Get your wings

Today: John Saward, a writer based in Chicago.

Issue No. 214

Pretty Wonderful
John Saward

Pretty Wonderful

by John Saward

For so long I avoided It’s a Wonderful Life—it was too bruising, its redemptions too meager for the guy I was in my 20s, with all those grand plans of his own. I always found myself wishing for more for poor George Bailey, I guess is what I’m saying. Trampled by bad luck, by his own virtue and his begrudging loyalties, stalled out at every moment of departure and always left to clean up someone else’s mess. And worst of all, tormented by the horrible Mister Potter, who creaks through Bedford Falls threatening foreclosures and buyouts in that blubbery old whine of his. I saw Potter as a special kind of real-world doom—a man so powerful you cannot fight against him, only beg him for mercy, as George’s father had done before him and as his children almost certainly will after. The Potters won’t live forever, but there is always another one on their way, with the cops and the bank examiner all working for them too. They weren’t going anywhere.

In George’s world potbellied crooks wheezed in and out of the Building & Loan, gnawing on your tendons with glee and impunity and scheming to build slums and pawn shops on whatever was left of you. They might offer you a deal and maybe even a living, but oh boy will there be interest, there will be a debt you are meant never to pay down, and the faster you hustle the more you will be crushed by how little you ever seem to have. You will have sick kids, a calamitous Uncle Billy bumbling around the family business, and luggage you can’t afford to take anywhere; you’ll have a honeymoon in your own leaky dining room, with two puny little chickens roasting in the fireplace. 

There is George’s brother, Harry, who was a hero the moment he left this crummy little town, a great and audacious pilot in World War II, returning always with a face chiseled and lit up by victory. There is an eager, striving high school classmate who made a fortune from plastics. He tried to tip George off too, but George was distracted by One Perfect Moment with a girl whose parents considered him a pushover and a frivolous dreamer.

Watching George fail was agony for me. Sick desperation radiates even from those curling, disheveled wads of greasy hair falling into his face as he chews on his knuckle, sitting at the bar in the sleazy commotion of Martini’s, pleading with God in a country that was supposed to be so much fun. One theory for the movie’s relative financial failure is that its boundless, miraculous optimism didn’t work in an era sobered by the grim realities of war. But to me the movie was haunted by regret and grief of a different kind, the cold torment of trying to define yourself beyond plain survival in a place where prosperity always seemed like one more brochure for a tropical paradise on the other side of the world.