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Recently I saw a movie entitled “The Family Man.” A hard-driving banker gets a chance to see what his life would have been like if he had stayed with his college girlfriend instead of going off to London for a prestigious internship at Barclays Bank.
It’s a rather silly movie, full of formulaic situations and cute kids. You can guess how it goes: the tough banker sees the value of family life and repudiates the cold, impersonal world of corporate takeovers. But I responded to it. So did my wife, and I couldn’t help thinking about other “second chance” stories in film and literature that are beloved classics.
“A Christmas Carol,” for example. Scrooge gets a second chance, gets to see how he blew his chances when he was young and how he’ll die a lonely death if he keeps going the way he is. He’s converted by his second chance experience, and he sends a big turkey to the Cratchits and goes to visit his nephew and his wife. Scrooge comes to understand that the only really important things in life are family and community.
In the film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” George Bailey is given a second chance to see what the world would have been like if he had never existed. He’s wanted to do great things and travel to far places as an individual all his life and has been thwarted by family and community responsibilities. Through his second chance, George comes to understand that his community and family work was the most important work he could have done.
Second chance stories are an interesting phenomenon. To the best of my knowledge, no one who gets a second chance in the literature or film of any society chooses to be a ruthless corporate executive or a corrupt politician. Where does such a value-bias come from? Why is it always in reaction to other values that aggrandize the individual and involve money? And why do millions of people respond emotionally to such portrayals, even when they’re silly?
I think that these stories and our responses to them are evidence of a biologically-based sense of how “things ought to be,” developed in hundreds of thousands of years of band life. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to cooperate with and trust one another in order to survive. It wouldn’t be surprising that most humans have an inarticulate sense of “how things ought to be” that includes trust based on family and community connections. Yet in contemporary society trust is often missing and individuals often succeed by screwing the community and ignoring the family. Given our sense of how things ought to be, that missing trust has got to make us anxious. Second chance stories always champion family and community values because the widening gap between individual success and the common good is scary, disorienting. Stories like “The Family Man” and “A Christmas Carol” confirm our feelings that individual aggrandizement at the expense of family and community is somehow wrong, and they counteract the pressure from the market system to compete and betray. They also help people believe that it is possible that a balance can be restored. Of course, most people don’t get a second chance in real life.
