THE WONDERFUL LIFE WE SQUANDERED.

It's Christmas, which means the culture studies types will be about their usual displays of cranky erudition.  That includes the movies.  The past two years we've examined the fun side of White Christmas.

This year, we'll feature It's a Wonderful Life, which a different class of culture studies types has gone after.  Ten years ago Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen wondered if the movie didn't anticipate a Suburban Experiment that would go wrong.

George [Bailey played by James Stewart] represents the vision of post-war America: the ambition to alter the landscape so as 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 and he remains in Bedford Falls. Most of the film portrays a re-telling of various episodes of George’s life for the benefit of a guardian angel—Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers)—who is sent down to earth to attempt to save George during his greatest test.

While George’s grandiose designs are thwarted, he does not cease to be ambitious, and does not abandon the dream of transforming America, even if his field of dreams is narrowed.

I think that's a variation on the Tragic Vision, you bloom where you're planted.

Professor Deneen's post has generated a lot of reaction, the most recent of which came to my attention just before Christmas of last year, which is to say, after we had settled in for a long winter's nap.  I'll highlight a few salient observations from a variety of longer essays.  Go there for the elaborations.  The tragic vision structures Bethel McGrew in First Things, for example. 

Let's start with what could be a pithy elaboration from National Review's Jack Butler.  "It is heartening to see appreciation for It’s a Wonderful Life extend into a new generation, and for the young to reject the stale, contrived, fallacious contrarianism of one of their elders on this matter."  Strip away the culture-studies wordnoise au courant in the academy, and that argument generalizes.

At Christmas, 2020, when we were all still under house arrest, Mr Butler offered one sort of reaction, namely that the Pottersville of that alternative universe without George Bailey might have been a vision of libertarianism gone libertine.

Pottersville’s pleasures are not harmless ones. The place runs on atomistic individualism and empty pastimes; it’s cruel to the poor and oppressed, and beset by family breakdown and abusive authority figures. It’s essentially devoid of community life, the search for which is at least as important to the American character as individual self-fulfillment is. In Pottersville, the latter has clearly vanquished the former, but individuals still suffer.

The American Conservative's Carmel Richardson continues that argument.

Violet Bick, a flirt who receives George’s sympathy in Bedford Falls, is seen in a nightlife street fight, having become a much worse woman by being allowed to indulge her rational self interest for the benefit of the town’s income. You’ve heard this story. You’ve lived this story. Men and women that are weak in a stronger society succumb to sinful nature far more easily under the all-encompassing seduction of profit uber alles. Capra’s movie saw prophetically the very errors of modern liberalism which are now so visible for Deneen and others to critique as nothing more and nothing less than that same old sinner, greed.

Put another way, you deconstruct bourgeois norms at your peril. Does Pottersville anticipate one of those west coast cities in microcosm, but without the shanty towns and mobile phones?

She also alludes to that squandered wonderful life.

For a young generation fresh out of war and a depression prior to that, two things Jimmy Stewart lived through personally as well as on screen, the gift George Bailey gives his town in these homes is the promise of a future, imperfect as it may be, for a generation that had lost much of its past.

What came before, though, was not good times either.  Let Smithsonian contributor Christopher Wilson elaborate.

[Director Frank] Capra uses history to establish themes of prayer and grief and loss right at the start of the film to connect with themes that would be very familiar to 1946 audiences just coming out of the death and destruction of World War II. Audiences today will learn (or relearn) the terrible toll of the 1918 influenza pandemic that took the lives of about 675,000 Americans and recognize parallels with the uncertainty and devastating grief of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yes, there's a lot of presentism in his essay, which the younger set is probably not intellectually prepared to rebut. His response to the end of the movie, though, is authentic.

As millions of people will do this December, I tear up at the end when George’s friends, neighbors and family come together to replace the money and demonstrate to him that “no man is a failure who has friends.” As a graduate of a Jesuit education, I have always been moved by the theme of selflessness in the film and felt that George’s life of service matched the Jesuit motto of “Men for Others” that I grew up with.

It's also worth keeping in mind that, just after a War that featured Italy as a lesser adversary, the status of people of Italian extraction as American was still contested. Perhaps director Frank Capra was putting down a marker for civil rights and leaving the extension to viewers as an exercise.