Bedford Falls vs. Potterville
SANTA MONICA, CA-- One of the enduring themes of Frank Capra�s It�s a Wonderful Life is the conflict between George Bailey�s Building and Loan and Mr. Potter�s bank in the fictional town of Bedford Falls.
Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, is the idealized small-town, small-business owner. Despite personal misgivings, he is loyal to his friends and family, sacrifices his personal ambitions to keep the family business going, marries a home-town girl, and is generous and understanding to his clients, who use his loans to buy their own homes.
Potter, as portrayed by a wheelchair bound Lionel Barrymore, is both a physical and an emotional cripple. Cruel and domineering, he wishes to take over George Bailey�s Building and Loan and ruthlessly dominate everyone. He owns slums, for which the working poor pay high rents.
The struggle between the two culminates in Potter�s dirty trick to drive Bailey into bankruptcy by stealing Bailey�s deposits just as the bank examiner arrives. Facing financial ruin, Bailey attempts suicide -- only to be saved by his guardian angel, Clarence.
Clarence takes George on a tour of the town as it might have been had he never lived. Instead of a friendly small-town with neat streets, charming downtown, and friendly people, Bedford Falls has become a wild and woolly sin city, with dance halls, burlesque joints, fistfights, and hookers. It is called Potterville.
The moral of the story is clear: middle-class values and personal sacrifice are a bulwark against social decay.
The film loomed large in my consciousness during a visit to Santa Monica.
I had moved here from New York City in the 1970s. At the time, it appeared to me like Bedford Falls does in the Capra film. A small town, primarily inhabited by retirees living in bungalows who tended their rosebushes and strolled up and down a nicely-maintained park on a palisade above the Pacific Ocean.
It was the childhood home of Shirley Temple. The mayor was a blue-haired matron named Clo Hoover. Douglas aircraft was the town�s major employer, and the Santa Monica Outlook newspaper was owned by a family that sent its children to the local public schools. The Rand corporation provided an eerie presence on Ocean Avenue, a link to the larger world. But what went on inside didn�t seem to tie into the sleepy pace of everyday life, in a town for retired people.
At the time, I craved the excitement that many teenagers want. The high school was the one seen in Rebel Without A Cause , and that spirit of rebellion was part of the atmosphere of the time. Santa Monica seemed too small, too dull, too stifling -- as did Los Angeles itself, after New York.
Now, a generation later, returning to Santa Monica has been somewhat jarring. High rises fill the city. Throngs of international tourists -- perhaps drawn by the publicity of the O.J. Simpson case -- are everywhere to be seen. A large shopping mall stands where the family newspaper plant once existed. On a weekend evening, movie-goers and restaurant patrons jam the old mall outside the new one.
In addition to tourists, students, and dating couples, one can find street musicians, jugglers, drug dealers, Hare Krishna and the homeless. A cross between Times Square, Haight Ashbury, and Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue.
It made me realize that I had come of age in Bedford Falls, and returned to Potterville. It was unsettling and a little depressing.
Santa Monica is thriving financially, but it has become noisy, threatening, and unpleasant. The old mall is dirty. The �homeless� (many of whom appear to need psychiatric care) wander through the city at will. Half of Palisades Park has been closed for renovation and a huge cyclone fence stands guard against the homeless. Fourth of July fireworks go off at dawn to prevent gang shootings. The local newspaper is out of business.
Curiously, New York has become more of an orderly town in the meantime, with Mayor Giuliani�s quality of life initiatives reducing the fears that used to be a part of the big-city experience.
In many ways the conflict between George Bailey and Mr. Potter is an eternal one in American life. The world of strip clubs, sleazy bars, hookers, and thugs is not some foreign import. It is as American as apple pie.
Curiously, films like The Truman Show and Pleasantville have been grappling with this tension just as Capra did, but have come out on the other side of the issue. In these contemporary fables, the small town is stifling and threatening. Behind the pleasant smiles lurk corporate conspiracies (the Truman Show) or the Ku Klux Klan (Pleasantville).
While no one would argue that small town life is ideal, and there exists a long American tradition of critical fiction from The Scarlet Letter to Babbit and beyond, there still seems to be something harder edged about today's anti-pleasant axis.
And the anti-pleasant movement seems to be winning the day. When people complain about Howard Stern or Don Imus or the �decline in civility� in some sense this is what they are talking about. That the rough edges are pushing out the smooth across the country.
A similar experience took place during a visit to Disney World in Orlando not long ago. In order to see Shakespeare in Love at a theatre on the grounds, it was necessary to walk up Main Street, USA. What had once been a perhaps saccharine magic kingdom had developed a rough edge. The attraction was a gauntlet of noise, crowds, and honky-tonk sleaze. The Virgin Mega Store boomed, the House of Blues and other simulated dives were almost as jarring as the real thing.
City Walk in Universal City had been another similar gauntlet. Noise, crowds, and an air of menace (there have been gang-related shootings in the past). While it is nice to take a stroll, the experiences in Santa Monica, Disney, and Universal show that Potterville is alive and well.
But at the same time, the world of white picket fences, sing-a-longs, and neighbor helping neighbor is equally organic to the American experience. Beauty, peace and quiet, and relaxation are also American values. As Mayor Giuliani tried to show in New York, even a big city can have small-town charms.
The same place can exhibit both tendencies. The same people can go either way, depending on the tenor of the times. The answer is not the stifling insularity of small town life, or the chaos and crime of the big city, but some happy medium that combines the best of both worlds.
Visiting Santa Monica showed the truth of the old saw that one doesn�t miss something until it is gone. It is too soon to tell whether the forces of pleasantness will be able to mount a comeback. But I hope they do.
