#20 ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
Gaslight, Gatekeep, Guardian Angel
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is America’s favorite Yuletide narcotic—an aggressively sentimental fable in which one man’s unpaid labor, stifled dreams, and crushing mental health crisis are spun into a heartwarming morality tale about staying put, shutting up, and being grateful you didn’t drown yourself in the snow. Frank Capra’s beloved holiday classic wants you to believe that self-sacrifice is noble, community is salvation, and that being a broke, broken man with four kids and a mortgage is the highest calling life has to offer.
Let’s start with George Bailey. Jimmy Stewart, the only man in history who could whine charmingly, plays a man who spends the entire movie getting sucker-punched by life. Every time he tries to chase his dreams—college, travel, doing literally anything else—someone needs him to save the family business, fix a crisis, or act as the moral backbone of a town full of helpless adults. And George, of course, obliges. Because he’s a good man—which in this universe means emotionally repressed, exhausted, and financially overextended.
The film’s entire premise hinges on George’s breakdown: on Christmas Eve, overwhelmed by decades of deferred dreams and a missing $8,000 (not his fault), he decides to end his life. Enter Clarence, an angel-in-training with the wingspan of a toddler and the wisdom of a TED Talk, who shows George what the world would look like if he’d never been born. Spoiler: it’s a hellscape. His absence causes everything to collapse—his brother dies, the town becomes a capitalist wasteland, and worst of all, his wife becomes a librarian.
Yes, that’s right. Mary, played by the luminous Donna Reed, is reduced to the most terrifying vision the film can imagine: a single woman with a job and glasses. Capra doesn’t show her mourning George or becoming a pillar of strength. No, she’s timid, bookish, and—gasp!—unmarried. Because in this vision of America, a woman without a man is a tragedy worse than death. Forget that she’s the one who redeems George’s life by rallying the town to support him. In his absence, she’s a ghost of a person, because without him, she’s nothing.
And that’s the core of It’s a Wonderful Life: a deeply gendered, quietly suffocating fantasy about duty, conformity, and community as salvation only if you never, ever step outside your assigned role. George is sainted for sacrificing everything, and the film ends not with him reclaiming any dreams, but with him surrounded by people paying off the latest crisis—cheerfully, in a pile of cash—so he can keep being their moral mule.
The message? Don’t ask for more. Don’t want more. Be glad you’re loved—even if it costs you everything.
3 out of 5 bells ringing
(One for Stewart’s performance. One for the haunting “what if” sequence. One for the existential horror buried under the tinsel. The rest flew off with Clarence, who, unlike George, at least gets promoted for his trouble.)
