The traditionalist conservative Patrick Deneen has a fascinating and very smart alternative reading of "It's a Wonderful Life," in which George Bailey saves Bedford Falls from Mr. Potter, only to open the door to the town's ultimate demise as a traditional community. Excerpt:
However, if George’s grandiose designs, first to become an explorer, and later to build new modern cities, are thwarted due to bad fortune, he does not cease to be ambitious, and does not abandon the dream of transforming America, even if his field of design is narrowed. Rather, his ambitions are channeled into the only available avenue that life and his position now offer: he creates not airfields nor skyscrapers nor modern cities, but remakes Bedford Falls itself. His efforts are portrayed as nothing less than noble: he creates “Bailey Park,” a modern subdivision of single-family houses, thus allowing hundreds of citizens of Bedford Falls to escape the greedy and malignant clutches of Mr. Potter, who gouges these families in the inferior rental slums of “Pottersville.” George’s efforts are portrayed as altogether praiseworthy, and it is right to side with him against the brutal and heartless greed of Potter. However, such sympathies serve also to obscure the nature of Bailey’s activities, and their ultimate consequences. In particular, it is worth observing the nature of “Bailey Park,” not merely by contrast to “Pottersville” – in comparison to which it is clearly superior – but also in contrast to downtown Bedford Falls, where it may not compare as favorably by some estimations.
Wow, it's like having Christmas with James Howard Kunstler!
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Jim, you might be right on the conversion aspect of George. Often, you can read these things different ways.
I just didn't like how the movie sort of made the claim "everything will work out in the end" if all you do is mindlessly try to get ahead. I think the real world is a little different; we all think we can spot who the nasty Mr. Potter is (he's always the guy against us, natch), but when we look in the mirror, it's really us.
We just saw part I of the movie. In part II, the dream goes all haywire. The town is hallowed out, the EPA sues George Jr. for expanding to wetlands, drug use soars, and every one of his kids are now divorced. When the EPA comes for George Jr., there will be no community to back him up; heck, his neighbors don't even know who he is. But hey, it's cool. George Sr. got his. And of course, he had nothing to do with all those problems that followed him like night follows day.
M_David:
I do understand your point about Bailey Park -- really, I do (although again, that was a paradise compared to the Levittowns that followed).
But when you assess George's morality or lack thereof, DID YOU MISS THE LAST THIRD OF THE MOVIE?
George's model is very modern, and it goes Self, Community, Family, God.
That's not George's model. Self is certainly not first, or he wouldn't have been constantly putting off his plans, or accepted Potter's offer to buy him out.
What you're trying to say is that George's changes will result in the community reordering priorities, but, frankly, that's insane. There's absolutely no reason that those people would stop going to church.
You've confused something that looks like a modern subdivision with the tendency of modern people to move around and never settle down, which causes a lack of community...but there's absolutely no evidence of anything like that. Moving from one side of a small town to another is nothing like a thirty minute drive to work, shopping at Walmart, and moving 50 miles every decade or whenever you get a new job, and having no roots.
Now, you want to argue that the film is glorifying subdivisions, go ahead. But in reality the film is glorifying home ownership, and subdivisions, at the time the movie was written (1946), were a convenient shorthand for that, so the houses he builds end up looking like them.
I think Deneen is reading way too much into the film, especially in his comments on the "look" of Bailey Park. For one thing, if you look carefully at the Bailey Park scenes, they're obviously filmed in the desert outside of Los Angeles somewhere. You can't make existential conclusions about film settings based on economy, convenience, and making the shooting time as short as possible. It's like drawing deep conclusions about the nature of the universe from watching Stargate-SG1 and noticing that just about everywhere looks remarkably like some state park just outside Vancouver.
Deneen has a good summary up now on what is wrong with George:
...all of the redeeming qualities that I find in George Bailey (of which there are many indeed) are...a consequence a decent democratic soul that was the result of his upbringing in Bedford Falls. It is his less admirable inclination to radical individualism [that is a problem].
And we see the results of this mentality in today's world. Bedford Falls doesn't exist, and the decent democratic soul has been lost.
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