As the holidays descend, it’s once again time to engage in our favorite tradition: questioning the sometimes bizarre storylines of beloved yuletide classics. Love Actually’s tangled plotlines are a favorite target, with even Keira Knightley calling her character’s storyline, involving her husband’s best friend and those infamous cue cards, “quite creepy.”
But today, we’re looking all the way back to the twinkling star that stands atop all other pull-your-heartstrings Christmas flicks: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
For those somehow unfamiliar, here’s the heartwarming setup: Hardworking family man George Bailey (played by the apple-pie-with-an-edge Jimmy Stewart) faces ruinous financial trouble. He contemplates suicide on Christmas Eve before Clarence, a guardian angel, intervenes by giving George a chance to see what the world would be like without him.
It’s a Wonderful Life then shows in almost dizzying succession just how badly things would unravel if George never existed. “Each man’s life,” Clarence angelically explains, “touches so many other lives.”
So what, exactly, are the dire consequences avoided by George’s existence?
For starters, the local checkered-tablecloth Italian restaurant has gone straight to hell and is now a dive bar. Nick the bartender won’t serve flaming rum punches, apparently a staple in heaven, and nobody smiles anymore.
Old Man Gower, George’s former boss at the pharmacy where he worked as a youth, ends up poisoning a child and doing a 20-year stretch behind bars. The druggist also becomes a “rum hound,” which perhaps explains the lack of punch.
As never-been-born George watches the by-gosh reality he once treasured curdle, he tears through the once idyllic town of Bedford Falls looking for the perfectly turned-out mother he knows. Instead, he finds a “Ma” running a boarding house. And George’s Uncle Billy? Ma explains he’s been locked away in an insane asylum ever since he lost his business.
Soon enough, George realizes his wholesome American town has become Pottersville, a tawdry neon strip that looks like a 1940s fever dream of vice—all neon lights, garish bars, dancing girls, and desperation.
Then comes the wrenching graveyard scene. George discovers his brother Harry’s tombstone: Without George pulling his younger sibling from the icy water years earlier, Harry drowned after their sledding-on-a-shovel accident. Every soldier Harry would have saved on a transport during the war perishes too. The audience is left to wonder whether the Allies even won World War II without the kids from Bedford Falls.
