It’s impossible for me to fairly assess or analyze It’s a Wonderful Life given how personal a film it is, although it’s not for lack of trying. I’ve ambivalently moved back and forth, from an early teenage obsession with Jimmy Stewart, to a regular rebellious reading of the film as sentimental drivel of American optimism, to a practically anarchic read of Frank Capra’s politics as a radical focus on communitarianism (a word synonymous with communism in the most literal sense, although that fact would give Capra a heart attack). It’s a Wonderful Life is the movie that made me fall in love with movies, and there’s no combating that fact or trying to retroactively omit from the record through reevaluation.
I don’t remember when I first saw it—presumably I was nearing a year old on my first Christmas Eve when my family had already started the tradition of watching it every year on NBC. I had flashes of the movie I’d apparently seen and forgot about over and over, and I remember being nine or maybe 10 when I tried so hard to remember that black and white movie where angels try to watch someone’s life but they can’t see. Surely a movie like that couldn’t exist, surely I’m misremembering one that I saw in a dream sometime; it felt so real but unlike anything I could imagine being from way back when movies weren’t supposed to have color—that’s not how movies were made, that’s not how they looked.
I was remembering correctly, and my mind put the dots together and it all came rushing back to me: George Bailey losing his hearing, working at the drugstore, the swimming pool opening up under their feet, saying he’ll lasso the moon. That’s what I thought the movie was for much of my childhood—I’d gone to bed around the time George and Mary finally got together, maybe making it as far as the bank run but no further, as the ad-ridden broadcast sliced the 130-minute movie into a three-four-hour tradition.
There was one time I woke up and wandered into the family room, stunned at the movie that was still playing. I must’ve been about seven—I know because I’d moved from my earliest childhood bedroom (what became my mom’s office) into my sister’s old room, the one where the door got stuck shut and the fire department had to pry it open, and I’d go the rest of my time in that house without a latch on my door, let alone a lock. What I saw was the man George Bailey that I already knew, but in a strange wooden shack with clothes hanging from the ceiling, and another gentleman who claimed to be an angel and apparently could perform magic. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen—one movie had suddenly become another altogether, and a secret world had revealed itself, one I now understood my parents knew but I hadn’t yet been privy to.
So it’s hard for me to say what It’s a Wonderful Life is really about or what it really means, because ultimately I found I can’t talk about it without talking about myself. It was an apocalyptic work of art for me, and I mean apocalyptic both in the classical sense of “revelation” and in the more contemporary catastrophic way. It’s lived with me, re-shaped how I thought—there’s no escaping it.
I watch it every year on Christmas Eve as a way to keep track of time. It’s my sundial, the only cosmological proof I have that the world has done a full spin around the sun, that I can confirm it’s been 365 (and a quarter) days since the last time, and it will be that same again till the next. But there’s hope it’s not just obligatory; given how massively it’s rewired my thinking, I wonder every year if it can’t happen again. The work has appeared more malleable, more plastic with every rewatch. Its flaws are more naked, and its brilliance is laid more bare. Perhaps I’m just looking back at a mirror to try to recapture that first revelation, that big one we all only get to happen once. Who knows. I’ll watch it again this year as I have the one before it, and will the one after, and the one after that, and the one after that, and after that, and after that all the same.