It's a Wonderful Memento Mori

Easter Eggs of Mortality in the Classic Movie

Happy New Year to all my subscribers! And a sincere thanks to all of you for supporting my work in 2023.  If you haven’t noticed yet, there’s a lot of good writing to choose from on Substack – and by “a lot” I mean an overwhelming amount, from talented and established writers, to boot.  There’s also just a lot of good writing to choose from, period, from whatever the source. And we all have limited time, right? So quite frankly, whenever someone reads one of my posts, I take it as nothing less than a small miracle.  Which means you, my readers, are nothing short of miraculous. 

I was ready to write an entirely different post this go-around, but recent developments in world news and my personal life pushed me into the kind of funk that makes you want to find a stiff drink and a cave and hibernate for a few months.  To fight that urge I re-watched my go-to uplifting holiday movie, It’s a Wonderful Life.  Not only was my funk dispelled, but I came away with a happier topic: namely, cool visual cues in the movie that had previously escaped my notice.

Like most people, I’ve watched It’s a Wonderful Life so many times that I can reliably predict lines of dialogue – hell, even beats of dialogue.  When, in the pouring rain, George arrives at 320 Sycamore to celebrate his makeshift honeymoon, I know that when he tips his hat to Ernie, water is going to dribble from the brim.  Every time George reaches for the staircase finial, I know it’s going to come off in his hand.  I know all this, and yet I still relish it.  Like all film classics, it’s comfort food, made familiar by decades of yearly Christmas broadcasts.

But baked into that familiarity, if you look close enough, are startling visual memento moris.  They are small and unobtrusive, often disguised by the larger scope of the sets, or by the action, which is often cheerful and Capra-corny.  But like the fact of mortality itself, they’re ever- present, asserting themselves in whispers.

Skulls

Death is always with George Bailey.  The ultimate memento mori, the skull, appears from the moment we first meet him as a child, sledding across a frozen pond with his friends. George, his brother Harry and their buddies all sport stocking caps adorned with skull-and-crossbones patches.

The skull-and-crossbones works literally as the pirate badge George and his friends wear to signify their boyish camaraderie.  It also works as a clever, multi-layered bit of foreshadowing.  Immediately, it predicts Harry’s near-demise when he falls through the ice.  But it also anticipates the very next milestone in George’s life: his intervention when the druggist Mr. Gower inadvertently fills a prescription with poison. And of course, the skull conjures George’s later attempt to take his own life.

The skull reappears in George’s adulthood, in the form of a figural silver pocket watch sitting on Mr. Potter’s desk during George’s confrontations with him.  “Death’s Head” pocket watches like Mr. Potter’s were popular from the 17^th century into the early 20^th; even in the 1940s, they were rare collectibles, giving Potter another easy means to flex his wealth (as if that giant, ornately carved throne chair wasn’t enough).

We first spy the skull in the scene where Potter offers to employ George for the handsome salary of $20,000 a year: life-changing money, the kind to make George not just financially secure but affluent, able to send his children to college and take Mary to Europe on vacation. The only condition? That George give up the Building and Loan, effectively ceding the control and future of Bedford Falls to Potter. 

I admire the way the director, Capra, and his set designer conspire to make the viewer complicit in George’s dilemma with that one Death’s Head pocket watch.  As Potter makes his proposal, Capra shoots the exchange from behind. We see two skulls, the back of Potter’s and the front of the silver watch.  The Death’s Head faces Potter, as if to intimate his worship of material wealth has only one end. But it also faces the viewer, as if to challenge us with those dark, socket-less eyes: What would you do? Would you take the money and run? Or would you consign your family to a modest, even financially challenging life for the sake of your community (you know – for those same knuckleheads who were damn near ready to sink the Building and Loan during that bank run?).

The skull’s second appearance is likewise fraught.  It occurs during George’s final confrontation with Potter, when he begs him for a loan for the $8,000 Uncle Billy misplaced (and Potter stole).  This time, the skull squarely stares Potter in the face as he denies George help and tells him he’s “worth more dead than alive.” The wages of sin is death, the skull seems to say, but Potter, true to form, is oblivious. Worse, he seems to be winning.  He grinds George into despair through sheer force of power; all the while, in the background, a huge bust of Napoleon – another guy who knew something about sheer force of power – glowers down at George.

This second appearance of the pocket-watch skull directly precedes George’s suicide attempt and thus serves as another clever foreshadowing device.  But fortunately for us – this is a Frank Capra movie, after all! – another, different memento mori re-asserts itself before the film’s conclusion to affirm George’s life and give us all some much-needed hope.

The Bailey Butterflies

At the beginning of the film, when we’re first introduced to the Bailey household, we see George having a heart-to-heart with his father at the dinner table. They’re discussing George’s planned world travels before he heads off to college.  But as we repeat viewers know, Pa Bailey will die and George will forgo his most heartfelt plans.  He will not fulfill his dream of becoming an architect and engineer; instead, he will fill his father’s shoes at the Building and Loan.  He will not travel the world; instead, he will never leave Bedford Falls.

During the scene, we see two shadow boxes filled with butterfly specimens hanging on the wall behind Pa Bailey.  This makes literal sense from an economic standpoint. Pa Bailey only made a modest living, so the Bailey home is full of the Victorian-era décor they no doubt inherited from past generations and made do with: fringed stained glass lamps, carved mahogany furniture, and yes, those butterflies (Victorians loved collecting and displaying specimens from the natural world).

This is not the last time we see those shadow boxes, however.  They resurface late in the film, after Uncle Billy tells George he’s lost the $8,000 and George fears ruin.  George returns home and, unable to contain his desperation, lashes out at Mary and his children. His daughter sits at the piano and, on the two corner walls to her left, the butterfly specimens hang.  Again, this makes literal sense: George is of limited means and his 1940s home is full of furniture and décor that look like hand-me-downs from decades earlier.  Of course he took his parents’ butterflies to 320 Sycamore.

But it also works in the metaphorical sense.  Presumably, the butterfly specimens were collected from exotic locations, perhaps some of the very ones George wanted to explore as a young man.  Both he and the butterflies are pinned down, trapped behind glass, frozen in place just as they were ready to spread their wings and fly.

Most importantly, in light of the film’s conclusion, it works as a memento mori.  Butterflies are common in memento mori art, representing Christian resurrection, the conquering of death. After the angel Clarence shows George a world in which he never existed, George experiences a parallel resurrection of sorts.  Instead of giving into self-eradicating despair, he understands the purpose and importance of his existence, and that his acts of self-sacrifice engender a goodness that will extend far beyond the scope of his own life. The butterflies appear behind him at the film’s conclusion as the group sings Hark the Herald, a subtle visual clue to both George’s rebirth and the promise of Christ.

The skulls and butterflies in It’s a Wonderful Life quietly co-exist with the real deaths and births, endings and beginnings, depicted by the characters. By weaving them into the story, Capra not-so-subtly hints that a wonderful life is only possible when we live with our own mortality in mind.  George’s memento moris are our own.