Comments on: It’s a Wonderful Subdivision

By: Jano

Jano — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:07:02 +0000

Folks, print out this essay. One of Patrick’s best. And then rent the film and compare and contrast the shots of the development, and those of the graveyard when he’s with angel Clarence. Note the identical tree, shot from different angles. Unforgettable once Patrick has pointed it out to you.

By: James Kabala

James Kabala — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:03:52 +0000

The “Is Bailey Park built over a cemetary?” theme must be hot right now, because it came up almost right away in a discussion of the movie at the site A.V. Club. Several interesting theories (supported by movie dialogue) were advanced.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/its-a-wonderful-life,36565/

Be warned that the unmoderated forum includes bad language and that the site elsewhere links to the vile Dan Savage.

By: Rob G

Rob G — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 01:36:53 +0000

~~The cemetery is just a prop to some cheap sentimental moralism about how important poor old self-pitying George Bailey is.~~

and

~~Which reminds me … the “what if you were never born?” vision from the Christmas ghost is a pretty self-absorbed twist on the Dickensian, “what if you weren’t such a jerk?” vision that leads to actual self-reformation rather than self-adulation.~~

Hmmm, so it’s a sop to a man’s self-adulation to attempt to rescue him from suicide by showing him that he matters? Now that’s a strange reading. Must be a Calvinist thang.

And yes, Empedocles is right; we’ve all heard the quip “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

By: Hans Noeldner

Hans Noeldner — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:08:30 +0000

Does behavior follow habitat? Does habitat follow behavior? Of course both are true, but living with a focus on the latter gives us many more possibilities for living as an act of creation.

I am trying to convince nominally enlightened people in my village to begin occupying our community more and more often as human beings, and less and less often as motorists…and then let’s see what happens!

My suspicion is that the specific FORMS of the built environment will more or less automatically morph into the human scale if more humans occupy it. OK, some places don’t have front porches – put a gazebo in the front yard – or a canopy – or just put some chairs there.

Or sit on the front steps, like row house dwellers have done for generations. It’s the presence of humans that matters, not spindles and posts and fretwork.

By: JB

JB — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:26:21 +0000

I think everyone one of you are still forgetting the entire point of the movie!!!

By: Sean Scallon

Sean Scallon — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:57:23 +0000

Let’s see, Potter’s slums or Bailey Park…boy a tough choice there. In Pottersville you won’t have running water or electricity and live no better than pigs and pay through the nose to do so do but at least you have a front porch where you and your neighbors can commiserate in the misery around you.

It’s a Wonder Life is a great film because it does say a lot about the American Dream and its contradictions but it would be a mistake to read too much into it. If I had argued to George Bailey that Bailey Park was creating a “car culture” that would have destroyed Main St. and led to a souless suburban life that would lead those in it into drugs and sexual infidelity, he would have looked at me like I was mad. He would have no idea what I was talking about. Such terms did not exist back then and no one at the time would have contemplated them at all. All George and the Bailey family were trying to do was help working class people live in descent homes, away from Potter’s industrial slums that housed earlier generations of working class citizens, largely immigrants like Mr. Martini, who probably worked in Potter’s factories in Bedford Falls.

What created suburbia, which in turn created interstate highways and shopping malls, was World War II. The techniques used to build airfields and ports and other such mass-scale construction projects for war were used to build subdivisions, four-lane highways to strip mine mountains and clear cut forests. Bailey Park was just a few homes here and a few homes there, it was hardly Orange County, Calf. Hell, Mr. Martini got to keep his family’s goat on the drive out to Bailey Park. Think the homeowner’s association would allow that today in the gated community? I think not.

The problem was not with Bailey family’s dreams of proving decent homes to working men. The problem was the American penchant of overdoing everything.

By: Jungle Cat

Jungle Cat — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:21:06 +0000

On graveyards: “Let the dead bury the dead”. It wasn’t George Bailey who said that.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:36:50 +0000

I enjoyed reading your post. In our family is a tradition to watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” around Christmas time.

By: Roger S.

Roger S. — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:31:56 +0000

Thanks for the analysis. One of the things that struck me the other night as I watched this movie for the upteenth time, were the scenes of city life depicted in Pottersville–the lights, the crowds, the sheer numbers gathered in Martini’s bar. Contrasted with Bedford Falls, it appears as though Pottersville would be prefered by modern city fathers.

By: Michael Z.

Michael Z. — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:07:13 +0000

I am shocked at such an bizarre interpretation of this movie.
Most notable was his very uncharitable take of the graveyard scene. Maybe I am a strange person, but I have always seen the Dickens Christmas Carol reference in that scene. Both Scrooge and Bailey find themselves in a graveyard during their wanderings. Instead Deneen insists that this scene is proof that George Bailey is a terrible person who commits sacrilege in his headlong pursuit of an anti-community.
I am very disappointed at this article.

By: brierrabbit3030

brierrabbit3030 — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:35:03 +0000

Best thing you ever wrote, Mr Daneen. I PDF ed this one for my own inspiration.

By: John Willson

John Willson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:19:19 +0000

Here’s another way to look at it, guys. I’ve watched this movie since it came out (how old ARE you, anyhow, said a wonderful little girl when she heard me say that I had seen Jackie Robinson play in his first season) and still watch it every so often and have never thought of it as anything much more than Jimmy Stewart at his sentimental best (he has other bests). Ward Bond is the ideal cop, of course, and probably all angels are stupid and all bankers evil. I still watch another Capra film, about the idiot Mr. Smith, every so often, because I like cynics turning around when almost none of them do. But let’s not make “It’s a Wonderful Life” into either a Front Porch or not a front porch. There’s no community in the film, either way you take it. It’s like “Nobody’s Fool,” a great flick about how an individual “makes a difference”–that is, if he’s Jimmy Stewart or Paul Newman. “The Best Years of Our Lives” took all the awards in 1946, and most people thought it fit in the same general mold. Watch it–it’s a great movie, and like the others above is about what Robert Nisbet called “the loose individual.”

By: D.W. Sabin

D.W. Sabin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:51:38 +0000

Russell,
If the sole reason for the suburban project was simply to make sure “more people had houses”, I think that the indiscriminate, ad hoc , consumptive nature of it could have been less damaging. No, it is well beyond getting more people houses. It was an experiment in modernity…the type which bypassed urbanity , that general hotbed of dissent and developed a mobile service worker…a resident of the globe and therefor a resident of nowhere. Suburbia must be viewed hand in hand with the globalist project. This project gleaned many benefits but if we cannot come to our senses and realize that our moral senses have been outpaced by our technological abilities…as well as our economic “sciences”…too far outpaced, we are doomed to the last phase of the Globalist Walk down a Primrose Path: Exhaustion……and impoverishment on all fronts….for the majority and a Gated Community, heavily defended for the minority…..hardly a “project for Democracy” whether they sentimentally intend it or not.

When we lost touch with knowledge related to how things are created, we lost touch with the feedback loops of a healthy social intercourse. The fact that much of the built landscape of the last 50 years (not all but the normative of sprawl) coincides with a swoon into the idea of a “service economy” is no coincidence. People who do not know how things are made or where they come from begin to not care about how things are made nor that place from which they come. They inhabit a simulacrum and while they retain the authentic faculties of a thinking person, the faculties tying them to the planet they live upon and the people they cohabit with begin to atrophy. Mesh this with a relentless and increasing fantasy life and a primary role as spectator and you arrive at a kind of able factotum whose spiritual essence will be but another function of the State.

Personally, I think Capra liked telling sentimental stories and he did it well and often used metaphor but I doubt there was much metaphor in IAWL beyond the now prosaic communal realities of the film’s era. Call me impervious. When it was made, not even the Cold War had begun to wreak its ultimate emotional havoc on the species. Dubai was a clutch of mud fishing huts enjoying the lethargic pleasures of obscurity and its economic underwriter Abu Dhabi was an even more remote redoubt of Bedouin on the edge of the Empty Quarter.

By: Caleb Stegall

Caleb Stegall — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:16:36 +0000

Russell, neither. I just recalled it as another interesting application of IAWL to contemporary issues. Ross, as is typical, pulled his punches in an effort to preserve a happy middle, but his piece is hardly pure praise of Bailey. The piece is titled “Not So Wonderful Anymore.”

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:04:17 +0000

Caleb, I just got around to reading that link you put up: it’s Ross Douthat, praising George Bailey on essentially the same terms that Patrick weighs his accomplishment as being a tragically ironic one. Says Ross: yes, suburbia destroyed the front porches, but it did so in the name of making certain more people had houses, period. Did you put that link for ironic reasons yourself, or are you embracing Douthat’s analysis?

By: Bob Cheeks

Bob Cheeks — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:06:06 +0000

I was going to pick a fight over Pat’s comments about the ‘front porch’ but there’s no way I can get around the fact that he’s right. I dunno, I suppose civility or politeness required the invitation to “sit a spell”, and then, on the part of the visitor, the obligation to accept the neighborly invite, to sit on your neighbor’s porch and talk.
Perhaps, inherently we understood that the porch provided the place for us to be who we are as a family, as a person, as a neighborhood.
And, on that porch on 7th street I sat and listened as my old man and Ray Copenhaver, smoking unfiltered Camel cigarettes and drinking Rolling Rock beer, shared war stories and hunting stories and stories of their childhood days; when my Irish-Catholic mother made peace with our Nazarene neighbors, the Knotts; when the Jones girls would come home from college wearing their saddle shoes and regal us with stories of Picksburgh or Ohio University and my mother as proud of those girls as if they were her own. And on and on.
Back then you needed a porch to have a home, maybe you still do?