It's a Wonderful Life pairings

 These are some analysis comments I wrote on Facebook after a Christmas watching of It's a Wonderful Life. 

Always liked It's a Wonderful Life thematically and the performances, but hadn't really noticed or appreciated the pairings and the really nuanced relation some of them reveal. Really amazing film.

 

The most obvious pairing is jumping in the water to save his brother Harry and then jumping in to save Clarence. Then, I assume it's standard to notice the pairing of the time he and Mary use their honeymoon money to hold customers of the building and loan over with the time at the end of those people pooling their money to help with the money lost (stolen by Potter). I'm guessing I'm not the first to put this forward, but I did notice it on my own (if much, much belatedly), but that pairing connects with a broader theme. In the scene where the honeymoon money goes in, just before that, George described how the cash is not there, that money one person deposited had been lent to another to build, and he uses specifically phrasing like "your money is in his bakery" and so on. In the final scene, money comes back out of places it has been tucked in the nice symbolism of the literal physical places of money being tucked, like Martini's jukebox and the drugists tip jar and the cook's self-built dowry.

And that symbolism intersects with the theme of George's big plans: He wanted to be an architect and build big material structures, but he wound up building the more organic infrastructure of how a community takes care of each other (hitting community as living organism with that obvious contrast pair of a cemetery being in the sans-George world where he builds his housing development in the real world ... and of course the equally obvious connection with a potter's field as a place of forsaken burial).

 

The one that I really noticed this time is the subtlest, and I think intentionally so as to be the most impactful for the most gut-level theme of human relation (which makes this an intricate film: the inter-workings of love/marriage/home being sort of a microcosm examined alongside the workings of a community as the corresponding macrocosm). We all know the scene at the beginning when, as a girl, she leans over the counter and says "is this the ear you can't hear in? George Bailey, I'll love you til the day I die." I think the reason it is so up front on the screen that she knows about his deaf ear is so that, from that and a few other places that emphasize identifying the left ear, when you get to the first night in the home, when she says that this was what she wished for the night when they through rocks through the window, you're tuned to looking for whether she is talking into is his left ear only versus someplace he would hear it with his good ear. But there's no onscreen marker, so you might gloss it; you might be checking which ear but then when there's no marker that he didn't hear (as with when they were kids), you sort of assume he probably heard ... you don't hear him respond but, then, you can understand a film focusing on her line by making it the end and not bothering to show his response (he might be just so lost in the emotion of hearing her say basically, "I've wanted you so long," he doesn't know how to respond etc. ... but it's also possible that everybody who ever saw the film has realized this and I was just slow ... but it is a kind of standard embracing talking scene and it could be that many sort of slip into dropping it into that standard slot and just move on to "ok, she loved him all this time etc.").

What I think it drives home is that, just as the inter-workings of organic community relations are not evident on the surface (the people relate to each other though the B&L, not directly), there are some things that must be communicated between persons on some level other than the conscious cognizance and reason involved in recognized speaking. For, what she told him was basically that she wished that he wouldn't get his wish. He wanted to see all the big, impressive structures in all the famous places and then build big material structures himself, but she wanted to build an organic community of a home, and the B&L as sort of the embodiment of the community sort of combines those (building the infrastructure for the organic community life). But it's also important that, while that nice picture of the B&L as community sort of resolves it some, there is still the fact that she wished he would not get his wish, which gives a nuance because there is a tension there of a kind that sort of makes the most hidden pairing: in the run-on-the-bank scene, he has to explain it to people; in the end, he has to learn the deeper side of it through an experience (organic community, beginning with couple and family and moving to a system of neighbors and relations, is what makes the big material structures worth anything).

 

On that score, this image of something communicated below cognizant hearing is the subtlest and most unmarked (when she says "this is what I wished for) because the film needs to reveal that real, deepest paring in that same way: in the gut more than in the head. George is a bit of an Abraham character in that the tension of his life is the grand ideas versus what makes life really wonderful, but the surface stage is one on which he has accepted the small town but it's almost like God won't let even that work ... he's not worried about the eight thousand for his how use, but just for the B&L to be able to keep going doing what it is doing and himself to stay out of jail and fulfill his duty to his wife and kids, like Abraham who could have fairly said, "you chastise me for not having the trust that you will give me a son directly for the promise, but then I do and you do, you then ask me to kill him ... but still trust that you will do the promise." George wanted to go live the exciting life, but he accepted the hard work of community building for the hoi polloi in a small town ... and then God has to let a bastard rip him off and almost get him thrown in jail doing that. That's a bit of what is in saying, "I just prayed, and you can see how he answered that."

 

In the end, this Christmas viewing made me appreciate the film a lot more (but,. yeah, it's during the 2020 pandemic, so I did cringe at those scenes in Martini's/Nick's).