I recently read a play entitled Everyman for my drama history course. Its a medieval play and I was expecting that it was going to be archaic and inapplicable to life today, but I actually found it very moving and relevant. It is the story of a man appropriately called Everyman going to his death and death is actually represented as a character here along with many other things which most people consider to be just "ideas". They turned good deeds, knowledge, strength, material goods, beauty, discretion, and the five senses into people who actually interact with Everyman. Though this play is an in your face moral lesson I believe that is what makes it so great and it was so refreshing to read something like this after reading a lot of the veiled modern literature today sometimes with no moral lesson at all. Then I started to think of my what media could be considered morally strong from recent times.
So Its A Wonderful Life is necessarily recent, but it is far more recent than Everyman. I have seen this movie billions of times as it is on of my favorite films, but it was so fun comparing these two works because of their subject matter. In Everyman only his Good Deeds could follow him to the end. That was what mattered most. All of the other things faded throughout the play refusing to go with him. In Its A Wonderful Life George Bailey gets to see what life would be like for others if he was never born. After seeing the effect his life has had on friends and family he realizes how important he is to them. He may not have had much prestige or material wealth, but he had what really mattered. I love the line his brother says in his toast at the end "To my brother George, the richest man in town". He wasn't the richest man in town because of money, he was the richest man because of all of his friends and the good deeds that made them his friends.
