I'll be watching Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life yet again this year. The film was a favorite of my family when I was growing up, and I've returned to it almost every holiday season since graduating from college in the mid-1980s. I asked myself recently what keeps drawing me back to this relic of a long-past world in which trans women like me were literally invisible?
Part of the appeal lay in the comforting assurance of continuity that all fond rituals provide us with. When I sit down to view Capra's film, I know that I'll boohoo at the end, and during the early scene when young George prevents his boss, the grieving pharmacist Mr. Gower, from sending poison to one of his customers, and gets his ear boxed for his troubles. I know that I'll fret over the bumbling of Uncle Billy, roll my eyes at Sam Wainwright's "hee-haws," hiss at the machinations of the meanest man in Bedford Falls, Mr. Potter, and laugh at and with George's ding-a-ling guardian angel Clarence. I know that I'll recite Rocky Horror-style favorite lines like "Youth is wasted on the wrong people!" and "Out you two pixies go!;" that I'll cringe at the over-the-top melodrama of George's glimpse of the world without him; that I'll nod appreciatively at the chemistry between Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in scenes like the one in which Sam calls Mary at home, and George and she kiss for the first time. And I know that I'll go to bed that night with a glow on my cheeks as from the whiskery kiss of a half-cocked favorite uncle, and with the melody of "Buffalo Gals" playing in an endless loop in my head.
Continuity is something I've come to value more and more since I came out a few years back -- a life event that often creates a substantial breach between past and future, and always problematizes our relationship with the past, especially when we come out later in life. Still, the staying power of Capra's film has proven unique. Movies like Miracle on 34th Street and Scrooge (the musical with Albert Finney), both also favorites with my family, for a long time just made me feel more isolated and depressed. What was it about It's a Wonderful Life in particular that continued to resonate for me?
The most obvious answer to that question has to do, I think, with the many ways the film's very American sentimental optimism mirrored my parents' outlook on life. My smalltown lawyer father was a farm kid whose ideals of justice and community remained imprinted by the tight-knit world of his tiny northern Maine hometown, a world spiritually akin to Capra's Bedford Falls. Dad was a storyteller, and one of my favorites growing up was about how the farmers in the town took turns delivering care packages at Christmas to the poor families who helped them plant, tend, and harvest their potato crops each year. This to my young mind magnanimous gesture readily linked itself to the selfless civic mindedness of the Bailey S&L.
Like Mary, my stay-at-home mother raised her kids in the same town she grew up in. One of the things mom passed down to us was the love for the natural beauty of the Maine coast that my grandfather had instilled in her. "Open your eyes," she would tell us when we were swimming at a neighbor's beach as kids, "and see how the pebbles and shells turn to jewels!" It was a sentiment that resonated with the film's celebration of the blessings at hand.
But It's a Wonderful Life has been more than an emblem of my bond with my family and my childhood, and an occasion for reaffirming it each Christmas. That bond has always been complicated, and the film's handling of its material is complex enough that I could also see my own struggles indirectly reflected in it.
For instance, though our family was by no means wealthy, the upbringing my brother, sister, and I received was privileged in many respects. This status was impressed on us by mom's frequent reminders that "Life's an adventure!" and "The world is your oyster!" I was never comfortable with these assurances of my entitlement, in the first place because my awareness of my gender variance from a very young age made me doubt that they applied to me. I felt like a stowaway in the fiercely cis, straight world I was raised in, doomed to choose between self-erasure and a marginalized existence spiraling swiftly and inexorably into despair and suicide.
This sense that the world's wonders were mostly foreclosed to me because I was born trans drew me to George Bailey. Talented and ambitious, George was thwarted at every turn not just by his circumstances, but also by his innate sense of justice and inability to compromise his principles for his own gain. Who (what) he was as a person, every bit as much as his father's early passing and the conniving of Potter, sentenced him to a life of drudgery in Bedford Falls. My transness drove me from my hometown in search of more accepting cosmopolitan environs, but in other respects, I continued to see my prospects mirrored in George's struggles far more than in my folks' somewhat cockeyed optimism.
My transness also made me yearn for the consolation gifted to him in the bacchanal of love and generosity with which the film famously ends. This was perhaps the most complicated aspect of my complicated relationship with It's a Wonderful Life. I "knew" that freaks like me could never receive that sort of communal validation, and this made me resent George for being the man I could never be at the same time that I continued fervently wishing to be like him. But I simultaneously recognized that the film's closing scene was ten parts Hollywood to one part realism, just as I recognized, but long remained afraid to accept, that however much I strove to be George-like, deep in my spirit I was drawn to Mary.
The way that Capra's film had room for all these conflicting responses is more than anything, I think, what brought me back to it those many Decembers. For decades, I tried to keep myself locked in an acceptance of my less-than status, believing that despite being gifted in ways, I would never truly experience love, intimacy, or even acceptance because of what I was. But I also held onto the hope that maybe just maybe, somehow, someday, I would. It was the coping mechanism of the closet. And It's a Wonderful Life not only affirmed that I had a place at the table (however dishonoring the terms of the invite were), it also seemed to reflect back at me my spiritual gridlock, and to assure me that I was, somehow, okay just the way I was. Watching the film was in this sense a sort of ritual reenactment of my decision to remain closeted -- one of the many less-than consolations I clung to in my ongoing effort to stave off suicide.
Since I embraced being trans and started transitioning, my perspective on the film has changed in a number of respects. For starters, there's the evolution of my relationships with the characters. George no longer seems to embody my failings, but stands rather as a model of decency and masculine sensitivity; and while Mary and I are very different women, I've come to identify with her admiration for her husband and her steadfast love for her family (though the model of gendered labor underpinning these attachments I find repugnant).
Embracing being trans has also impacted my relationship with the world of Bedford Falls. My consciousness of my minority status, which I only felt as part of a pervasive, stultifying numbness before, has made me more aware of how the ideal of community the town represents is circumscribed by the prejudices of the post-war period. Capra's reach doesn't extend beyond the town's Italian Catholic immigrant family, the Martinis. The only semi-major non-white character, the Baileys' maid Annie, occupies a subordinate economic and social position. A little detail that has become particularly poignant for me is the seemingly innocuous laugh line punctuating Annie's donation during the climactic scene: "I've been saving this money for a divorce if ever I get a husband!" For the film's original audiences, the joke would have drawn its punch not only from Annie's pugnacious personality -- what right-thinking man would put up with such a woman? -- but also from their recognition that, so far as we can determine from what we see of the town, there are few other black folks living there. Given these demographics, the very idea of her marrying would have struck the great majority of white viewers in particular as absurd -- for what right-thinking white man would marry a woman of color? In this, of course, It's a Wonderful Life is again very much a product of its time. The joke still stings for trans women, however, since most of the cis majority continues to view the prospect of partnering with us in the same light. (It goes without saying that there's no hint in the film of anyone being other than cis and straight.)
Even with its very real limitations, Capra's little world still speaks to me, and still, I think, has something besides sentimental nostalgia to offer contemporary viewers.
Consider another detail from the film that struck me for the first time only recently: the event that triggers the buildup to the film's climax, Uncle Billy's leaving the Christmas Eve cash deposit of the S&L in Potter's lap, remains unresolved. Potter never comes clean, and presumably pockets the money, and it's only the generosity of the people whose lives George and the S&L have touched, most of them like the Baileys struggling to get by, that enables Capra to keep him out of jail and bring the film to its rousing conclusion. I suspect I overlooked Potter's unpunished malfeasance for so long not just because it so easily gets lost in the closing Mardi Gras hoopla, but also because the personal needs the film was speaking to drew my focus elsewhere. But once I did key in on it, I recognized how much richer and more resonant It's a Wonderful Life is for it.
This detail encapsulates more emphatically than any the film's awareness that the financial system is "rigged" against people like the Baileys (though that state of affairs is in the main accepted as a given rather than critiqued). Potter's going unpunished also makes the show of generosity of George's neighbors and friends be about far more than "when life gives you lemons." The communal ideal that that final sequence taps into, and that Bedford Falls embodies (however imperfectly), helped mobilize the war effort to counter Hitler's homicidal bigotry, but it also informed left-wing efforts during the Great Depression that preceded the war to mobilize the dispossessed millions, and thereby combat an increasingly stark divide between haves and have-nots. It's the same ideal that's evoked so movingly today by the musical Hamilton, the ideal that's at the heart of who we are as a civic collective when we're guided by our better angels: the shared belief that we're "a nation of immigrants," a "melting pot" — an ongoing reason-born, law-driven, historically radical experiment in secular pluralism.
And it's under attack today as perhaps never before in our nation's history.
And so I'll return to It's a Wonderful Life, with all its shortcomings, this holiday season not just for the rich tangle of memories and emotions it will summon, but because of the way its big, socially conscious heart reminds me, and everyone who watches it, of this shared legacy of communal striving. For it's in this commonality, surely, that our hope for the future of this nation, and in some measure our world, lies.
