Countless viewers this holiday season will be re-visiting Frank Capra’s classic 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life. I did so myself last night –and was particularly struck, this viewing, by the turn the film takes after George Bailey (James Stewart) drives to the bridge, determined to take his own life. This is, of course, where Clarence (Henry Travers), George’s guardian angel, appears and before long decides to show George what the life of Bedford Falls and its inhabitants would have been like without him. For a while, Capra’s Christmas classic turns into a horror film, and, in doing so, it illustrates the enduring meaning and importance of horror film in people’s lives.
George Bailey on the bridge, contemplating taking his own life
The scenes late in the film in which George races frantically around the town in which he’s lived all his life (and which he’s despised all his life) adopt some unmistakable tropes of the horror film. There’s the fairly extended scene in the storm-swept cemetery, of course, in which George finds his young brother’s grave. With no big brother to save him, Harry Bailey drowned as a young boy.
George and Clarence at the cemetery
From then on, George races to familiar places and people in Bedford Falls only to find, in every instance, that no one will listen to him, that no one even knows him. In many ways, this scene anticipates the ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), when everyone Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) knows has become someone (or, something) else. Miles experiences such a profound sense of alienation that his very identity seems annihilated. Similarly, George Bailey finds himself in a nightmare—his memory, his identity, his very being all denied. In these scenes, George undergoes an existential panic, facing the erasure of everything he is and has been, that is the stuff of many a horror film.
George desperately searches for something familiar in Bedford Falls
The point of this episode in It’s a Wonderful Life is to “save” George from his suicidal despair, to teach him that his life is worth living, that he’s made a difference, that his life is “wonderful.” And it does. But George has to go through a horrifying experience to get there. And when George arrives at that place, when he finally comes to believe that his life is indeed “wonderful,” it’s a place he has never been before. Part of what’s so good about Capra’s film, after all, is that George becomes a good man—a good son, brother, husband, and father, the bedrock of Bedford Falls–very much against his own desires. He wants to leave–to live life unhampered, on his own terms, free of obligations and responsibilities. He wants to travel, to go to college, to build things. But he can’t do any of those things, and so he stays in Bedford Falls, making it an immeasurably better place—as Clarence shows him. George gives up his happiness to create happiness for others—and he has to face the unbearable horror of non-existence to find happiness in that fact, to find happiness in what he’s actually struggled against his entire life.
George searching for something recognizable in Bedford Falls
What It’s a Wonderful Life shows us is that what makes a “wonderful” life possible—a good life, a life of devotion to others—is the specter of horror. What finally reconciles George Bailey to the conditions of his life, conditions he didn’t make and didn’t want, is the horrifying specter of something else. In George’s case, it’s the horror of nonexistence—his own, his brother’s, his children’s, even his wife Mary’s, who, while still “alive” in this alternative history of Bedford Falls, is reduced, absent George, to the horror of being an “old maid” and librarian. (Don’t get me started on that – that’s the subject of another post.)
For every “wonderful” life, then, there’s a horrifying “other” life that didn’t happen but always could. And maybe this is exactly one of the functions horror films serve. They are always there, showing us what the other side of a “wonderful” life could be; one slip off the bridge and we could be there, in the horror film, jettisoned out of our “wonderful” life. Maybe we watch horror movies to appreciate how we aren’t quite there – yet. Maybe we watch them in some mystical hope that we’ll thus ward off the horror our lives could so easily become. George Bailey lived it – briefly, as Frank Capra so brilliantly showed. We, if we’re lucky, watch it on the screen.
It’s a Wonderful Life is currently streaming, in black and white and in color, on Amazon Prime:
Thanks! This made me look at “A Wonderful Life” in a whole new way.
You’re welcome. Thank you for the comment!