It's a Destructive Life

'Tis the season — for homecomings and wassail and shopping malls. And, of course, for "It's A Wonderful Life," the American classic which rightly — if ceaselessly — claims its place as a feature of our Christmas celebration.

For most viewers, the film is a light and happy reflection of the holidays. Yet, if there is a dark side of the American dream, the film quite ably captures that aspect as well — and contrary to popular belief, it is not found in Mr. Potter. That dark side is represented by George Bailey himself (yes, Princeton's own Jimmy Stewart '32): the optimist, the builder, and, above all, the man who deeply hates the town that gives him sustenance, who craves nothing else but to get out of Bedford Falls and remake the world. As we watch "It's a Wonderful Life" this season, we should be aware that, in the end, George Bailey destroys the town that saves him.

We like this film because it portrays a world that increasingly eludes us. The first scene pictures an idyllic Bedford Falls covered in freshly fallen snow, people strolling on sidewalks, healthy store fronts comfortably framing the tree-lined streets. It is an America dying if not yet dead: Scathed first by Woolworth and mortally wounded by Wal-Mart; mercilessly bled by the automobile; drained of life by subdivisions and suburbs. We like this movie because it portrays Mr. Gower's drug store as a place to meet neighbors over a soda or an ice cream, not merely a place to be treated as a faceless consumer buying an endless variety of painkillers. We like this movie because, like Cheers, Martini's bar is somewhere everybody knows your name.

George Bailey hates this town. Even as a child, he wants to escape its limiting clutches, ideally to visit the distant and exotic locales vividly pictured in National Geographic. As he grows, his ambitions are recognizable but redirected: as he says, he wants "to build things, design new buildings, plan modern cities." The modern city of his dreams is imagined in direct contrast to the enclosure of Bedford Falls: It is to be open and fast. He craves "to shake off the dust of this crummy little town" to build "airfields, skyscrapers one hundred stories tall, bridges a mile long . . . " George's ambitions are to alter the landscape so to accommodate modern life, to uproot nature and replace it with monuments of human accomplishment, to re-engineer life for mobility and swiftness, one unencumbered by permanence, one no longer limited to a moderate and comprehensible human scale.

George's great dreams are thwarted by innumerable circumstances of fate and accident: He is consigned to live as the manager of the Bailey Building and Loan. Yet his grandiose designs are not forgotten. Rather, they are channeled into the only available avenue that his position now offers: He creates not airfields nor skyscrapers nor modern cities, but remakes Bedford Falls itself. His efforts are portrayed as nothing less than noble: By creating "Bailey Park," a modern subdivision of single-family houses, he allows hundreds of citizens of Bedford Falls to escape the greedy clutches of Mr. Potter. But while Potter is malevolent, we should not automatically conclude that George is praiseworthy. Bailey Park is nothing short of a modern nightmare, especially when we consider it in contrast to Bedford Falls.

Bedford Falls has an intimate town center, and blocks of houses with front porches where people greet neighbors who constantly amble on the nearby sidewalks. It is a town with a deep sense of place and history. When George's car crashes into a tree, the owner berates him for the gash he has made: "My great-grandfather planted this tree," he says. He is the fourth generation to live in his house, and the tree's presence serves as a living link to his ancestors, a symbol of the stories told about the dead to the living and the yet unborn.

Bailey Park, on the other hand, has no trees. It is a modern subdivision: The trees have been plowed under to make room for wide streets and large yards with garages. It is designed primarily for the convenience of automobiles; thus, there are no front porches, because there are no sidewalks. In contrast to Bedford Falls — which is always filled with strolling people — the development is empty, devoid of human presence. The residents of this modern development are presumably hidden behind the doors of their modern houses (watching that newfangled invention, the television), or, if outside, relaxing on the back patios. One doubts that anyone will live in these houses for four generations, much less one.

The film ends with the moving and unforgettable scene in which innumerable friends and relatives crowd into the Bailey living room, emptying their pockets to save George, the unjustly accused man. "They didn't ask any questions, George," says Uncle Billy; at the first cry for help, the neighbors grabbed their savings and ran to help their lifelong friend. One wonders, however, if George's children — likely to grow up in the Bailey Parks of the world — will be able to count on this kind of help when they are adults. By realizing his vision of transience and impersonality, George bequeaths to his children a society in which they will be expected to sink or swim wholly based on their own efforts and resources. It's not unlike the society we now live in, come to think of it — a world in which compassionate conservatives and bleeding-heart liberals each vie to be our friends.

We don't notice these things about George Bailey, partly because he is a seemingly decent man, and we root for him against Mr. Potter. But we also don't notice George's animus against the town that sustained him in part, I think, because we find nothing aberrant about his vision: After all, it is largely our own. We should be reawakened the costs incurred by these sympathies. Above all, we should recognize that, in the end, George Bailey is saved ironically by the very community that he devotes his life to destroying. Patrick Deneen is an assistant professor in the politics department. He can be reached at pdeneen@princeton.edu.