The Reel Christmas
MCCARTNEY, GEORGE
The Reel Christmas No miracle on 34th Street. BY GEORGE MCCARTNEY In one of their earliest decrees upon reaching the New World, the Puritans outlawed Christmas. It was a heathenish holiday that...
...His wound is the baptismal guarantee of his identity...
...When Edmund Gwenn, the man who maintains he's Kris Kringle, takes over as Macy's Santa, he puts niceness above business, going so far as to direct parents to other stores when his employer can't supply the toys for which their children yearn...
...Tellingly, blood is the sign of his rebirth...
...It was a heathenish holiday that had nothing to do with Christ's birth...
...George Seaton's Miracle on 34th Street (1947) provides an apt example...
...Although he has ambitions to travel and go to college, he dutifully stays home to keep the family's building-and-loan business going after his father dies...
...There was to be none of that in the New Jerusalem...
...For a mainstream film, the moment is daringly exquisite and deeply funny...
...Bailey's irreversible affliction is of a piece with his less tangible wounds...
...Soon Gimble's is following suit, launching a veritable war of niceness on its primary competitor...
...It is a uniquely unsparing exposure of the consequences of a Christless Christmas...
...Shepherd plays his cameo wearing a black overcoat, black tie, pearl gray homburg, and a black beard...
...It merely pretends to respect its audience by giving us a knowing wink...
...We are to believe merely in belief...
...Governor William Bradford made it a point to have people work their fields on December 25 to show their contempt for what he called, with a rare flash of Puritan wit, the Fool's Tide instead of the Yuletide...
...It's meant to signal a triumph of decency over evil, no more...
...Realizing he's about to lose his last chance, Ralphie stops mid-course in his descent and scrambles back to the top to plead for his Red Ryder carbine...
...He is the man who despite his sorrows stands up to evil...
...He is unmistakably the Anti-Claus...
...It turns out to be a nightmare world firmly in the grip of selfishness and vice: In his absence, evil flourishes...
...It's good public relations and that means increased profits...
...It's invariably the emotionally stunted curmudgeon...
...His brother drowns, Gower becomes a ruined alcoholic, his father's business collapses, and Potter gains control of the town...
...When Ral-phie, mistaking the line's length, steps in front of them, Shepherd calls out, "Hey, kid, where do you think you're going...
...The film closes with all its characters gathered round a decorated fir tree, but it's more a prop than anything else...
...Magoo in 1962, Albert Finney in 1970, George C. Scott in 1984, or Patrick Stewart in 1999 in the part—it's never the redeemed Scrooge we really picture...
...This seems satiric, but it isn't really...
...Tellingly, Miss Wood's new-found faith is severely tested when at first she doesn't get the house she had requested from Gwenn—a nice suburban home for her mother and herself and possibly the nice young lawyer her mom has befriended...
...Under Gwenn's charming influence, however, she comes to believe fervently in him as the North Pole benefactor...
...Shepherd was determined to expose the clownish, shabby reality behind the gloriously advertised world, and for Ralphie this inevitable truth unfolds when he confronts Santa atop of a twelve-foot platform, supplied with a staircase on one side and a shiny metal slide on the other...
...Seemingly a send-up of Christmas commercialization, it actually promotes a sappy ethos in which material gain is the final measure of moral success...
...This is the essence of sentimentality: a labor-saving shortcut to self-approval...
...It is such a bitterly accurate rendering of the travesty we've allowed Christmas to become: an obsessive pursuit of commodities...
...However reluctantly, he is a man who suffers loss to help others...
...Climbing the stairs with an awed look on his bespectacled face, he sits on Santa's lap too dazzled to speak his heart's desire...
...What remains is a feverish ordeal of forced bonhomie and manufactured sentiment that is especially the legacy of the late nineteenth century...
...Every time he brings it up, he runs into "the classic mother block" in the formula of a non-negotiable rejection: "You'll shoot your eye out...
...Only by returning to life can Bailey dispel this curse...
...Miracle on 34th Street doesn't recommend anything be changed...
...Three years ago in the surprisingly cynical and predictably execrable Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Jingle All the Way, a father maniacally hunts for the season's ultimate toy, an unattainable action figure called Turbo Man...
...Over the succeeding centuries, the celebration of Christmas has become almost entirely divorced from its occasion in Bethlehem...
...Hearing no request, Santa impatiently suggests a football might be nice and hustles him onto the departure slide...
...This is most evident in the wounds he gives George Bailey, which mark him explicitly as a savior hero, one who undergoes an ordeal of suffering, death, and resurrection...
...And then, in our own century, an even more potent force went to work: movies that glamorized the holiday as the ultimate locus of all our material desires...
...I can't think of another scene that so thoroughly explodes the season's commercially created sentimentality...
...In this world, he reminds us, we're always being sent to the back of the line...
...When he marries, he gives up his honeymoon to quell a financial panic that threatens his clients' welfare...
...But it is, to use Scrooge's favorite word, humbug...
...The truth is we don't really want a reformed Scrooge...
...When we don't have exactly what our customers need, we'll send them to where they can get it," he chortles...
...The production is generally thought of as a Christmas film, though the holiday seems at first incidental to its story of a despairing man redeemed by angelic intervention...
...His ear is further damaged when Mr...
...the Civil War, merchandisers were quick to recognize an unparalleled economic opportunity in the Christmas tradition and the various stories of St...
...It's exceedingly difficult to feel redeemed while in the grip of the spangled mania of commercial Christmas...
...Even classic Christmas films carry this depressing message...
...His lip had been cut in a drunken bar brawl just before Clarence relieved him of the burden of life...
...He then points to the line's end some thirty or forty yards in the distance...
...Having exhausted all other avenues, Ralphie decides to go over his parents' heads and appeal to the guy at the top, Santa Claus, not that he believes exactly...
...Gower, the pharmacist he works for, slaps it...
...After a series of remarkably humorless misadventures, Schwarzenegger finds himself mistaken for the actor who is to play the toy character in a Christmas day parade...
...But when the house finally does turn up, her faith is instantly restored and everything is nice once again...
...Then, he gently places his booted toe on the tike's forehead and pushes the BB desperado down the slide...
...Upon his return to the living, it begins to bleed once more...
...That sounds oddly Puri-tan—and indeed, our modern movies' sappy sentimentality does descend in a straight line from the Puritans, for it's what you get when you retain a Puritan view of faith and strip away its original object...
...Honoring the mystery of the Incarnation in all its terror and promise doesn't promote sales, especially when the instrument of God's entry into human history was a seemingly ordinary girl giving birth in the lowliest of circumstances...
...Even in Dickens's text this is left suspiciously vague, but in the movie versions, what few hints Dickens gives are quickly stripped away...
...We first see him pressing his face against a department store's plate glass window as he gazes rapturously on the Holy Grail of Christmas presents, "an official Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing that tells time...
...Before he knows what is happening, he's hustled into a superhero costume and put on a float...
...When Clarence, a timely angel, grants his wish, Bailey discovers what Bedford Falls would be like without his generosity of spirit...
...The film betrays its hollowness most in the conversion of nine-year-old Natalie Wood to Santa orthodoxy...
...Falling into despair at the imminent collapse of his family's business and the consequent triumph of Potter, Bailey, contemplating suicide, wishes he had never been born...
...The question is, faith in what...
...This is why—whether we think of Alastair Sim in 1951, Mr...
...This is especially true in its fantasy sequence...
...Whether for commercial or ideological reasons, there's absolutely no mention of the Christ child...
...Potter (Lionel Barry-more), for the soul of Bedford Falls, their conflict takes place within a demonstrably Christian ethos, however secularized...
...The cold-bosomed bastard is the one who warms our hearts...
...Bailey has been rendered deaf in one ear as a boy by saving two people...
...Popular culture confirms this nowhere more than in Christmas movies...
...Ral-phie's look of stunned disbelief at the bottom of Santa's slide is a tonic restorative capable of bringing us back to our senses...
...Frank Capra's favorite, It's a Wonderful Life, narrowly avoids sentimental bathos almost in spite of itself...
...Gower assumes Bailey is being insubordinate when he refuses to deliver a mistakenly prepared prescription, only to discover afterward that the boy was not shirking but rather preventing a fatal mistake...
...Worse, its festivities were unseemly if not immoral...
...The story begins with Shepherd's boyhood alter ego, Ralphie Parker, possessed by the demon of Christmas commerce...
...There is one other film in this genre worth attention, A Christmas Story, with its script by Jean Shepherd, who died this fall at age seventy-eight after a long career as a humorist in radio, television, and film...
...We're invited to laugh at this, but how can we...
...Diving into the frigid waters of a frozen pond to save his younger brother, he contracts an ear infection...
...The twisted Scrooge and the hapless Cratchits present irresistible opportunities for over-acting, especially in that spectacularly poignant parallel between the spiritually crippled skinflint and the physically crippled innocent, Tiny Tim...
...During his period of non-existence, this wound had vanished...
...Christmas has never recovered...
...The anxiety this causes store executives is quickly allayed when astonished customers pledge their undying loyalty to such a thoughtful institution...
...There's a long pause as Santa studies his plaintive smile before delivering the coup de grace: "Kid, you'll shoot your eye out...
...Macy himself decrees Kringle's decency as store policy...
...He knows it's beyond his reach...
...Miracle on 34th Street hews to a particularly American view of faith as the guarantor of material welfare...
...The various film adaptations of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol are similarly afflicted with a well-meaning appeal to our instinct to believe in the right thing...
...So our commercial culture has encouraged us to honor instead a generic bonhomie: our softer selves, our better instincts, our fellow feeling—all to be made manifest in the gifts we bestow on one another, the more expensive the better...
...Beyond sponsoring a mawkish belief in the spirit of niceness as embodied in Santa, the script keeps its counsel...
...Shepherd had an engagingly sardonic vision that is fully apparent in this film, which he wanted to call Satan's Revenge...
...For all its fantasy, this film doesn't duck mortal issues...
...In his presence, it's no effort at all to feel good about our noble, generous selves...
...Let's face it," Shepherd says in his perfectly pitched voice-over narration as the adult Ralphie, "most of us were scoffers but moments before zero hour it didn't pay to take chances...
...Bradford and the Puritans proved uncharacteristically prescient...
...He has become the toy for which he was desperately searching...
...There he encounters Jean Shepherd himself playing a mildly exasperated father waiting with his own son...
...With the advent of large department stores after George McCartney is a professor of English at St.John's University...
...Capra's moral vision may have been singularly simple-minded, his theological understanding risible, and his egoism obnoxious, but he was nevertheless an artist in the grip of more than he seems to have understood...
...We've allowed, in other words, the holiday to be ruled by sentimentality, and the consequences can be read in all those harried, fatigued faces we meet during the season...
...Admittedly, Dickens's stage-managed sentimentality is full of energy and wonderfully entertaining...
...Campaigns were drummed up to promote the necessity of gifts, toys, and cards for the season...
...This doesn't conjure visions of plenty and luxury...
...Nevertheless, when George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) battles the evil financier, Mr...
...Naturally the child has been taught that Santa was merely a silly legend...
...She has been brought up by a thoroughly faithless modern woman, played by Maureen O'Hara, who believes only in being "realistic...
...Nicholas...
...It's not difficult to understand why Christ has faded into the background of our Christmas season...
...Entering Higbee's department store, he eagerly rushes to the Santa line...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 15
