Merry Christmas! We’ve got a lot of ground to cover in this newsletter, so let’s get to it. This issue is all about Christmas movies: our relationship to Christmas movies, which ones we think should be considered Christmas movies, and how to examine old classics.
But first, here’s an old picture of Opal posing in front of the first Christmas tree I ever owned:
This newsletter is full of some great observations by two talented writers, so my piece is a little shorter than usual. But following my thoughts on seeing Lord of the Rings as holiday fare, this newsletter features Dr. Jeffrey Crouse showing us how knowledge of James Stewart’s military experience makes It’s a Wonderful Life much more meaningful. Chris Bush brings it all home with a look at the evolution of the Christmas film genre over the years. Thanks to my friend Austin for introducing us!
With that, let’s get started.
The time that is given us: Fellowship of the Ring as a 2020 Christmas film
By Jake Harris
There are no Christmas trees in The Fellowship of the Ring. No mentions of Santa Claus. No stories of a Christ child born to a virgin in a manger. But in a day and age when film fans have the same argument every year about whether or not Die Hard or Gremlins are Christmas movies, the first installment of Peter Jackson’s lauded Lord of the Rings trilogy should absolutely count as a Christmas movie. Especially in 2020.
Sure, there’s the obvious Christmas connections. In Fellowship, you’ll find:
Elves
A benevolent old magical man with a grey (soon-to-be-white) beard who brings joy to people
A perilous journey across treacherous terrain to alter the fate of the world
Family feuds and heated exchanges
Lots of singing and ceremonial meals
In addition to the above, LOTR author and noted Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien set Dec. 25 as the date that the Fellowship departs Rivendell to destroy the One Ring, which places it firmly in Die Hard and Shane Black territory for films that take place at Christmas. Scholars have also posited that Gandalf was based on Tolkien’s Father Christmas character from his Father Christmas Letters collection.
All exegesis aside, LOTR in general and Fellowship in specific makes for a perfect Christmas watch because of its theme: People from all over the world joining forces and hoping to make their world better. Peace on earth, goodwill towards all beings.
Take away all of Tolkien’s religious references and Christ imagery and strip out the fantasy lore, and the story is about nine ordinary beings from different tribes who decide to trust each other with a giant task in the hope that good will triumph over evil. This hope transcends feuds across racial lines and familial bonds. It cancels out everything else and gives the two main protagonists, Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, something to cling to on their journey.
Tolkien’s original work was heavily influenced by the trauma of both World Wars, and the film’s original release date was Dec. 19, 2001. I couldn’t keep those dates out of my mind while watching Fellowship again in 2020, another pressure point year for the world. The trials of this year will not go away after the clock strikes 12 a.m. on Jan. 1. Work is being done to restore justice to the world, but that shouldn’t stop just because we’re out of 2020.
It’s a work of fantasy, but the elves, men, dwarves and hobbits of LOTR teach us humans a valuable lesson: Living in “unprecedented” or “not normal” times doesn’t excuse us from trying to do good. In fact, it’s more important:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
So this year, swap out John McClane at Nakatomi Plaza for Frodo in Middle-earth. You’ll be glad you did.
Jake Harris is a digital producer for WFAA in Dallas and is the writer of this very newsletter. His favorite Christmas movie is It’s a Wonderful Life. Catch more of his work at jakeharrisblog.com or follow him on Twitter @jakeharris4.
‘Don’t you know me?’: It’s a Wonderful Life as a work of trauma
By Dr. Jeffrey Crouse
Soon after winning his Oscar in one of the most competitive Best Actor races in Academy Award history for The Philadelphia Story in 1941, James Stewart was the first Hollywood celebrity to enlist in World War II. He was 33. Already an accomplished pilot in civilian life, he was soon raised to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. Yet his being relegated to making training films for other airmen left him dissatisfied, and his request to take an active part in the bombing raids over Germany, despite the unease by his commanding officers, was finally granted in 1944. Leading by example, the newly minted Captain Stewart spent the next 18 months flying highly dangerous missions over the Rhineland in his B-24 Liberator bomber from bases in England. The story behind the most celebrated “Christmas” movie ever filmed starts here.
Despite his evident heroism, bravery publically rewarded in the form of Two Distinguished Flying Crosses, four Air Metals, and the French Croix de Guerre with bronze palm, Stewart was nonetheless human. The terrible, indeed indescribable, toll of the perversion which is war, incomprehensible to those who have never endured combat, left him, as it did to countless other military personnel, with the shattering condition of being “flak happy”—in modern terms, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He was haunted by the knowledge that some of the bombs he dropped had unintentionally killed civilians, especially when the weapons of mass destruction were accidentally arranged to target the wrong city. Worst of all, he could not psychologically handle the consequences of one particular incident wherein he felt responsible for 13 planes being shot down in which 130 men—many of whom he personally knew—lost their lives. This episode left him so despondent that he was grounded for the remainder of the war.
When he returned to Hollywood after the war’s end, Stewart found himself not only seemingly damaged beyond repair but jobless as well. He needed the mother of interventions to happen, and in the form of director Frank Capra, it did. They had previously worked together on a pair of extremely successful projects (You Can’t Take It With You in 1938 and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the following year), and Capra had just formed his own independent production company, Liberty Films, which had a distribution agreement with RKO-Radio Pictures. For his first venture with his new company, Capra turned to a little 1939 Christmas story which Cary Grant passed on but thought might interest Capra. It did. Once he acquired the rights, Capra knew only one actor could pull off the role of George Bailey: James Stewart. Playing the part of an imaginative young man who dreams of adventure in erotic foreign lands as well as someday becoming a leading architect outside of his ordinary small town, the role required Stewart to show Bailey’s growing frustration as his plans continually became deferred. Tragically, or so it seems, Bailey experiences the annihilation of all he sought to achieve and of being forced to remain in the deadly-boring old burgh of Bedford Falls. Capra knew he could tap into Stewart’s emotional range, one amplified, albeit in the rawest of forms, through his war trauma. Capra had himself served in the war, directing for the US government the seven films comprising the highly successful documentary series, Why We Fight (1942-45), and he was aware of what the actor was going through. The result was that this 1946 release would become the personal favorite film of Capra’s entire distinguished career. It also, most likely, ended up saving Stewart’s life.
The catharsis that It’s a Wonderful Life provided for Stewart can be directly observed in several key sequences, especially as Bailey’s life becomes ever more agonizingly desperate, resulting in a film as emotionally rich and philosophically complex as any film produced in the Classical Hollywood Period (c.1930-c.1960) — or any era for that matter. Cast and crew were aware, for example, that the scenes involving Bailey on the snowy bridge contemplating suicide where his prayer is to never have existed were ones in which Stewart was directly confronting his pain. It was likewise felt in the extraordinarily wrought scenes wherein we see George having a mental breakdown while his wife Mary (Donna Reed) and children try, and fail, to comfort him with the festive rituals of Christmas. A further example comes in the form of the peerless series of scenes set in the 20-minute Pottersville film noir sequence, the culmination of which is his devastating rejection by the author of his life, that is, from his own very mother (Beulah Bondi). The film is so masterfully laid out that, as scholar Ray Carney invites us to do, one can interpret the many figures surrounding George Bailey, in a kind of Jungian sense, as being aspects, real and potential, for him. In simplified form, we witness: Potter (Lionel Barrymore), ostensibly the film’s antagonist who is so many ways diametrically opposed to every tenet of Bailey’s existence, while also acting as a dark mirror to him in some disturbing ways; Violet Bicks (Gloria Grahame), herself the opposite of Potter, may be said to stand for a sensuousness which Bailey desires but seems closed off to; Sam Wainwright (Frank Albertson), who emerges as the most threatening figure to Bailey by being the one to leave Bedford Falls and to enjoy the life of success which was frustratingly always out of reach for George; and, finally, Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) and the angel Clarence (Henry Travers) who serve as emblems of potential insanity, stuntedness, and helplessness as George’s frenzied isolation mounts.
George Toles has written that American cinema starting in 1940 represents a significant shift from movies made before that year. In films such as Rebecca (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), and the emergence of film noir (Toles uses The Locket, a film which was released the same year as It’s a Wonderful Life as his analytical test case), one readily observes what he terms a “crisis of subjectivity.” This refers to the phenomenon in which previous representations of the self had proceeded from a unified idea of a secure and solid identity in which the inner psychological drives and social forces, which together form who we are, could be accessed and understood by the individual. So while, say, Vivien Leigh’s Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939) or Irene Dunne’s title character in Theodora Goes Wild (1936) or Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella Dallas (1937) enjoyed moments of confusion, they ultimately returned to full possession of who they are. The periods where they seem to be mysteries onto themselves are but catalysts for self-affirming transformations of who they already were. But that all changed in the decade of the 1940s, the image of human fragmentation continuing to this day. The threat of suicide hangs over Capra’s postwar film, in this way signifying the ultimate condition of being unknown to self and others. It is no exaggeration to declare that George suffers from the most profound form of alienation possible within the range of human experience. Is it any wonder that It’s a Wonderful Life coincides with the emerging existential philosophy of Sartre and Camus?
The catharsis that occurs in the film’s closing minutes—one achieved after Bailey faces not only the idea of never having existed, but indeed having gone through the experience of it—packs such a wallop of emotional plentitude that it leaves viewers undone. It is achieved by Stewart’s Bailey when the protagonist, undergoing the hero’s journey, learns, in Joseph Campbell’s words, that “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life waiting for us.”
Since James Stewart never shared his experience of PTSD to anyone, we do not know the extent to which Capra’s film assisted in his recovery. Another film from 1946, John Huston’s Let There Be Light, a documentary commissioned by the War Department but held from release until 1980 because it was deemed too intense for civilian audiences, showed the harrowing mental effects of war on WWII servicemen. Yet in the end, however, it paints a falsely optimistic picture of PTSD by claiming that it can be cured through pharma drugs and years of intense therapy. It can’t. Today we know that the only real cure for trauma is a combination of somatic therapy directed in tandem with consciousness-expanding medicines like psilocybin, MDMA, or LSD within a controlled setting. We can only hope that Stewart was able to grapple with his mental illness through his re-enactment of parts of it in so many areas in It’s a Wonderful Life. Judging externally from his life after the release of It’s a Wonderful Life, the answer happily seems to be yes. That Stewart appears to have undergone significant healing might explain why it went on to become, like Capra, his favorite movie as well.
Jeffrey Crouse is a Seattle-based independent film scholar, after having graduated with a Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick.
Two Sizes Too Small: The lost art of crafting a holiday classic
By Chris Bush
There’s a moment in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 masterpiece, The Shop Around the Corner, when Alfred Kralik — the honest and diligent (if slightly pig-headed) store clerk, played with ineffable charisma and sensitivity by James Stewart — reads his letter of termination aloud to his fellow employees. There is no music or background noise during this scene, only the sound of Stewart’s voice, cracked with emotion and barely more audible than a whisper against a deafening silence that only amplifies the dramatic tension. The looks of heartbreak mingled with those of confusion and sympathy from Kralick’s coworkers make clear this isn’t just a group of people who happen to share the same workplace. This is a family.
Even the words of Kralick’s temperamental employer, Mr. Matuschek (played with wry humor and aguish by Frank Morgan, the eponymous “wizard” of Oz) are panged with sadness and regret at Kralik’s letter. That Mr. Matuschek is painted as a kind of enduring father figure to Kralik only adds to the scene’s heartbreak, and the depth of their filial-like relationship is most felt in their brief exchange before Kralik is given his severance pay and dismissed. As Mr. Matuschek cuts ties with his best, and best-known, employee (during the Christmas season, no less) the conflictuing, complex emotions poignantly reverberate in Morgan’s perfectly-calibrated performance.
There are no heroes or villains in this scene, only the devastating loss of a friendship between two souls. After all, Kralik is the main character here, and he’s just lost his job at one of the worst possible times, so we are expectibg our feelings to be completely vested with him during this moment. Lubitsch’s film is much too empathetic for that, and in Morgan’s performance, he found the perfect vehicle to help the audience distribute their emotions instead of exclusively reserving them for the film’s two main characters (Stewart and Margaret Sullavan). That decision pays off in spades when we learn the painful truth behind Mr. Matuschek's brash decision to terminate Kralik and discover that Mrs. Matuschek has been having an extramarital affair with one of her husband’s staff. Kralik is completely innocent, but his close and extensive friendship with Mr. Matuschek makes him a logical suspect. Matuschek’s intense whirlwind of emotions while trying to make sense of his hasty assumptions are understandable, especially when those emotions finally crescendo with him attempting his own suicide.
While The Shop Around the Corner is more remembered for the fragile romance at its center between Stewart and Sullavan as romantic pen pals unaware of the other’s identity, even while they begrudgingly work opposite each other in the same department store (the inspiration for Nora Ephron’s modern-day re-imagining, You’ve Got Mail), there is also the presence of tragedy. This provides the story with a dramatic core that makes it truly resonate. The characters and their plights only burrow deeper into our hearts and minds as tragedy encroaches threateningly on their happy ending.
This tragedy is never forced, pretentious, or callous, but unequivocally and universally human. The movie is labeled a romantic comedy, and although there are indeed moments of humor and tenderness, there is nothing tender or humorous about suicide and losing one’s job during Christmas. It certainly isn’t what one expects from a Christmas movie. Yet, the way in which the movie bravely confronts tragedy is exactly what makes it so universal as a Christmas film. There are many of those who are touched by tragedy during this season, and for others, the holidays are an incredibly painful time of the year when they’re reminded of their loss. Even when everything is mostly resolved by the movie’s end — Stewart and Sullavan end up together, he gets his job back along with a promotion, and Mr. Matuschek recovers in time for Christmas Eve (though it’s clear that Mrs. Matuschek will not be receiving any “diamond ring” come Christmas morning) — we never once take for granted that their story was guaranteed that happy ending.
Just as the two characters at the center of this story have hope — ardently spilling out their vulnerability, intimate thoughts, and longing into the letters they sendnwith an almost reckless abandon, as if the P.O. box they’ve been communicating with were some kind of cosmic void that may permanently close at any minute to never answer back again — so also does the movie have hope for its characters.
This is something that is sorely lacking in today’s Christmas films: Tragedy, and the hope to overcome it.
That’s the primary reason Christmas films have lost so much of their integrity in today’s corporate-run, consumer-obsessed market. The Shop Around the Corner is not the first Christmas film, or even the greatest Christmas film, but for me, it’s the first genuine Christmas masterpiece, one that ushered in a wave of classics that defined the genre in Hollywood’s Golden era. Those great Christmas films were unafraid to confront raw human tragedy while ultimately still having hope in their characters’ salvation and happiness.
Christmas classics
As mentioned in Dr. Crouse’s essay above, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is about healing, but it’s also about hope. James Stewart once again brings his remarkable sensitivity and lived-in grace to a Christmas film overflowing with those qualities. Blessed with a loving and beautiful family and gifted with an unconditional kindness that would seem like a utopian myth in today’s America, Bailey’s naïve optimism and moral integrity are eventually no match for the crude callousness of Mr. Potter, who degrades and besmirches Bailey with a cavalier relish that is nothing short of heartbreaking.
This encounter pushes Bailey to contemplate suicide, an act he almost follows through with until a guardian angel is sent to help him reexamine his life and all the people whose lives have been changed through his kindness and selflessness. It all sounds shmaltzy on paper, but Capra’s film works because he and Stewart believe so strongly in gethe story’s humanity and compassion. At the heart of their film is a story overflowing with love and empathy. And if love is at the root of hope and all things good, then the force of money (both its influence and the absence of it for those who desperately need it) is at the root of all things evil and tragic.
No Christmas text better understands the evils of greed and wealth than Charles Dickens’ timeless classic, A Christmas Carol, which has been adapted more than 100 times. 1951’s Scrooge, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and starring an iconic Alastair Sim as Scrooge, is the best film rendition of the story thus far. Sim delivers the most compelling Scrooge to grace the screen that I have ever seen. The man starts off filled with such a cold cynicism for both the world and his own salvation (so cold that it puts the ice and snow around him to shame) and ends up being unmade and reborn by love and mercy. There’s such an abundance of cynicism in today’s world that Scrooge’s behavior seems almost second nature. That cynicism exists inside all of us, to varying degrees, whether we would care to acknowledge it or not.
George Seaton’s Miracle on 34th Street (1947) confronts that uncomfortable reality head-on. In this film, Kris Kringle (a legendary and magnetically warm Edmund Gwenn) is the physical manifestation of hope that people are either starving for or have utterly lost faith in altogether. His is the kind of hope that can bring a lonely little girl the family she desperately wants, or the kind that encourages morally ethical business practices that put people’s needs above profits. It’s no wonder that his fate i left up to a bunch of pencil-pushing bureaucrats, revealing the cynicism of today’s society and the institutions that shape it.
Sadly, those kinds of ideas are hardly tackled at all in today’s Christmas films, and certainly not in as brazen a fashion. If anything, the very ideas those earlier films challenged and fought against would only be bolstered and more pronounced in the years to come. However, it seems the genre had one last golden egg to give before beginning its downward spiral into today’s hollow Yuletide offerings.
Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story (1983) is perhaps the last truly great film of its kind. While its central story of a young boy who fantasizes about receiving his dream Christmas gift — a Red Ryder BB gun — may seem like a heartfelt ode to indulging in the season’s more consumerist tendencies, it’s ultimately much more. Ralphie (played with an enduring wide-eyed charm by Peter Billingsley that lights up the screen) doesn’t have a Christmas wish list that stretches a mile long. He only wants the one toy, which is actually a physical representation of bridging the gap between childhood and manhood, in hopes of emulating the spaghetti western heroes he idolizes. What shines through the most in Clark’s touching and often hilarious comedy is a story that feels so personal and pulled from life, held together by the lovingly made portrait of the family at its center. Their Christmas story becomes our Christmas story as well.
Capitalist classics?
The holiday films of the next few decades following A Christmas Story heavily relied on blockbuster dazzle and sorely lacked in any genuine Christmas substance. Die Hard, Gremlins, Home Alone and Batman Returns are not exclusively bad movies, but they are not particularly good Christmas movies. In these offerings, Christmas serves as more of a backdrop to explosions, crass humor and cleverly orchestrated stunt work. In some cases, that backdrop works in imaginative ways that straddle the line between entertaining and iconic (see: the Gremlin invasion of a suburbanite’s kitchen set to Johnny Mathis’ “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, or Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman giving Batman a flirtatious schooling on fun facts about mistletoe). In others, it serves absolutely no purpose at all.
This era also delivered two more renditions of A Christmas Carol: The Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged and Jim Henson’s adorable Muppets retelling with Michael Caine. While the popularity of both films over the years is understandable (personally, I prefer the Muppets version), the timeless story isn’t given any new dimensions, but exploited to further the respected brands of their entertainers. Indeed, much of the entertainment during this era was about developing a recognizable brand or intellectual property that caters to a specific demographic while adhering to a quantifiable formula. Entertainment wouldn’t yet reach the depths of soullessness that thrives in so much of today’s content, but it was on its way.
Of course, none of those revelations are at all surprising, given what happened during this era. If Ronald Reagan’s legacy was strengthening the structures of corporate power and free-market fundamentalism, then Bill Clinton’s legacy only indulged that philosophy by outsourcing American jobs in exchange for the lure of cheaper goods before both legacies culminated into today’s market that favors convenience, instant gratification and profit margins over humanity and moral ethics. This philosophy rears its ugly head in a lot of today’s mainstream movie fare, but it’s probably never more desperate, transparent or cynical than in today’s holiday-infused offerings.
These days, most mainstream Christmas films hardly ever involve Christmas at all (or any holiday for that matter), instead opting for the baffling title of a “Holiday Event Film.” If you’re really lucky, it’s a multi-million-dollar adaptation of Broadway’s Cats (complete with Taylor Swift prancing around in CG-fur while she gets high off a bedazzled bottle of catnip).
Then there’s the plethora of Hallmark and Lifetime holiday movies. I’m sure deep down most people must realize how awful these movies are, but their easy-to-digest plots — with their tidy zero-stakes drama involving attractive one-dimensional characters who look like spokespeople for Crest whitening products, all tucked inside a universe that readily rewards them with disingenuous happy endings for nothing in return — are all perfectly designed to create a seductive package that profits from lying to their audience. The attractive couples at the hollow centers of these movies never try to sell Christmas as a holiday centered around family, kindness and generosity. Rather, Christmas is some kind of unofficial precursor to Valentine’s Day where the only goal is to bag a sweetheart or wedding ring by Christmas Eve.
Another example: Two films by Robert Zemeckis, The Polar Express, and its equally unpleasant cousin, another soulless rendition of A Christmas Carol. I use them both synonymously because everything wrong with one is exactly what’s wrong with the other, and everything wrong with both of them represent so much of what’s wrong with today's mainstream, big-budget holiday fare. While loaded with money and packed with the potential to tell their story in a unique and engaging way, they all ultimately trade in substance and feeling for CGI spectacle and theme park ride excitement.
The cloyingly saccharine and the vapid big-budget spectacle also converge in Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring Jim Carrey. It’s entertaining and avoids being an outright dumpster fire. It’s certainly far better than Illumination’s more recent, insipid animated version. But there is one moment in the finale of Howard’s film that sticks out like a sore thumb for me.
In Dr. Seuss’s classic children’s book, the Whos hardly notice the disappearance of their extravagant holiday trappings, seeming far more content with the sense of community and fellowship that the holiday season around them has only enriched — something the superior 1966 version smartly never shied from. In Howard’s version, the Whos’ loss of commercialized goodies is at first a devastating blow to their spirits, with the town mayor even blaming the precocious Cindy Lou for trying to fraternize with the local humbug. At this moment, the girl’s father timidly steps forward and confesses that he’s proud of his daughter’s actions and completely nonplussed about the loss of their materialistic trinkets.
It’s a sweet and tender moment, but also one that feels completely unearned. At the beginning of the film, Cindy Lou’s father makes a comment about how commercialized traditions are what the season is “all about.” But there is never a moment that happens between this statement and the film’s end to suggest that Cindy Lou’s family (or any of the Whos) have any other feelings about the holiday traditions that are different from her father’s original observation. We’re instead given a scene of Cindy Lou’s mother drooling over her neighbor’s shiny new toy that can decorate a house with a tidy arrangement of Christmas lights in mere seconds. It would be a lot funnier if wasn’t so ironic.
In Dr. Suess’s story, we’re given an X-ray vision perspective of the Grinch’s heart, which is “two sizes too small.” It’s a piece of imagery that’s especially easy to recall when thinking of the state of today’s Christmas films. How can you tell an authentic story about hope if your heart is barely big enough to extend to the audience? Could it perhaps have something to do with a sociopolitical climate that is both a reflection of and condemnation of America’s own failures? There’s something that Dr. Cornel West said that I feel is incredibly relevant to this question. When asked on CNN by Anderson Cooper about America’s shortcomings and what the country is experiencing right now, he replied that “our culture is so market-driven — everything for sale, everybody for sale — that it can’t deliver the kind of nourishment for the soul, for meaning, for purpose.”
While COVID-19 has been one of the worst tragedies to ever ravage our country, if there’s one good thing that’s come of it, it’s that it has pushed us to unplug from our “market-driven culture” and divest more attention into our relationships with loved ones and with the world around us — relationships we will never take for granted again. This is nothing if not a blessing in disguise. If we’re ever going to take that further and mold it into some semblance of progressive change, we must not flush the events of 2020 down a damn memory hole that stays at a comfortable distance in our rearview mirror. We’ll have to put in the work, and we’ll have to put in the love.
Perhaps then we’ll finally be given a Christmas film that reflects the hope and optimism we want to see.
Chris Bush is a freelance contributor from Seattle who writes screenplays in his spare time, promoting goodwill on Earth and peace towards men.
And, with that…