Hard décor and other trimmings

In the final and most famous scene of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey (played by James Stewart) is gathered around the Christmas tree with his family, receiving contributions from the community in order to save his bank from going under. The Christmas tree is both at the center of the frame and central to the film: formally it splits the screen; conceptually it adds to the picture’s meaning, via trimming.

To trim is to cut, minimize.

And yet — To trim is also to decorate, add.

The tree is a symbol of life (that is cut down). George feels similarly severed by forces greater than him — capitalism and greed. The film’s villain, Mr. Potter, is this manifestation of the Corporate Dream gone terrifyingly right: all artifice and conquest.

The Christmas tree is another symbol of contemporary life, one that is filled with feel-good add-ons and fluff designed to make us all see bright and colorful outside and feel warm and fuzzy inside: the surface of prosperity and the soul of a commercially-driven value system.

It is then quite ironic how a film that has socialist overtones (i.e. the celebration of collective effort and small-scale cooperatives and the rejection of materialistic excesses and corporate takeovers) would be associated so heavily with the most consumer-driven season of the year.

Experimental trimmings for a hardcore yuletide tree: 1) hip-hop poster; 2) gold spray paint; 3) punk shirt; 4) blown-up photocopy of grade school class picture: 5) balaclava; 6) white paint; 7) mask cutout of a holiday heartthrob: and 8) hentai “star” on top of the tree.

And so some of us may say “it’s a wonderful life,” not because it exactly always is, but because oftentimes it takes a little bit of trimming (the verbs  “cutting down” or “adding on,” and the nouns “decoration” and “decorum” — both a paradoxical process and a complex product) to transvaluate a hard reality.