The Moment in It's a Wonderful Life That Absolutely Destroys Me as a Dad
We live in a society that venerates and romanticizes dreamers, that encourages us to pursue our dreams at any cost, consequences be damned. That’s part of what makes It’s a Wonderful Life so achingly sad and endlessly resonant, not to mention infinitely darker and more complex than its reputation as a wholesome, All-American family classic suggests.
It’s a Wonderful Life is the heartwarming, powerfully bittersweet story of a dreamer who most assuredly does not get to live out his dreams, or even pursue them, really. It’s about a strapping lad who daydreams of adventure and travel, of fighting in wars and kissing French girls in front of the Eiffel Tower, living the Ernest Hemingway lifestyle minus the sad demise.
Yet circumstances continually and repeatedly conspire to keep this wanderlust-addled dreamer imprisoned in his comfily soul-strangling hometown of Bedford Falls. Instead of the life of freedom he dreamed of as a boy he lives a life of obligation and compromise. He’s tethered forever to Bedford Falls and a sleepy little savings and loan through a complex web of family tragedy, death and obligation that is the only thing standing in the way of cruel Mr. Potter transforming the town into an overpriced shantytown.
A more composed George Bailey
Because George is a profoundly good man, he is perpetually willing to put his own interests and ambitions aside for the sake of his family and his hometown.
Then there comes a point when even the small life of compromise that George Bailey has settled for becomes impossible to sustain. Drunken Uncle Billy, whose existence is one of many heavy familial burdens George must bear, accidentally ends up giving a small fortune of the savings and loan’s money to the hated Mr. Potter, enough to get George tossed in the clink for embezzlement.
There is a very real possibility that George will be rewarded for his life of Christ-like self-sacrifice and doing without with disgrace, professional ruin and a lengthy jail sentence.
It’s a testament to what a dark but not despairing film It’s a Wonderful Life is that George’s desire to kill himself is never anything other than one hundred percent understandable. Without heavenly intervention, George really is screwed. Without Clarence doing his thing and earning his wings, George’s future is nearly as bleak as the alternate reality Clarence outlines if George had never been born.
The moment that fucking destroyed me as a dad the last time I saw It’s a Wonderful Life comes during that heartrending stretch between Billy’s epic, potentially life-ruining mistake and Clarence directly intervening in George’s life.
George returns to his home in a state of complete and total disrepair. He’s not just anxious: he’s vibrating with soul-consuming dread. He’s given up so much for everyone else and now, through no fault of his own, beyond excess kindness and poor judgment in letting Uncle Billy do anything with any level of responsibility, he stands to lose everything: the savings and loan, a home that suddenly seems rickety and hopelessly inadequate, even his own freedom.
It goes beyond that: without Clarence in the picture, George ends the movie with less than nothing. He stands to lose his good name and his reputation along with everything else. Instead of being seen as a plucky, All-American David standing up to Mr. Potter’s Goliath he’d go down in infamy as the criminal who stole from his own business, a business he’d devoted his entire adult life to keeping afloat.
George comes home to an almost disgustingly wholesome, All-American tableau: his gorgeous wife Mary and adorable children decorating the Christmas tree, his daughter banging away at a Christmas song on the piano.
In another context a scene like this would warm George’s heart. Instead it renders him quietly apoplectic. How can people go on like nothing is wrong? Don’t these fools have any idea how fucked they are, how fucked he is, how fucked Bedford Falls is? How can they be so, oblivious to the terrible predicament their patriarch and breadwinner finds himself in?
George’s body is in the house but his mind is fixated on the missing money, Uncle Billy’s blunder and his impending doom/incarceration. All around him life goes on happily, even merrily, but inside his troubled mind a dark, suicidal storm rages.
George can’t express the misery and despair wracking his body and mind. Society has told him that men like him must be stoic and strong, that he must silently and unselfishly and solitarily take on this terrible burden the way he’s taken on so many before but it’s taking everything he has to keep from devolving into a weepy puddle.
His son Tommy is goofing around with a Santa mask before wiggling into his father’s lap. Then, with bracing suddenness a visibly distraught and overwhelmed George pulls his child into his embrace, hugging and squeezing him with a heartbreakingly visceral sense of confusion and defeat.
George is holding onto his oblivious child like he’s a human life preserver he must cling to or fall helplessly into oblivion, as if hugging this child is the only thing keeping him connected to a sick, sad, corrupt, seemingly cursed and doomed world.
This moment destroys me as a dad because I know what it’s like to be in that position. I know all too well the anxiety of holding a child you love more than anything in the world with tears in your eyes and fear in your soul and wondering if you’re going to be able to fulfill your sacred duty to provide for your family, financially, emotionally or otherwise, or if you are going to fail them and yourself.
I did not appreciate this singularly shattering moment before I became a father. I did not understand, down to my bones, just how awful and overwhelming it feels to worry about failing your family, the vulnerable little people who rely on you for just about everything.
Before parenthood I could appreciate the sequence on an aesthetic and creative level, but not on an emotional one.
It took fatherhood and desperation, and failure, and age, to get me to the place where I could relate to what George is going through on a deep, painful, personal level. A father’s sacred obligation when It’s a Wonderful Life was made was to always remain in complete control. But the George Bailey who hugs his son with a sense of animalistic desperation has lost all sense of control. He’s raw, naked, exposed in all his messy humanity and all-consuming fear and panic.
George kisses Tommy way too hard. He squeezes him so tightly that his son can’t help but recoil. Children are intuitive. Tommy may not know what’s wrong with his father, or grasp the depth or extent of his problems but he knows something is very much off with his dad, that he’s lost control of his emotions.
George holds his son as if he’s the only thing keeping him from falling into an endless abyss. He hugs his son because he needs to know that there are still things that are beautiful and pure and worth fighting for. George hugs his boy with a tearful intensity that can’t help underline the high stakes of the predicament he finds himself in.
When Tommy wiggles out of his father’s too-tight embrace George’s crankiness and irritability return but for a few heartbreaking moments this archetypal movie dad and American saint is emotionally naked and completely vulnerable.
Like so much about It’s a Wonderful Life, this makes me cry, or at least tear up on the level of good old George Bailey himself but’s it’s the good kind of tears and the good kind of pain, the kind that reminds you of what you love and treasure most in the world and will do anything to provide for and protect regardless of the ugliness the world has to offer.
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