It’s a Wonderful Life: Writing a Flawless Character?

It’s a Wonderful Life has a flawless protagonist.

This depends on your definition of ‘flawless,’ of course.

(pours a whiskey sour)

I know it’s been a while since I’ve been on. I’m fighting a youtube addiction and a 50-hour work week at a new job plus I overloaded my crafting schedule and I’m writing and composing again.

Welp, zero excuses, infinite restarts.

So, a flawless character.

So much modern writing advice–
read: advice you find on the internet and in deconstructionist literature classes–
tells you to write characters with flaws.

Oh, and they have to be juicy flaws.
Hidden flaws.
Shameful things.
Alcoholism.
A secret past.
Blackmailable offenses.
Anything at all! so long as it directly affects the story, causes strife, causes all the problems that have to be solved so that the character can overcome and grow.

Or not. But screw John Knowles.

Let me bring to your attention a Mr. George Bailey.

(adds a few more cherries to the whiskey sour)

Friends from church invited me and my wife to a theatre box showing of It’s a Wonderful Life, the classic Christmas movie starring a lately-shell-shocked Jimmy Stewart.

My wife and I had very different reactions to it.

George Bailey is a man who dreams forever and ever of travel.
Of doing great things.
He wants to design bridges and buildings in big cities and see Europe and Africa.
He wants to leave Bedford Falls, “shake the dust from my feet!”

And whenever he feels he has to, he sacrifices all of it so he can help the very people of the town he claims to despise.

He gives up college and travel to save the house loan market from being taken over by a true post-conversion Scrooge.

Then he gives up that travel so his brother can marry and travel.

Then he gives up his honeymoon money to guarantee the loans of all the people who needed the money, to again avoid the takeover.
(this he does as he is departing on his honeymoon)

This happens time and time again, until his uncle makes a silly mistake and misplaces a significant amount of money, drawing George to the brink of arrest, bankruptcy, discredit, all that.

And after giving up on dream after dream after dream, he is at the point of killing himself for sheer despair.
All the carefully-constructed comforts, all the love, all the attention he has poured into sealing over the wounds of his unlived dreams… it all comes apart on Christmas.

Now you don’t have to see the first two hours of that movie, but I recommend it anyways.

Let’s discuss his fatal flaw:

Selflessness.

(takes a sip)

Yes.

It’s a flaw. It is his fatal flaw.

It isn’t a vice. It isn’t a secret. It isn’t even unrecognized. Everyone knows it.

For all his talk about leaving the town behind, he chooses instead to shoulder the weight of its dreams every time.

He would rather his own goals go incomplete, than that the dreams of so many get shattered by an unscrupulous banker.

This isn’t a moral flaw.
It is a structural flaw.
It is where the hammer of life hits, time after time, until he finally cracks.

And what a mighty crack it is.

Because along with his selflessness, he has an accompanying flaw:
Self-sufficience.

He hates to ask for help.

Well, not ‘hates.’
He takes the load of it upon himself, always.
Long hours at the office.
Personal financial loss.
Reputational distress.
He takes it all on himself.

(another sip)

Fascinating, isn’t it?

The ideal American.
Independent.
Generous.

Unwilling to ask for help.
Unable not to sacrifice himself for the sake of others.
The hidden American.

(another sip)

Not a wicked bone in his body,
just the perpetual question,
“When is it my turn to have my dream come true?”
Deep, deep flaws.

A masterclass.

My wife and I talked about the movie when we were at home. It broke her heart, all the way through. “Is he always supposed to sacrifice himself for other people? When does he get to care for himself?” she asked. “Does he just have to do what others expect him to, all the time? What about his dreams? Is he supposed to gladly give up on those? Is that the message I’m supposed to take? I hate it!”

I think George hated it, too.
You can see it, from time to time.

He helps a man buy a house,
but he walks slowly, joylessly, as he thinks about it.
“What about my dreams?”

He is happily married with four children to a wife who wants a home but was also right willing and ready to travel with him across the world for their honeymoon.
And yet, some coldness sits on his heart when he is in her presence. “Why did you have to charm me? Win me? Why couldn’t you let me be, let me travel? Why did you have to want me?”

He is proud of his younger brother. Saved him from drowning one winter. ”Why does he always get out of this town? When do I get to travel?”

Time after time, person after person.

And I see him on early mornings when I look in the bathroom mirror, my goal of being a paid author seeming farther away and down a different road than the one I took to make ends meet. And my great trait- trustworthiness- locks me into one reliable position after another, always in the same old field, never where I want to be.

My wife was encouraged (with no other input) to be a teacher. The job tore her apart until she had to quit. She is a surveyor now, and so happy with her job. But the old burden of expectations weighs on her. And new expectations are added yearly, as friends and family sit on milestone achievements that have eluded us.

George Bailey.

“When is it my turn?”

At the end of the movie, George’s eyes are turned outward.
When shown what the town would have been without him,
when shown how many lives would be worse- or gone- without him,
when given the opportunity to destroy the heartache by eliminating his own past,
he saw that the life which had been so unfulfilled to him
was spent in filling so many other people.

He changed.

No more did he weep over lost dreams. He unlocked himself from his past and was reborn into his present.

All he had to do was die, and he was reborn.

“Our lives touch so many others.”

(finishes the whiskey sour)

I am not the son of a home lender.
I have not set aside dreams and finances several times over the course of my life to help hundreds of other people secure their futures.
I frankly doubt if my death- or my un-existence- would be felt by more people than you can count with both hands (and maybe a few toes).

But I have, several times, set aside my own dreams for the goals of other people.

It isn’t a fatal flaw on George’s level, but it is a place where the hammer of life hits. Every six months or so, I do crumble.

Maybe one day I will have what George had.
A revelation.

But we are not guaranteed that.

And maybe that’s why a flawless man is so fascinating to me, as a craftsman but also as a person.

He did nothing wrong.
In fact, he did a great deal of good.
And it drove him nearly to suicide.

That question, always that question.
“When is it my turn?”

If that movie had ended any other way, it would not be a classic.

Instead, the man who always wondered when it was his turn to live
turned out to be the man who had always–
always–
been the answer to that question for so many people.

But it wasn’t until he let go of his past,
until he saw the alternative,
until he realized that he actually did love Bedford Falls and all its people and all its places,
that his second fatal flaw could melt away.
And the moment someone asked for help on his behalf,
the town helped.

Yes, George Bailey was a character written without vice,
without evil,
without malice,
with only goodness and a brewing discontent.

He was the sort of good man we all feel underappreciated for being.

(taps glass slowly on the counter)