Yeesh. It’s been five whole years since I originally posted this:

It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life

Where it is pointed out that the “feel good” Christmas movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” is really more of a story of a man’s fall into madness and misery, where the “happy ending” is just a prelude to an inevitable utter collapse into failure and probably jail time, where the villain of the piece ends up not defeated, but empowered. Where all the Good And Moral People are shown to be one minor twist of fate away from being moral reprobates…  and given the inevitable “what happens next” after the credits roll, chances are good that’s where they end up anyway.

In a way it’s similar to the original “Wizard of Oz.” What happens at the end of that? Dorothy finally gets to go home to her family. Huzzah! Her dirt-poor family. Living in a region of Kansas that is so poor they can’t even afford *color.* Where instead she could have lived in the lap of technicolor luxury in Oz, very likely insulated from the poverty and illness and, lets face it, madness that likely will kill Dorothy Gale in relatively short order (assuming, or course, that the whole Oz sequence isn’t a delusion caused by endorphins flooding the grievously and terminally tornado-wounded brain of young Ms. Gale).