Seventy years ago this Christmas, the world first learned how much worse things would have been without the existence of George Bailey. Frank Capra’s 1946 Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, was a lyrically corny tribute to the virtue of small-town USA and the wonderful, good-hearted patriotic small town folk, like George, who live in it.

Watching the film this bleak Christmas season, though, it’s difficult to enter fully into its spirit of democratic communal celebration. Last month, across the nation, heartland Americans like good old George (Jimmy Stewart) and his loving wife Mary (Donna Reed) joined with wealthy creeps like Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) to give a bigoted authoritarian the nuclear codes. The bustling scene at the end of the film, with cheerful neighbors crowding into George’s front hall to celebrate and wish him well — are those scenes of communal democratic virtue? Or are they scenes from a fascist rally where the participants have just removed for a moment their “Make America Great Again” caps?

The sinister, Twin Peaks-esque darkness beneath the surface of Bedford Falls isn’t just a post-Trump retrospective interpolation. It’s a Wonderful Life has a very conscious current of bitterness and despair running through it. On the surface, of course, George Bailey is depicted as a kind of saint who “always thinks of others,” and is universally beloved. Jimmy Stewart, transcendentally handsome and equally charming, totally makes you believe that women would throw themselves at George Bailey while angels descend from heaven to tell him how awesome he is.

Bailey’s good cheer and easy brilliance has a flip side, though. Talented, dazzling, confident, George wants to get out of Bedford Falls, see the world, do great things. Yet fate keeps thwarting him. His father has a stroke just as George is about to leave town, and he has to take over the family bank. He has to use money set aside for his honeymoon to stave off a bank run. He never gets out of Bedford Falls; he never fulfills his dreams. He lives a normal life, when he could have been extraordinary. As the devious Mr. Potter tells George, speaking with the tongue of Satan:

George is, in short, a victim of relative deprivation. A petty bourgeois bank owner and successful small-scale entrepreneur, he is not poor, but neither is he as rich as that crafty, big banker elite Mr. Potter, who schemes against him. George is galled by his lack of success, and that gall turns to anger, despair, cruelty, and a kind of egotistical fugue.

When his Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) loses $8,000, and the bank is threatened with ruin, George becomes positively frightening. “Where’s the money, you silly stupid old fool?” he rages. “Where’s that money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison! That’s what it means! One of us is going to jail; well, it’s not gonna be me!” Jimmy Stewart storms away, lanky form twisting in anguish, shirt unbuttoned, coat askew, and hurtles himself at his home and family, raging at his wife, breaking furniture, snapping at his little son, “What’s the matter with our car? Isn’t it good enough for you?”

In theory, this is an unusual response to a one-time stress. But when Mary reprimands him, she doesn’t say, “Why are you behaving so horribly?” Instead she demands, with exasperation, “George, why must you torture the children?” — which could apply only to George’s current bad behavior, but which might also mean, “why must you [always] torture the children?” One has to wonder if he’s tormented the children with this kind of tantrum a few times before, or even habitually. George’s anger and violence seem so much more real than the cheerful, idyllic American façade, that the rest of the film feels like a stage set erected over an abyss.

The film’s famous final half hour, in which an angel shows George what the world would be like without him, is supposed to demonstrate what a wonderful person George really is, and redeem him from his paroxysm of resentment. But you could also see the alternate reality sequence as a kind of psychotic break, in which George gets exactly what he wants — a demonstration of his own virtuous awesomeness and a sweeping revenge on those whom he feels diminished him. George’s brother, the war hero, who escaped town, becomes a corpse. George’s wife, who kept him from leaving town and fulfilling his dreams, becomes a timid, spinster librarian caricature who, unconfined to a domestic role, is miserable. She, and everyone, must suffer, so that the film can make George feel better about himself.

It isn’t just individuals who are worse off without George; it is the town itself. George stood up to the malignant Potter. In his absence, lovely homey Bedford Falls becomes callous, alienating Potterville. Horrified, George wanders through a Potterville festooned with ratty bars and dens of iniquity.

One sign of that iniquity is, notably, integration. The first real sign George gets that the world has changed radically for the worse is when he walks into a formerly cozy family bar and sees a black man playing rowdy piano. Black people exist in the “real,” Georgeful world, but they are servants and boosters, not independent individuals performing on their own without a white family to guide them. George, it turns out, was the dam protecting the real America from a flood of ominous jazz.

The obvious analog to Trump in It’s a Wonderful Life is Potter — the “scurvy little spider” bloated with wealth and ego, who wants to put his own name (Potterville! Trumpville!) on everything he owns. Onscreen, George refuses to work with Potter, no matter how much the elite banker offers to pay him.

But offscreen, in 2016, not all Georges were so virtuous. Capra’s film shows a world in which fairly well off white men demand paranoid validation of their own importance, and reject a world in which that importance is undermined by gender or racial progress. George is a bulwark against the corrupt elites; without him, urbanization will ooze in, causing black people to be independent and gender roles to warp, leaving a wake of loose women and spinsters cluttering the streets.

We need George to shore up the American verities, whatever those may be. It’s a wonderful life for white male small bankers, and all those — including quite possibly Mr. Potter — who see themselves in white male small bankers. Or at least, it better be a wonderful life. If it isn’t, there are many George Baileys willing to break America to make it great again.

By Noah Berlatsky

If you had told fans of the Mad Max franchise circa-1986 that the fourth film in the series — up for an Academy Award at this Sunday’s Oscars ceremony — was going to be an explicitly feminist (or at least arguably feminist) narrative about overthrowing the patriarchy, said fans would probably have grunted and scratched their armpits in amused disbelief. Because whatever their virtues, the first three Mad Max films were, at best, only dimly interested in women.

Director George Miller’s series is devoted to manly men beating their manly chests while grunting and butting chests and cars and other manly bits. Tough guy, glowering-cowboy-biker-machismo and leather, and guns, and brutal death in gladiatorial combat: That’s what Mad Max was originally all about, not feminism.

The first film, in 1979, was particularly stark in its gleefully Neanderthal gender posturing. In a post-apocalypse that looked almost indistinguishable from the present, Mel Gibson as Max wanders through a right-wing nightmare in which evil thugs protected by oleaginous lawyers terrorize good neighborly folks and threaten the fabric of civil society. Max’s pure, sporadically spunky wife is casually offed to provide him with the requisite revenge motive. But the real energy of the film is in the male bonding, whether between Max and his shirtless, leather-pants-wearing police commander, or between the cops and their slavering biker gang antagonists. Men man the barricades of civilization to protect women from the barbaric manly hordes amidst the grim grinding of gear shifts, biceps, and gender stereotypes.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) shuffle male archetypes a bit, but don’t really challenge them. With an increased budget, the post-apocalypse looks much more post-apocalyptic, and Max transforms from an agent of the crumbling but noble state into a wandering loner. He’s a shaggy cowboy Han Solo swaggering into Dodge to declare his contempt for the sissified city folk before offering to die for them in an apotheosis of revving engines and gunfire. Women and children look up to Max and his giant swinging guns, and he laconically acknowledges their tribute by performing uber-competence and uber-violence. Then he heads back out into the desert: a man alone with only his penis and his car for companionship.

There are, though, perhaps a few foreshadowings of Fury Road in the earlier films — especially in the character of Aunt Entity in Thunderdome. Entity, played by an electric if under-utilized Tina Turner, is the boss of Bartertown, a precarious community of thieves and toughs. She has shakily reinstated the order which Max brutally but unsuccessfully defended in the first film.

“You think I don’t know the law? Wasn’t it me who wrote it?” she declares. Though she’s the villain of the piece, her motives seem admirable, more or less. She wants to preserve civilization, and build a functional community out of pig shit — the fuel which Bartertown uses for power. Entity isn’t exactly a feminist hero, but she’s still a precursor of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, who overthrows the evil patriarch Immortan Joe in order to establish a better, female-led society.

In fact, when you look at Entity, the gap between the women in the earlier Mad Max films and Furiosa doesn’t seem so great after all. Perhaps Furiosa isn’t a rejection of the Mad Max series’ gender roles so much as a re-crystallization of them. From the first film to the last, women are figured as a force for civilization; as Aunty suggests, they are the ones on whom the law is built. In the first movie, Max is a policeman — but only as long as his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) is at home, tending to the baby and providing an oasis of 1950s idyllic home life to ground her man. Once she’s gone, Max turns from lawgiver into vigilante outsider, riding sweatily towards isolation and death.

The various communities into which Max drifts in the second and third films are also anchored by women and the associated children. Men are sometimes in charge — but all-male communities in these films tend to be gangs, not civilizations. Notably in Beyond Thunderdome, when Max stumbles into a group of kids reminiscent of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, the children aren’t all boys. Instead, the leader, and the person who preserves the oral traditions, is Savannah Nix (Helen Buday). At the conclusion of the film, Savannah has found an abandoned city and has figured out how to generate electricity, to light many of the buildings at night. They keep them on, she says, in case Max, or others, should return — a beacon of civilization for all those lost men, traipsing about the desert as men do.

Fury Road is in some ways a radical break with Mad Max past. It puts a woman at the center of the story, and that woman gets to overthrow the patriarchal law giver. It’s almost as if Jessie from the first movie kneed Max (rather than the bad guy biker) in the crotch and stole his car.

But was Furiosa really that revolutionary? One could argue that the last film in the franchise could also be seen as a conservative embrace of Mad Max gender roles past. Women are civilization; Immortan Joe’s male patriarchy, in which women are enslaved and marginalized, is therefore innately uncivilized — an unsustainable innovation. Furiosa, in going from Max-like rebel to domestic leader, isn’t launching a progressive future so much as she’s turning the clock back.

The apocalypse rewinds, and the matriarchal civilization is reinstated. And Mad Max for his part fights for the women as he always does, before striding off toward the wilderness, where men are uncivilized men alone.

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Lead image: flickr/Tom Blunt