Down & Out in Bedford Falls
It’s a Wonderful Life and the Dream of Small-Town Life
By Dean Bakopoulos
Photographs by Mike Belleme and Kaoly Gutierrez
Mike Belleme is a self-taught, Appalachian-born documentary photographer living in Asheville, North Carolina. Kaoly Gutierrez is a Mexican documentary and portrait photographer based in Asheville.
FADE IN—NIGHT SEQUENCE
Sometimes you forget that the movie begins on a bridge. That’s because you don’t see the bridge at the beginning. What you see, in those first opening moments of Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, are the people of snowy, idyllic Bedford Falls saying a prayer for a man in trouble—George Bailey. They’re all rooting for him.
The prayers are heard by a blinking cosmic cluster of white lights up in the starry heavens—two senior, wing-wearing angels, Franklin and Joseph, who decide it’s time to get to work and use the occasion of George Bailey’s suffering as a chance for a somewhat wayward angel, Clarence, to earn his wings.
You remember the image.
This is the image that came to me one brief, purple-skied afternoon shortly before Christmas 2014, while walking, half-drunk, on a bridge that spans the Mississippi River, connecting Dubuque, Iowa, with East Dubuque, Illinois. It was the time of year where the sun barely rises above the bluffs on the Wisconsin side of the river.
I was thinking that my life had become a life I didn’t know how to live.
I was in the middle of the worst major depressive episode of my life—a darkness I had known several times in the past but one that, at this moment, was threatening to kill me. I had never seriously considered ending my life before though, for some reason, in the darkening weeks of late autumn that led up to the moment on the bridge, I felt the pull acutely. I’d gone dizzy one morning on the roof of a parking structure in Iowa City a few weeks earlier; driving down a dark two-lane one night, I pictured the release of swerving my small pickup into the path of an oncoming hog truck. One night, I found myself in the emergency room at the University of Iowa telling a receptionist that I had chest pains, but once I was admitted, I finally told the attending physician the real reason I was there: I wanted to hurt myself and needed somewhere to get through the night.
And yet, these moments didn’t feel like me. I didn’t feel like the kind of person who would consider suicide. My two kids needed me—I knew that and the thought of leaving them fatherless in this world while I moved into the underworld seemed unthinkable—but the voice in my head insisted they’d be better off, the world would be better off, the whole fact of my existence was—
I walked out to the bridge.
There are stories you never tell anyone until you have to tell them.
This is one of those stories.
In the middle of the bridge, it was windy. Cold. The sky was steel gray, the cloud layer low. The water churned, choppy below me. I did the mental calculus. Would I die if I jumped? Would it be painless? Would it be—
And then I thought of George Bailey. And of Clarence.
Fucking Clarence.
INT. 6714 MANSFIELD ST., DETROIT, MI—XMAS EVE, 1982
When people think of It’s a Wonderful Life, most often we think of the triumphant final moments—George finding Zuzu’s petals, George leaping with joy shouting, Merry Christmas, down the snowy, twinkling, perfect little Main Street. Merry Christmas, Movie House! We think of George coming home to find his beautiful wife, Mary, waiting for him, his beautiful kids bouncing with excitement, and the whole beautiful town of Bedford Falls coming to his financial rescue. We think of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the copy of Tom Sawyer from Clarence with an inscription proclaiming, “Remember no man is a failure who has friends.” We think of George finally hearing (and believing) his daughter when she says, “Teacher says, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”
I think that the first time I watched It’s a Wonderful Life, I was seven years old, lying on the sofa at my Ukrainian grandparents’ house in Detroit, where I half-dozed waiting for my family to leave for midnight mass. My parents were still together then, and in the kitchen, my father and his mother-in-law, my Baba, were drinking with their usual fervor, though Baba was holding back a bit, since she had to sing in the choir in just a few hours. My mother and grandfather washed the dishes, after we wolfed down our traditional Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner, all twelve sacred dishes of Sviatyi Vechir, in a matter of minutes.
I am somewhat embarrassed to say that It’s a Wonderful Life became my favorite movie that very day and has remained my favorite movie in the world ever since. I know, in 2024, the film might come off a bit clichéd, sentimental, and, like just about any film from that era, politically problematic.
But I’ve watched this movie more than I’ve watched any other movie in the world. I’ve watched it at least once a year, but most years I watch it three or four times.
That night, back in the early part of what became known as the Reagan Era, as we drove to St. John’s Ukrainian Catholic Church on the streets of a city that had become a symbol of America’s urban crisis, I sat, un-seat-belted, in the back cargo compartment of our Ford station wagon and wondered what it would be like to live in a place like Bedford Falls. No, I didn’t just wonder. I wanted.
EXT. FROZEN RIVER AND HILL—DAY, 1919
The scene that first hooked me comes early. Clarence, still wingless, needs Joseph’s help to see it: a group of boys, preparing to slide down a snowy hill on large shovels, and there is young George Bailey, who has to rescue his younger brother Harry, after Harry slides down the icy hill too fast and plunges into the thawing river.
This is the scene I remember as the most thrilling scene in the whole movie, at least to my seven-year-old mind. George Bailey is not just fearless, but selfless. He risks everything for his brother that day.
I come from a family of Ukrainian refugees who endured brutal events to eventually land in Detroit in 1950 and a Greek immigrant who fled a military coup to come to the US in 1967, a few months before Detroit exploded into its now infamous riots.
The two cardinal virtues I learned by the time I was seven: fearlessness and self-sacrifice. I learned these mainly from my Ukrainian grandfather, Gregory, who was a stoic in every sense of the word. I knew his own brother was killed by Stalin’s henchman in the 1940s, but I also knew, that like George Bailey, he would have saved him if he could have. I knew my grandfather would work the line at Ford Rouge for thirty years without complaint, sacrificing his days, his body, to put food on the table, to put money in the bank.
INT. GOWER’S DRUGSTORE, MAIN STREET, BEDFORD FALLS—DAY
The Main Street in Bedford Falls was unlike anything I had ever seen at the age of seven. We didn’t travel often as a family—money was tight and my father didn’t get much vacation—so I had never seen, outside of Henry Ford’s outdoor museum Greenfield Village, a classic small town Main Street. I imagined what it would be like to live there: to ride your bicycle wherever you wanted—the public library, the ball diamond, the soda fountain, the movie house. Everyone would know your name. It seemed perfect to me, a painfully shy and introverted child who loved the familiar and the calm much more than the strange and chaotic.
Later, we will see the ever-vigilant George, still a boy, working for Old Man Gower, whose son has just died of influenza while away at college. Once again, George saves the day, preventing a grief-stricken, intoxicated Gower from sending poison out as medicine.
Before he’d hit puberty, before his voice even changed, George Bailey had, through his acts of fearlessness and self-sacrifice, saved two lives.
I wanted to be just like him.
I remember, once, maybe when I was nine or ten, drowsily watching the movie with my father and as it neared the end—which I already knew by heart—I sat up on the couch.
“Dad,” I said. “You have the same initials as George Bailey.”
“Another George B!” he said, in a cheerful voice, his Greek accent somewhat comical, though when I looked over at him, he was crying. It was probably the last Christmas he would spend living with us. The next Christmas he would be alone in an apartment in Wixom, hungover, calling us in his smoke-crisp voice to ask us what Santa had brought us.
“There’s no such thing as Santa,” I remember telling him. “It’s Mom’s handwriting on the presents.”
FADE IN—GEORGE AND MARY’S MOONLIGHT WALK
While watching the story unfold on that ancient television in that small living room, I remember wondering what it would be like to live in a small town, especially at Christmas time. I remember thinking that Mary (Donna Reed) was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
I was too young to feel real lust in my heart, but I felt excitement in that scene where George’s whisper rises to a semi-feverish speech: “I know what I am going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m going to see the world.”
Although I always wondered why George considered Bedford Falls crummy, by the time I was twelve I knew this speech by heart, would repeat it, in a passable Jimmy Stewart drawl, for my mother and her other divorced friends, as they drank Bailey’s Irish Cream around the kitchen table on Friday nights. They would cackle with delight.
And sometimes, around that age, I would take out our VHS copy of the film, and watch this scene alone in the basement, as the semi-drunken laughter from upstairs echoed in the furnace ducts. I would watch the moment when George asked her what she wanted: “Do you want the moon, Mary?” I remember, distinctly, the small rush I felt when, in the famous bathrobe scene when, en route home from the big dance, we see a flash of Mary’s bare leg just before she ducks into the hydrangea bushes. I would press pause on the VCR to stare at her leg.
When I was twenty years old, I spent Christmas Eve with my new girlfriend in her hometown of Lodi, Wisconsin, where her father was the favorite local pastor and the Main Street was lit up for the season. It was the first time in my life I had spent Christmas away from the Ukrainian Catholic Church where I’d grown up, and I remember crying my eyes out when the sanctuary of Lodi First Presbyterian went dark and the congregation lit candles and sang Silent Night. In my head, in my heart, I sang the words in Ukrainian: Tykha nich, svyata nich. Yasnist’ bye vid zirnyts.
Less than two years later, I married that girlfriend, a pretty brunette, who, in her vintage 1940s wedding dress, looked a little like Donna Reed to me.
And now, as if I were Clarence, who can move through time and space, there is another Christmas, I want to take you to, a decade down the road.
INT. MINERAL POINT, WI, CHRISTMAS EVE, 2008
When I was thirty years old, I had what any writer would call an unimaginable run of good luck. My first novel, published the year before, had received a six-figure advance and sold to foreign publishers and had been optioned by a movie studio. It was successful enough that the publishers offered me a $100,000 advance on my second novel, still unwritten. I received an NEA fellowship and, a couple of years later, a Guggenheim. My wife and I, who had been debt-ridden and broke throughout our twenties, now had a one-year-old baby girl, and, it seemed, an easy life ahead of us, as we paid off our student loans and our credit card debt and bought a house in the country, a place where we could raise our family and I could write my books. It was an old miner’s house from the 1860s, nestled on the edge of Mineral Point, Wisconsin, one of the most picturesque towns in the Midwest.
I had first visited Mineral Point at Christmastime, a few years earlier, and was charmed by the gentle lights of High Street and the cozy glow of the snow-covered streets. And I remember distinctly thinking: this is my Bedford Falls. I was determined to live there.
Now, it was Christmas Eve, and we had lived in Mineral Point for nearly three years. We had a four-year-old girl and year-old boy. I remember coming back from Christmas Eve services with my daughter in tears. She had been an angel in the Christmas play and had been shushed by Mary for starting her song too early. She was heartbroken, ashamed, and embarrassed, and she finally collapsed in a teary heap on the couch next to me, while I sipped a glass of eggnog, spiked with bourbon, and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. I, too, was heartbroken, ashamed, and embarrassed.
This was at the end of 2008, the year I, and many other people, went broke, the victim of both my own reckless optimism and the complete collapse of the international economy. I had secured a job at a rural arts center in town, working as artistic director and writer-in-residence, which should have covered my health insurance and mortgage, but when the market crashed, so did our donor base. During a tense board meeting, it was suggested by our treasurer, a wealthy Republican, Christian businessman, that I lay off most of the arts center staff. What did I do? Well, I delivered a very George Bailey-esque speech to the board, reminiscent of the one George gives to Potter, and I resigned, eliminating the largest salary on staff on a rage-inspired whim that saved the jobs of three other people.
The next month, my publisher, a steady company for well over 100 years, had a storied financial meltdown that made the front page of the New York Times. My book publication, and two-thirds of my advance, would be delayed indefinitely and maybe forever. Then I received a letter that my COBRA health insurance payment would increase from $600 to $1,800 dollars a month. Also, our house needed a lot of work. Also, our car needed a lot of repairs. Also, our property taxes went up. It’s an old story. My father, whom I might have been able to ask for help, wasn’t speaking to me (we’d fought about the 2008 election) and my mother, a retired teacher, was in the middle of a foreclosure of the house I was born in, just outside Detroit.
In short, like so many other people in 2008, I needed a job, any job. (Of course, I was lucky enough to have things like advanced degrees and fellowships and published novels, so I had a leg up compared to many of the people in my position.) Eventually, some job offers came in, and I landed a good one. In the fall of 2009, I started a professorship at Iowa State. My family and I left Mineral Point, giving up a great old house, dear friends, and a landscape we loved deeply, out of financial necessity. It was a wrenching experience, but one, I think, that was important for me to go through as a writer who tells stories about struggle. Everything I felt in that tumultuous year—regret, despair, rage, sorrow—has gone into my work. Every ounce of that year still sits at the desk with me each morning.
I can’t deny that we left Wisconsin heartbroken, selling our house for a huge loss and burdened with debt and uncertainty. We rented half of a shabby duplex in Ames, Iowa, with considerably less picturesque vistas, with grim and low-ceilinged rooms.
After falling in love with the hills and bluffs and sleepy, hidden towns of southwest Wisconsin, we felt trapped in the bland, flatness of our new hometown. The endless gray of the fields surrounding us felt foreboding that winter. The coal plant belched smoke out over our new Main Street, where clouds of burning trash kept the city’s lights on. The air smelled vaguely of bleach and antifreeze all winter. I even thought some of the roads were so ugly, that I refused to drive on them. I took nonsensical, non-linear routes home to avoid Lincoln Way.
EXT. VIOLET BICK’S BEAUTY SHOP—NIGHT
Here is another scene I remember watching as a child and finding it thrilling and confusing: The local beauty Violet Bick, described in the screenplay as “an eyeful,” is closing up her shop when she bumps into a troubled George. The script instructs her to look at George with “seductive and guileful eyes” and George makes her a proposal: “Let’s go out in the fields and take off our shoes and walk through the grass.”
Violet is puzzled; Violet says, “Huh?” This is not what she—nor anyone in Bedford Falls—expects from the sober-minded, practical George Bailey.
But he continues: Then we can go up to the falls. It’s beautiful up there in the moonlight, and there’s a green pool up there, and we can swim in it. Then we can climb Mt. Bedford, and smell the pines, and watch the sunrise against the peaks, and… we’ll stay up there the whole night, and everybody’ll be talking and there’ll be a terrific scandal…
When I was young, this idea seemed so out of character for George, but now, as a middle-aged man, watching the film, I see this moment as one of deep tragedy. George has given his life to others; the ultimate self-sacrifice. But he’s ready to snap, to give up on everything and run away. He still wants more. Is self-sacrifice a virtue? Or is it an addiction? Can we people-please so much, can we adopt the role of caretaker so intensely, that we lose ourselves? That we find ourselves on a bridge, thinking of making the ultimate, the darkest, of self-sacrifices?
Wait.
Did you forget about the bridge?
INT. EAST AMANA, IOWA—2014
I have never felt more like a failure than I did in 2009, when my family left a house and a town we loved because we were broke and out of options. Mineral Point and the little house on Spruce Street where we made our home felt to me like the reality we were meant to live. I remember my wife’s sadness, our children crying as we loaded their things into a moving truck. I remember reading William Maxwell’s great small town Midwestern novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, around this time and coming to the line: “It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn’t be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed.”
This is how it felt. I had made a mistake. I was a self-sacrificing father. I was not afraid of hard work. I was not afraid to hustle. I was the sole income earner in my family, and I had failed to provide my family with the perfect life.
I see now that I spent the next five years trying to get back to a place like Mineral Point (one might even say like Bedford Falls). I felt my wife falling out of love with me, and so I worked even harder. I took on extra teaching gigs, wrote weird articles—in which I was a human guinea pig of sorts—for men’s wellness magazines, helped people move for extra cash, ghostwrote a novel for a wealthy stranger. I had one goal for my family: I would buy them once again, an old idyllic house in the country. I would give us our own place, our own slice of heaven again. I would prove I was not a failure.
In 2013, while I was teaching at Grinnell College, we found an old house from the 1860s for sale in East Amana, part of the Amana Colonies. The house backed up to thousands of acres where one could hike, fish, wander, hunt, camp, and even kayak. In our yard were remnants of heirloom gardens—an old pear tree and grapevines. East Amana was even smaller and quainter than Bedford Falls or Mineral Point. It had a population of 55. I would write in a wood-paneled room that looked out toward the river and the golden fields beyond it. We would homeschool our children there. We bought a dog.
INT. GRANVILLE HOUSE—NIGHT CLOSE SHOT
George enters. The house is carpetless, empty. The rain and wind cause funny noises upstairs. A huge fire is burning in the fireplace. Near the fireplace a collection of packing boxes are heaped together in the shape of a small table and covered with a checkered oil cloth. It is set for two.
You know this scene. George and Mary embrace. Outside, Bert the cop and Ernie the cabbie sing “I Love You Truly.” A rotisserie chicken, powered by the phonograph, spins tenderly in the fireplace, which crackles and flares. George has used their hard-saved honeymoon money to keep the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan alive, and this old house is as far as they will go. But this is all they need.
When I bought the old, drafty rundown behemoth of a home in East Amana, a down payment funded by the sale of my third novel, the first thing I did was order a fireplace to be placed in the living room. Did I think of the Granville House from Bedford Falls? I did. Did I think that this house in the country had secured my family in place again, had given us the deep and mysterious gift of certainty? Were we done drifting? Yes. That’s what I thought.
Of course, I did.
This was my happy ending. The day we lit that fireplace for the first time, in a house we owned, I felt as happy as George felt as his neighbors bring save-the-day cash into his living room while singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”
But wait—don’t you remember? I am still on the bridge. How did I get to the bridge?
Look, life is funny.
Somehow, in all the work I had done to get back to this dreamscape I imagined for myself and my family, my marriage had died. Within a year of moving into what I thought was my forever home, a home I would raise my children in and a home that would be big enough for my children’s children, my wife of 17 years filed for divorce. She found herself in love with someone else, a contractor we’d hired to help us install that fireplace. He still lives there with her. He’s my children’s stepdad and sometimes when I drop my kids off, he is in the yard, working on that house.
It’s an old story. I don’t want to tell it again. All you need to know is that suddenly I was nearing forty, in debt, improperly medicated, and I had stopped going to therapy. I felt that I had once again lost everything.
No, this time I felt like I had lost even more.
And so, a little before Christmas, I had been drinking at a dive bar near my hotel in Dubuque, where a woman I shouldn’t have been dating was asleep in the bed. And I had gone out to the bridge to look at the stars from the middle of the Mississippi River.
It was so cold.
And when I looked up, I saw the blinking clusters of white lights in the sky, and thought of them as alive, hoping George Bailey wouldn’t take his own life. And I heard the voices of my kids, the way we hear the voices of George Bailey’s kids praying for their daddy in the movie’s opening scene, and their voices were telling me to come home.
In the movie, the angel Clarence leaps from the bridge so that he gets George’s attention and breaks him from the spiraling darkness of his thoughts. In that moment, Clarence saves George’s life. That day in Dubuque, Iowa, the clear and distinctive voice of Clarence, the very vision of him, a rather far-fetched character in a box office failure made over sixty years ago, probably saved mine too.
We don’t see George Bailey on the bridge right away—at the start of the movie, George is off screen, and, only later do we learn that he’s thinking of ending things. He feels like the world would be better off without him, a feeling that is the most insidious and consistent lie the suicidal mind tells itself. In rural Iowa, among my children’s friends, I am the only biological dad still present. Their dads have all been lost—to addiction, to violence, to prison, to suicide. I know so well how much I am needed. And despite all this evidence, there is sometimes that feeling—
The inciting incident of the entire film is a simple one. A man gets drunk—or at least, wait, I remember him getting drunk—and walks out to a bridge. George Bailey is a depressive, a people-pleaser, and we meet him on Christmas Eve, when he realizes he cannot please anyone anymore. He’s failed and sees his self-worth shimmer and vanish. He’s lived a life of constant self-sacrifice, and now he’s on the precipice of the ultimate sacrifice. Why? Because he has nothing left to give.
He looks down at the churning, frigid waters and in falls Clarence, shrieking for help.
And this is what I remembered out there on the bridge. The movie I knew by heart unfolding before me so crisply that I walked back off the bridge to safety and eventually found my way to my hotel by dawn, where I woke up the woman sleeping in the bed and told her I was going home.
Fucking Clarence, I said to her. Fucking Clarence.
EXT. THE WHITNEY, NEW YORK CITY, 2023—DAY
