Since I was 10 years old, my favorite Christmas song has been Joni Mitchell's "River." This is pertinent for several reasons. First of all, it provides an interesting insight into what I was like as a child, since not that many 11-year-old boys tend to gravitate toward songs where female folk signers express a desire to "make a lot of money and then quit this crazy scene." Also, in case you may not have realized, Christmas really is coming, and everyone is cutting down trees and singing songs of joy and peace. And as a result, I thought this might be a good time to talk about Christmas and, by extension, Christmas movies.
People who do not know me particularly well assume that I am the type of person who would dislike Christmas. I have no idea how people come to this conclusion about me: I enjoy spending time with my family and friends, I really appreciate the opportunity to do absolutely nothing without feeling any guilt, and I thoroughly support Bill O'Reilly in his quest to win the "War on Christmas" (although I admit we should think about calling it the "Armed Police Action on Christmas").
This does not mean, however, that I don't sympathize with people who hate the holiday season. Whenever people tell me that they hate some vague, faceless entity like the NBA, Paramount Pictures, or hipsters, I tend to agree, if only because I have found that if you're going to hate something, it is more practical to direct your rage toward something that won't sock you in the face if you run into it at a bar.
The argument against Christmas, as I understand it, is that the holiday is crass and materialistic. This is pretty much the standard argument people make whenever they want to take down something big and commercial, and I suppose it is technically correct — but that doesn't mean anybody has to accept it. Christmas may very well be an overblown, pseudo-religious version of the Orange Bowl, but that isn't a legitimate reason to dislike the holiday. This is America, and for better or worse, overblown spectacles are the backbone of this country. Our national motto might as well be, "If you can't make it good, make it big."
More to the point, I suspect the people who claim to hate Christmas because they feel like it represents everything wrong with our hyper-aggressive capitalist culture are hiding from the real reason they hate the holidays. The real reason to dislike Christmas is actually much more interesting and inspired than the simple knee-jerk, anti-capitalist approach: The real reason to dislike Christmas, if you must, is that it is a fundamentally inegalitarian holiday. Christmas divides the world up between people who have someplace to go to celebrate it and those who do not. This divide does not get talked about, mainly because the central premise — people spending the holidays alone — is almost too depressing for words.
And this is what makes Christmas movies so unique: They understand this divide better than any sociologist ever could. In fact, holiday loneliness is one of the few unpleasant realities Hollywood chooses not to dumb down; if anything, they choose to amplify it.
This is notable for a number of reasons. First of all, obviously, is that when we think of Christmas, aching loneliness isn't the first thing that pops into our heads. If you're a normal person, Christmas conjures up images of fat men in red suits and small children lusting after shiny imports from Japan. Of course, if you happen to be both Catholic and Italian, as I am, you will invariably think about overlong church services with stifling incense, capped off by a three-hour meal featuring various kinds of partially cooked marine life.
But there really aren't that many Christmas movies that treat the traditions of Christmas — secular or otherwise — as joyful occasions. The exception, I suppose, are movies that come of that booming sub-industry of "Christian-themed entertainment," a phrase that is really just a code for a movie that gets released exclusively at Wal-Mart, stars Kirk Cameron, and features a character who is a 33-year-old carpenter named James Christopher.
Looking at the movies that have entered the canon of so-called defining holiday movies, it's amazing just how many of them tap into the loneliness and frustration of the holiday season. I'm not just talking about the movies like "Bad Santa," "The Ice Harvest," "The Apartment" or "Scrooged," which are designed to appeal to the misanthrope living inside all of us.
Even so-called "nice" Christmas movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," "White Christmas" and all of the permutations of "A Christmas Carol" are governed by principles of loneliness and despair. "It's a Wonderful Life" is probably the most striking example, since the main crux of the plot is whether or not Jimmy Stewart is going to kill himself. Along with the characters in "White Christmas," the characters in "It's a Wonderful Life" are still reeling from World War II. And the less said about the loveless, insulated Ebenezer Scrooge the better.
All of these movies end on a note of redemption, but I can't help but think that sometimes this rings a bit hollow. What happens to Scrooge the week after Christmas? Dickens tells us he's better than his word, which we can accept, but can the same thing be true of the Scrooges portrayed by Bill Murray, Michael Caine, Alaistair Sim, George C. Scott and Scrooge McDuck? One of them had to have backslidden into his old ways, right?
Perhaps the one tangible lesson we can take from Christmas movies — and Christmas itself — is that hope is the one thing we need in order to carry on in life. It doesn't matter if you're about to lose the company store to Lionel Barrymore, or the fact that Fred MacMurray is tagging the girl of your dreams in your bed as you walk the icy Manhattan streets. This is the time of the year for hope. That's what these movies understand, even if their desperate characters do not. There's nothing more powerful than hope — hope in a better future, the solemn belief that this year is going to be better than last. And there's nothing wrong with that. If Andy Dufresne taught us anything, it's that hope is a good thing — maybe the best of things — and that no good thing ever dies. Merry Christmas.
Ray Gustini is a sophomore majoring in English and journalism. Want to vent some of your holiday frustration and loneliness? E-mail him at [email protected].
