“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
– Henry David Thoreau
George Bailey dreamed of one day leaving his hometown of Bedford Falls, Capra’s microcosm of 1940s small-town America. To George, this meant “seeing the world.” From adolescence, George lived with courage, integrity, and attention to others’ sufferings. Early in the film and early in his life, George dives into a frigid pond to save his younger brother, Harry, from drowning during an accident, sustaining a lifelong injury to his own left ear. He would later need someone to dive into a freezing river for him.
In Aristotle’s conception of bios praktikos, human virtue develops by participation in community and civic institutions; a life lived for the good of others.[3] Harry traveled the world, leaving George to steward their father’s faltering Building & Loan Company, making void a prior agreement between the two brothers. This was foreshadowed by their father’s comment about Harry, that “he is still young, and you were born old.” George was born with a virtue normally seen in older men, and thus he was “born old.” The public life—which George viewed as a precursor to a life of adventure—became his personal destiny, and later his civic salvation.
Bedford Falls was in the shadow of Mr. Potter, the antagonist millionaire with whom the company was financially intertwined. The charitable spirit of the company stood opposed to its investor’s greed, a dynamic that brought years of bullying to George’s father, Peter Bailey. It was in the wake of his father’s death that George sacrificed his dreams and fulfilled his father’s. His loss of adventure abroad was tempered by one at home—meeting Mary. George tells her his wish: travel and college, fame and fortune, but Mary makes a secret wish of her own.
Harry returns to Bedford with a wife and a job offer from abroad, salt in the wound for his older brother. George’s restlessness remains, typified by this “crummy old house,” and the crown that just will not stay on the banister. We as viewers resonate with this: the wonder of all things new in birth giving way to an ordinary world and our ordinary responses to it; disappointment anesthetizing us to hope. Yet “the world,” says psychiatrist and philosopher Ian McGillchrist, “is changed by the kind of attention we pay to it.”[4] We are sense-making creatures, and frame of attention we bring to the world often determines the meaning we find there.
“Let the day perish on which I was born,
And the night that said, ‘a man is conceived.’
Let that day be darkness!”
– Job 3:3–4
Potter deceives George, and a large sum of the Building & Loan Company’s money is misplaced. George is at his end, his bitterness reaching a boil; he lashes out at his family and his kids’ teacher on the phone, stumbles to a local bar, and offers a desperate prayer. He is then punched by the husband of that teacher, and is chased by police to the bridge, wishing he had never been born. The churning river symbolizes chaos; what I call the heart-storm. Yet there is something Christian about this moment, beginning with his prayer: the turn toward God, the paradox of lament; when unresolved despair and hope coexist in the human heart. Just then, Clarence, his guardian angel, jumps in.
Sometimes those suffering are given visions: Daniel and the Son of man, Ezekiel by the Chebar canal, and Julian of Norwich’s visions of Christ. Clarence shows George a Bedford Falls without George Bailey: a Harry Bailey drowned, a Building & Loan foreclosed, and the lonely librarian Mary’s unknowing gaze. The visions bring George back to the bridge, praying the famous words, “I want to live again!” While his head is bowed, the snow begins to fall, and the prayer is answered. Suddenly, all that is wrong with life in Bedford is a welcome sight, an awakening that invokes Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: “Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”[5]
What follows are the scenes from the film I love most. The snow, the musical score, and the brightest moments of Jimmy Stewart’s performance: a wide-eyed wonder at the ‘same old, same old’ in Bedford Falls. The perceived absurdity in George’s response is instructive. There is something about changing the nature of attention that changes the world, and there is something distinctly Christian about returning to the same objects of consciousness with new enchantment and wonder.
Christ’s words to Nicodemus, “You must be born again,” run to the core of the biblical vision for human flourishing. Our sin distorts reality, such that coming to the truth requires spiritual rebirth. This is painful, as God often works it out in our suffering, what W.F. Albright called “the catharsis of major upheavals.”[6] But in this process, we begin to see that even in suffering, every moment is teeming with redemptive possibility.
Like George, we need a hero like Clarence; someone to plunge into the dark waters of our despair for us and show us the truth. To enable our own Aristotelian bios, we first need our own public servant. At the end of the film the characters sing together:
“Mild he lay his glory by / Born that man no more may die”
A champion and a teacher, someone to face death for us. At Christmas, a light dawns in human despair; God enters human suffering. Like us, he was born in tears, the pains of consciousness: weeping in the cradle, weeping when his friend dies, weeping in a garden.
“Born to raise the sons of earth / Born to give them second birth”[7]
The movie ends with the joyful generosity of the Bedford community, a people whose love George had spent a slow, unremarkable lifetime earning. George’s life of navigating marriage and public service became his greatest adventure.
George Bailey never existed, but he feels real to me. This film remains a perennial classic in so many households for a reason. Perhaps we could all stand to live with a little more wonder, and our eyes a little wider, like George on the bridge.
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