Sr. Potter (Henry F. Potter): The Town That Money Swallowed

Mr. Potter owns almost all of Bedford Falls: the bank, the rents, the transport. Only a modest credit cooperative —the Bailey family's— keeps him from owning the whole town. In its celebrated nightmare, the film shows what the place would become if Potter won: Pottersville, a place of usury, slums and abandonment. It is, without knowing it, the finest imaginable experiment in institutional anomie: a community with the market as its only god.

// The theoryTwo versions of the same town

Messner and Rosenfeld argue that a society corrupts itself when the economy dominates the family, the community and politics and drains them of authority. It's a Wonderful Life has the rare virtue of showing the experiment with and without control: Bedford Falls is the town where the Baileys' cooperative decommodifies the essentials —it lends so that people can own their home instead of being Potter's eternal tenants—; Pottersville is what remains when that counterweight vanishes and only profit rules. Same place, same people; only one thing changes: who holds the power, the market or the community.

And here is the criminological edge: Potter does not break the law. He does not rob at gunpoint; he forecloses on mortgages, raises rents, strangles a competitor and even keeps 8,000 dollars that fall into his lap by mistake — and all of it, or nearly all, is legal. His harm (evictions, usury, an uprooted town) fits into no criminal code, because he commits it from an office and with contracts. It is Sutherland's white-collar crime in the shape of a landlord: the perfectly lawful devastation of the powerful.

// The subjectThe man who understands nothing but the price

Potter is not a villain of passion: he is a man who has reduced the entire world to a balance sheet. He does not hate George Bailey; he simply cannot comprehend any logic that is not that of profit, and that is why its very existence offends him. To Potter, a neighbor who wants a home of his own is a bad deal; a community of solidarity, an inefficiency; the Baileys' generosity, a stupidity that costs him custom. His coldness is not sadistic but accounting: he sees people and sees assets, and only the latter seem real to him. He is the perfect citizen of an anomic society — one for whom no value remains that money cannot explain, and therefore no limit that money cannot leap.

There is a bridge to Rapture: where Rapture proved that without institutions there is no community, Pottersville shows the step before it —it is enough for one institution, the economic one, to swallow the rest—. Robert Putnam measured exactly what Bedford Falls has and Pottersville lacks: social capital, that network of trust and reciprocity that makes neighbors hold one another up. Its erosion not only saddens a town; it makes it, with data, poorer, sicker and more prone to crime. Potter sells no drugs and wields no weapon: he dissolves the glue that held Bedford Falls together.

// The crackNostalgia for a town that never existed?

The film —and with it the theory— runs the risk of nostalgia: idealizing the community of old as a paradise of solidarity against the cold market, forgetting that those communities also excluded, surveilled and oppressed. Institutional anomie can sound like a conservative longing for a lost order. A nuance is in order: it is not about returning to a mythical Bedford Falls, but about recognizing, with data, that when the market rules alone society produces more harm and more crime. The Baileys' cooperative is not nostalgia; it is public policy — decommodified credit and housing, something perfectly current.