Community and Comedy in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life

Figure 1.

It's a Wonderful Life, Henry Travers, James Stewart, 1946 RKO. Permission granted by MPTV.net.

Almost as long as religion and film have been discussed academically, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life has been a focus of attention.¹ This is hardly surprising, considering it features an act of divine intervention, which can hardly be counted as your typical Hollywood plot resolution.² Among the various approaches, the most fruitful course to date for the exploration of religion in Capra's film has been to examine the distinct sacramental sensibility filtered in part through an Italian ethnicity discernable in the work.³ The potential for plumbing It's a Wonderful Life in this vein has hardly been exhausted. In my own effort, among others, I wish to provide a broader context for the Catholic sensibility by examining its confrontation with the dominant "cultural code" of American society.⁴

It is useful, however, to rehearse the salient points of the Catholic sensibility. Andrew Greeley has examined the subject, starting from David Tracy's theological concept of the analogical imagination and buttressing it with sociological research, and termed the sensibility the "Catholic imagination."⁵ Fundamentally, on the one hand, the theistic imagination pictures God as distant from creation, which is more likely for the Protestant sensibility; on the other hand, God is also felt to be close to people. Although the relationship of these two tendencies is dynamic and shifting, the Catholic imagination inclines toward accepting the closeness of God to creation.⁶ This, among others, explains the importance of the sacraments, which stress the availability of grace to God's creatures. The religious sensibility that evolves from this perspective is more sacramental and multiplies metaphors demonstrating the proximity of God to humanity. Greeley stresses the complementarity of the two religious sensibilities and that neither is superior to the other.

Greeley stresses that the Catholic sensibility focuses to a great extent on community, and with its propensity to see grace everywhere it is essentially comedic. It's a Wonderful Life hardly differs from a number of Capra's other works in demonstrating both qualities but depicts them with a greater intensity.⁷ However, of seminal importance here is the context of It's a Wonderful Life: both concerning the society in which it was created and, in light of the above, the filmmaker's earlier work.

Within a largely Protestant society, the dominant religion has been understandably impressed upon the society's "cultural codes," as sociologist Robert Bellah puts it in "Religion and the Shape of National Culture," which cumulatively tend to generate "expressive individualism," along with its degenerate form, radical individualism.⁸ In light of this problem, Bellah feels that the Catholic sacramental sensibility could add a necessary corrective to the flaw in his nation's code, since sacraments incline people toward "an embodied world of relationships and connections . . . rather than a world in which individuals attempt to escape society."⁹ Anticipating the problems of radical individualism while imbued with a sacramental sensibility, Capra's work to no small extent constitutes a prescient response to the issue Bellah poses.¹⁰ With his position on the crux of radical individualism and the sacramental community, George Bailey remains an unusually dynamic character, and if Bellah is correct, this keeps him in the vital center of America's civic and social concerns.

For the sacramental sensibility beauty delights, as St. Thomas Aquinas famously puts it. Thus beauty intimates a relationship between the work of art and those who perceive it. This partially explains why the ambitious Capra on the one hand strove to prove his role as the dominant artistic agent behind his films, with his "name above the title," and on the other hand willingly placed his work under the judgment of the public, whose patronage he claimed gave the filmmaker artistic freedom from "subsidies or strictures from government, pressure groups, or ideologists."¹¹ To some extent, many of Capra's films hearken back to the comedies...