It's Still A Wonderful Life
The Classic Film's Most Enduring Character
I have a few Christmas movies I rewatch every year. Most are nostalgic fluff, but my favorites are the World War II era classics. Despite being set in a very particular decade, there’s a timelessness to them that goes beyond being filmed in black-and-white.
The 1940s and 50s were a very introspective time for America. We’d defeated evil abroad and now had to face it at home, perhaps disturbed by the blatant similarities between the Nuremberg Laws and Jim Crow segregation, or sobered by the numbers of Black servicemen willing to fight in “Separate but Equal” battalions for a country that treated them as second-class citizens.
We had big, fundamental questions to answer. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human in a world filled with other humans? Christmas stories, especially the kind of Christmas stories pioneered by Dickens in A Christmas Carol, became a way to reason through these questions, to hold up the ills of society and imagine ways we could solve them.
Of these, It’s A Wonderful Life is my absolute favorite. In an attempt to answer the big question (how much is a life worth, anyways?), it takes a meandering path through housing insecurity, disaster capitalism, the migrant experience, predatory financial institutions, political corruption, alcoholism, depression, and suicide. It’s a heavy movie. It’s a heavy movie.
But the film’s most enduring character - virtually unchanged since 1946 - isn’t George Bailey, the cranky-but-lovable everyman played by Jimmy Stewart. The most enduring character is the film’s antagonist: the bank owner, Mr. Henry F. Potter.
We see glimpses of Mr. Potter throughout George Bailey’s childhood, but his first real scene - the one that establishes him as the villain - happens when George is about to leave for college. A death in the Bailey family leaves the Bailey Building & Loan without a chair, and Mr. Potter moves in to convince the Board of Directors to dissolve the business.
Since Mr. Potter owns the only other bank in town, this would remove his only real competition and leave the citizens of Bedford Falls with just one mortgage lender. He’s much too smart to put it in those terms, though. Instead, he accuses the Bailey family of corruption and favoritism in their lending, and claims that allowing the business to continue will lead to a “discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.”
George steps in with the moral argument, and for a wonder, it actually works:
Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle.
I think of this scene whenever I hear people talk about “the economy.” For pundits and politicians, that word seems to mean GDP and quarterly growth and whether we’ll move the needle six trillion dollars this year or only five. The answer could depend on who you vote for.
But for average people, the economy is a question of whether or not we’ll work and pay and live and die in decent homes, and the answer always seems to be the same, no matter which way we vote.
The next big clash between George Bailey and Mr. Potter happens just as George is about to leave for his honeymoon. Potter’s bank calls for repayment of a loan, leaving the Bailey Building & Loan desperately low on cash. He then starts rumors that the Building & Loan is about to go under, which of course leads to a bank run on the now-vulnerable institution.
But the masterstroke is when he offers to buy out individual shares for fifty cents on the dollar. Fearing that their shares in the Building & Loan are about to become worthless, the townspeople rush for the door to take what they can get from Mr. Potter.
This is the classic prisoner’s dilemma. As individuals, each person has a choice between two outcomes: a guaranteed chance at a reduced payout, or a moderate chance of losing everything. If they work as a collective, their outcomes look better, but each person who betrays the group worsens the collective outcomes for everybody. Fortunately, George Bailey is clear-headed enough to realize what’s actually going on:
Can't you understand what's happening here? Don't you see what's happening? Potter isn't selling. Potter's buying! And why? Because we're panicky and he's not. That's why. He's pickin' up some bargains. Now, we can get through this thing all right. We've, we've got to stick together, though. We've got to have faith in each other.
This is another scene I think about often. Fear is a strong motivator, and entire industries have sprouted up to profit off the very things that make us afraid - war, disease, chronic illness, crime, and financial insecurity, to name a few. This is especially potent when those fears draw lines between groups in ways that make collective action impossible.
To use a recent example, consider the Covid-19 era. Instead of working together to, say, increase staffing at nursing homes, reduce overcrowding in schools, provide mental health resources to isolated children, improve ventilation in shared spaces, and support vulnerable small and medium businesses, we retreated into separate camps to argue over mask mandates, vaccine rollouts, and rules for indoor gatherings.
In many cases, our political leaders egged us on, deepening political divides over what should have been a non-political issue. While small businesses like the Building & Loan struggled, larger corporations pulled in record profits.1
If you ever feel afraid or isolated, it’s worth considering whether your fear and isolation are key to a multi-billion dollar business model.
Back in Bedford Falls, the hits keep coming for George Bailey. When Mr. Potter’s attempts to close down the Building & Loan fail, he goes after George directly. George nearly accepts Potter’s bribe (a quarter million dollar salary, in today’s terms), but turns him down, unwilling to be a player in Potter’s latest takeover attempt.
(As a brief aside, the setup for this scene contains a small but important nod to Mr. Potter’s influence in the community. While concocting a plan to deal with George, a secretary tells Mr. Potter that a congressman is waiting to see him.
His response: “Oh, tell the congressman to wait!”
Not only does Mr. Potter control half the businesses in town, but he seems to have a congressman in his pocket.)2
The rivalry comes to a head in the final act of the film, when an employee at the Building & Loan misplaces $8,000. Mr. Potter knows where the money is, but isn’t about to waste such powerful leverage over the Bailey family. When George comes to ask for help, he convinces George that his life is ruined, and swears out a warrant for George’s arrest. George walks away from the conversation with a $15,000 life insurance policy in his pocket, and a firm belief that he’s worth more dead than alive.3
Thankfully, George’s guardian angel shows up to talk him out of it. While Clarence certainly deserves his share of the credit, it’s the town that saves George. The same community that he poured his life into shows up to save him in one of the most heart-shatteringly triumphant endings in all of American cinema. Not by defeating Mr. Potter once and for all (Mr. Potters, as a rule, are never defeated), but by proving that we can survive men like him, that the strength of our communities can weather the narrow self-interest of the wealthy oligarchs that seem to have cast themselves in Potter’s image.
Watching this movie in 2024, I hope we haven’t lost that feeling, because it seems like we’re stuck with Mr. Potter, that warped, frustrated old man who turns every new generation of George Baileys into warped, frustrated young men. He still controls the banks, the bus lines, the department stores. He still decides where we live, how much we pay in rent, and whether or not we go off to war.
But he’s at his weakest when we stick together, when we look out for each other. Don’t get me wrong; I’m just as jaded as you are. There are days (weeks, months) where it feels like the divisions between us are insurmountable, that any meaningful collective action is impossible. At times, it feels like Mr. Potter has won, possibly forever, and we’ll never get out from under him.
And then, suddenly, it’s 1946 again, and Mary Bailey is running toward her husband, and the entire town is right behind her.
Zoom positioned itself as a magic bullet for schools, and did very well for itself ($1.8B for the year ending in January 2021, compared to $507M in 2020). The market for loosely regulated dietary supplements grew from $80B to $149.5B in a single year, and Pfizer raked in $80B selling a government-funded vaccine.
Almost 30 years after this scene, the Federal Election Campaign Act sought to limit the influence of wealthy donors by establishing disclosure rules and contribution limits in federal elections. Supreme Court decisions in 2010 and 2014 reversed major portions of the law, reopening the floodgates for virtually unlimited contributions. In 2024, Donald Trump asked oil companies for $1B to support his campaign, promising direct financial benefit through taxes and deregulation. This is a blatant example, but it would be naïve to think this behavior only affected one candidate from one party in one election.
It’s worth noting that people like George Bailey still do this math in the twenty-first century. The year after the 2008 financial crisis, there were an estimated 5,124 excess suicides globally. In the United States, the $700B Emergency Economic Stabilization Act included a $46B provision to help families avoid foreclosure, but foreclosure rates more than doubled from 2007 to 2009 and didn’t return to normal until at least 2013. Suicide rates continued to rise until 2018.