ironinkpen

it’s always the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, but never the Irritating Ordeal of Being Known

ironinkpen

someone: [correctly infers something about my personality based on my patterns of behavior]

me: [seethes with rage for some fucking reason]

me af  
Jan 17 2023 42,979 notes Source

fictionadventurer

Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

disgruntled-foreign-patriarch

this is the best analysis of It's a Wonderful Life I've yet read.

myguidingmoon-light

Not to mention that it's also a just badass example of the power of housing and mutual aid

alex51324

Yes!  George Bailey saves his town from becoming the capitalist hellscape Clarence-the-angel shows him, not by defeating Mr. Potter in an epic battle, not by acts of flashy, dramatic heroism, but by showing up for work at the Building & Loan every day, even though it isn’t his dream job.  (He wants to be an explorer.)  

A Building & Loan was a type of community-owned bank: ordinary people deposit into a pool of funds, and were in turn able to borrow from the pool.  Interest rates paid by borrowers went back into the pool, increasing the amount of money that was available for borrowing.  That way, the money just kept circulating through the community, instead of being siphoned off to profit investors in distant cities.  

A lot of B&L’s failed during the Depression, because they weren’t backed by anything other than the public trust--that’s what’s happening in the scene where George asks the townspeople to withdraw enough “just to get by,” instead of demanding their entire deposit back at once, and it’s the closest thing George gets to an epic hero moment--but this was a system that worked well for close to a century, starting in the 1830′s, making it possible for working-class people to buy homes, businesses, and farms.  

Without the Building & Loan, Mr. Potter’s bank is the only source of startup capital in town--and as a result, he gets to decide what kinds of businesses are able to exist, and who is allowed to start them.  And he pockets in the interest, instead of re-investing it in the town’s prosperity, so even when one individual manages to beat the system and succeed, it’s only that individual who benefits, rather than the whole town.  

It’s a very anti-capitalist movie, and it’s kind of startling to realize that, in 1946, this was considered a sufficiently politically-neutral message for the film to get made.  

it's a wonderful life  
Jan 17 2023 38,477 notes Source