It's a Wonderful Life and PTSD

When you are in the throes of a traumatic flashback, trauma therapists recommend a practice called "grounding."

In grounding, the person who needs to be pulled back to reality is encouraged to look around and pick out an object to describe in detail. I, for instance, am looking at a pink, plastic bowl, which used to hold cereal. The surface of the plastic is scuffed from overuse, and the remnants of milk are in the bottom of the bowl. I might go on to tell you what the bowl feels like, what it sounds like if I knock on it with my knuckles, what the warming milk smells like. I might then describe something else in the room, continuing until I was safely back in the present, grounded in reality.

The need to return to the present becomes clear when you understand that often, a trauma flashback doesn't feel like a memory. It feels more like a flashback in a TV show or movie, where suddenly, you're somewhere else. If you can't find your way out of the maze, you might wake up in a nightmare of your own devising.

You might wake up, in other words, in another world.

It's a Wonderful Life was made by men who had just come home from war. Both Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart gave several prime years of their career to the effort to fight World War II. Stewart flew combat missions, while Capra was part of a program by some of Hollywood's biggest directors to make documentaries supporting the war effort. His Why We Fight remains one of the great propaganda documentaries.

Also taking part in that program was the great John Huston whose post-war documentary Let There Be Light was not seen until the 1980s. The movie documents what we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers returning home. The government found Huston's depiction of soldiers struggling to resume their normal lives so disconnected from the sunny normalcy it strove to promote that it shelved the film.

We still have a cultural blind spot around the idea that the soldiers who fought World War II were deeply traumatized by what happened there. Within families, talk of grandpa's struggles with memories from the war might have been normal, but as a country, the United States got very good at moving past the war. The goal of beating back mid-20th century fascism was so self-evidently righteous that once it was achieved, the suffering accrued in winning that war went increasingly unexamined. Eventually the children of those who were part of the war effort dubbed their parents "The Greatest Generation," and that was that.

Where we find close reflection on the traumas of World War II, if obliquely, is in art made between roughly 1945 and 1960. This period is perhaps my favorite in American film, and It's a Wonderful Life is perhaps my favorite film from that era. Every time I watch it, I find new nuances, new ways that it seeks to take stock of a country that had just been through two World Wars and a Great Depression.

This year when I watched it, I kept thinking about PTSD.

How do you think George Bailey explains to himself what happens at the climax of It's a Wonderful Life, say, 10 years after it happened? When he's had enough time to reflect, does he continue to earnestly believe an angel showed him an alternate reality? Or does he start to explain it all to himself as a strange dream? After a while, does his life start to feel unsatisfying again?

The magic of a story, of course, is that we can believe the characters within it have learned the lessons they need to learn and will change their ways accordingly in the years to come. Yet even as we are asked to believe people can change, we know in our own lives how fleeting an epiphany can be.

The question of whether George Bailey's epiphany will last has occurred to many who've written about It's a Wonderful Life (including me). Critic David Thomson's novel Suspects, published in 1985, goes perhaps the furthest with this notion. The book initially seems to be a series of biographies of film characters, almost entirely drawn from darker films and noirs – and then George Bailey is included. As the book continues, the reader begins to get the sense that someone is committing a series of murders and that the text we're reading is written by someone who might be privy to what's happening. I won't spoil what amounts to the novel's reveal; suffice to say Suspects directly asks the question of if George Bailey can ever be happy or if Christmas Eve 1945 was a one-off burst of good cheer.

So, okay, what if what George sees is just a fantasy?

The angel Clarence gives George a glimpse of an alternate reality that seems awfully self-serving. It's not just that some people's lives are poorer for not having George in them; it's that the entire town has crumbled into licentiousness and debauchery. Every man on a Navy transport ship died because George was never born! The idea is so over the top that it starts to feel comical. Surely, there are many worlds where George didn't exist; surely, in many of them, life trundled on much the same. Yet the glimpse George gets of the other world essentially argues he is the most important person in all of Bedford Falls.

When the townspeople of Bedford Falls rally to save him at the film's end, they inadvertently prove his secret egotistical suspicions about himself correct. George has sacrificed and sacrificed and sacrificed. The only thing he seems happy about in his life is his marriage to Mary, and even that he had to be talked into. We're led to believe he's a good father, but the text of the film displays this in only a few moments, most with Zuzu, his youngest. George is, as his antithesis Mr. Potter says, a warped, frustrated young man. He's just not old enough to see that yet.

(Quick sidebar: For the first 20 years of his career, Jimmy Stewart often played younger characters who served as foils for older characters who preside over the broken system the characters operate within. Either those characters were idealists – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – or they were cheeky strivers, as in The Shop Around the Corner. Once he became an older man himself, Stewart often played disillusioned idealists. What made him such a compelling movie star for so long was how ably he managed to surf the waves of public opinion from can-do optimism all the way to world-weary cynicism. It's a Wonderful Life amounts to a fulcrum point, wearing down the idealistic striver until he becomes disillusioned.)

Everyone's response to trauma is different, but for plenty who struggle with PTSD, self-sacrifice becomes normal. Trauma destabilizes your thought patterns, making the ground of reality feel soft and ever-shifting. Eventually, your very sense of self starts to feel elastic. If you don't have a coherent, consistent self, then it doesn't hurt to keep giving yourself away.

Yes, we're well aware of trauma responses that result in further perpetuation of trauma, whether through violence or emotional terrorism. But niceness can be a trauma response, too, and the maladaptive behavior it props up can be just as troubling as more overtly awful behavior. You need to have a self. You need to be a person. You can't simply give all of yourself away. You'll become warped and frustrated, and then something terrible will happen.

Dislodging the idea that niceness formed as a response to PTSD is part of our core being and not something we need to reexamine is really fucking hard (she said from experience). Our world values noble sacrifice because noble sacrifice is often a beautiful thing, and making sure the people you know are cared for, even if it comes to your own detriment, is a necessary part of relationships sometimes. We are in a time of year when what you can give to others, while not expecting to receive anything in return, is the spirit of the season. Generosity, grace, kindness – they're core to what makes humanity work when we're at our best.

Yet like all good things, they must be applied in moderation to oneself. Being kind and gracious to others is good; letting them take and take and take from you because they matter and you do not is not as good. You can lose yourself in a spiral of goodness as surely as you can in a spiral of wickedness. Sooner or later, you have to figure out who you are and stand up for what you need. When you do, that might cause you real pain. So too many of us simply try to chart a course that will give us little dribbles of what we need and want, then continue to shower what everybody else needs onto them. It gets exhausting, and it breeds resentment.

Or, to put it in terms of It's a Wonderful Life, ask yourself who asks George what he needs or tries to figure out what he's feeling at any given moment. It's pretty much just Mary. Everybody else takes everything he has to give.

As a huge fan of It's a Wonderful Life, all of what I'm saying feels like heresy, like deliberately reading against the text of the film to find something to fit my own personal takes. What I love about this film, however, is how, like all great art, it carries multitudes within it, even if those making the film were totally unaware of that fact.

Still: The idea that maybe what George really needed was to not give all of himself away to a town that comes to expect that of him not only cuts against the film but also against many of our assumptions about how the world operates. We are all aware in theory that building a happy and successful life involves carefully balancing your needs with those of the community. Lean too far in either direction and you'll hurt someone, even if it's only yourself. What's more, achieving that balance all of the time is impossible. Sometimes, we need what we need, and damn the community, and sometimes, we swallow ourselves to make the people around us have a slightly better life.

Further, I'm not sure Wonderful Life argues George's example is worth emulating. Even if you think it does, it's not as though the film doesn't present numerous other ways to have a happy life. Mary knows what she needs to be happy and goes after it, which gives her the inner peace to spread love and fulfillment outward. Harry Bailey has all the achievements George thought he deserved, and he seems pretty okay, too. Sam Wainwright makes a lot of money, Martini gets a nice house to live in, Mr. Gower doesn't go to jail, Violet Bick figures out how to put herself first, and Uncle Billy collects woodland creatures. The film doesn't find a one of these characters somehow inferior to George. He's just the one character who's forgotten how to see what he has because he's so blinded by what he doesn't.

Only Mr. Potter – isolated from his community – is presented as unambiguously bad. He's lost touch with his fellow man, and therefore, all his wealth does the world no good. He always wants more, and he won't feel good until he has it. But once he does, he'll want still more again. When Potter compares himself to George, he's not just egging the guy on; he's giving the film a chance to nod toward where the desperate, angry George we see for much of the film's second half is inevitably heading.

Potter is the film's antagonist, yes, but he serves as a foil to George, a reminder of the worst self George always carries within him. After all, George's worst enemy – and the film's true antagonist – is himself.

It's difficult to directly read It's a Wonderful Life as a film where George Bailey experiences PTSD because, well, the movie doesn't give us much of an indication he suffered any formative traumas. Yet it's also hard to read the film as not being made by people who'd recently seen a lot of traumatizing things, aimed at a nation that had been through those horrible experiences as well. (Here I should note that the film was a financial disappointment upon release. Maybe it cut too close to the bone.)

To put this in modern terms, Barbie is a film made by people who've just been through the heights of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. How the movie filters that experience into its fiction results in a bubbly comedy, but it's there, waiting for anybody to find if you go looking. And I would argue the film's success stems from how it converted those experiences we all went through into something that would help us process those long years safely. Culture that ignores the present rarely connects.

But the context a present moment provides is by its nature ephemeral. The further we get from a story's release, the more the realities of the eras in which they were written fall away from them. For instance, many of Shakespeare's plays were written to curry favor with Queen Elizabeth I, but unless you're a Shakespeare scholar, you're probably not thinking about that when watching Richard III.

So it goes with the films of the post-World War II period. For its part, It's a Wonderful Life works World War II into its text, but it spends far less time on it than, say, the golden days of the 1920s or the gutting depths of the Great Depression. Yet even as the movie makes us aware of its historical context, there are few alive anymore who remember how it felt to live through that. The rest of us only have stories we've heard elsewhere, and stories have resolutions. They suggest things end, obscuring how hard it can be to live through something.

If you read George's wish he had never been born as the wish of some filmmakers – and perhaps the nation they lived in – wishing that they had never had to go through so many awful things in rapid succession, other dimensions of the film open up. Darker ones open up, yes. The world in which George was never born being a hellscape only underscores how selfish he is, how much he wants everybody to see his importance. But you'll also reveal harder-to-pin down dimensions that become more starkly beautiful as you think about them. Whatever self-negating reasons George has for putting other people first, it does help build a community that can survive so many terrible things.

We live in an era where if a person has an at-all-suspect motive for doing a good thing, too many are quick to write them off as insincere in their actions and, therefore, not somehow as "good." But a good act is a good act regardless. Kindness begets kindness, even if the reasons you are kind are suspect or self-defeating.

The beauty of It's a Wonderful Life is that even if you read it as being about a trauma survivor who longs for recognition, to be noticed so that someone might also notice his pain, you mostly end up in the same place as the more conventional read of the film. To ground yourself in the reality of the film is to look around at bright, shining faces one Christmas Eve night and know that you can be and deserve to be loved, regardless of who you are, what you've done, or why you did it.

For most of my life, I would have called It's a Wonderful Life my favorite film. I saw so much of myself in George Bailey, a guy constantly sucked back into the maw of his hometown, a guy who could not catch a break no matter what. The truth of the matter was that I left my hometown the second I was able, and I moved as far away from it as I could get without having to get in a plane or boat. I caught many, many breaks on the way to the career I have now. And I wasn't a guy to begin with.

But it didn't feel like I had escaped, not really. No matter how far away I got from the facts of my past, the more they trapped me. I had left Bedford Falls, but most of me was still lost there, mired in a life story she refused to look at honestly, for fear of what it might upset. Before I came out and began transition, it was easy for me to imagine a world in which I'd never been born because, to some degree, I was living in it, trapped inside a body that made no sense and decaying, waiting for an angel to save me.

I used to imagine meeting that angel around Christmastime. I would ask them to make it so I had been born a cis woman, or I would ask them to make it so I had been adopted into a different life altogether, or I would simply ask them to give me a taste of any other life. It had to be better than the one I was leading, even if the one I was leading was the one I thought I wanted. To be an adopted trans trauma survivor was simply too many what-if points to choose only one. I didn't want to live in a world where I had never existed. I did want to live in one where everything about me was so different that I could finally understand the persona I inhabited was a false shell I could let dissolve.

For that to happen, however, I had to take steps myself. There was no angel. I had to be the one to begin transition. I had to be the one to build a family that felt like one I belonged to. I had to be the one to look at my trauma head-on. That work was long and hard and scary. It is ongoing. It will never end.

The me who related so heavily to George Bailey is mostly in my past. Now, I spend Christmas with my wife and child. Now, I've completely rebooted my career in a way I find invigorating but also in a way where I'm not entirely sure how I'll pay the bills come June. Now, I have a rich network of friends and family to buy Christmas presents for. Now, if you ask me, I'll tell you my favorite film is Spirited Away, which is, after all, about a girl who gets lost in a strange world for a long time, forgets her name, then finds a way back to herself.

I still watch It's a Wonderful Life every Christmas, and if Sight & Sound ever asked me to make a top 10 of all time, it would be in there. But time has moved on. The context in which it meant so much to me has slowly fallen away, and now, when I watch it, I remember how easy it is for some of us who struggle with PTSD to build worlds where we effectively don't exist anyway. Until I die, I will be dealing with psychic wounds that linger and never quite heal. The trick is to understand that the dealing with these hard things – and doing your best not to create further issues for others – is the work of being alive. To pray, desperately, to live again is to ask some force beyond comprehension or maybe just your subconscious to accept that your life, too, can be wonderful, even in all its horrors. And then, after a few hours, or a few years, or a whole lifetime, you might wind your way back through snowy streets and finally arrive home to a world that feels whole.

Merry Christmas to you if you celebrate, and a happy holidays to all. I'll be back in the New Year with a slight shift in focus for the newsletter, which I think many of you will be excited about. Thank you for reading all this time, and thank you for being such great supporters of my work.

I'll see you in 2024.

--Em