George Lassos the Moon. Mary Does What?

Picture this scene.

George and Mary. The night is warm with a bright moon. George is dressed in a jersey sweater and oversize football pants that keep wanting to come down. Mary is in an old white bath robe. Each is carrying their wet clothes tied into a bundle that leaves a trail of dripping water. As they near the camera, we hear them singing, “Buffalo Gals can’t you come out tonight …”

So says the screenplay of It’s a Wonderful Life, at the beginning of one of the most romantic scenes in all of film, when George Bailey offers to lasso the moon.

As they walk along singing, Mary, who is self-aware, asks George whether she looks as funny as he does. “I guess I’m not quite the football type,” he replies. In a high school at the time, “the football type” was a young man who was like a soldier or adventurer. A “football type” might even be chivalric, like a knight.

As for Mary, George says that she looks just right. Babbling on, he says, “Yes, sir, you look a little older without your clothes on. … I mean, without a dress. You look older … I mean, younger. You look just …”

And by these words we are made aware, that she is aware, that he is aware, that she has no clothes on under that robe, and that they are no longer children but now a mature man and a mature woman. Accordingly, we feel along with them that they are drawn towards each other, with a natural attraction, to be one.

In his confusion George steps on the end of the belt of Mary’s bath robe, which is trailing along behind her.

If he is dressed as a kind of knight, then he must play that part, and therefore she in her bathrobe must play the part of a lady. She catches on and does so. Gathering her robe around her, she says, “Sir, my train, please.” George goes along with the conceit: in a medieval idiom he apologizes with mock humility, “A pox upon me for a clumsy lout. Your caboose, my lady.” Mary replies, “You may kiss my hand.”

They look at each other and are about to unite with a kiss, but Mary turns away, singing. They throw rocks at the old Granville house. George explains that the custom is to make a wish and then throw a rock. If you break a window, your wish comes true. This is significant: immediately after turning to each other, they go out from themselves. To throw a rock is to go out from yourself, since you have an effect on something far away.

“It’s full of romance, that old place,” Mary says, “I’d like to live in it.” For her, clearly, romance is found in the home that you make out of a house. George is incredulous and has other plans. He throws a rock and breaks a window.

MARY

What’d you wish for, George?

GEORGE

Well, not just one wish. A whole hatful, Mary. I know what I’m 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. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Colosseum. Then, I’m coming back here and go to college and see what they know … and then I’m going to build things. I’m gonna build air fields. I’m gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high. I’m gonna build bridges a mile long.

He’s going on voyages, first to distant lands. But after that his adventures, he says, will take him to college, “to see what they know.”

This detail may be surprising to us, but George is expressing a common outlook at the time, which, we know, was shared by the movie’s Director, Frank Capra. Capra was also the screenwriter for the film (with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett), and so it would not be surprising if George Bailey turns out to be a little bit like him. Capra in his autobiography wrote:

I hated being poor. Hated being a peasant. Hated being a scrounging newskid trapped in the sleazy Sicilian ghetto of Los Angeles. My family couldn’t read or write. I wanted out. A quick out.

For Capra, college was his way out of his own Bedford Falls. But like George it turns out to be a place of adventure. It is there that he pursues his quest for truth. He continues:

As a boy, I had begun to equate religion with peasant superstition. In our neighborhood only the poor went to church to confess sins. Why? Was poverty the big sin? Anyway, peasant stuff was not for me. At Caltech I found a new cause—science. The beauty, the clarity, the logic with which Galileo and Newton formulated their brilliant laws of mass and motion were all that a man needed in his quest for truth.^[1]

Capra wasn’t going to equate religion with peasant superstition always, and neither does the character, George. But the restlessness for new things and big things they share.

After going to college, George is going to accomplish great deeds. Mary, it seems, senses that there’s greatness to be found, too, in living in a house in Bedford Falls—because when the rock she throws manages to break a window as well, and George asks her what she wished for, as the script puts it:

she looks at him provocatively, then turns and shuffles off down the street, singing as she goes.

Next George follows and insists that she tell him. But she demurs, saying, “If I told you it might not come true.” And then come the amazing lines which everyone counts as among the most romantic in all of film. George the knight endearingly proposes an impossible task to prove his devotion to his lady:

GEORGE

What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say …

LONG SHOT

Full moon shining through the trees.

BACK TO SHOT – GEORGE AND MARY

GEORGE (CONT’D)

…the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey, that’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary.

MARY

I’ll take it. And then what?

GEORGE

Well, then you could swallow it and it’d all dissolve, see? And the moonbeams’d shoot out of your fingers and your toes, and the ends of your hair.

(pauses)

Am I talking too much?

I bet there isn’t one person out of ten, who knows the line about lassoing the moon, and who can also say what George tells Mary she should do with the moon when she gets it. That she should eat the entire moon, and that it would dissolve, and that after having dissolved its beams of light would emanate from her fingers, toes, and the ends of her hair (which could not happen unless somehow she turned into the moon by eating it)—this is just so bizarre, that it cries out for an explanation. “Am I talking too much?” No, it’s not a matter of how much you have said, George. It’s a matter of what you said—of how you might have babbled on in this strange direction.

Romantic poetry has often been conceived of as speech inspired by a god or some muse. (See Plato’s Ion.) And poetry is the right word for George’s strange words. It makes me think of a famous epigram in the Greek Anthology, attributed to Plato, addressed to his beloved Aster, which means “Star”:

You, my Star, gaze upon the stars.

If only I could become the night sky, to return your glance with countless eyes.^[2]

But if these words are somehow inspired, what is their inspiration?

I have wondered in thinking about those lines whether they are meant subliminally to evoke the Eucharist. The moon, round and white, is like a Eucharistic Host lifted up to the sky. George does not say that if she swallowed the moon she would ingest it or digest it; rather, he says that it would “dissolve.” This is a strange word to use of the moon. But when Catholics receive the Host, they do not eat it, but rather they let it dissolve. Again, the Eucharist assimilates its recipient to the God who is present in it, or so Catholics believe. Likewise, George says that Mary would throw off beams of light, just like the moon. Wouldn’t a divinized human being throw off beams of light?

Am I being fantastical, reading something into the scene which could not possibly be there? Perhaps, but maybe not. I refer to a passage in Capra’s autobiography, where he explains how, as a young man, despite his distance from the simple Catholicism of his childhood, he would nonetheless go to church on Christmas and Easter. These are his words:

On those two holy days I sneaked into a Catholic church to kneel; to smell the incense, hear the angels sing, and be lifted out of my shoes by the passion and resurrection of Christ. It may happen to you only once in a hundred Masses—but it will happen. You walk back from Communion with the Host on your tongue—a nobody. You kneel, drop your head in your hands. Slowly the wonder of it fills you with joy—the dissolving Host in your mouth is the living Christ! The priest, the church, all the bowed heads around you, disappear. You hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing. Your mind empties itself of all thought, your body of all substance. You are a spirit suffused in a glorious Light. And out of its glory a word infuses your spirit: “Courage!” You have glimpsed the Eternal! The Light fades. Thoughts re-form in your mind; substance returns to your body; bowed heads around you materialize. You hear the priest say, “Go. The Mass is ended.” You leave filled with the urge to shout it to the whole world—”Courage! Courage!”^[3]

What Capra himself says is that you carry the luminous Host on your tongue. You don’t ingest it, but it dissolves. You don’t assimilate it, but rather you are suffused in a glorious Light. So says the screenwriter who wrote those lines, or at least signed off on them, and who also said, about moviemakers, “I think every man’s picture is in a sense an autobiography.”

What is regarded as the most romantic scene in all of film, it seems, has led us to the Eucharist.

And then I think of Tolkien’s letter 43 to his son, Michael, about romantic love and marriage, which concludes:

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste — or foretaste — of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

Capra has intimated this truth, if he has not grasped it himself.

^[1] The Name Above the Title, xi, 130.

^[2] ἀστέρας εἰσαθρεῖς, ἀστήρ ἐμός. εἴθε γενοίμην
οὐρανός, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς σὲ βλέπω.

^[3] Ibid.