Is it really a Wonderful Life? Or a Wonderful Lie?

I love you truly, truly dear

Life with its shadows, life with its fears

He really has two choices.

• He can go mad, descending into a pit of alcoholism and drug addiction as he seeks to escape from the cold, hard world which he finally sees…
• Or he can go full Potter.

The thing is, George Bailey has seen two different realities. And the horrible realization is that they are actually the same reality.

Oh, in the one he in which he lives, things are inherently nicer — for him. Sure, his niceness has created a bubble of goodwill, charity and Christmas cheer. But take one step outside of Bedford Falls…and it’s Pottersville.

Sam Wainwright, the plastics millionaire lives in POttersville. He is betrothed to Mary but actually has a piece on the side the whole time, as evidenced by the fur-clad bimbo massaging him while he coos at his naive, small-town girlfriend and barks at his so-called best friend, George Bailey, a big-eared sucker whose physical appearance and inherent ‘’goodness”— read “stupid naivete” causes Sam to mock him with a vicious hee-haw, because in Sam Wainwright’s eyes, George Bailey may be lovable…but he’s basically just a jackass.

What about Uncle Billy? An alcoholic nincompoop employed only because George is too soft to throw him out on the streets, a man who uses George and joyfully allows him to go to prison for a crime he commits.

And don’t get me started on Nick, the cheerful manager of Martini’s bar. An ethnic man who exemplifies the working class spirit of the immigrant class, a ccharming example of the Melting Pot of America in one reality; but change a few things and he becomes a vicious violent asshole who literally sprays water or rum or something in an old homeless drunk’s face and then has him thrown out face first into the snow, basically condemning him to death by frostbite and hypothermia.

What about his brother, Harry Bailey, the handsome war hero? A man who gleefully uses his inherent privelage to sexually harass and abuse their African American maid? George turned a blind eye to that all his life.

And Violet? He sees her as little more than a glorified prostitute: a human one with a heart of gold in his reality; an angry fucked up borderline personality in the reality without him.

Mr. Gower. Was it really an accident that he put poison in the diphtheria medicine? Or was it the raging, senselessly vengeful act of a man driven half-mad by grief for the son taken away by influenza? This is a man who fucking beats his own twelve year old employee in his already deaf ear,drawing blood fromit. Of course he comes to his senses, later, once the booze has worn off. But this shit happened in the REAL world, not the world in which George didn’t exist.

What about the affable, jovial Ernie and Bert? A cop and a cab driver, singing in two part harmony:

I love you truly, truly dear

Life with it’s shadows, life with it’s fear

In this seemingly innocent couplet, we see the two warring notions of It’s a Wonderful Life brought to life: and we see the cab-driver, who moments before demanded a tip for his service and was rewarded with water from Bailey’s fedora, a metaphor for the bourgeousie pissing on the proletariat if I’ve ever seen one. Overcome with sentiment he kisses the horny brow of the cop; and the cop responds with fiery violence. Again, the strange dual theme of love vs violence and fear. (There are other homophobic nods in the movie too, most notably the referal to George and Clarence as ‘pixies’ by the thuggish goombah Nick.)

But in the other reality, we have Ernie, the cab driver, the angry working class prole, whose wife “took the kid and ran off”, willing to use the strong arm of the law to beat down a man whose only crime is recognizing him!

Bert, a police officer so enraged by a blow to the face that he shoots his fucking gun into a crowd of innocent bystanders, heedless of the consequences!

And, really, the working class poor George supports with his housing projects are good people. He makes them so with the conviction of his charitous, ultimately Christian belief. He wills their goodness into existence and uses his own financial capital to make it so…because he can’t really bear to be the big business mogul ‘with a harem of wives’ that he always dreamed of being.

But what about the other denizens of Bedford Falls? The man who knocks him out for berating his wife, who George blames for his daughter’s head cold — where does he fit in in the happy utopia of small-town America that Bedford Falls exemplifies?

With this man — the teacher’s husband —we see that not everything in Bedford Falls is a Christmas postcard of a bygone era. There is an anger underneath the surface. There is an inhuman machine of the War effort, where people are separated into soldiers sent off to die on a distant sea; there is the Great Depression, a bank that goes under, robbing most of its patrons of their savings? You don’t even have to step outside of Bedford Falls to see ugliness and brutality, viciousness and inhuman suffering. 90 percent of the town is Pottersville. The ten percent which isn’t isn’t only by the grace of George Bailey, who literally sacrifices his dreams and ambitions to make it so. Only to see it all go away in a horrifying movement of fate which enables Potter, the lord of the town ‘the King’, as Clarence puts it to rob him of his firm’s money and thus, his entire life. In one fell swoop, Potter is able to absolutely destroy a man with a large and loving family and wipe out the lifestyle of an entire class of human beings who are just trying to get by. And that is the world that George sees when he decides to commit suicide.

Certainly, George Bailey is special. He does do good for people. He believes in people and it is his belief that makes his life bearable. But he has, unconsciously, constructed a bubble. The ‘good’ bubble he lives in is by no means defining. There is a whole world out there, a world of suffering and pain and hunger and utter human-on-human savagery.

Maybe this is the positive message. WE humans create, through charity and goodwill our own reality, as George does. But most people are not like George. Most people are like, well, Ernie, Bert, Nick. Prisoners of fear, of shadows: in thrall to their context.

So when George accepts the money from his ‘people’ does he sign his soul over to the devil, even as he gives an angel his wings?

For what is he doing but accepting his proper fealty from his own peasantry, a populace to dumb to realize that they create their own reality? A peasantry he now knows is ‘good’ only because George Bailey has the power and financial resources that allow him to will it to be so.

A few economic tweaks and you get broken homes, violence, horrific deaths.

This is a man who has been driven to commit suicide. What is left for him but endless depression as his illusion of a good and gentle world is completely shattered? Only the comfort of Mr. Gower, the comfort of the bottle, of the syringe…or the comfort of material possession.

Or he can accept the world as it is and use it to his advantage.

The money George Bailey receives is more than just salvation. It is the seed money for his own cruel aristocratic business empire. And the new Bailey will weave his webs like a scurvy little spider just like the Old Potter did. 

Because the Wonderful life he has carefully, if unconsciously constructed may actually be...a Wonderful Lie.

But maybe there is a third path he takes. Maybe, in realizing that he is actually the creator of the goodness in his world, he decides to continue to do that. Perhaps he goes into politics to create greater, larger ‘good’ realities.

If so, how does he fend off the temptations of corruption, when he realizes that inherent good does not really exist and is in fact self created?