Christmas Week: A Christmas Carol (1951)

2 years ago

Christmas Week: A Christmas Carol (1951)

I WEAR THE CHAIN I FORGED IN LIFE

by Letitia Trent

Unlike most kids between eight and twelve, I dreaded Christmas break more than I dreaded school, and I dreaded school almost every day to the level of sickness. Dread made my stomach churn while on the inevitably long bus rides (we always lived at least ten miles from town); dread made me plan exactly by which door I’d enter the school so that the fewest people would see me. But I dreaded Christmas vacation in a different way. It was a slow-burning dread, an eventuality that I couldn’t plan for. It was two weeks of cold, isolation in our tiny trailer, inevitable arguments, and no indoor plumbing or running water (the best things about school, by far, besides the books, were the running faucets of hot and cold water and the flushing toilets). My mother tried to make Christmas day special—we had gifts labeled as from “Santa”, though I had long since heard my parents cursing at each other on Christmas Eve as they put the gifts under the tree, and Santa had my mother’s perfect cursive handwriting. No amount of tinsel and dollar-store-candy-stuffed stockings could make it anything but bleak and cramped, a house full of dirty clothes and the underlying smell of old cat litter.

So I read books until my eyes hurt. And I watched TV, which was the best thing about holiday break. My favorite movie of all of the wonderfully schmaltzy holiday programming was Scrooge: A Christmas Carol. Specifically, the version make in 1951, starring Alastair Sim, the man who ruined all other Scrooges for me. Scrooge is my favorite archetypal holiday character. Not because he figures out how to love his fellow man just in time for Christmas, but because I recognize the fear and insecurity underpinning the desire to hoard money and keep poverty at a distance. Here’s a character who shows how much neglect, poverty, and helplessness can fuck you up and fill you with fear.

Scrooge is the classic formerly-poor/formerly-neglected person who clings to what little status and financial security he can get. He’s caged up by fear, the source of greed and miserliness. If he can coldly recommend that the poor go to jails and workhouses, if he can pass a beggar without stopping, then he can pretend that poverty exists somewhere else, that he has transcended it, and that it no longer has a hold on him. And I know this feeling. Sometimes escaping dependence on others through economic success can do the opposite of what you might think: instead of inspiring you to turn back to the poor communities you came from, you run as far from them as possible. It takes a long time to get far enough from poverty to view it as a social evil and not a real, pwerful force that could permanently break you. Poverty is a hole you fall into. Once you’ve been poor, it’s easy to see how quickly it can happen.

This reading of Scrooge comes mostly from Alastair Sim’s incredibly sympathetic and funny Scrooge. Even in the initial scenes, where he plays the heartless miser with glee, you see flashes on his face that indicate a self-disgust, a hatred of his own words and actions even as he says them. He’s locked up tightly in his black coat, his black hat, his gloves, his mouth firmly shut unless he’s delivering a barb to anyone who shakes the tower of isolation he had created. His money is armor. He’s more to be pitied than hated, and many other versions of A Christmas Carol fail in that they ask us to see Scrooge as cold, heartless, empty, and without suffering until he’s taken through the lessons of the past, present, and future. But he’s suffering, all right, from the very beginning of the movie. It’s the suffering of somebody desperately afraid to lose what they ‘ve worked hard to build up to keep poverty away.

When the ghost of Christmas past visits Scrooge at midnight, after he has received a visit from his old business partner Jacob Marley (a great scene, in which Sim asserts that Marley’s just an “undigested bit of beef”), we get a small snippet of Scrooge’s childhood. As a very young child, he was abandoned for most of the year in a shabby boarding school. Later, he was a young, moneyless apprentice, apparently scorned and ignored by his father and left to the good graces of Fezziwig. His sister, the only person to which he had an emotional connection, died young during childbirth. We are all familiar with these scenes—every version of A Christmas Carol includes them, and they’ve been copied and parodied countless times. But they’re still effective.

I’ve wondered how this movie is re-made over and over in a culture that generally seems to reward originality (at least in terms of what is critically acclaimed—I’m not claiming that each new bromance, torture porn, or Judd Apatow-esque jerfest is in any way original). I think that Dickens hit on a particularly effective device by making Scrooge watch his life play out along with the viewer. There’s something powerful about watching the old man watch himself as a young man making mistakes in what seems like real time. Only Alastair Sim has pulled off this double-scene in a way that truly affects me. The way he reacts to himself and the people he once knew seems genuine, not the straining and obvious outbursts you get from other Scrooges. You get the feeling that Sims is watching with us, equally invested in this story that he’s familiar with but can’t quite remember. That’s how memory works, isn’t it? I bet we’d all be shocked by ourselves and our decisions, which we now remember through a haze of revisions and softenings. If we could see ourseves again, objectively, standing outside the scene, we’d break down in disgust at our own stupid choices.

I’ll tell you who I never quite believed, though—the Cratchit family. Not just for Tiny Tim, that very Dickensonian little tearjerker, but the cheerful, loving little family itself. I don’t believe that they exist. They are penniless, and there seem to be a hundred of them, but they are still happy. I suppose that we and Scrooge are supposed to take a lesson from this—that money can’t buy you happiness. And it can’t. The point of the Cratchit family is that they love each other despite their limited place in the Victorian world and their scant hopes for ever being more than what they are. I wonder if such a family is possible. From what I’ve seen, poverty generally drives people into the ground and wrings any last bit of hopefulness from them. But perhaps I’ve just never met any real Cratchits.

I wonder if Dickens was a Scrooge or a Bob Cratchit. I wonder if they were two parts of him—Cratchit, the idealized, loving father-figure (his own father spent years in debtors prison, where his family often joined him) and Scrooge, the successful man who could easily skate above poverty. Did Dickens remember where he came from in more than just his fiction?

It’s difficult to go back to those places where you feel most vulnerable. By the end of the movie, when Scrooge jumps up in his bedclothes proclaiming his joy at Christmas and makes his housekeeper think he’s mad, when he visits the Cratchit’s in their home of poverty and acceptance (one thing he didn’t have and most sorely wanted), and his nephew at a holiday party (the nephew whose birth killed the only person he loved), he’s doing just that—going back to the places that frighten him and letting them in.

Every time I go home for Christmas, to that trailer where I felt so trapped, I think about these scenes from Scrooge. When I go back, do I truly go back? It’s easy to hang outside the scene, acting as though I’m not really there, feeling a removed pity for the people who still live in a place I’ve been lucky enough to leave. Do I bring gifts and remove my black top hat, take off my black coat, and come inside?