It's a Wonderful Life Because of Death

Every year, after the Christmas tree is lit, the fire built, and the Christmas story read, my family watches the timeless classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. For as long as I can remember, that’s been the tradition. Back in the day, I somewhat resisted it, but my dear mother persisted, and so to this day we carry it on, and the movie has become, if not my very favorite, then definitely one of my favorite movies of all time. As with many things, my love preceded understanding, but with each year I am better able to articulate the reasons I have come to appreciate the movie like I have. It’s a classic and though (sadly) many in my generation haven’t seen the movie, most still know what it is. And if not by name, then “every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings,” usually jogs the memory. There are precious few other movies so old that still have as much precedent in culture. Just what is it then about this movie? Is it the nostalgia that it brings to families like mine who have been doing it year after year? Maybe, but surely there’s something more. What is it about any story that makes people keep coming back to it again and again?

I want to argue that, perhaps among other things, at the heart of any good story are echoes of truth. Growing up, my dad was intentional to start and end the day together as a family. In the morning, we would gather in the kitchen, Dad would read the Proverb corresponding to the day, and then would read out of a book on character—each page had a different character trait with a definition, examples of how to carry it out within a home environment, and rewards of this character trait. At the end of the day, we would gather in the living room and Dad would read aloud to us. We learned about a lot of character traits over the years; we read a lot of stories over the years. I’m thankful for the intentionality in both the morning routine and the evening one, but if I’m honest, I don’t remember the character traits. I might be able to roughly recite a couple of the definitions, but that’s about it. I do remember—vividly—The Pevensies’ first time in Narnia, and I remember Billy’s hard work raising money to buy two hound dogs. I remember Anne Shirley traipsing through Lover’s Lane and past the Lake of Shining Waters; I remember Ralph Moody moving to Colorado, and I remember when his father died… I remember countless stories and I feel, even now, the impact it’s had on me. Stories serve to take things like character traits and show them to us in a way we can relate to and understand. The Remains of the Day is a book about a butler in the 1940’s, and looks at how the old traditions of England change as the world changes. It’s been years since I read it and I don’t remember much of it well, but one thing in the book struck me and has stuck with me and is perhaps the best “explanation” I’ve found for what stories do. “What is a great butler?” the story asks, and the main character, who narrates the story and is a butler himself, seeks to come up with an answer. He tries and tries to talk his way through it and explain it, but clarifies very little. He then turns to a story, a story his father used to tell:

“The story was an apparently true one concerning a certain butler who had travelled with his employer to India and served there for many years maintaining amongst the native staff the same high standards he had commanded in England. One afternoon, evidently, this butler had entered the dining room to make sure all was well for dinner, when he noticed a tiger languishing beneath the dining table. The butler had left the dining room quietly, taking care to close the doors behind him, and proceeded calmly to the drawing room where his employer was taking tea with a number of visitors. There he attracted his employer’s attention with a polite cough, then whispered in the latter’s ear: ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but there appears to be a tiger in the dining room. Perhaps you will permit the twelve-bores to be used?’ And according to legend, a few minutes later, the employer and his guests heard three gunshots. When the butler reappeared in the drawing room some time afterwards to refresh the teapots, the employer had inquired if all was well. ‘Perfectly fine, thank you, sir,’ had come the reply. ‘Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.”

This story says more than the previous five pages of the book about what a dignified butler is. Of course one can go on about knowing what to do in the event of a crisis, of reporting it to the right person but handling it on your own, of doing so with calmness and without drama. But none of that really gets the point across like the story does. The closest this butler, or his father, ever came to adequately describing the role of a butler was through the means of a story. The narrator further says, “It is of little importance whether or not this story is true; the significant thing is, of course, what it reveals concerning my father’s ideals.” He gets at the critical idea that there are two different types of truths. For the sake of clarity, I will categorize them as immediate truth and abstract truth. In the case of the butler’s story, whether the events of the story actually happened would be the immediate truth of the thing—the accuracy of the factual events. But there’s truth in the world that has less to do with the facts and more with abstract principles--Truth, with a capital T. The factual accuracy of the butler’s story is not the principal focus; rather the concern is with the deeper truths about the nature of a butler. And this, I think, is the beauty of stories. Fiction presents to us Truth, through non-factual means. Flannery O’Connor says, “When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in a concrete, observable reality.” A novelist’s aim, she says, is to “show the supernatural taking place…on the literal level of natural events.” Stories, in many ways, are an incarnation of the things which we cannot see or feel or touch, but are nevertheless very real and true. Stories present these things to us in a way we can relate to and identify with.

The plot-line of a story serves as the container of truths; it’s the means by which stories are conveyed, but there must be more to a story than mere plot, or at least more to a good story than that, or we would not keep coming back, as my family does to It’s a Wonderful Life year after year. C.S. Lewis describes it with the metaphor of a bird caught in a net. “To be stories at all they must be series of events; but it must be understood that this series—the plot, as we call it—is only really a net whereby to catch something else.” Real life, Lewis says, has the same type of sequence of events, but even so, we still feel that there is something more. “In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.” Something outside of the sequence that gives the events meaning. Surely almost anyone would agree that there is more to life than just one thing after the next—anyone would at least want to believe this, I would assume. Art, (particularly stories), Lewis says, “is an image of the truth. Art, indeed, may be expected to do what life cannot do; but so it has done. The bird has escaped us. But it was at least entangled in the net for several chapters. We saw it close and enjoyed the plumage. How many real lives have nets that can do as much?” This, then, is what stories give us. They hand us the elusive element of real life, the thing of the non-successive, that gives meaning to the successive. The “supernatural” as O’Connor calls it, or the abstract truth—the thing that gives meaning to the story of the tiger and the butler. Fiction should put fundamental truth in tangible imagery.

This is precisely what It’s a Wonderful Life does so well. It puts the truth of Christianity in story form, “on the literal level of natural events.”

One of the deepest, most fundamental Christian truths is the paradox that life comes through death. The death of Jesus on the cross, but also the death to oneself. Romans 6:6-7 says, “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin.” Likewise, Luke 9:23-24 says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” The call of the Christian is to deny oneself and find identity in something outside of himself, namely, Jesus. This is the grace of salvation. We have to surrender, there’s got to be death, and we have to lose our identity in order to be saved.

If we peel back the story of It’s a Wonderful Life, and distance ourselves from the particular—in C.S. Lewis’ terms, to step back from the successive events and seek to capture the non-successive element—it reveals a very Christian message. George Bailey is a good man. He continually sacrifices his own desires for the benefit of others. He gives up his dreams of college, traveling around the world, and even his honeymoon, in order to help others out. He doesn’t yield to the miserly Mr. Potter, even when it means much greater financial stability for him and his family, but instead repeatedly upholds goodness, refusing to succumb to the morally corrupt values of Potter. But in the end, this isn’t what saves him. When his uncle loses a significant amount of money, and it looks as if the family bank is going to be in serious legal trouble, and George will most likely be put in jail, all his good works, all his self-sacrifice is not enough to get him out of this one. He is brought to a place of despair. He goes for a walk, goes to a bar, and says a prayer: "God, oh God, dear father in heaven, I'm not a praying man, but if you're up there and you can hear me, show me the way. I'm at the end of my rope. Show me the way." A plea for grace, because he has nothing else left to do. This is the position the Christian must find himself in before he is saved. We have to come to a place where we are on our knees, crying out because there is nothing else we can do, and we finally realize it; it is a reality we feel deep down to our core—that we are utterly helpless, we can do nothing to save ourselves, it all must come from somewhere else. And so we cry out in desperation.

This feeling of desperation leads him to the point of death. His despair is so great he sees no way out but death. He asked God to show him the way, and the answer is death. The most pivotal scene in the movie is when George Bailey stands on a bridge overlooking a half frozen, swiftly moving river. He contemplates jumping in. He has come to the point where he sees death as his only option. And he is right. Just before he jumps, his guardian angel falls into the water, knowing that George will jump in to save him, and thereby saves George from killing himself. George then realizes that killing himself wouldn’t help and says, “I suppose it’d have been better if I’d never been born at all.” And then Clarence, the guardian angel, grants him his wish. George Bailey sees what it would have been like if he would have never been born. He loses his identity. The Christian call is to “die to self”—to lose our identity and find it in something outside of ourselves, namely, Christ. George Bailey must lose his identity—undergo a death of sorts—to realize the value of life. When he regains his identity, he goes home and all his friends and family come together and raise the needed money that was lost. They have also been earnestly praying for him this whole time, as the opening of the movie shows. In the end, it is something outside of George that saves him, not his own efforts or good works.

The Christian story does not end in death, it continues to the resurrection. Death brings life. “Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:24). Interestingly, the end of the movie takes place on Christmas Eve and ends with the singing of Auld Lang Syne. This song, however, is traditionally a New Year’s song, not necessarily a Christmas one. The new year is symbolic of a new beginning and fresh start. And so by singing this song, the movie ends on a note of new beginnings, of new life. It’s bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new, thus echoing the Christian theme of rebirth and new beginnings.

Deeply engrained in the heart of this story are the fundamental truths of Christianity. Watching It’s A Wonderful Life gives a realistic view of grace and redemption; we see it at work in the lives of people like us. Perhaps I should throw in a disclaimer and make it clear that this movie is not meant to be a gospel tract or to proclaim the gospel outright. If it were, we’d run into some serious theological issues. But the underlying truth and the echoes of Christianity are there, nonetheless. Like the story of the butler and the tiger best described the dignity of a butler, It’s a Wonderful Life allows us to see the theme of grace and redemption played out in a story, capturing it in a way informative prose could not. In Flannery O’Connor’s terms, this movie puts the supernatural on the “literal level of natural events.” It has caught the elusive bird that C.S. Lewis describes so that we can momentarily examine its plumage. It is a good story because at its core, it echoes The Good Story--the story all long to hear, whether they know it or not. And so for that reason, we keep coming back, year after year.