I sat down on Christmas Eve to watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ – it’s been a while – expecting a comforting serving of Christmas sentimentality with extra cheese. What I saw was a polemic about banking and a parable about karma and interconnectedness. You may be thinking, ‘Remind me not to do Christmas with Vishvapani,’ but bear with me.
George Bailey, played by James Stewart, reluctantly inherits the Buildings and Loans – a credit union in Bedford Falls that his father has laboured to develop in the face of Potter’s predatory, profit-driven financial institution (i.e. what these days we would call ‘a bank’). George wants to see the world and do great things, but his father dies and the only way to keep the credit union out of Potter’s hands is to run it himself. It’s a moral stand and here’s what he tells Potter:
‘this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you’ll ever be.’
When the crash comes there’s a run on savings and Potter offers to buy out the desperate creditors by giving them 50 cents to the dollar, which would leave him owning the credit union. Bailey stops the panic with another big speech:
‘If Potter gets hold of this Building and Loan, there’ll never be another decent house built in this town … He wants to keep you living in his slums and paying the kind of rent he decides. Joe, you had one of those Potter houses, didn’t you? Well, have you forgotten? Have you forgotten what he charged you for that broken-down shack? Here, Ed. You know, you remember last year when things weren’t going so well, and you couldn’t make your payments? You didn’t lose your house, did you? Do you think Potter would have let you keep it? Can’t you understand what’s happening here? Don’t you see what’s happening? Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicking and he’s not. That’s why. He’s picking up some bargains. Now, we can get through this thing all right. We’ve got to stick together, though. We’ve got to have faith in each other.’
That word ‘faith’ is no accident. It’s the confidence that every financial institution requires: George can’t repay the people who put their savings in Bailey’s because he’s loaned it out to other townsfolk so they can buy a house. The system works if everyone trusts it, but without trust everyone loses, and profiteers like Potter can take advantage. It’s also a larger faith in human goodness and in life as something wonderful.
Eventually, George has his own crisis of faith – a crisis on all these levels – and says it would have been better if he’d never been born. This is the really famous bit when an angel appears shows him the world as it would have been if he hadn’t lived at all. Without his moral stands and all the nameless acts of kindness and of love Potter would have had his way. Bedford Falls would have become Pottersville, a town based on competition, desperation and hard liquor where all the neighbourly kindness has dried up. George made the difference.
The two kinds of banking create two different worlds. That’s a pretty damning critique of the banking we in fact have, but the morality is personal as well as social. We realise that there’s another kind of accounting beside the financial one, that reckons up Bailey’s good deeds. The angel knows this, but he doesn’t just read from the ledger to weigh up Bailey’s fate on Judgement Day. The film’s moral order is the lived reality of Bedford Springs – a town small and interconnected enough for moral laws to be visible in the rippling effects of an individual’s actions on the whole community. This is Middle America as Middlemarch, and George Eliot’s judgement on Dorothea in the novel’s final sentence could be the motto of Capra’s film.
The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George is rescued by the generosity of the people he has helped over the years, who are only too happy to help George in his hour of need in response to the diffusive aid they have received from him. If that isn’t karma in action, I don’t know what is.
Of course, the movie pulls its punches politically. Not only does Potter not get his comeuppance, the movie swerves away from the awkward truth that he has already won, and a system that requires a deus (or angel) ex machina is no system at all. But that shouldn’t detract from George’s moral victory, especially when the personal and the social are as interwoven as they are in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.
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