TRANSCENDANT SAPHOOD:

Aristotle pointed out that the best way to arouse or explore human fear and pity in a drama is to have a situation where a relatable character goes from a good to bad fortune by making a mistake.    

In a noir this mistake is often the fear-driven decision to commit a perfect crime that seems like it will bring gain (dispel fear) only to have it (pitifully) blow up in the character's face. 

We can see this clearly in Double Indemnity where an insurance salesman driven by lust and greed makes the mistake of committing a murder that leads to his own regretful pitiful ruin.     

But in It's a Wonderful Life, this exploration of fear and pity is done not in the classic first fear-then-pity sequence of a noir.  

It is done in the opposite way with the pity first and the fear second.

Aristotle said pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune and fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.

This describes the life of George Bailey to a T.   

Because from the beginning of It's a Wonderful Life, we see that pity-inducing unmerited good-to-bad fortune is pretty much the constant refrain in everyman George Bailey's life. 

First, he goes half deaf from saving his brother. Then he can't go on a trip-of-a-lifetime because his father dies of a heart attack. Then he can't go to college because his brother has gotten married and accepted a better job rather than taking over the family business as was agreed.  

Then worst of all on Christmas Eve, his uncle loses the Bailey savings and loan deposits, ensuring the ruin of all George Bailey has struggled for in his life before sending George to jail.  

Facing this ruin and feeling that all the difficult pitiful sacrifices in his life have all led to nothing but failure, George snaps.  

Pity turns to fearful despair as George decides to jump off a bridge.

There at the bridge, after he is saved by Clarence, the angel--who has cleverly jumped into the water to be saved by George before he can jump himself--George, still embittered, remarks that it would probably be better had he never been born at all. 

"Okay, George, you've got your wish. You've never been born," Clarence says. 

It is here where we see the terror-laden noir influence within the film come to vivid, seedy underbelly life.  

Because as George and Clarence head back into Bedford Falls, it has suddenly been transformed from a bucolic small town out of a Norman Rockwell painting into what seems to be the redlight strip of a hard-boiled city.     

In place after place, we see a hell-like noir Bedford Falls that would have been had George not made all his sacrifices. 

In this nightmarish Bedford Falls, his vivacious girl-next-door loving wife is a sad depressed spinster and his old beloved boss at the corner drug store is a homeless drunk whom the townspeople mercilessly humiliate.   

With this dark view of a world without George, we see that George is in essence an anti-noir protagonist who could have but did not make the selfish fear-driven mistakes that often lead to a pitiful end.  

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