11 Heroic Acts In Movies That Changed Absolutely Nothing

11. Clarence The Angel - It's A Wonderful Life

It's A Wonderful Life is clearly all about change, and specifically the impact that even the slightest changes - like the wiping out of a life deemed insignificant and toxic - would have on the universe. For a Christmas film, it's also relentlessly grim: not least because its idea of a happy ending is to have the main character simply grin and bear everything that drove him to suicide in the first place, and its first key narrative moment comes as Jimmy Stewart looks all set to throw himself off the bridge to certain death.

Luckily Clarence the angel intervenes, distracting George and takes him on a journey through an alternate universe where he never existed, and terrible things happened to ungrateful people who never though to show George how valued he was in the first place. He pulls off that little distraction technique in a surprisingly odd way, throwing himself into the self-same river that George intended to end his life in.

In short, Clarence dived in to stop George from jumping in the water and killing himself, thus prompting the now distracted George to jump in the river, achieving the exact same thing he was going to do anyway. So what changed? Is the film suggesting that George would somehow have died from the thing that patently didn't kill him when he actually did it? Yes perhaps he would have sought another suicide method if he failed, but the point is that Clarence didn't actually need to pretend to kill himself to stop George jumping in, because the short-term outcome remained exactly the same.