CRITIC, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him. (Ambrose Bierce)
The light shines in darkness, a darkness which was not able to master it. (John 1:5)
I have always thought that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who watch the movie It’s a Wonderful Life every year at Christmas and those who do not. This week, I was shocked to find that this neat categorization is in fact inaccurate. There are men and women who have never watched It’s a Wonderful Life (let alone read it). And these—to borrow the phrasing of that man-who-would-be-king Henry F. Potter—are no common, ordinary yokels; they are intelligent, smart, good-hearted people, perhaps even the brightest of their respective bunches. And yet, they have deprived themselves, or been deprived, of one of God’s greatest gifts: the watching of It’s a Wonderful Life.
This is a sad state of affairs. But it is not as sad as it could have been, had certain critical opinions prevailed. On December 23, 1946, The New York Times, in a foreshadowing of its present-day participation in the ritual killing of good sense and sound reason, ran a review by Bosley Crowther faulting the film for its “its illusory concept of life” and its ultimate weakness: “the sentimentality of it.” The story itself is a “moralistic fable” and its hero, George Bailey, is a “figment of simple Pollyanna platitudes.” Capra’s work is “emotionally gratifying,” Crowther admits—but that’s the extent of the entries on the positive side of the ledger.
Not to be outdone, The New Republic featured Manny Farber’s sneering appraisal of the film as another entry, in Capra’s efforts to “convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the Saturday Evening Post covers of Norman Rockwell.” Lest his reader retain any doubts that It’s a Wonderful Life is anything less than a cinematic miscreation, Farber sprinkles his review with such characterizations and descriptions as “hysterical”; “moralizing”; “frantic”; “unbearable whimsy”; “absurdly over-simplified”; “contrived”’; and “simple-minded.” And just to be sure that the film is dead, good and dead, Farber implicates the audience in this naïve buffoonery: the path of the film “doesn’t give much credit to the intelligence of the audience.” If you happen to be someone who likes the film and enjoys the stroll down the Capra-presented path of life—well, then you must be a simple-minded buffoon yourself.
Had the Crowthers and Farbers of the world had their way, none of us would watch It’s a Wonderful Life—not at Christmastime, not ever. In the battle for Bedford Falls, however, the Crowthers and Farbers lost. But the battle was not bloodless. There are people who have only withering disdain or outright dislike for the movie, just as there are others who have still yet to witness for the first time the glory of Capra’s masterpiece. To be clear, I do not lay the fault for these casualties of good taste at the feet of the Crowthers and Farbers. For those who see It’s a Wonderful Life as a contrived and mawkish token of American nostalgia, best consigned to the rubbish heap of history, I doubt they do so because somewhere along the way they picked up a copy of the January 6, 1947, edition of The New Republic and nodded in vigorous agreement with Manny Farber. They don’t see the film in the way they do because Farber or Crowther told them so; rather, they see it the way they do for the same reasons that Farber and Crowther saw it in the way they did. Never mind the moralizing: I mean this simply as an observation of the human condition. By nature, all of us can know and all of us can love. What we know and how we love determines how we see life. We see what we know how to see and we see what we want to see.
It’s a Wonderful Life could be the ultimate piece of modern art: the viewer sees in it what he wants to see; the story means what the viewer wants it to mean. Take, for example, the “family man.” He may not be the most well-adjusted member of society; he has his fair share of faults and failings (a shortness of temper, a streak of forgetfulness and selfishness, a tendency on occasion to have one drink too many)—but taken all in all, he treasures his wife and children and honestly desires to honor and love them. He is, like they say of the archetypal family man himself, George Bailey, “A good guy, God—give him a break.” For a man such as this, It’s a Wonderful Life can offer a full-hearted affirmation of the intuitive goodness of living, of the nobility of marriage and the joy of children, of the dignity of both work and leisure; paired with this affirmation is a full-throated rejection of a way of life that is base and selfish, that flattens down responsibility to make way for ambition, that accepts cynicism or apathy as viable alternatives to anger in confrontation with the evils of the world and other men.
Now on the opposite extreme are the Crowthers and Farbers of both past and present. They are the critics—professionally and otherwise. A critic, in Ambrose Bierce’s famous definition, “boasts himself hard to please.” And that makes him both a cynic and an idealist. Through the lens of idealism or cynicism, It’s a Wonderful Life becomes nothing more than a rich example of philosophical vacuity, or in political or economical propaganda, or in pietistic diversion, or penny-ante theatricals. Or it is a combination of these. Or it is none of these. Whatever the case may be, they assure us, make no mistake: what you see is soaked in sentimental hogwash. It’s not A Wonderful Life, but A Sentimental One—a life that feels real but is not real, that feels good but is not good, that feels meaningful but is not meaningful. Real life is nasty and brutish and sometimes short—perhaps not everywhere or all the time, but somewhere and for someone. For every one happy marriage, take five failed ones. For every happy child, take three neglected ones. For every happy town, allow ten oppressed ones. And so on and so forth. What’s wrong with the world? Let George Bailey answer: “Wrong? Everything’s wrong!” The cynic is content to stop there; the idealist continues and claims the capability to remedies all those wrongs.
Call it confirmation bias if you want to feel fancy, but we see what we want to see strikes me as a fairly reliable maxim for our default mode of looking at things we love or anti-love (hate)—be that a parent or sibling, a spouse or child, a friend or neighbor or co-worker. Seeing in this way allows us to avoid conflicts and maintain allegiances, as the case may be. Seeing in this way is natural (“Do not even the pagans do the same?”)—an instinctual power over which we have little formative influence. We can insulate this way of seeing from knowledge. If I accept the possibility that this person whom I despise may not be as bad as I make him out to be, then I will have to change the way I look at him. And change is no fun. Even if I know that this insulating tendency is wrong, I can persist in it all the same. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
Looking at the world with blinders on is no better than looking at the world blindly. Unblinkered vision does not mean I see perfectly; it just means I can see more widely and sometimes even more deeply. Whether I actually see in that way is up to me. To see as I know how to see is a technical power, a power that is only as strong or as weak as its wielder chooses to make it. To see in an enemy a friend is not natural. To see in an intractable child your own son is not natural. To see a man in his dotage and recognize your own flesh and blood is not natural. We know that because we don’t do it accidentally. We can barely do it on purpose. And, absent drastic divine intervention, it takes a lifetime to learn it. But it can indeed be learned. However painstaking, ponderous, or pitiful the process, this power can be obtained.
Don’t believe me? Ask George Bailey. An intelligent, smart, ambitious man—the smartest in the crowd, mind you—George is a man of powerful sight and foresight. He can keep his head in a crisis, as Potter reminds him: “Take during the depression, for instance. You and I were the only ones that kept our heads. You saved the Building and Loan, and I saved all the rest.” He thinks on his feet and his thinking yields results, real results that help people, improve their lives, get them on their feet or keep them there. When Sam Wainwright tells George that the family business has plans to build a factory in Rochester, George’s first thought is of his neighbors and his town—the very people and place he has always wanted to escape. “Why not right here?” he asks Sam. “You remember that old tool and machinery works? You tell your father he can get that for a song. And all the labor he wants, too. Half the town was thrown out of work when they closed down.” Little wonder, then, that the townspeople storm heaven with such declarations as: “I owe everything to George Bailey. Help him, dear Father,” and “He never thinks about himself, God; that’s why he’s in trouble.”
Help him. He’s in trouble. And then: “Please, God. Something’s the matter with Daddy.” If George is such a great and resourceful guy, why has he hit the skids? Something is the matter, not with the world, but with him, with George. What’s the matter? He can’t see clearly. “Show me the way, God,” he prays in that pivotal scene at Martini’s bar. This lack of clarity is not limited only to Christmas Eve, 1945, and its attendant worries and obligations and missing eight thousand dollars. All his life, George has tended towards tunnel vision: for good, it is a singular strength of focus (rescuing the Building & Loan, sacrificing his education for his brother, marrying Mary Hatch); for ill, it is a blind heedlessness that produces antagonism, pride, and—yes—cynicism.
I don’t know why we don’t all have pneumonia. This drafty old barn! Might as well be living in a refrigerator. Why did we have to live here in the first place and stay around this measly, crummy old town? … Wrong? Everything’s wrong! You call this a happy family? Why did we have to have all these kids?
We have seen It’s a Wonderful Life so many times that Clarence’s words at the end, “You really had a wonderful life,” are a comforting reassurance, not a shocking revelation. But it should be shocking. George really did have a wonderful life, but he needed an angel and the chance to see what the world would be like without him to realize that. Eight thousand dollars are lost and the threat of bankruptcy and prison and scandal looms upon him—and this is all that George can see. But all that he can see is not all that is. Light and life endure.
A popular last-ditch effort to downplay the greatness of It’s a Wonderful Life is the assertion that it is not, in fact, a “Christmas” story. “Some joke,” as George Bailey would say. All literary theories to the contrary notwithstanding, the kind of man who makes a story is a perfectly functional marker of what kind of story that story is. Capra said he made It’s a Wonderful Life neither for the “oh-so-bored critics nor the oh-so-jaded literati,” but for “his kind of people”: “the weary, the disheartened, and the disillusioned”; “the wino, the junkie, the prostitute”; “the downtrodden, the pushed-around, the pauper”; “the homeless and the loveless”; “her whose cross is heavy and him whose touch is ashes”; “the abandoned grandfathers staring vacantly in nursing homes,” “the Magdalenes stoned by hypocrites,” and “the afflicted Lazaruses with only dogs to lick their wounds.” And what would these people hear from Capra’s story? That no man is a failure. Each man’s life touches so many others. You are the salt of the earth.
How does the maker of Christmas describe the making of that story? “He opened the book and found the place where it was written…”
To preach good news to the poor…
To proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
And how does that redemption come about?
The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.… To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…
“The eye is the light of the whole body, so that if thy eye is clear, the whole of thy body will be lit up.” Before Clarence tells George, “You really had a wonderful life,” he first says: “You see…” For just about his entire life, George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls, “playing nursemaid to a lot of garlic eaters”—in Potter’s pungent phrasing. A man only does something like that in a story (and a story imitates life) because the light is in him. And he sees things in that light. Bailey’s body is not wholly lit up, of course; nobody’s is, after all. We can see brilliantly or darkly or not at all. We can see brilliantly for years only to succumb to crushing darkness. We flit from episode to episode of life, light to dark to light to total blindness and then, before the last gasp, light again. The dark is always there but the light can always overcome it. That is why the most grievous error is to forfeit the greatest gift: life. Because with the loss of life goes the always-on-offer opportunity to live again—and this time in the light.
Credit: Erik Werenskiold, From Lysaker (1909), via Wikimedia Commons; James Stewart, still from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), directed by Frank Capra.