The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

by Andrew Root

Jim Henson was dead, to begin with. A freak bout of pneumonia had taken away the man who was at the centre of countless projects and characters; the very voice of Kermit himself. Richard Hunt—who performed Beaker, Scooter, Sweetums, and Statler, among many others—had also died, and the number of beloved characters that had been shelved out of respect was ever growing. How could The Muppets survive after such a monumental loss? It would be foolish to think that the idea to shut down Muppet Studios wasn’t bandied about across more than one boardroom table. How do you come back from that? How do the children find the strength to go on when the father has died?

One of the truly remarkable aspects of the Muppets was that despite all of their endearing self-deprecation (early Gonzo) and in-fighting (Fozzie vs. Statler & Waldorf), they were not only susceptible to, but also revelled in great moments of pure, unadulterated optimism. During the climactic showdown between Kermit and an obsessive restaurateur in 1979’s The Muppet Movie, the beloved frog (then still performed by Jim Henson) delivers one of the most genuine, heartfelt, and unquestionably true monologues on the nature of friendship. What he says is this:

I’ve got a dream too. But it’s about singing and dancing and making people happy. That’s the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with. And, well, I’ve found a whole bunch of friends who have the same dream. And, well, it kind of makes us like a family.

Over the course of his journey, Kermit’s dream has been scoffed. He has encountered hardship after hardship, not least of which is a psychotic frog-leg enthusiast, and as Kermit struggles to find the words to reconcile his frustration with his pursuers and his generally positive outlook on life, he stumbles on this immutable true revelation on the nature of friendship; that what you are doing with your life is not as important as the people that you are doing it with. This may well be the central ethos to the entire family of Muppet performers. What choice did they have but to pick up and keep going?

Choosing their next project would be an incredibly difficult task. It would need to be a story that embodied their commitment to positivity, featured a wide variety of memorable characters, and had a solid emotional core. By choosing to adapt Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, they got all of those things. At its heart, this story is about redemption, about coming out of the blackness of solitude, denying cynicism, celebrating love, and above all, carrying on tradition. In embracing these themes, the Muppeteers were also committing to a sea change; with Jim gone, the status quo had been swept away, and shaking things up was a necessity.

The Muppet Christmas Carol is a true ensemble work. Michael Caine brilliantly fills the shoes of Ebenezer Scrooge and provides a performance with seemingly boundless range. He is cruel and flinty; broken and remorseful; joyful and loving; all without sacrificing the continuity of his character. Seeing Scrooge experience happiness is like watching a newborn fawn finding its legs. He simply does not know what to do with himself! Caine’s performance is also noteworthy for being one of the only human characters in the film, a stark contrast to 1984’s cameo-packed The Muppets Take Manhattan (Kermit and the gang’s last big screen outing). With fewer humans filling up the scenery, it’s up to the Muppets themselves to fully populate this world. The way that these characters are used is another indicator of the evolution of the Muppets; for one thing, Kermit and Fozzie don’t have any scenes together. The original trinity of Kermit, Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear is downplayed in favour of the interactions between Gonzo and Rizzo. The chemistry between these two characters is unmatchable and completely fresh. Kermit and Miss Piggy form the emotional core of the film, ruminating on the nature of family, love, and togetherness, while Gonzo and Rizzo form more direct connections with the audience, breaking the forth wall with delicious precision and intent (when the narrators don’t want to stick around because the story is getting too scary, it’s a fairly good indicator that something frightening is about to happen). How does one talk about the casting of a film in which most of the characters are puppets? “The manufacturing?” Whatever the vocabulary, the characterization is beautiful. With 20 years of characters to fall back on, it would have been easy to rely on established personalities rather than forge ahead into new territory, but here again we find the Muppeteer’s commitment to change.The three ghosts that Scrooge encounters work so well for their particular idiom that the idea of shoehorning Scooter into the role of the Ghost of Christmas Past seems perverse. Where Muppet cameos are used, the old familiar faces appear in ways that instantly resonate (Robin the Frog as Tiny Tim jumps instantly to mind, as do Statler and Waldorf as Jacob and the ingeniously named Robert Marley). It’s a clear indication that the Muppeteers are not resting.

Much credit must go to Brian Henson - Jim’s son - who picked up the reins and directed this film as his first feature. While it may seem strange to comment on mise en scène in a film that contains talking rats, it is an important aspect of what makes this film so well-crafted. The Muppets are always shot to fill the frame, a trend which would diminish with each subsequent Muppet film until (during the ghastly Muppet Wizard of Oz), the puppets are relegated to the bottom half of the screen.

Look at this frame from 1999’s Muppets From Space. That is 18 inches of wasted headroom. Perhaps it was the changing trends in aspect ratios that forced the Muppets into wider and wider angles, and that Muppet movies were meant to be seen in the old 4:3 home video format, but whatever the case, that the Muppets are treated with the same (sometimes more) care as the human performers speaks volumes about Brian Henson’s commitment to his father and his friend’s creations.

Just as Scrooge found salvation in his fellow man, so too the Muppeteers must have found solace in each other. When Scrooge is confronted by the regret of how he spent his younger days, and how the manner of his ways cost him the love of his life, he curses the Ghost of Christmas Past. She replies by saying “These are the shadows of the things that have been. That they are what they are, do not blame me.” Above all things, the past is unchanging and unapologetic, but the future (so terrifyingly depicted here) is mutable. Every year that passes is an opportunity. Jim Henson is gone and we cannot change that. What we can do is try our best to live up to his ideals and the ideals of this film; to make a positive connection with the people around us, and to revel in the togetherness of loved ones, whatever form they may take.

Andrew Root is a writer living in Canada. He tumbls here.

A Christmas Carol (1951)

I WEAR THE CHAINS 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, powerful 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?

Letitia Trent is a writer, poet, and teacher living in Arkansas. She tumbls here.

White Christmas (1954)

WHITE CHRISTMAS, DECONSTRUCTED

by Elizabeth Cantwell

As most of my friends know, I tend to conceptualize movies in terms of brief, disconnected scenes that for whatever reason stuck in my mind. (So: “The Godfather is the movie where there’s a cat on Brando’s lap, and people are making some kind of red sauce, and Al Pacino is in the rain, and they shoot James Caan at a toll booth.”) My detractors may claim this is unsophisticated, and a generally poor way to analyze a movie. I disagree. Following is my personal summary of the timeless classic White Christmas, with an insightful commentary.

White Christmas: The movie where there’s a big wall, and Rosemary Clooney wants to wash herself in snow, and Bing Crosby makes a good sandwich while Danny Kaye makes fun of Martha Graham, and then there’s some cardboard cutouts of fat farm people and Bing Crosby throws a perfectly good gift into a tree.

Commentary:

… there’s a big wall

Okay, so, to be honest: even though I have seen this movie a lot, I always kind of black out on the war part in the beginning. I mean, I feel like the sky is kind of too dark for me to watch it closely, and men in uniforms always confuse me because I’m waiting for something to come out of their mouths that I don’t understand, like “Formation One, Hut Hut” or “Load that gun!”

Anyway, I know that a wall falls on Bing Crosby (who I know isn’t called Bing Crosby in the movie, but we’re going to ignore that for purposes of this essay) and Danny Kaye saves him and hurts his arm, and this puts everything in motion, as we all know that when someone pulls you out from beneath a falling wall you are contractually obligated to perform large and colorful musical numbers with that person.

… and Rosemary Clooney wants to wash herself in snow

She does. She says so in the song. I remember hearing this as a kid and being sort of creeped out by it. First of all, snow isn’t a very good washing agent. Probably most tap water is better for washing purposes than snow. It’s got all that acid rain in it, and it lies on the ground with the winter bug corpses, and people step on it, and there’s no anti-bacterial content to it whatsoever.

Second of all, when I love things, I’m not usually like “Oh yes, I want to wash myself in that.” Like, I love orange marmalade. But do I want to wash my hands, my face, my hair with orange marmalade? No. Furthermore, do I want to “see a great big man entirely made” of orange marmalade? Fuck no. That would be terrifying. So when Rosemary Clooney wants to wash herself in the snow and then see some huge man made out of it, it just gives me a weird feeling in my spine. But you know, I’m going to give her a pass for this because she is George Clooney’s aunt, and that makes her God’s sister or something.

…and Bing Crosby makes a good sandwich

What bothers me about the scene where Rosemary gets all flirty with Bing over a midnight snack is that they don’t actually eat it. I think the Spirit of Christmas demands that you eat all the food people make for you, especially if they made it specifically for you because you were up traipsing about in your robe and claiming you couldn’t sleep. Bing goes to all that trouble, and sings for what seems like a lot of choruses about counting your blessings instead of sheep, and then she just leaves the sandwiches by the fire. I don’t care if he did beat his children; that is no way to treat a Christmas Sandwich.


…while Danny Kaye makes fun of Martha Graham

“Chicks / who did kicks / Aren’t kicking anymore / They’re doing choreography.”

I think this part sticks with me for personally sentimental reasons, because my mom’s a modern dancer (and she LOVES this scene). I remember watching her laughing as the dancers contorted themselves around the stage in these gray stretchy costumes and wondering whether this was the sort of thing I’d find funny when I was a Grown-Up. And then when I actually knew who Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham I laughed too. Plus, Danny Kaye looks ridiculous, and I love him for that. Maybe the best part is that it was back in those magical times where people could REALLY dance, not High-School-Musical dance, but I’ve-Got-A-Killer-Pink-Dress-On-and-I-Can-Work-It-Like-No-One-Else-While-Maintaining-A-Classic-Elegance dance.

…and then there’s some cardboard cutouts of fat farm people

JESUS CHRIST. Can anyone explain to me who thought that part of the movie was a good idea? I get it, it’s supposed to be a joke. Like, “Hey, we’re not in the army anymore, so we’re getting lazy and fat!” But it’s not really funny to make fun of people based on weight, and I don’t see why it’s funny to make fun of farmers, and whether or not it’s funny those cutouts are TERRIFYING. I know the shot only lasts about 20 seconds. But it is NOT Christmas-y. Plus, none of the actors look very enthused about them, even Danny Kaye, who is also known as The Man Who Looks Very Enthused About Everything, Even Cereal.

How do I know this? Because sometimes when I’m eating cereal I imagine what Danny Kaye would look like eating cereal right across from me. And his expression is always Very Enthused.

…and Bing Crosby throws a perfectly good gift into a tree.

This part of my summary of White Christmas got added on just this year, while watching the movie for the millionth time with Chris. At the very end, as the big show for the General is coming to a close, and it’s started to snow, and everything is wrapping up in that lovely, warm, musical fashion, Rosemary gives Bing a statue of a knight on a white horse as a present. See, there’s a running thing in the movie where Rosemary talks about Bing being her White Knight, and then when she gets all bitchy and Assumes things, therefore making an Ass out of U and Me, she tells him he’s fallen off the horse. Which is pretty mean, when you think about it.

So when she gives him the statue, it’s a thoughtful, symbolic way to apologize without having to actually say “I’m sorry” and to confirm that they will be having hot Christmas sex later in their red velvet costumes. And Bing is so happy that what does he do? He sweeps Rosemary up in his arms for a movie-ending kiss and THROWS THE STATUE INTO THE TREE.

Just throws it. Tosses it like a balled-up kleenex, or a used piece of floss. It looked pretty substantial, too, so I have the feeling that he may have BROKEN it. And I don’t know about you, but if I gave someone that I cared about a meaningful gift, and they proceeded to throw it on the floor, I’d be pretty ticked. But then again, it’s not the material gifts that matter. It’s the love, and the smooth baritones, and the loyalty and brotherhood in the face of hard times, and the stream-of-consciousness memories of experiences that have brought you joy, one way or another.

Elizabeth Cantwell is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

GETTING THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS RIGHT

by Erica U.

All month I’ve been contemplating which holiday movie I wanted to write about and I’m embarrassed to tell you how much time I spent googling “obscure Christmas film.”

It wasn’t that I wanted to put on airs of sophistication or intellectualism (I watched several seasons of The Hills and went to see Superbad the night it came out; No illusions of classiness remain.) It was that I’ve always been pretty dissatisfied with the superficiality of most holiday movies.

Of course they’re all very sweet and sentimental…but in such an airy and obvious way. Turn over a new leaf, Embrace generosity, Realize how much you have to be grateful for. Epiphany, epiphany, epiphany, cue a Christmas carol, and wrap it all up in a tidy satin bow.

I wanted to discover a holiday movie with depth and complexity. But days in to its pursuit I realized the film that meant the most to me personally – and maybe even carried the purest messages - was the least highbrow of all: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

How appropriate!

Every year, we’d rent the movie on VHS or find it just starting on one of our five network television channels. My mom was always too antsy to watch – fussing around with meal preparations and past-due Christmas cards and obligatory decorations. But my dad – my dad stretched back that brown corduroy La-Z-Boy and committed himself to the tradition.

My dad loved Christmas Vacation more than most people. By that I mean he loved Christmas Vacation more than most people do. But I also mean he loved Christmas Vacation more than he loved most people. (Ok, I stole that joke from Homestar Runner. Sue me. Please don’t.)

For two hours each December, my dad didn’t have to be stoic or driven. He could simply laugh. And I’d cozy up beside him, tucked into the big calico couch in the basement and furtively watch him roll and roll at the slapstick. Literally wipe his eyes at Clark sliding down a collapsing ladder or the squirrel launching out of the Christmas tree. I’d watch his face relax and now, it occurs to me that maybe Clark’s well intended buffoonery made him go a little easier on himself.

At a glance, Clark Griswold and my dad could not have been more dissimilar men. My dad was confident and stubborn, mostly serious back then and always larger than life. He snow shoed and winter-camped in Canada, built cabins with his bare hands and hitchhiked to California at 17; slept on the beach and ate loaves of bread for meals when his parents refused to wire him a single dollar. My dad was an adventurer, a perfectionist, an unrelenting worker, a wandering soul chained to domestic responsibility.

From my four-foot, twelve year old vantage point, he was Right about everything – unquestionably Right. From this age, I can understand that he may not have seen himself – as a husband and father - with the same unwavering certainty. His plumbing business was slow to take off in those early years and we lived frugally. When they took a chance and moved back to Minnesota from Denver, they bought for a song three acres of land on a small town river and he built our house as we could afford it.

The first spring and summer and fall, we lived in a tiny camper trailer behind the framed in split-level. Three kids and a wife, each getting ready for their day in a six by twelve foot tin can. That first winter, we moved in by the time the snow came, but it was still all cement and sheetrock and dry wall. My mom helped us string popcorn and cranberries for the tree that we harvested from the untamed backyard and my dad sprung for a string of tiny white lights from Pamida. That year, I started the tradition of sleeping at the foot of the lit tree at least once before Christmas. 24 years later, and I’ve never had a prettier tree than the one that rose up from hand me down clothes and roughed in bathrooms and no beds.

Those were the first years he tilled and planted the enormous garden that feeds us still. But maybe he didn’t see how worthy that was. This food producing and building of homes alone, from scratch like a super hero. Maybe he saw instead our faces the year he gave us too small, brown velour Carhart jackets from Fleet Farm. Picture the scoffing, snotty preteen hearts of my sister and me as we held up these clearance rack, boys jackets that came to our waists and forearms. This was Christmas, we thought? With such horrible ingratitude. And you could see the confusion on his face. They were new and warm, practical and soft – why weren’t we thrilled?

Or how about the Christmas he bought us matching white baseball caps – thin as onion skin. Mine was emblazoned with the British flag and my sister’s said “Damn I’m Good.” It’s debatable which makes less sense for a child. Looking back, they still make me laugh and laugh.

My father wasn’t raised as a priority. Four sons and his parents fed themselves first if times were tight. Maybe we wore clothes from garage sales instead of from the Gap, but my dad never slowed from working for us until we were long past needing it. He put us through college and paid for summer camp and band lessons and I didn’t have the first damn idea of the stress those bills must have cost him. Still every year at Christmas – even as we adults promise over and over not to exchange gifts – he puts in hours at the mall, finding us each the perfect gift and wrapping it personally, all thumbs and lumpy corners. Wrapping as he has lived – getting the most important things right even if no one ever taught him how to do it all perfectly.

Here’s the thing Christmas Vacation taught me this year: My father did the absolute best he could for us - and Clark Griswold’s all-too-human fumbling maybe reassured him that he’d done well enough. I love the movie for both reasons.

And for one more: The heart of its protagonist.

I’ve always identified with Clark’s holiday giddiness despite the world’s increasing cynicism. There will be no city tree lot evergreen for the Griswolds: No! They will march into the snowy woods and uproot their own. A single train of rain gutter lining Christmas lights is unthinkable. It will be a twinkling Sistine chapel of a yard display or it will be nothing.

There is a risk to earnestness, isn’t there? There’s a risk to being the dreamy goof who won’t turn off the Christmas music, who sings poorly and proudly at church – who GOES to church!, who loves an old sweater with snowflakes woven in, who puts up a tree even if you’re the only one around to admire it, who hands out late gifts to those who may not do the same for you – late because you don’t want them to feel obligated to reciprocate, given because your heart is so bursting with gratitude and affection this time of year you can’t not spell it out through some tangible, nostalgic token.

The world is not a great admirer of such earnestness. And what I love about Clark is that he could give a damn. The mocking of his in-laws and scorn of his neighbors don’t thwart his enthusiasm for creating a reverent Christmas and that is a beautiful and rare sort of strength. You may argue that the analogy is a stretch, but I’ll tell you what: Clark is not on the snob side of cummings’ division.

He’s earnest and committed to the marrow of life, not the showy arrangements of the incidentals and accessories. As a coworker puts it, he’s the “last of the family men.” His Christmas bonus won’t be invested in sport cars or golfing trips – it’s already pre-spent to install a family pool. And when the check doesn’t arrive, it’s not himself he’s upset for; He’s devastated at the prospect of letting his family down.

Clark is the kind of man who gets it wrong sometimes with the very best intentions, who falls off roofs, gets stuck in the attic and causes city brownouts with poorly planned light displays. Who awkwardly, innocently flirts with voluptuous store clerks and nearly kills himself on greased snow sleds. But he is also the kind of man who loves his family unabashedly, primarily.

Halfway through the movie I find myself thinking maybe this is what life is all about. Not about the dashing men who say all the right things and charm your co-workers at parties and remain an intriguing arm’s length away. Maybe love is about a good (not perfect!) man who wears Santa hats and comes to bed faithfully every night, wanting to be there, and lets you call him Sparky. Who tears up at old home movies, who wants life to be better for his children. Who fights to defend the heart and adventure and fun in life and labors every day solely for the care of his family. Maybe a family man – like Clark, like my dad – is the very best sort of man.

Even more than the holiday classics, Christmas Vacation convinces me that a purposeful commitment to your family may be the noblest of pursuits.

And loyalty might be the purest definition of love that I know.

Erica U. is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here.

Christmas Week: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?

by Chad Perman

It’s easy to lose track of your life.  All of us do it, in one way or another, locked up so tightly in our own heads - our own private little worlds - that we lose sight not only of The Big Picture, but of even our own smaller pictures: our families, our friends, the things we set in motion, the lives we impact and influence on a daily basis.  Which is precisely why one should watch It’s a Wonderful Life at least one time each year.  Not because it’s on TV all the time in December, not because your relatives are forcing you to, not even because it is (in my opinion) one of the best ten films ever made.  No, watch it because of the way you feel once it’s over, the way it reminds you that you matter, the way you interact just a bit differently with people (or at least, try to) for a few days after seeing it.  Above all, watch it to remember your ripple.

Let me explain.

Dr. Irvin Yalom, a brilliant psychotherapist and writer, as well as one of my own personal heroes, is, sadly nearing the end of his long and distinguished career.  As such, he’s turned his professional focus over the past few years towards death - the grappling we all must do over its inevitable finality, and the long shadows it casts over every single aspect of our lives.  How are we, the only creatures on this earth aware of our own fragile mortality and the awful realization of an expiration date (no matter how well we live, how wonderfully we behave, or how healthy we are), how are we supposed to carry on with all this awful knowledge?  What is the point, ultimately, of anything that we do?  How do we, especially those of us not comforted by the tonic of religion or soothed by the promise of a better world awaiting us after this one, confront our own mortality without being utterly crippled or paralyzed by it?

Yalom concludes, finally, that one way we endure is through our ‘ripples’, the “the fact that each of us creates - often without our conscious intent or knowledge - concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even for generations…the effect we have on other people is in turn passed on to others, much as the ripples in a pond go on and on until they’re no longer visible but continuing at a nano level. The idea that we can leave something of ourselves, even beyond our knowing, offers a potent answer to those who claim that meaninglessness inevitably flows from one’s finiteness and transiency”.

Of course, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), the Everyman Hero of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, doesn’t exactly come to this idea of rippling on his own.  In fact, it’s basically forced upon him by an angel-in-training after a botched suicide attempt on Christmas Eve.  Clarence, the angel attempting to earn his wings, saves George by rescuing him from the waters he’s jumped into, and then offers him an ingenious gift (and narrative device!) that a good many of us might indeed feel changed by - the ability to actually see what what the world would be like if we had never been born.  George, in effect, becomes aware of the ripples he’s made by being shown their absence: the war hero brother who never makes it to war (and saves other soldiers lives) because George wasn’t around to save him from drowning in a frozen lake as a boy; the quiet and lonely sadness of his wife Mary’s (Donna Reed) life without him in it; the scores of people who were screwed over by the town’s resident Scrooge, Mr. Potter, because George was never there to stand up to Potter, stand up for the people, and provide a different, better way of life for the citizens of Bedford Falls through his inherited work at the Savings and Loan.

Now, sure, your own life might not contain such large ripples - at least not yet! - but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain any.  Think of the lives you’ve touched.  Think of all the lives you still have left to touch.  Think about your ripples.

There’s another way to read It’s a Wonderful Life, a much more cynical one to be sure, but also one that I suspect goes a long way toward explaining its massive appeal over the years.

Very few among us can relate to someone who is actually living out their dreams, conquering the world in exactly the ways in which they had hoped to as an idealistic young person.  But who among us can’t relate to its opposite, to thwarted dreams and lives of quiet desperation?  To making small concessions that eventually turned into a life you’d never meant to have, an adventurous Man of the World becoming, instead, a Family Man stuck back in his old hometown?

This is George Bailey’s story for most of the film, the discouraging plot of It’s a Wonderful Life for well over half of its running time.  George dreams of a life perpetually out of reach, always right around a corner that never comes.  He makes all the responsible choices, the safe ones, the necessary ones, and in exchange gives up nearly all of his youthful ambitions.  It’s heartbreaking.  And worse, it happens to almost every single one of us.

But It’s a Wonderful Life assures us that it’s all going to be okay.  It assuages that nagging voice in the back of our heads that tells us we were meant for something greater, soothes that itching ambition and resulting disappointment at a life not fully lived.  Looking at it this way, it’s not hard to see why so many people love and embrace this film.  Who doesn’t want to feel better about all the things they never did?  Who doesn’t want to think that all the compromises they’ve made along the way will wind up bringing them just as much happiness as the dreams they traded them in for?  Thus, we flock to It’s a Wonderful Life because it’s our therapy, our culturally endorsed, holiday-approved balm for all the miseries and disappointments that pile up around us with each passing year.

So I guess the question becomes, then, why am I so personally drawn to the film?  Why do I insist on watching it every single year?  Is it the theme of rippling (I hope) or merely the band-aid the film applies to my own regrets (I fear)?  Can it somehow be both?

Regardless - and make no mistake about it - It’s a Wonderful Life is a tremendously dark film, 15/16ths a tragedy.  Sure, there’s a jubilant celebration at film’s end (a happy ending which takes up, literally, less than five minutes of the entire film’s running time), the telegram, Zuzu’s Petals, Auld Lang Syne, and a Happy Ending fade out.  But in comparison to all the darkness that’s come before it - compromise, defeat, depression, a nearly successful suicide attempt by the film’s main character (!!) - there’s nowhere near enough love and joy to balance it all out.

It always amazes me the ways in which people misunderstand It’s a Wonderful Life, thinking of it as a something almost wholly other than what it really is; that it’s a holiday staple, revered by nearly everyone (though, interestingly, not very successful when first released in 1946), is even more puzzling.  There is no Santa Claus here, no Winter Wonderland, no whimsy, and precious little  ‘holiday spirit’ to the film.  That it is considered a Christmas film at all has mostly to do with the timing of George Bailey’s suicide attempt: this beaten down and worn out businessman, husband, and father jumps off a bridge on Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas, eh?

That George finally decides life is worth the living - after Clarence’s inspired this-is-your-life-without-you tour - and rushes home to hug his wife and kids and celebrate the holiday with his friends and family is certainly a nice touch, but hardly one that would justify its status as an Official Christmas Movie.

Still, in the end, we gather around our televisions every December, we hold our loved ones close, we think about all the food we just ate, and we let George Bailey’s triumphs and failures become our own.  And maybe, just maybe, we realize how lucky we all are.  Because to live, for even a single day, is a miracle.

Chad Perman is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Filmosophy.  He lives in Seattle.