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Capra's is finally a tragic
sense of life. It's a Wonderful Life is a film of endless frustrations,
deferrals of gratification, and of the complete impossibility of representing
the most passionate impulses and imaginations of the self in the world–and
yet the title is still entirely unironic. Capra wants us to know that
George Bailey's life is wonderful–not because his neighbors bail him
out with a charity sing–along, and certainly not because of the damnation
of his life with the faint praise embodied in Clarence's slogan, "No
man is a failure who has friends," but because he has seen and suffered
more, and more deeply and wonderfully, than any other character in the
film. This Cinderella, unlike the one in the fairy tale or That Certain
Thing, is returned to the hearth, restored to being a char girl, with
no future possibility of escape and with only the consciousness of what
has just been lived through in the preceding dark night of the soul as
consolation–but that, Capra argues, is enough. The adventure of consciousness
that George has lived through in dreamland is greater than any of the
romantic adventures he has talked about going on–but it is
at the same time only an adventure of consciousness.
 The
final scene of the film enacts the same narrative movement we have seen
previously in the final scenes of The Way of the Strong, Ladies of
Leisure, Dirigible, The Miracle Woman, Forbidden, Bitter Tea, and
It Happened One Night. In the last ten minutes or so, Capra does
protractedly what he has done only briefly at crucial earlier moments.
He retards or arrests the progress of the plot and silences the speech
of the characters in order to move them and a viewer into a special meditative
or imaginative relationship to experience. Capra briskly shifts from a
scene involving vigorous physical movements and/or passionate talk to
a scene of sudden stasis, stillness, and silence. In a kind of metaphoric
transference, the physical, verbal, and social agitation of the previous
scene is transferred into the following one as a psychological, emotional,
or metaphysical agitation. The energy of the outward, public drama is
suddenly redirected and released in the form of an intense inward, private
drama of consciousness in a central character.
We move from eventfulness to
meditation, from movements of plot to movements of imagination, from action
to reaction. At the end of the terrifying dreamland experience, George
is crying out loud and running for his life. Then, abruptly restored to
his identity, he again runs, equally hysterical with joy, down the street,
wishing Merry Christmas to everyone he meets, dashes into his house and
up the stairs, crying over his wife and children and talking a blue streak.
Then the shift occurs. Capra stops his tears, silences and immobilizes
George, as we and he are suddenly moved into another realm. A crowd of
friends, relatives, and neighbors pours into his house, surges around
him, and comes forward, as they make their financial contributions one
by one and he stands quiet and reflective at the eye of the storm. The
whole of It's a Wonderful Life–and indeed most of Capra's work–might
be said to exist simply to make possible and to legitimate this movement
into the interior: In place of worldly movements, adventurous events,
and public speeches, Capra substitutes possibilities of imaginative movement,
adventures of consciousness, and silent revelations. George Bailey, like
Jack Bradon, Megan Davis, Florence Fallon, or Kay Arnold at the end of
their films, learns only to stand still, yet to make that standing still
count for the most exciting movement of all.
In stilling ourselves in this
way, in order to allow ourselves to become agitated in the other way,
our consciousness can be enriched and complicated more than by a trip
around the world. One can "gain one's wings" and make the most
daring flights of imagination, without ever leaving home.
Whatever Capra may have thought
he was doing, George, in his silent marginality and imaginative exile,
is not merely integrated back into the society around him at the end of
the film. He is irrevocably alienated from it, in both an exhilarating
and an endlessly painful sense. The experiences he has had are untranslatable
into its forms and incommunicable to its members. He is on the creative
margin defining the modernist critical position, somewhere inside the
text and yet outside it at the same time. He is on the margin of
simultaneous susceptibility and detachment inhabited by modern heroes
of American art and culture as different from one another as Hester Prynne,
Huck Finn, Maisie Farange, Lambert Strether, Maggie Verver, the Chaplin
tramp, Seymour Moskowitz, and Mabel Longhetti: living at home, but never
able to feel simply at home; alienated and estranged to a critical distance
from the society of which he is a part, but unable and unwilling to leave
it, renounce it, or escape its powerful, threatening influences.
In the final seconds of the
film, George's brother Harry arrives and toasts him as the "richest
man in town." It is hard to know exactly what Harry intends by the
remark. He is certainly wryly commenting on the nearly miraculous appearance
of the money George needed to cover the bank loss, and he is probably
also graciously alluding to George's social good fortune in having so
many generous friends gathered around him in his house on this Christmas
Eve. Yet the most important meaning of the phrase–the meaning that a
viewer attaches to it and that George himself undoubtedly understands
by it –is almost certainly unintended by Harry. George's true
richness at this specific moment has nothing at all to do with either
his social or his financial good fortune. It is utterly unrelated to the
presence or absence of dollars and cents or of friends. It is imaginatively
that George is rich beyond the wealth of kings, and it is not insignificant
that even this fact can be communicated in Capra's film and in George's
life only in the form of this private pun–a pun of which no one in the
room except George is even aware.
With that silent pun (silent
or inaudible to everyone but George and the viewer), as with the ringing
of the bell on the Christmas tree or the sight of the copy of Tom Sawyer,
we and George have left the group far behind. The significance of
those events, like the significance of all of the crucial events in the
film, is silent, inexpressible, and untranslatable into any terms that
the society of Bedford Falls could understand. Their meaning exists only
in the alienated richness of George's private consciousness and in the
alienating enrichment of consciousness that the viewer undergoes in watching
the film. George is inextricably embedded in the group, never to be released
from its pressures or even able to want to turn his back on it, but
with this imaginative movement he has also forevermore been propelled
outside of it, at an infinite distance from it, reflecting
on it.
George has traveled and, in
his continuing imaginative movements, is still traveling at this instant,
in what might be called the Keatsian realms of gold. Like Keats, or Keats'
Cortez, a figure imaginatively wooed away from the pursuit of physical
riches in the jungle to the possession of imaginative and visionary riches,
as he stands silent on a peak in Darien, George has nothing to show
for
his truly excessive expenditure of imaginative capital but his visionary
interest. Both imaginative travelers are left with nothing but a "wild
surmise" to show for it all. George indeed is, in a sense
Harry is utterly unaware of, the richest man in town–in a
Miltonic, Keatsian, Emersonian, or Jamesian sense–not in
spite of, but because of the absolute imaginative freedom his worldly
bankruptcy has conferred on him. George–family
man, burdened with debts, cares, children, and well-meaning but frequently
inept friends–is the richest, most imaginative traveler in
all of American film. In this film, he is second only to the god
of the Moviola who created,
edited, and screened it for us–himself, like George, half
within it, involved emotionally with it, and half outside
of it,
looking critically and dispassionately at it from an infinite
and unbridgeable imaginative distance as the envisioner and reviser
of
the entire fictional text....
This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's American
Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. To obtain the book from which this
discussion is excerpted, click
here.
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