Another Christmas has passed, and for my wife and I, that
meant another three-day trip to my parent’s house up in Vermont. We pulled into
the long, winding driveway, tucked away amidst the evergreens, just as the sky
was turning a dark, fluorescent purple. With our bottle of cheap wine—whose
price label had been scratched off—in tow, we rang the clanging doorbell. The
sort of doorbell that doesn’t ding-dong, so much as it lets out a sharp
electric wheeze that continues breathlessly for as long as you press it. My
mother’s footsteps came rumbling quickly to the door, and when she opened it
she greeted us with ecstatic warmth, taking us both in her arms and kissing us
on the cheek. From the other end of the living room I heard my father’s
boisterously festive salutations. A big, bear-like man, he took me in for a
hearty, manly handshake, before dipping his Santa hat chivalrously for the
lady. He then laughed, dropping his pretenses and offering us eggnog or glasses
for the wine. It’s a Wonderful Life was about to start, he reminded us.
Flopping
down on the couch with my mother at his side, he grabbed the remote and turned
it on. 7:33; the movie had just started. We sipped our drinks, occasionally
making a comment, and lapsing into dispatch-like conversation during
commercials. But for the most part, I for one, simply allowed the warmth of the
eggnog and the vaguely followed story to envelop me. That is, until Donna Reed
came onto the screen.
It’s funny
how sometimes entire portions of your childhood become blocked off from your
memory (not in the sense of repression, or something sinister like that, but
merely in the way that old friends, and schoolteachers, and playgrounds fade
out of view) only to be brought back into full, flooring consciousness by the
slightest of provocations. Seeing her waltz across the screen, I was
immediately brought back to days of my early childhood, watching old reruns of
the Donna Reed Show, and of course, the Christmas-Eve airings of It’s a
Wonderful Life. It hit me that it was then, watching reruns with my family at a
point where I could still count my age on my fingers, that I had experienced my
first sexual thoughts. Not that it was anything so crude, mind you. I was still
just an innocent child. But her pin-up like looks, so innocently garbed those
in fantasy-inducing, flowing dresses of adolescent mystery, awoke feelings in
me that I could not articulate, even to myself. And maybe it was that—that
inability to articulate and make concrete—which relegated the memories of those
feelings to the chopping block on which such vague and fleeting notions are
often placed.
And as I
sat there on the love seat, half drunk on eggnog, her undeniable sex-appeal hit
me once again. Even though she was 25 at the time of the film, only a year
older than me, she gave off an irresistible, milfish air. Something, nearly
untouchable, but all the more maddeningly arousing for it. She had that
All-American look of innocence, a real Midwestern face—the face of a girl that
you could make blush with a single string of words; the face of a girl who
would feign shock at any notion of proposition, but who you could tell, behind
closed doors, let her unzipped dress fall to her ankles. I imagined her
dropping down to her knees and furiously sucking a throbbing dick with all the
tongue swirls and soft use of teeth to let you know that she knew exactly what
she was doing. Just looking into her bright, family-pleasing smile, you could
just see something wonderful and devious brimming underneath. She had the
pleased, telling smile of a wife who fucks before church so to feel the her own
wetness against the pew as her own little secret, her own little pleasure.
Fuckable,
maddeningly fuckable she was.
I crossed
my legs so to make my train of thought inconspicuous, but as I did so, I caught
conscious sight of my wife, who sat nestled up against the side of my chest.
Glancing down at her I could not resist the shameful, sexist lure of
comparison. I could not help but see the soft coating of fat that was
accumulating around her midsection. I could not help but think back to the
gentle waves of ripples along her thighs. I could not help but see that her
brow was to heavy, that her smile had been sagging, that her teeth had lost a
shade or two. All by 26, I could see in her the inevitability of age.
And it was
then that the central dishonesty, the central illusion of It’s a Wonderful Life
made itself blindingly apparent to me. All these Christmases I had blindly
bought into the notion that ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was the story of the
average man being shown the meaning that one life has. And therefore that it
was the story that showed the meaning and importance of the lives of all
average men and women
‘But what
average man is 6’2 and impossibly handsome?’, I thought to myself as I looked
down at my scrawny 5’7 frame. ‘What average man is the most sociable and
befriended man in town?’, I thought as I imagined the nine numbers in my
cell-phone’s contact list. ‘What average man has the job of altruistically
protecting an entire town?’, I thought to myself as I looked back to the
previous week of minimum wage work and useless graduate courses.
What average man has saved
concretely someone’s life? What average man has, by extention, saved dozens of
lives? What average man has four unspoiled, non-hideous children? What average
man has the charming voice of Jimmy Stewart?
And what
average man has a wife as fuckable as Donna Reed—at all, let alone after four
kids.
I felt body
begin filling with the sloshing juices of barely contained, drunken rage. ‘It’s
a wonderful life for George fucking Bailey’, I thought bitterly to myself. It
wasn’t even that the movie rubbed your face in the shittiness of your own life,
it was the dishonesty of it all. Because why is someone ever dishonest? Why
does someone ever lie in a debate?
Because
they know that they have no argument, that their side is wrong.
The fact
that Frank Capra had felt the need to go to such elaborate lengths of
dishonesty and ridiculousness to articulate his message that the average life
had meaning struck me as unbelievably heartbreaking. My anger melted away at
the thought of Capra, lying not to the viewers, but to himself, so to prove
something that he desperately needed to believe. It made me think of every
crumbling smile I’d ever seen in the solitude of a forgotten retirement home.
Was I the
only one who saw this? Jesus Christ, was I alone?
Once again,
I felt bitter hatred for the movie. ‘Any movie, any book, any piece of music
should be aimed at making its consumer feel less alone in their own head, not
more’, I thought to myself as I drained the rum-dense bottom of my glass. I
remember reading Notes from the Underground when I was 17, and even though
there wasn’t a single positive word in that entire fucking book, I found myself
extremely comforted by it. It showed that at least I wasn’t alone in thinking
the way I did.
I’ve never
been some cynic—I get watery-eyed at the end of each Toy Story as much as the
next guy—but the isolating dishonesty in the movie’s tone repelled me. I
couldn’t believe that no one else was seeing this. I glanced down at my wife’s
face, but all I could see was the untelling top of her head. I then looked out
of the corner of my eye to my father’s face. He simply sat there, with a warm
smile on his face, and with his arm around a wife that had never looked like
Donna Reed—as near all women don’t.
This was
after a life of work in an insurance office that a thousand men could have
done. After a life of the casual loneliness of an American social circle. After
a life of ordinary looks and ordinary accomplishments. After a life of a son
who could never repay the love he’d been given, as all sons can’t, to await
visits that weren’t frequent enough, as they never are.
And yet he
still sat there, softly smiling in his Santa hat, with a glass of eggnog in his
hand and his arm around his wife, utterly content, watching his favorite movie
on his favorite day of the year. I kept my line of sight fixed on him for quite
a while. I’m still unsure if he ever noticed. But it was then that the
importance of It’s a Wonderful Life dawned on me, not in what the movie said,
but in what the movie was, in what it created rather than told.
Noticing
that it had changed to the commercial, I jumped up and asked if anyone else
needed their glass refilled. I smiled as I refilled the glasses of my wife and of
my mother and of my father, too.
And then I
re-entered the room.
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