George Bailey on the Bridge

by David Kordahl
Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," about to jump off the bridge.
In the fallow days of late December, I watched many holiday movies with my kids. The choices weren’t adventurous: Rudolph, Elf, The Polar Express. Between viewings of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Home Alone 3, The Grinch played no fewer than eight times. My daughters capitalized on their parents’ exhaustion. Their baby brother had just come home from the hospital, and this was turning out better than we’d warned—less screaming, more TV.

But even on vacation there are limits. Instead of Home Alone 4, I insisted we watch an old gem, a movie I remembered fondly from childhood. Everyone loves It’s a Wonderful Life, I declared. It’s a real Christmas classic.

You can probably guess where this is going. Did my daughters (aged five and eight) love It’s a Wonderful Life? They tolerated it. But I felt amazed by what I saw, wrung out, on the verge of tears for the whole last hour.

It’s a Wonderful Life (which, as every appreciation notes three paragraphs in, you should really watch if you haven’t) is a fantasy about contingency. The story is wrapped in holiday gauze and told through intricate flashbacks, but at its heart is George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart in his everyman mode. By the film’s third act, George wants to jump off a bridge and end it all. To stop him, a guardian angel shows him how horrible his town, Bedford Falls, would be if he had never been born. This vision causes George to realize his mistake. He returns to the bridge and prays, “Please, God, I want to live again!” And—poof!—back to the real world. In the end, George reunites with his wife and children, surrounded by friends who have rallied to his aid.

Why does a movie like that work? The brief description sounds like inspirational bunk, and many appreciations—including a surprising number praising the film’s depiction of fractional reserve banking—fail to capture what’s most effective about it. For me, what makes the film work is that when George reaches the bridge, we’re there too. We understand why he wants to jump.

George Bailey’s life is not the life he wanted. In an early flashback, we watch him explicitly reject his father’s plan for him to take over the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan. Yet time and again, his decisions lead him back to the family business. George declares, “I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world!”—only to accept circumstances as they arise.

Of course, there’s more to the plot, including George’s reluctant marriage (hard to understand for this viewer) and his professional rivalry with Mr. Potter, the villainous banker who functions as George’s foil. But this sketch is enough to understand the potent fantasy of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Like many of us, George Bailey harbors romantic views of himself that don’t quite mesh with reality. He is competent and dependable, and many people rely on him. But he isn’t nearly as adventurous as he imagines. As his life progresses, it seems not to amount to much. Then, in the third-act fantasy sequence, his actions are revealed to have changed his entire community’s fortunes, which, without him, would have fallen prey to Mr. Potter’s greed. As Clarence, the angel, remarks, “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

As I write this, my one-month-old son is screaming in the next room. I’ll admit that some of what I felt watching It’s a Wonderful Life over the holidays connects to an earlier column I wrote for 3 Quarks Daily, which discussed my own shift toward reflexive conservatism after becoming a parent.

Economists sometimes talk about consumers’ “revealed preferences”—preferences shown in spending patterns that may contradict stated wants. Would it be appropriate to ascribe to George Bailey a revealed conservatism, with a revealed preference for the life he has chosen?

That might be one way to describe things, but a clever redescription doesn’t stop It’s a Wonderful Life from being a sort of tragedy. George Bailey is a stranger to himself, with explicit desires that violently conflict with his revealed preferences. He genuinely wants to escape—he isn’t just kidding—and while he always imagined he would return one day, he wanted to do more than just maintain his inheritance. Every action that pulls him deeper into Bedford Falls cuts against his own ambitions. By the time he is on the bridge, George sees his efforts as fundamentally fruitless: the family bank is about to fold, and his former peers who left town seem to enjoy the material and reputational success that he has missed.

Sometimes, the things that make our lives meaningful can also make us miserable. (I speak—hello, screaming son—from experience.) Even though it’s only minutes after the bridge scene, the ending allows viewers to forget some of that ambiguity, with what Paul Norris on Substack calls “a perfect modern Christmas: instead of gold, frankincense and myrrh being offered to an infant, we have money, money and money offered to a heap of money.”

Still, I felt grateful for this movie, the high point of my family’s marathon of holiday hokum. I am myself a diffident muddler—a competent man, but an incompetent dreamer. George Bailey is now my patron saint. It’s a Wonderful Life offers hope to those of us without much clarity of purpose and promises that by following our nobler instincts, we might end up doing some good.

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