It’s a Wonderful Life and Cavafy’s Poetry

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

I believe that the most important dilemma in a person’s life is the one between the first person singular and the first person plural. George Bailey, the protagonist of the film It’s a Wonderful Life, is faced with exactly this dilemma. He is an ambitious, outgoing, and intelligent young man full of potential, and he wants more than anything to leave the small provincial town that raised him, since he believes that “another city will be found, better than this…”. But of course, when man makes plans… fate smiles. Unfortunately, his dreams of becoming a civil engineer collapse just like the great bridges and skyscrapers he once hoped to have designed. His father dies and so do his son’s dreams, passing the reins of the company to him. But why does this happen? Why can’t George Bailey stand on his own two feet? Because since childhood, he has had one big flaw: submissiveness. He saves his brother from the icy waters of a frozen lake, damaging the hearing of his left ear. He saves a child from poisoning after the pharmacist he works for sends him off to deliver the wrong medicine (and gets beaten for doing so). He invests all his savings in his younger brother’s education and — deep down — envies the fact that he is not in his shoes.

What makes George Bailey a “tragic” character is that, despite the obstacles he faced, deep inside he knows he was capable to be much more than this. In other words, mediocrity was never his goal in the first place but merely what he settled for. Nor did he ever wish to have an average job with an average salary, living in a below-average house with many children. He could have achieved everything, become great, spread his wings and traveled the world. Inside him stands a huge “ego” which, however, is repressed and suffocated by others, leaving him feeling stagnant and lonesome. He used to be a boy who once wanted to conquer the world and who now lives someone else’s life. He is steeped in poverty — a man who could have lived in the lap of luxury. He is indifferent to social institutions such as marriage, yet he falls in love and eventually “succumbs” to marriage. During the Great Depression, the Building and Loan company he runs goes bankrupt, but he lends the money he had saved for his honeymoon to his unfortunate fellow townspeople. As the years go by, George Bailey keeps getting more and more blows from life because “his soul is seeking other things, for other things it longs” yet no one acknowledges his pain. He knew within himself that he was “destined for works of great beauty and distinction” but no one ever really recognises his true potential. He suffers because, in a sense, something within him is dying. Death is not merely the death of the body, but the death of the soul — of your greatest desires and dreams, your potential, the backbone of your identity, your mark upon the world. The day you die is “the day that you let yourself to give in” when you believe that nothing you do has actual value. He believes that the worth of a great man is reflected in the creation of some great “work.” And yet… he was wrong! In a moment of madness, the glass inside him overflowed and he is driven… to suicide!*

Fortunately, his guardian angel saves him and shows him what his town would have been like had he never been born! Without George Bailey’s help, his brother would have drowned and frozen in the lake’s waters. The pharmacist would have gone to prison for accidental murder. His fellow citizens would have lived in apartments owned by a greedy old man instead of in their privately-owned homes. The cinemas, cafés, and libraries would have been replaced by bars, cabarets and pubs. Without Bailey’s contribution, his town would have been a decayed slum. Submissiveness, in reality, is altruism. And so suddenly, his ego subsides as he realizes that a man’s worth is also reflected, in part, by his communal work. At the end of the film, the main theme is summarized: “No man is a failure who has friends”. Thus, giving value, after all, to the first person plural I mentioned at the beginning.

Personally, I believe that truth lies somewhere in between and that the first half of the film is just as important as the second half. To be specific, we may love our family, yet we leave them behind to pursue something bigger than ourselves. We seek romantic relationships and friendships, yet on the other hand, we think of the lost time we could have used to sharpen a skill. We want to be great (many of us, at least), not merely modest and humble; to have enough money to travel the world and lose ourselves “in the great commotion of the world, in the sea of people and in conversations”. Yet, at the same time, we long for our hometown, for everyday — even trivial — visits to the supermarket, and for contact with familiar faces. No human has ever resolved the dilemma between the “I” and the “rest of the world”. Between community and the individual. Between self-sufficiency and ambition. Between the quiet provincial town (of community) where one grew up and the anxious, fast-paced metropolis (of individuality). Whoever had the audacity to embrace only one of the two, lived a life of either complete isolation or complete concession in the name of the multitude. For we are social animals, with aspirations that compel us to walk down paths cut off from social life. Man is truly a tightrope walker constantly balancing between what he himself desires and what those around him expect from him. The only thing we can do is to digest this contradiction — sometimes putting our ego forward and other times prioritising our love for our fellow man. Armed with a code of values, sometimes Christian and other times Nietzschean. Truly, for me, that is what man is: a pendulum oscillating between two extremes — philanthropy and philautia.

P.S. The bolded words in quotation marks are taken directly from various poems of the greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.