A very appropriate essay on Pottersville and a great erudition of what it means being a citizen of these two possible worlds. From the moralistic Bedford Falls view Pottersville is a “combo pack of Sodom, Gomorrah,” but from Pottersville’s perspective, the bars are better! What? There is something missing? Of course not because Pottersville is the best of all possible worlds, or to put it in the lingo of Pottersville, the boring bars lack patrons and go out of business. So what exists is by necessity, and is right by virtue of its existence. For Pottersville art is advertising, social conscience is replaced by nightlife criticism. Bedford Falls can sit in judgment of Pottersville, but Pottersville can’t judge Bedford Falls because there is ethical no standard for judgment—only the market exists in marketplace nihilism.

A citizen of Pottersville can only focus on the quality of bars and can’t ask about the druggist, Mr. Gower, who is in a private for profit prison convicted of manslaughter because he accidentally dispensed poison capsules. Pottersville doesn’t know about Harry, George’s little brother, because he drowned after falling through the ice of a frozen lake—hey, it’s survival of the fittest so the fittest are those that survive. And Violet Bick , the prostitute in the House of Dolls, is just playing her role in the entertainment industry as the market dictates. The fact that she may have had dreamed of another life, a fuller life, is unintelligible in Pottersville for nothing could be fuller than what is. Besides what else could a whore do? Tragedy is an incomprehensible category in Pottersville’s market fundamentalism. What sells is good, and what doesn’t sell is bad.

Oh, and what about the great war against Fascism that Henry went to fight? There’s no need to fight Fascism in Pottersville because Nazism is good for business—weapons from Remington, trucks from Henry Ford, financing from Wall Street (and we know who don’t we?), record keeping computers from IBM. The business of Pottersville is business. Fascism is good for business and business recognized it immediately. Tyranny of the marketplace just leads to tyranny. If Frank Capra’s Aesopian fable were to be complete, he would have shown the Pottersville citizenry wearing uniforms and giving the fascist salute with Mr. Potter carrying one of the five issues of Henry Luce’s Time magazine with Benito Mussolini’s picture on the cover extolling the virtues of fascism.

When George was in Bedford Falls he called it a “crummy little town” and is one of the down sides of being from Bedford Falls—having the capacity of visualizing a different reality--the counter factual--in which one can live free from desperation, tragedy, and tyranny. You know that you’re really in Pottersville when it starts looking good and the only difference that is meaningful is the quality of the bars. Literary criticism has reached a point where Aesopian tales are unrecognizable and mistaken for product advertisement—don’t buy sour grapes, purchase the sweet ones. Or would have Gary Kamiya taken the opportunity to give Capra's unmarketable film version a fashion review of Nazi uniforms--isn't silk be better than wool? So the admittedly rigged choice is to be either a sad Socrates or a happy pig. Bedford Falls is a silly dream so grow up and join the “real” world of Pottersville. The siren song is playing, Ka-ching. There is no “what could have been,” only what is.

I'd rather not read what a Twelve-Step Zombie has to say about anything. I'll take Mr. Lassen's insights, thank you very much.

It's gone from the front page and you have to go looking for it. No fair, Salon--if you're going to give us a rerun you have to own up to it and take the criticism.

Pottersville really does rock. However, the Salon dot com writer forgot the best scene of the movie...

The scene that empowered me at age 13 to know how to act

That's the scene in the movie where the three men have their hunter gatherer radar genes turned on...

They are seriously drilling Violet's hot ass with their eye's as she walks away...

How would you like...

Yes.

Want to come along, Bert?

We'll show you the town.

No, thanks. I, uh, I've gotta go home and see what the wife's doing.

Family man.

http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/i/its-a-wonderful-life-script.html

http://www.angryalien.com/1204/wonderful_lifebuns.asp

I mean Vera-Ellen AS Judy Haynes. Ahem.

You are writers there at Salon, right? Or was I mistaken?

I know it's Christmas, but could you please, please maybe plan ahead (maybe put the reminder in your 2007 calendar now) and please WRITE SOMETHING NEW NEXT YEAR. Something besides a recap of what I can already find in my TV guide?

Reading this article every year is starting to cause me considerable pain. And I don't like that movie either.

Let's all go watch White Christmas instead. Young and hot Rosemary Clooney and Judy Haynes in a much more burlesque environs would hit the spot right about now, wouldn't it?

Yeah, see, that's better...

February is around the corner...why not sharpen the Kamiya blade and take on a more recent perennial favorite: "Groundhog Day"?

Heck, there must be something that you can savage about Phil's (Bill Murray's) gradual weening from an all-cynicism diet, even to the point that he comes to regard Bedford F--sorry, Punxsutawney--as halfway civilized.

Come on, Gar! Take on the Rat! Take on the Rat!

I guess I saw a different movie then Mr. Kamiya. It's a Wonderful Life REINFORCED the utter mind crushing horror of Small town middle-america. George's life was one miserable kick in the crotch after another. This was never downplayed or romanticized. George's life sucked, and he broke under its weight. It's a wondeful Life was the Original Donnie Darko, American Beauty and Fight Club, all rolled into one.

The so-called happy ending? George's hysterical shrieks "God Bless us one and all" weren't shrieks of happiness. It was a shriek of terror and despair and madness. His sacrifices were the only thing that was holding together the lie that was Bedford Falls. The weight of the world WAS in fact on his shoulders. And the weight was destroying him.

The great depression, and WW2 forever changed America, and It's a wonderful life was an wry, witty and terrifying examination of those changes. Of course Pottersville looks more appealing to the modern eye. Pottersville looked more appealing to Americans of 1946, too. Which was Capra's sly point.

That Capra's dark vision of American life has somehow been whitewashed into a candy coated fairytale is no surprise. Times Square in New York used to be Pottersville, and now it's Disneyland. No matter how witty Mr. Kamiya wants to be, it doesn't change the fact that Capra beat him to it by 50 years.