Virtue V. Vice

This theme is stuck in my mind, as I kick around Christmas morning, waiting for my teenage daughter and my wife to wake up and come out to the living room. My teenage son has gone through all the stockings, built a fire, and Jimmy Neutron - one of my favorite forms of modern art - is on the tube. As soon as everyone is up, we can kick this holiday into high gear. In the meantime, I'm sitting here reading the Times on my laptop and musing on the meaning of Christmas.

It's a Wonderful Life was finally over about midnight last night, so the story is fresh on my mind. Here's an interesting essay exploring the film's themes - Wonderful? Sorry George, It's a Pitiful, Dreadful Life. Essayist Wendell Jamieson explores the relative values of virtue and vice in the film.

Now as for that famous alternate-reality sequence: This is supposedly what the town would turn out to be if not for George. I interpret it instead as showing the true characters of these individuals, their venal internal selves stripped bare. The flirty Violet (played by a supersexy Gloria Grahame, who would soon become a timeless film noir femme fatale) is a dime dancer and maybe a prostitute; Ernie the cabbie’s blank face speaks true misery as George enters his taxi; Bert the cop is a trigger-happy madman, violating every rule in the patrol guide when he opens fire on the fleeing, yet unarmed, George, forcing revelers to cower on the pavement.

Gary Kamiya, in a funny story on Salon.com in 2001, rightly pointed out how much fun Pottersville appears to be, and how awful and dull Bedford Falls is. He even noticed that the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”

Now that’s scary.

I’ll do Mr. Kamiya one better, though. Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.

On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.

What I find compelling is that we all get to choose how we go through life. The long-term value of Virtue only becomes more plain as I grow older. There's no discounting the short-term value of Vice - vice is fun and immediately gratifying, that's why its so popular. But it too often comes at a high cost. It seems that its only with age and accompanying wisdom that we begin to see the reality emerging from behind the veil of fantasy. Vice masquerades as Good but is a chimera in the end. Virtue comes across as Less than Vice, but it is the tortoise that ultimately defeats the hare. Slow and plodding, much more boring, but ultimately better.

Much of wisdom is about cultivating a taste for Virtue and learning to deny the false promise of Vice. Christmas is a time to ponder these things and It's a Wonderful Life gives us a great vehicle to structure our pondering.