OPINION- Column One

PAUL GREENBERG: A seasonal people-pleaser

To many Americans, this season would not be complete without a few scenes from It's a Wonderful Life. The movie, which got a decent reception when it was released just after the Second World War, has become a Christmas ritual, gaining a legion of devotees.

Much like Norman Rockwell's paintings, the movie can be counted on to please people and offend critics. Maybe for the same reason: It represents, and satisfies, a characteristically American vision of small-town life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Which may be what annoys sophisticated critics, who consider it sappy, simplistic, and parochial, by which they seem to mean American.

Consider a brief analysis of the movie by Ray Carney, a professor of American Studies at Boston University, who wrote a book about Frank Capra's films titled American Vision. He said It's a Wonderful Life shows that, while life can be "an enriching Norman Rockwell experience, it also can be smothering, where you end up marrying the girl you went to high school with, and you never get to go to Europe ... It tells us George is one of the most sad and lonely and tragic characters ever imagined. I cry when I see it."

George Bailey a tragic figure? Why, he's the richest man in town, as his brother says at the end of the movie. He makes Mr. Potter, the stock plutocrat in the plot, look like a pauper. That's because George Bailey has loved and sacrificed and built and given and stood alone. He has lived.

Never getting to Europe does not strike me as the kind of experience that qualifies for tragedy, possibly because I grew up the child of immigrants who were born in Europe, and could scarcely think of a fate worse than having to return there.

And surely only an American swimming in blessings would consider marrying your high school sweetheart a tragedy.

Can the professor be using "tragic" as a synonym for sad? It's a common misusage, and it says a lot about our history. Lacking much experience with the real thing, Americans call everything from a fender-bender to a bankruptcy a tragedy.

If there is a moral to Frank Capra's movie, it may be the comment from Clarence, George's bumbling guardian angel: "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives, and when he isn't around he leaves an awful hole to fill, doesn't he? ... You see, George, you really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to throw it away?" There's a lot more Eugene Field in that comment than Aristotle.

To quote Nancy Dillon, a writer from Worthington, Ohio, who remembered watching the film with her father: "We laughed, and cried, a lot that afternoon, and at the end I no longer saw my father as being at all ordinary." There are few things more extraordinary in this world than the ordinary virtues of small-town, middle-class America.

The values of Bedford Falls are those our professional intellectuals are almost obliged to see through. Sometimes they are so busy seeing through our values that they don't see them at all. Or they confuse the happy with the sad, the lonely with the interconnected, and, strangest of all, the triumphant with the tragic. Just as George Bailey did, till his eyes were opened.

The most unsettling aspect of the popularity of It's a Wonderful Life is the realization that nostalgia for certain values sets in just when they are disappearing. Happily, nostalgia can bring them back, for there are fashions in values just as there are in clothes.

The professor's view of George Bailey as a tragic figure is sadder than anything in the movie, but at least it's not tragic. It's more comic, this being America. I wish the professor a merry Christmas, a happy New Year, and a wonderful life.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; the original version of this column appeared in 1989.

Editorial on 12/17/2017

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