the normality of the event yet persuasively presents each birth as wonderful and amazing.) While it takes a lot of supernatural (or at least filmic) effects to persuade us that a middle-aged man's life is wonderful, no such effort is required for a newborn baby. 

So, while IAWL promises absolute happiness, in my interpretation at least, the Christmas Story, as told and re-told in the Gospels, countless infant nativities and Christmas specials, simply leaves us with a family stuck far from home in a dirty manger, having achieved the everyday yet still wonderful achievement of a successful birth. All is not well, yet there is still happiness. That message sits happily with believer and unbeliever alike.

On that note, I wish you all the merriest Christmas and happiest New Year achievable in this imperfect world.