Several years ago, aided by the wonders of modern technology and the principle of fair use, a number of people independently produced remixes of It’s a Wonderful Life as a horror movie.  That this worked brilliantly is really no surprise, since the dystopian world of Pottersville in Frank Capra’s masterpiece foreshadowed such later classics of horror and suspense as Don Siegel’s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Jack Finney, the author of Siegel’s source material, was as fascinated as Capra was with the breakdown of community in the United States in the 1940’s and 1950’s—decades that many of us now regard as a Golden Age from which we have since been engaged in a long, but accelerating, descent.

It has become commonplace to blame the destruction of community on the rise of technology, and even fast-food giant KFC jumped on the bandwagon during the most recent holiday shopping season with a clever viral marketing campaign for a KFC-branded “Internet Escape Pod”—a dome-shaped Faraday cage with a larger-than-life-sized Colonel Sanders draped over its apex and an Original Recipe drumstick serving as its door handle.  Gather the whole family (assuming it’s no larger than four people) inside to sit Indian-style on the floor around a bucket of Extra Crispy and a couple of sides, and the Colonel will take care of the rest, blocking all wireless signals and rendering our ubiquitous iPhones useless.  To point out that an eight piece of the Colonel’s Finest is as emblematic of the underlying problem as are those pictures we’ve all seen of groups of teenagers sitting in the stands at high-school football games with their heads bent toward their Samsung Galaxies seems as pretentious as the conservative essays on how the destruction of community didn’t start with Steve Jobs, since the iPhone was preceded by the personal computer, which followed the television, which was a natural evolution from moving pictures and the radio and Thomas Edison’s phonograph.

And yet, pretentious or not, it’s true.  By the time when family psychologists and cultural critics began to preach about the importance of sitting down for dinner as a family at least once a week—even if the exigencies of modern life mean that the menu must consist of unidentifiable cuts of fast-food fried chicken and muddy gravy on top of boxed mashed potatoes—something had gone horribly wrong.  And both our use of technology (intentionally or unintentionally) to isolate rather than to unite and our treatment of the Colonel’s greasy offerings as a treat rather than a necessary but unfortunate convenience reflect far deeper and more disturbing trends that Capra and Finney saw clearly some 70 years ago.

George Bailey, as I noted last month, was, in an important respect, very similar to Mr. Potter.  Before Uncle Billy absentmindedly placed control over the savings-and-loan’s future in the hands of Mr. Potter, setting up the sequence of events that would lead George to contemplate suicide, George had endured another temptation at the hands of Mr. Potter.  And it was a temptation most of us would find hard to resist: Come work for me, and you will be set for life.  Earn as much in one year as you currently do in ten.  Give your wife and family everything they could ever want, and travel the world.  All you have to do is cut all meaningful ties to Bedford Falls—even though you’ll still be living here.

We can see the struggle in Jimmy Stewart’s eyes as George undergoes his temptation, and we can feel his desire to say yes.  Every time I see the movie, I half-expect George to stand up, shake Potter’s hand, and yell (in Stewart’s inimitable way), “It’s a deal, Mr. Potter, sir!”  One could even make a putatively conservative case for accepting Potter’s offer.  Materially, Mary and the children would be better off if George joined forces with Potter than they would likely ever be if he turned Potter down.  In the morality of everyday life, my first obligation (beyond that to my Creator) is to my family.  Mr. Potter may not be the best of employers, but many men have, like modern-day Bob Cratchits, put up with far worse in order to provide far less for their wives and children.  The Baileys could at least have had a comfortable life, if not a wonderful one.

And yet, outside of the odd libertarian, everyone who has ever watched It’s a Wonderful Life knows instinctively that George makes the right decision in putting Potter behind him.  The quest for community is part of human nature, even when we, in our sinfulness, do everything we can, actively and passively, to undermine the conditions that make community possible.  The family is the first community from which all others grow; but pulling back from our obligations to the broader community for the sake of one’s family in a way that puts one’s family in opposition to that community is the devil’s bargain.  That is the true trial that George faces in Potter’s offer.  Overcoming that trial not only reveals George’s character with regard to his obligations toward the community of Bedford Falls but prepares him for the later trial, when he is tempted, out of self-pity, to deprive his wife of her husband and his children of their father.

There are limits, of course, to how far community can extend beyond one’s family—geographical and cultural limits chief among them.  But the danger for us today lies less in extending the concept of community too far than it does in accepting Potter’s bargain, and trading a wonderful life for a comfortable one.