It really is a wonderful life

Three reasons why everyone should watch It’s a Wonderful Life this Christmas.

Jon Kuhrt

Jon Kuhrt is CEO of Hope into Action, a homelessness charity. He is a former government adviser on how faith groups address rough sleeping.

A man stands one side of a bank counter while others, on the other side, look hopefully at him.

In my view, It’s a Wonderful Life is not the best Christmas film ever. It is simply the best film ever, full stop.

Released in 1946, the film focuses on the life of a man called George Bailey who lives in the small town of Bedford Falls. As a young man, George intends to “shake off the dust of this crumby little town” and get away to see the world and achieve great things. Yet through tragedy and his own sense of responsibility, he ends up spending his entire life in Bedford Falls running the building cooperative that his late father established.

He sacrifices a lot. He ends up giving the college money he has saved to his younger brother so he can go to university instead of him. During the depression he and his new wife give their honeymoon funds to keep the Building & Loan bank going. All the time he battles against the richest and most ruthless businessman in town, Henry Potter, who is determined to build his business empire at everyone else’s expense.

The film focuses on a Christmas Eve where George stands accused of fraud and faces scandal and jail. It’s all too much for him – the lost dreams, the feeling of insignificance and the heavy burdens he has carried for so long – crash in on him. Drunk and alone, he finds himself on a bridge, wishing he had never been born and preparing to commit suicide.

Yet at this lowest ebb, salvation comes. Through the visit of an angel, George is enabled to see what would have happened if he had never lived. He sees the impact that his life has had on so many people and on the whole town. He realises what a wonderful life he has had.

The film has a basic, raw message about living right. Our cynical age tells us that there is no point in trying to change things. But this is not true.

So why is it such a great film?

I love this film so much that, rather embarrassingly, I bought the DVD of it for my best friend two Christmases in a row. The main reason is because it has given me inspiration in my life and work.

Why? I think it’s for the following three reasons.

It’s realistic about the hardship of life. Mainly due to the final scene many now perceive it as quite a sentimental film, but when it was released, it was not popular because it was considered too dark. It’s because the film depicts the struggles that many ordinary people face – such as debt, low self-esteem and feelings of insignificance.

Also, in the character of Henry Potter, it sharply criticises the greed and self-interest of money-makers who don’t care about people. Henry Potter acts within the law but does not care about how people are affected by his money making. Profit overrides everything else.

In standing up to Potter, George Bailey is ‘sticking it to the Man’ and this is costly and tough. The renewal of community does not come without resistance against the powerful forces of greed and self-interest.

It shows that how we live does make a difference to the world. George Bailey’s life makes a massive difference to his town. Through unglamorous dedication he helps hundreds of people escape Potter’s slum housing and own their own homes. His bravery and leadership builds up his community and offers dignity and hope to others.

The film has a basic, raw message about living right. Our cynical age tells us that there is no point in trying to change things. But this is not true – we can make a difference if we have courage and commitment. George Bailey’s life shows the importance of how we live and the choices we make – we will invest simply in profits or will we invest in people?

But the key thing is that we will never really know the difference we are making. It’s a mystery beyond what we can grasp. We cannot avoid the need to have faith.

It’s about the love and grace of God. The opening scenes of It’s a Wonderful Life commences with George’s friends and family saying prayers for him because they know he is in trouble. And at the end of the film, with their prayers answered, together all of George’s friends sing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.

People who want to make a positive difference in our broken world don’t need lofty idealism or utopian dreams of naive optimism.

It’s significant that the film starts with prayers and then ends with a hymn – because essentially, it’s all about grace, redemption and salvation.

Too often words like this simply sound like religious jargon – as if they just refer to ‘getting into heaven when we die.’ But this is a damaging misunderstanding. Salvation is needed now – people are desperate in the face of meaninglessness, low self-esteem and suicidal thoughts. Also, people need redeeming from lives of greed and selfishness. Jesus meets people in these needs – he both comforts those who are disturbed – and also disturbs those who are comfortable.

God’s love and grace comes to us in the midst of real issues. This is the core message of Christmas: that God became human, in history. He came to earth to share the real struggles that humanity faces and to conquer them with his redeeming love.

People who want to make a positive difference in our broken world don’t need lofty idealism or utopian dreams of naive optimism. We know how damaged the world and its people are. But whether you are Christian or not, we all need inspiration, encouragement and hope to make a difference. And this is where It’s a Wonderful Life works a treat.

Review

Aliens

Culture

Film & TV

4 June 2024

7 min read

The problem with The Three Body Problem

The possibility of love in a universe of terror.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

a man leans against one end of a table one another sits against its other end.

Two bodies contemplate a problem.

Netflix.

If you are prone to nightmares or paranoia you might want to steer clear of the first season of Netflix’s sci-fi epic, 3 Body Problem. Adapted from Cixin Liu’s multi award-winning Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, the story starts in the Chinese Cultural revolution of the 1960s and ends twelve million years in the future. Mercifully the narrative is non-linear, so we’re spared a minute-by-minute account. It begins as a global mystery - scientists all over the planet are taking their own lives in mysterious circumstances – and ends with advanced alien weaponry collapsing the universe to a single dimension. All based on a true story, apparently.

Why the paranoia? At the heart of both Liu’s novels and the Netflix adaption, is a particularly terrifying solution to the Fermi Paradox. Enrico Fermi was one of the physicists working on the Manhattan Project (played by Danny Defari in the Christopher Nolan depiction of it in Oppenheimer), who presented his now famous paradox to his colleagues at Los Almos. The paradox goes like this: in a galaxy of billions of stars similar to our sun it is almost certain that advanced alien life is out there, and yet we have not received any convincing evidence of their existence. This, it seems, requires some explanation.

Interestingly, this question was also the starting point of C.S. Lewis’ sci-fi cycle The Cosmic Trilogy, and lies behind the title of its first book, Out of the Silent Planet. According to Lewis, the Earth has been placed under a kind of galactic quarantine, as a result of the fall of humanity, nothing and no-one is allowed in or out. The solar system is teeming with life, but we are partitioned from it. We’ve been blocked from the cosmic WhatsApp group for breaching behaviour standards. The aliens are out there but they’re keeping clear. We are the silent planet.

Cixin Liu however opts for a darker and more disturbing solution to Fermi’s question, which provides the title of the second book in his trilogy, The Dark Forest. The aliens are out there, but it is not we who have been silenced, it is they who are silent. The universe, according to this theory, is like a forest filled with predators and the most sensible thing any intelligent life can do is hide in the undergrowth to avoid attracting attention. Telegraphing our existence into the void by sending signals into space is to naively invite destruction. Alerting the universe to our presence is an act of existential self-harm. The universe is silent because everyone is hiding. For Lewis the universe shone with a love from which we had been excluded, for Liu it is saturated with malice from which we should exclude ourselves.

If Nietzsche was right, that we can survive any how as long as we have a why, then Liu’s characters are saddled with the opposite burden: endless hows and no why.

It probably isn’t too much of a spoiler to acknowledge that the inevitable happens. Aliens are contacted. They do make plans to invade. It is arguably a bit more of spoiler to give away exactly how this happens. The distance between them and us is so vast that, even travelling at one percent lightspeed it will take their invasion fleet four hundred years to get here. And in the meantime, just to ensure we can’t mount any meaningful defence against them, they fold a planet-sized computer into a photon-sized particle and send it to earth to sabotage all technological development. They can watch our every movement, overhear every conversation. We know they are coming and can do almost nothing about it. The bodies of suicides hanging in the fog from every lamppost lining the Thames underline the overriding despair. It is deliciously bleak. I did not sleep well after watching it.

Liu’s brilliance is not in doubt. The Netflix adaptation can barely capture the fireworks of creative inventiveness that crowd every page of his books (indeed the producers even dropped the definitive article from the book's title). In China, his fellow science fiction writers simply call him ‘Da Liu’ (Big Liu) in honour of his works of towering imagination. But I can’t help feeling that the overall atmosphere of The Three Body Problem is an example of what the theologian Carver Yu, another Chinese author, claimed characterised our culture: technological optimism and literary despair. Liu’s characters respond to the relentless encroachment of a malevolent universe with endless technological innovation. They possess an inexplicable will to survive in a cosmos where no one would wish to live. If Nietzsche was right, that we can survive any how as long as we have a why, then Liu’s characters are saddled with the opposite burden: endless hows and no why. They are thirsting for purpose while drowning in applications.

What struck me most watching the Netflix adaptation was that it seemed to extend the experience of living in a post-industrial society to the whole universe. Our sense that many of the organisations to which we owe our allegiance are clever but inhuman, technologically advanced yet amoral, is expanded to fill the farthest reaches of our imagination. Of course, human beings have always done this. Our ancestors saw faces in the clouds and gods in the constellations. We peer into the emptiness of the skies and populate them with our fears and hopes. Faced with the Copernican revolution and the rise of science, Pascal anticipated the cosmic horror of Liu by nearly four hundred years in confessing, ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’ The Three Body Problem, unlike Lewis who saw planet Earth as an aberration in an otherwise benevolent cosmos, takes our global technological arms-race and makes it the ultimate reality of the entire universe.

The crucial point is that we are not obliged to populate the blank canvas of the cosmos with the malice of Liu or the terror of Pascal.

The Three Body Problem then, like much science fiction, is a valuable and ingenious thought-experiment, but not one I wish to dwell on for too long. I prefer to contrast it with something closer to the cosmology that informed C.S. Lewis. One in which the core operating principle of everything is not the necessity of violence, but the indispensability of love. Something akin to Teilhard de Chardin’s assertion that in the dreams, wonder, exploration and imagination of love, a thread is woven that reaches the very heart of the universe. Despite all appearances to the contrary, love is the deepest reality of all.

This assertion is problematic in many ways. Not least in the face of the evident brutality and violence that traumatises human life. But even more fundamentally than that, how can we intelligibly assert the primacy of love while gazing out at a vast indifferent universe? What are we to do with those infinite silent spaces that so terrorised Pascal?

Perhaps we can try another thought-experiment. This one is drawn from the work of philosopher Chris Barrigar. He calls it the Agape/Probability account. The full argument is long and detailed, so there is no time to explain it all, but the broad brushstrokes are enough. Here’s the thought. What if we live in exactly the kind of universe required to produce creatures who can freely choose to live with self-giving love? They couldn’t be forced or coerced into it, but the conditions could be set in place that would lead to the emergence of such beings. The principles of ‘asymptotic’ statistics suggest that some things may not be determined but they can be so highly probable as to be inevitable. Barrigar asserts that the appearance of a species with the capacity to love was a cosmic inevitability. What is required to turn this possibility into something pretty much certain? Two things – lots of opportunities and lots of time. In other words, with apologies to Carl Sagan, if we want creatures capable of love, we need to build a universe.

Of course, a universe like that – a universe like ours – will throw up many other things in addition to love: violence, rock music and apples pies. But the crucial point is that we are not obliged to populate the blank canvas of the cosmos with the malice of Liu or the terror of Pascal. The cold silence of space does not in itself contradict our intuitive sense that the capacity to love is somehow ultimately significant. On the contrary, when we look at the vast distances between the stars, we could be looking at the minimal amount of spaciousness required to bring about beings with the capacity for self-giving love. At the very least, it’s a thought-experiment worth trying.