The Tao of George

There’s a reason why “It’s A Wonderful Life” is such an enduring film—and it’s probably not what you think.

It’s not just that certain copyright and licensing issues led to it airing every night on every station every holiday season for many years, making it as much a part of Christmas as trimming the tree and exchanging gifts.

It’s not just that it’s sweet or sentimental or so called Capracorn.

It’s not just that it’s an exceptionally written, perfectly acted and directed, inspiring and entertaining movie.

It’s the Taoist-like balance it achieves, the yin-yang of its light and darkness, the truth of human existence it captures and conveys.

Birthed out of failure, “It’s a Wonderful Life” began as a short story titled, “The Greatest Gift,” written by Philip Van Doren Stern, who, after failing to find a publisher for it, made it into a Christmas card, which he mailed to two-hundred family members and friends. Originally purchased by RKO Pictures as a vehicle for Cary Grant, three different scripts were written and rejected before the project was shelved and Grant went on to make the “Bishop’s Wife”—all of which led to Frank Capra getting involved and the success the film ultimately became. Of course, success is relative. This seminal, among-the-best-of-all-times movie was a box office failure when first released in 1946.

George Bailey is a small-town man whose life seems so desperate he contemplates suicide. He had always wanted to leave Bedford Falls to see the world, but circumstances and his own good heart have led him to stay. He sacrificed his education for his brother's, kept the family-run savings and loan afloat, protected the town from the avarice of the greedy banker Mr. Potter, and married his childhood sweetheart. As he prepares to jump from a bridge, Clarence, his guardian angel, intercedes; showing him what life would have become for the residents of Bedford Falls if he had never lived—a hellish existence in the greed-driven, dark, depraved Pottersville.

Clarence tells George, “See, you’ve really had a wonderful life.”

But has he?

As “wonderful” as George’s life is—particularly in its positive impact on others, it’s not all wonderful—or even good. There’s a price to pay for living in a small town—or any size place where you don’t fit in. There’s a price to pay for honesty and integrity, for a life lived in service to others and high ideals, a high price for not having a price. The biggest price George pays is an internal one, intellectual and spiritual, the anguish and frustration that comes from being awake, surrounded by those who slumber.

Appropriately black and white, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is profoundly Taoist in its push-pull of yin and yang. These two forces, and the interplay between them, arise out of emptiness—symbolized by the empty circle they are drawn into. George embodies, and is surrounded by, and is acutely aware of, light and dark, soft and hard, masculine and feminine, receptive and aggressive, but mostly the empty that is around and in and between all things. And it’s this balance of the lighter and darker sides of existence that elevate this film to greatness. Without the one, you’d have silly, sweet, sentimental swill. Without the other, you’d have only meaninglessness and darkness. But the two together achieve a complexity and profundity that so mirrors reality it gives rise to the notion that life can actually imitate art.

Many viewers seem to miss how truly dark the film actually is, but it’s this ingredient, this rich yinish quality that enables “It’s a Wonderful Life” to earn its inspiration and ending.

The film’s shadow side doesn’t just appear when Bedford Falls transforms into Pottersville. It’s been there all along—showing through the skein between realities, in the injustice and inequity, in the claustrophobia and frustration, in the way the rich and powerful oppress the poor and disenfranchised.

Perhaps more than an alternate reality, Pottersville is the same reality as Bedford Falls—only seen differently. George Bailey, a truly good, kind, and decent person projects a goodness and decency on the world he inhabits. To him, the town is Bedford Falls. Old Man Potter has always seen it as Pottersville. The rich and powerful always view the world as theirs—their right, their entitlement, their prize, their reward. Instead of Pottersville being the version of reality that resulted from George never being born, maybe it’s what happens when a good man like George finally allows the selfishness and brutishness and meaner aspects of lesser men to cloud his vision, when he gives up and gives in, quits fighting the good fight and turns the whole thing over to them.

The Tao is the way or path (a term used in a lot of the world’s great wisdom traditions). It is ancient. Ineffable. Unnamable (“the Tao that can be named is not the Tao”). And you don’t have to be Taoist to appreciate its universals truths or the wisdom of its most sacred text, the Tao Te Ching.

This way or channel is the flow of the universe. True fulfillment and serenity comes from living in harmony with it, walking the path. Like us, George spends much of his life fighting the path, stubbornly resisting the way, insisting he has a better way. Invariably, when he surrenders and begins to travel the way he glimpses his best self and begins to practice wei wu wei—doing without doing, actionless action, that in-the-zone, alignment with the Tao, where we, like water, flow in a stream of effortless action/in-action, yielding, becoming inseparable, indistinguishable from the creator and all of creation. Truly one.

But George went to some very dark places before aligning himself with the Tao, before giving in and becoming truly free.

Like religion and philosophy, we turn to art for meaning—and few films are as meaningful and as much about meaning as “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That an average George can make a difference, can have meaning by giving meaning to others gives us hope, challenges us to make a difference. Viewing the film is a religious experience for me. Profound. Transcendent. Trasformational. Watching it each year is a rite, a ritual, a memorial and remembrance.

For me, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is both inspirational and cathartic. It moves me like no other movie. I laugh and cry (a lot). I am George Bailey. I am small town. I have a small life. My Bedford Falls existence could easily be Pottersville if not for love, for art, for meaning, for family and friends. I’m on a quest, searching for meaning, attempting to walk the way. I want to make a difference in the world and doubt that I am doing much of anything that matters to much of anybody. George inspires me to give, to take the small gifts I’ve been given, like a few measly loaves and fish, and share them with others. It’s what Philip Van Doren Stern did with his story, “The Greatest Gift.” It’s what I’m attempting to do at this very moment by writing and giving away this column, for I believe what is written beneath the picture of George’s dad in his office: “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.”

The Most Wonderful Films of the Year

What is it about Christmas movies?

I don’t mean Oscar contenders released during the holidays, but films in which Christmas is actually a character.

Why are the good ones SOOOO good?

What makes movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Love Actually” among my favorite films of all time, and why do I return to “The Holiday,” “The Family Stone,” “The Ice Harvest,” “This Christmas,” and “Home for the Holidays” time and time again—and not just in December?

I think it’s a number of factors really—many of which are the very ones that make this season the most wonderful time of the year.

There is much that is tired and trite, hollow, cynical, and sentimental about the holidays. Much cashing in. Sometimes the entire environment sounds as shallow and tinny as poorly recorded, overplayed Christmas music on small, cheap department store speakers. Too much of the season is about buying, spending, acquiring—and ridiculous reciprocation calculations (Should I get him a present? He’s probably gonna get me one. We’ve got to invite them to our party since they invited us to theirs, right?)

The crass commercialism of the holiday supposedly in honor of the impoverished peasant living among and fighting for the marginalized, subsistence, villagers and day laborers of First Century Palestine is, like so many things related to him, a most tragic irony.

What is bought and sold more than anything else during this season is us—our very souls.

And yet. And yet. In spite, of all these violent assaults on Jesus, all these adulterations and perversions of the meaning of his life, something sacred, something magic, something undeniable survives. This, more than anything else, demonstrates the true power of the man, his message, and the holiday that honors and celebrates his birth. That something of the ineffable, something of the transformational, something of the true spark of divinity survives the full on assault of the American capitalist religion is truly a Christmas miracle.

And the best Christmas movies embody this. They tap into the magic and they quiet all the clamor to capture the love.

Jesus dared to live love. His life (and too soon his death) was the result of his conviction that God is love, that God loves everyone equally and unconditionally. (It’s another tragic irony that the religion that rose up around him has all but lost this). Jesus’ radical, yet only-hope-for-humanity notion that God is not an angry, distant deity, but a present loving parent who loves us no matter what we do (or fail to, including living out love) survives in spite of the religion that bears his name’s insistence on being like every other religion. And it somehow survives Christmas, too.

Love survives.

We ignore, abandon, dilute, and contaminate love, and yet love remains. Mixing our needs and projections and illusions and neuroses and insecurities and attempts to control with love can’t kill love any more than mixing our greed and gluttony and selfishness and tribalism and sentimentality with Christmas can kill its spirit. We alter it to be sure—and what remains often bears little resemblance to love or Christmas—yet we can still glimpse love, still feel the meaning and magic beneath, above, around, and, on occasion, through the small tears in the fabric of the blanket of commercialism smothering Christmas.

The best of Christmas movies provide us with this glimpse of love, which is captured so brilliantly by Richard Curtis in the prologue to his Christmas masterpiece, “Love Actually.”

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge—they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspicion . . . love actually is all around.”

The characters in “Love Actually” or “The Holiday” risk and receive love, and it’s this not particularly dignified or newsworthy phenomenon that is a metaphor in microcosm for the macrocosmic love Christmas is meant to commemorate and celebrate.

Among the best movies ever made, “”It’s A Wonderful Life” is also about love at Christmas—about a good man who truly lives in love by turning his back on greed and selfishness and extending himself on the behalf of others (the textbook definition of love). It captures love on many levels—the love of a couple (George and Mary, “George Bailey I’ll love you to the day I die”), the love of family (both George’s home of origin and the one he and Mary build), the love of others, and community, and ultimately, the divine source of all love (which comes to George through Clarence and eventually others). This last is particularly important, and the meaning of Christmas—we experience God’s love through those others who are willing to be conduits of it for us; others experience God’s love through us when we are willing to undergo ego death, becoming empty of anything but love.

The best of Christmas movies, like the best of art and religion and philosophy, remind us of what really matters. They inspire us toward the best versions of ourselves and provide us with much needed perspective. They say, like all truth, that love, not status or money or power or presents or bills or public opinion, matters most of all, and, as Clarence wrote to George, “No man is failure who has friends.”

The End of the World As We Know It

If the Philistines are at the gate of American culture, it’s on the inside.

We’re witnessing the end of an era, the twilight of American culture.

As a wise person once said, “America has become a storefront for a corporate mob.”

We are a culture of constant consumption, gluttons who mostly stuff ourselves with regurgitated entertainment devoid of anything meaningful or of lasting value. As social critic James Twitchell put it, “There is barely an empty space in our culture not already carrying commercial messages.”

So many things being sold to us. So much noise.

We live in a “systematic suppression of silence,” George Steiner said.

It’s the end of the world as we know it—and how do most of us feel? Just fine. At least we do as long as they keep us distracted, entertained, medicated, and consuming.

Morris Berman says in his book, “The Twilight of American Culture” that there are four factors present in the collapse of a civilization. Name one of them that doesn’t apply to us:

1) Accelerating social and economic inequality.
2) Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems.
3) Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness.
4) Spiritual death—the emptying out of cultural content and repackaging it into formulas.

In the same book, Berman writes, “We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotion/commercial bullshit that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.”

Are we talking about the Roman Empire or the American one?

According to Sallust, Rome in 80 B.C.E. was a government controlled by wealth, a ruling-class numb to the repetitions of political scandal, and a public diverted by chariot races and gladiatorial shows.

Sounds like us to me. Our sickeningly greedy culture is of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations. Too many are numb to and ignorant of everything that truly matters. And we are a public diverted by NASCAR, sitcoms, reality TV, transient, trashy novels, trite, tiresome, retread movies, extremist political pundits, and the pathetic freak show parade of celebrity culture—and I’m not even talking about the too-easy targets of Palin and Paris, The Situation and the Octomom, and Bush and Beck.

We celebrate ignorance and inanity and incivility—and we like it loud and obnoxious and arrogant.

Are we Philistines? Read the definition and decide for yourself— a smug, ignorant, especially middle-class person who is regarded as being indifferent or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values.

The problem isn’t the occasional consumption of cultural crap. It’s the steady diet of it—it’s not knowing it’s crap.

You may wonder what’s made me so cheery, why a hopeful, glass-half-full-guy like me has suddenly become a sandwich-boarded sidewalk seer wildly and wide-eyedly proclaiming the end is nigh.

Easy. It’s my front-row seat to the apocalyptic end of art and culture, justice and compassion. But the reason I’m ranting about it right now is an incident that happened last week in (of all places) New York at a place known for enlightening events—the 92nd Street Y.

This particular event was a conversation between Steve Martin, the writer and actor, and Deborah Solomon, who writes a weekly interview column for “The New York Times Magazine.”

About halfway through their conversation, a Y representative handed Solomon a note asking her to talk more about Martin’s career in show business and less about the art world, the subject of his latest novel, “An Object of Beauty.”

The following day, the Y sent out an apology for the event and the promise of a refund.

“The Y never told me what they wanted,” Solomon said, adding that Martin, a longtime friend, had asked her to conduct the interview, and that she determined that a conversation focused on the art world and his book seemed most timely and interesting. “Frankly, you would think that an audience in New York, at the 92nd Street Y, would be interested in hearing about art and artists. I had no idea that the Y programmers wanted me to talk to Steve instead on what it’s like to host the Oscars or appear in “It’s Complicated” with Alec Baldwin. I think the Y, which is supposedly a champion of the arts, has behaved very crassly and is reinforcing the most philistine aspects of a culture that values celebrity and award shows over art.”

And I couldn’t agree more.

Entertain us or we’ll whine and want our money back. Make us laugh, not think!

But the event and the response it received points out part of the problem. Steve Martin, who happens to be a good writer and storyteller, is a celebrity. His novels most likely get published and read because he’s a movie star. It seems to me that the very thing that gets him published and reviewed and read (or at least purchased), namely celebrity, is the very thing that came back to bite him in this instance. Celebrity culture sycophants wanted to hear not about art and literature, but mindless movie star trivia.

Celebrity books are a bane for novelists like me. Rare is the day that goes by that I’m not working hard to become a better writer, but because like Emily, I’m nobody, who are you? I send my books out into the loud, crowded world armed with only reviews and word-of-mouth. Recently, I was doing a signing in Tampa at a Barnes and Noble, for which a very modest crowd showed up, when the manager told me that just a few days before, the store couldn’t hold the huge throng that turned out for Tori Spelling’s new book.

Who knew Tori Spelling wrote? Let alone had more than one book out?

How should it make me feel that Tori Spelling, Brittany Spears, and Justin Beiber’s books outsell mine? (By a lot!)

Serious literature, fine film, great art—all still exist, but are too often buried under the loud, crass, kitsch, shallow, hollow, derivative drivel of consumertainment. We’ve blurred the lines between news and entertainment, between art and entertainment, between what truly matters and what matters not at all, and it’s making us trivial, silly people.

We pay for diversion, to be distracted, to keep from truly being moved or inspired or challenged, to fill the void with noise to keep ourselves from meditating on our mortality, from the time and space and silence required for serious thinking and reading and contemplating and the crafting of soul. And we’re doing it everywhere—not just in tiny Deep South towns, but in New York City.

Will you join me in the revolution? Let’s start the avalanche. Just because poison is being served doesn’t mean we have to eat it. When’s the last time you challenged yourself with a work of art? How long has it been since you refused to be bought or distracted or mesmerized into moronity?

Today’s the day. Turn off the TV. Turn your back on the insulting 3D idiocy at the Cineplex. Close the contrivance and crass manipulation of hyper-commercial novels. No longer submit to the artless assault of shallow entertainment. And begin your search for works that challenge and inspire, provoke and nurture, educate and entertain.

What Sven Birkerts said applies to all great art: “If literature survives at all, it is as a retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.”

Refuse to assimilate today! Crack open a good book and join me in a revolution that feels like an inspiriting monastic retreat.