A Merry Christmas Punch/CounterPunch On the Sensitive Topic of One Mr. George Bailey, Part One
Author’s Note:
This is the first year in a very long time that I will be spending Christmas away from Kansas and my family. It will also be the first Christmas I’ve ever spent working and, given that I work at a casino, my first Christmas in a casino and my first Christmas in the desert.
As this holiday comes crashing through and the New Year comes next, two benchmarks approach. Both the mark of my first year in Las Vegas (I drove my Prius filled with crap out of Chicago on February 12th) and my fifty-fourth birthday. The year has been one of huge, sweeping change, a fresh start in a new place in a new industry, and some rather serious if not completely naval-gazey observations about things in general.
Rather than walk you through all of that happy crappy horse shit on Christmas Day (I’ll save the staring into my naval pieces for the New Year/Decade), Joe Janes flew out to Vegas for Christmas and he and I went head-to-head at BUGHOUSE! Our topic: George Bailey: A Wonderful Life or a Miserable Failure?
This morning, we start with my argument. Later today, Joe will present his. FYI: he won. Go figure.
George Bailey: Having Friends Bail You Out Isn’t Enough
The warmth of that final scene is supposed to make us hug our loved ones and revel in the glow of a town surrounding their failed banker by bailing him out all in the Spirit of Christmas.
But did that room full of people really know George Bailey? Did they fully grasp his horrible failure as a human being before throwing down the money he lost?
Who was George Bailey and why do we in the Age of Cancel Culture want to see him escape his tragic fall?
First, understand that the film was pretty much critically panned at the time of its release in 1947 and recorded a $525,000 loss. It didn’t become the feel good classic until the 1980s when public television began playing it because it was free to do so. The 1980s when the world was celebrating problematic films like The Breakfast Club, Wall Street, Risky Business, and Porky’s.
Second, George Bailey in his own words:
George Bailey: How old are you anyway?
Mary Hatch Bailey: Eighteen.
George Bailey: Eighteen. Why it was only last year you were seventeen.
George Bailey: [to Mary] You look older without your clothes on.
George Bailey: You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?
Third, the George Bailey his many friends did not know:
George is that guy who graduates high school and then comes back to the high school party to troll recent graduates.
At the party, George becomes reacquainted with Mary, graduating that night. Mary is smart—she advances to college—but that isn’t what interests George. Walking home, he speaks lines seemingly from the Weinstein couch: “How old are you, anyway?” he leerily asks Mary, who replies that she is eighteen and wonders if that is “too young or too old.”
Later, when he learns he will be stuck in town managing his late father’s bank, George drunkenly makes his way to Mary’s house, where he “shakes her,” yells at her and forcibly kisses her. I suppose a later scene where he asks her if he can masturbate in front of her, she says nothing, so he does.
After George and Mary have married and had children, George releases his workplace stress by screaming at his children and destroying family belongings—incidents that today would be seen as red flags for domestic violence
Annie is the Bailey family’s African-American maid. At one point George’s brother slaps her fanny. All in jest, though one wonders how an older minority woman, as Annie is, might take such sporting if she weren’t dependent on a privileged white family for her room and modest income.
So, George is a sexist, a creep, a sexual assaulter, a potential domestic abuser, and a passive racist
He’s also a tragically bad businessman. Entrusting the money of the poorest people in Bedford Falls to a known drunk and a man who needed string on his fingers to remember things. You’d think after George caught the drunken Mr. Gower poisoning kids, he’d learn not to trust alcoholics but he was far too self-involved to learn that lesson. It all indicates that George had checked out somewhere around the time his selfish fucking brother reneged on his promise
George had kept the business running, in an agreement with his brother that Harry would take over after he returned from school. But Harry and his new fiancée, Ruth, had other plans. Ruth tells George her father offered Harry a job in the research business. While Harry says nothing’s set in stone yet, it hits George that his dreams really are turning to dust
Did Harry truly understand how much George hated him after that? The look of horror, panic, and hopelessness George gets on his face after Harry reveals his casual “I’m in love and have opportunities so go fuck your dreams of world travel” says far more than words
When George discovers the $8,000 missing, he loses his shit. “It means bankruptcy and scandal, and prison. One of us is going to jail. Well it’s not gonna be me!” George tells the exhausted and addled Uncle Billy, making it clear he’d send his uncle up the river if the money doesn’t turn up
Finally, when he sees that Potter, a bitter old man with a successful if not completely cutthroat business whom he has intentionally alienated throughout the first half of the film, is going to have him jailed, he decides to commit suicide. Not out of chronic depression or a chemical imbalance. Not out of grief or any sort of mental illness he may be suffering. He decides to take his life because that’s just easier than taking a breath, figuring out where the money went, and solving the problem.
His decision to off himself and leave his family and the host of poor people in town whose money has evaporated is narcissistic, sociopathic, and selfish to a degree that those friends who bail him out would stop in their tracks and say “What the fuck?
Instead, he is redeemed.
In the unwritten sequel, when George discovers a few months later that Billy has been quietly funneling funds to pay for his drinking problem, he decides to buy a shotgun, kill Mary and the kids and then turn the gun on himself until Clarence comes back and shows him how Zuzu grows up and creates a strain of agriculture based on the science of flowers that can feed the world. The third unwritten film, has George older and on trial by the FDIC for financial malfeasance. He plots to wear a suicide bomb to the trial and thus end his troubles but this time Clarence shows up, slaps him repeatedly in the face and tells him maybe suicide is the right choice. Once called on it, showing himself to be the coward he always was, Bailey turns state’s witness against his uncle
In a time when society no longer truly embraces redemption for mistakes, the idea that we can all sit down and feel good about a suicidal, abusive, sexist, racist, avoider of responsibility like George Bailey is out of place. We now look toward Punishment instead of Rehabilitation, Revenge in lieu of Redemption. We no longer Forgive or Forget
He may have a room full of friends but they don’t know what we know. He will never be held accountable for his mistakes. Bailey is a tragic failure and should be cancelled
Don’t even get me started on the Grinch or Ebenezer Scrooge.
