What Exactly is a Story’s Climax?: A Look at It’s a Wonderful Life
So here are three questions about the film that are sort of the same question. One, why do I find the final sequence, in which George Bailey’s friends save him from financial ruin, so moving? Two, why do other films and stories that climax with acts of charity bestowed on the protagonist feel so hackneyed and flat? And finally, how is it that It’s a Wonderful Life breaks a central rule of storytelling—that the hero is the one who saves the day—and gets away with it?
I’ll start by giving a brief summary of the film. Up in Heaven, several prayers are being sent to God to help George Bailey. Two angels, represented as stars, talk about what to do about it, and they decide to send an angel named Clarence down to help George, who is contemplating suicide. The two angels decide to familiarize Clarence—described as a simpleton—with George’s life, so that Clarence might be able to come up with a strategy to help. The first part of the film is a history of George’s life.
Living in a small town in Upstate New York, George is represented, even as a child, as two things: an adventurer who wants to make a name for himself on the one hand, and a selfless hero on the other hand. He saves his younger brother from drowning, for instance, and he prevents his employer, the druggist Mr. Gower, from sending poisonous pills to a customer when Gower is in a haze of grief over the death of his own son.
As a young man, George meets his future wife, Mary. On their first date, he tells her, “I know what I’m gonna do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet, and I’m gonna see the world.”
Several things get in his way. His father, the director of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan, has a stroke the same night as Mary and George’s first date, and George decides to stay in town, instead of traveling to Europe, to help get the business in order. Soon the board tells him that he must stay on permanently if he doesn’t want the business to be taken over by Mr. Potter, a greedy monopolist. He decides to stay on.
He marries Mary, and George plans an elaborate honeymoon. Again, he is stymied, this time by the Great Depression, which leads to a run on the bank and the possible failure of the Building and Loan if he can’t reassure customers. He gives away all of his money to do so.
Later, World War II begins, and George’s services are required in town. The film’s narrator explains that George never leaves Bedford Falls.
Just before George and Mary start a family, a curious thing happens. Mr. Potter offers George a job that would pay him ten times what he currently makes. George seriously considers it, but it would mean that the Building and Loan would be dissolved, and Mr. Potter would own effectively everything in town. George denies the job offer and tells Mr. Potter, “You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn't, Mr. Potter. In the whole vast configuration of things, I’d say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider.” This outburst shuts the door on any future offers from Potter.
The film skips ahead to a time when George and Mary have five children, and the film stays in this time period for its remainder. It is Christmastime, and a bank examiner is visiting the Building and Loan on a routine visit. George’s business partner, Uncle Billy, loses $8,000 that same day—accidentally dropping it in Mr. Potter’s newspaper—and when George finds out, he knows there will be scandal, he will go to jail, and the Building and Loan will collapse unless they find the money.
They don’t find the money. George goes to Mr. Potter, begging for a loan, and during the exchange George admits that his only wealth and collateral is a life insurance policy worth $15,000. “You’re worth more dead than alive,” Potter tells him, and he’s right.
George’s despair explodes outwards. He wrecks a Christmas scene in the family living room, insults his daughter’s teacher for letting her walk home without a coat, and, with a straight face, tells his wife, Mary: “You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?” For someone about to lose the little ability he had to provide for his children, it’s a dire question.
George goes out drinking and prays for help—“I’m at the end of my rope, Father”—and is then punched by the insulted schoolteacher’s husband. He leaves the bar with a bruised lip, crashes his car, and goes to a bridge, where he is preparing to commit suicide and generate enough money, one assumes, to save his family and business.
Enter Clarence, whose first strategy to save George is to jump into the river himself, knowing that George will save him instead of drowning himself. Once they overcome their cold, Clarence’s second strategy is to subject George to a frightening dreamworld in which he has never been born. This, Clarence hopes in a prayer to his co-angels, will address George’s pressing spiritual crisis: that his life has not mattered.
In a way that seems exciting—or perhaps frightening—to me, rather than dutiful, the film chronicles George’s encounters with his friends (bartender, taxi driver), then his mother, who is angry and lonely, and, in the dream-story’s climax, his wife, Mary, who is unhappy, unmarried, and does not recognize him. (This sequence escalates from people who, if they did not recognize George, would make him sad, to people who, if they did not recognize him, would vacate whatever was left of his connection to the world and leave him as a total void.) The town, for its part, is called Pottersville, and George’s brother has died, along with those his brother saved as a fighter pilot in the war.
Clarence takes it upon himself to explain the moral to George: “You see, George, you’ve really had a wonderful life. Don’t you see what a mistake it would be to throw it away?”
George goes back to the bridge and prays: “Help me, Clarence, please! Please! I want to live again. I want to live again. Please, God, let me live again.” Burt the cop arrives, and in their exchange it becomes obvious to George that he is no longer in the dream world. He becomes ecstatic. He returns home, and when the bank examiners—standing in his living room—tell him there’s a warrant for his arrest, he responds, “Isn’t it wonderful? I’m going to jail.” Soon Mary arrives, followed by a crowd of townspeople and friends, and they give him more than enough money to pay what is owed.
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Let’s define a few strategies that Capra is employing here.
First is a frame story that gives away the fact that, at some point, George is going to consider attempting suicide. The content of the opening is dark, I think darker than it first seems given the rather cheery narration of Clarence’s co-angels, or bosses (the exact workplace dynamics of Heaven are not explored). So one thing this frame story does is focus the viewer’s attention: Why might this man one day consider taking his own life? What, exactly, is his problem? The other thing it does is encourage the viewer to speculate how Clarence might try to save his life.
Capra’s second strategy is to clearly define George’s goal—to see the world—and set up two antagonists to that goal. One is unfortunate circumstances: the death of the father, financial collapse, and the war, which all seem like they are conspiring to prevent George from attaining his goal of leaving Bedford Falls. Mr. Potter is the second figure who prevents George from satisfying his ambition, because George knows that if he leaves, Potter will gain power, absorb the Bailey business, and do what monopolists do: create low-quality products—in housing and banking, in this instance—and charge too much for them because he can.
Capra’s third strategy is to give George a glimpse of a different possible fate. When Mr. Potter offers George a job, the viewer knows this would solve his financial problems in the near-term and likely forever. But George doesn’t take it, which sets up the fact that George’s later financial ruin is, in part, his own fault. It was not simply bad luck; he had a hand in it.
Capra’s fourth strategy is to create an emergency with a ticking clock. If George doesn’t come up with $8,000 fast, he is going to jail, his business is going to collapse, and his family will have no money to live on.
Taken together, these strategies set up an expectation for a spiritual crisis, and then they provide clear (and I would say believable) reasons for George’s despair. George has sacrificed everything—everything—to stay in Bedford Falls and keep the Building and Loan going. Has he been thanked? Been made wealthy, like his friends who left? No. Instead, he has met ruin. His self-sacrifice is starting to feel more like self-immolation. Who is he, after all, if he is neither an adventurer nor the last holdout against Potter’s reign? He’s a nobody, just another person who lost to Potter, and whose life went off the rails and never got back on. What’s worse, perhaps, is that George had a hand in it for refusing a job from Potter, and it didn’t have to be this way. Now, the only way out for George seems to be a life insurance policy that will provide for his family in the wake of scandal.
Here I’ll pause and ask: what would this film be like if Clarence didn’t subject George to the dreamworld in which he had never been born? Imagine there’s no frame story, and we’ve just been in George’s world the whole time. What if Burt the cop came up to George on the bridge, said, “George, you need to come home and see this,” and he went home and saw that all his friends had given him money, and his business was saved?
Well, first, I think I would still recognize it as a story. Guy who’s given everything away to his community finally gets repaid. There’s still a tight logic to it. But it would also feel hollow, right? And overly sweet? And I think here’s where I’ll make my argument. The climax of the movie does not occur when George’s business is saved but when he says, “I want to live again” on the bridge. Without that utterance, the film has introduced a spiritual crisis but has not given the hero a chance to overcome it. Without that scene, the film has no climax. It is the freaky dream sequence, Capra’s fifth strategy for those keeping track at home, that generates the story’s meaning. In this reading, George being saved by the townspeople and his friends does work as a triumph of George’s debts finally being repaid by the community. But, more than that, it feels like a divinely-inspired outward reflection of George’s newly gracious inner state.
This style of climax has me thinking, perhaps surprisingly, about the climax to the Odyssey. Odysseus has been away for twenty years—ten at war, ten at sea—and when he arrives, disguised as a beggar, he finds a group of suitors courting his wife, eating all his food, and disrespecting his home. His wife, Penelope, has given up hope and decided finally to put on a competition among the suitors, and she says that she will marry the victor. Part of this competition involves stringing a bow that only Odysseus had strung before, and firing an arrow with it through a narrow chute of axes. Odysseus, dressed as a beggar, decides to attend the competition and take part.
One after another the suitors try to string the bow, and one after another they prove too weak to do so. Finally, Odysseus steps up to the bow. Of course the suitors make fun of him for his appearance, and it’s not clear he’ll be able to string it. He’s been away, he’s older, and he’s almost certainly gotten weaker. But he does string the bow, he drives the arrow straight through the chute of axes, and then, as the suitors stare dumbfounded at what he’s done, he turns the bow on them and starts firing. Odysseus has returned.
In both It’s a Wonderful Life and the Odyssey, the climax does not involve the protagonist becoming a new person, or doing something he’s never done before. Instead, they are climaxes of return. Odysseus becomes Odysseus again—strong, formidable, and respected in his homeland. George Bailey stops wanting things he can’t have—wealth, adventure, escape—and embraces who he’s always been and the gifts of his life right now: a loving family and a friendly community that he helped create.
Maybe you think a typical story is about a character forming a goal, encountering obstacles, and surmounting or going around them, before encountering one ultimate obstacle that requires them to grow and change or order to overcome, before starting a new kind of life as a new (stronger, more generous, wiser) person. It’s a Wonderful Life is about a character forming a goal, encountering obstacles, totally failing to overcome those obstacles, and becoming hopeless after the few consolations he has left fail to comfort him, until he comes into knowledge that his original goal was an error and he already has what he needs. He doesn’t need to change or accomplish anything. What he needs to do is embrace what he already has.
So maybe we can become more specific with how we talk about a story’s climax. A climax involves a character becoming the person they’ve always been but has lost touch with. They stop trying to be someone else or live a dream and instead face the world as it is. As they come into knowledge about who they actually are, they come to see their world with clearer vision. As they attain clearer vision, so do we. For George Bailey, that means the anger, resentment, and despair of having his goals denied falls away and is replaced with gratitude for what he has. And because he comes into gratitude, the world itself shines.
I’ll make one final observation. The film’s resolution, in which George and his family are saved, does what you expect it to do, which is demonstrate that the conflict is definitively settled and that George has come into a new understanding about himself. But it also does something more. Now that the questions posed by the film’s opening have been answered, Capra can imply a larger question, and perhaps one that animated him to make this film in the first place: What is the true nature of this world, that has come to feel so mean and small?
