C.S. Lewis is most famous for writing the Chronicles of Narnia which, to this day, is a staple of English fairytale and fantasy. While entertaining in their own right, most people also know they are a thinly veiled allegory for Lewis’s views on religion and politics, in particular, his hope to maintain Christianity in his society in the face of encroaching secularism and atheism.
Despite his self-appointed goal as Christianity’s defender, in his very first book, Lewis is heavily dependent on pagan mythology for figures like fauns, centaurs, and dwarves. This is a tradition carried by many heavily Christian authors, like Dante who includes Medusa and Achilles in his Inferno. That is because Christianity never destroyed paganism, it merely conquered and appropriated it.
Throughout the history of Christianity, there have been attempts to blot out this pagan influence. From the Inquisitions to the Reformation, to the Puritan movement (think “purify” in Puritan) that ultimately led to a civil war in England. These Puritans would also be founders of some of the first English colonies in North America. Whether these Puritans reigned over England or their American colonies, one of the most significant decisions they made was banning the celebration of Christmas, a fundamentally pagan holiday with its reliance on non-Christian iconography (ornaments and Christmas trees) and its pagan characters like elves and Odin-based Santa Claus. This was the true War on Christmas.
At the end of the day, Christmas won. Like Christianity itself, no matter how much it seems on the back foot, it always finds a way to make an unstoppable comeback. How surprised and furious the Puritans would be to find that the single most famous Christian advocate of his day would feature Santa Claus as a benevolent entity in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Part of the reason Christmas lives on is because the very idea of it plays an important role in our sanity. If we don’t celebrate holidays life ultimately seems banal, and we miss out on mending broken relationships or reaffirming existing ones. Not only that but, before global warming, it was cold outside, and we needed something to keep our spirits up. Christianity ultimately decided it couldn’t win this fight and strengthened its alliance.
A couple of centuries later, in the age of the bleak industrial revolution, people needed this sense of good Christmas cheer. Charles Dickens was able to harness that yearning in his classic, A Christmas Carol, where pagan spirits convicted the cruel capitalist to broaden his Christian values to include compassion, not just industriousness.
Since then, Christmas has played an essential role by balancing the isolating, cold logic of modernity with a sense warmth, comradery, and even fantasy. Problem is it’s an open secret that Christmas has not only been appropriated by Christianity but by modern capitalism to hyperdrive consumer demand. Generosity of giving is replaced by greed at the toy store and an even further sense of isolation that some studies suggest leads to higher suicide rates at Christmas time.
This irony isn’t lost on us, but we crave the good things that Christmas has to offer, thus the most common story about Christmas, especially in the movies, is the story of reviving and rescuing “The True Spirit of Christmas” from the cold logic of modernity.
One of the most prominent examples of this is Miracle on 34th Street, made at the verge of the Cold War and a crossroads of the commercialism of Christmas. Here, a man who claims to be Kris Kringle himself goes around trying to spread good Christmas cheer and trying to free Christmas from the clutches of commercialism by standing in as a Santa Claus at Macy’s. He is thwarted by psychiatrist, Granville Sawyer, who represents modernity and modern science that says people should only behave in confined, logical ways that he sees fit. At the climax of the film, the idea of Santa Claus himself is held on trial.
Parents, both in the movie and real life, persist in telling their children Santa is real, hoping they will grow up to stop believing he actually exists. That’s because, as we get older, belief in mythology becomes less about credulity and more about how it guides our actions and thoughts. The heroic lawyer in Miracle, Fred Gailey, defends Kris with radical faith, not because he believes he is Santa Claus, but because he has matured into someone who acts as though Santa exists. According to the film, he is more insightful than his critics who believe Santa teaches good values to children but, at the end of the day, his myth needs to fold in the face of harsh reality. The adults who think Santa is merely a good metaphor.
On the other hand, as Kris’s ideological antagonist in the film, psychiatrist Dr. Sawyer, depresses a 17-year-old by convincing him his desire to be good to children must be driven by repressed guilt. In the absence of any abstract values outside modernity, he can only see the secretive cynical machinations of our biology behind every good deed, robbing the world of joy. His faithful employer, Doris Walker, an executive at Macy’s, dutifully fulfills that vision by instructing her daughter to only entertain scientifically real things (no pretending to be a monkey at school).
Santa triumphs against Sawyer, both in the court of law and public opinion. Every source of authority, from the judge to Kris’s employers at Macy’s, are squeamish at the idea of condemning the world to not have fantasies like Santa Claus. Society’s laws and voters will continue to depend on his joy-affirming mythology to sustain their values against the encroaching conflict with the atheistic Soviet Union.
This is a happy ending, there’s just one problem: Sawyer was never Kris’s actual enemy. He was merely a henchman.
“That’s what I’ve been fighting against for years…the way they commercialize Christmas,” Kris rails to his new friend, Alfred, who concurs, “A lot of bad “isms” floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.”
It’s not an accident that, at the beginning of the film, Sawyer and Walker have no real function outside their service to their commercial employer, Macy’s. Without an external set of values they find meaning exclusively in the reigning status quo. The former character is destroyed, and the latter converts to a richer life with fantasy and family thus giving the illusion that Kringle has provided an escape from dreary and vacuous commercialism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Santa Claus does not save Christmas from commercialism. He tightens their bonds and makes it more sustainable.
In confronting “commercialism,” Kris’s is outraged at Macy’s policy of pushing overstocked products onto customers through their Santas. “Imagine making a child take something it doesn’t want,” he huffs, but having your desires directed for you by society at large has always been the norm even before “commercialism”. As Todd McGowan writes in Capitalism and Desire, “As thinkers from Plato onward have insisted, what one wants is always socially mediated and thus necessary before it is free. We don’t generate our own wants but inherit them from our milieu and its constraints” (p 116).
Macy’s pushy sales strategy is obvious and desperate. The real means producers tell you what you want to buy is through directing your fantasies, and fantasy is exactly what Kris provides for Macy’s. First by making the case that he is Santa Claus (now there is magic and wonder with presents bought at Macy’s – not just a toy), and then by directing would-be buyers to competing stores for better offers (Macy’s is now a benevolent caretaker for the wellbeing of all people). Philosopher Slavoj Zizek often points out that Starbucks likes to promote how much of their profits go to helping the disadvantaged in other countries. By doing so, they induce a fantasy of spreading goodwill to the disadvantaged that goes beyond a simple cup of coffee every time you purchase a cup of Starbucks coffee.
This fantasy of making something more than it really is has always been essential for commercialism to function. Macy’s fires Sawyer the moment he jeopardizes this fantasy. His version of “commercialism” lacked the uplifting fantasy element to make it palpable in the long run. The world at large had grown cynical from merely consuming goods for pleasure, Christmas needed a mystical savior and mythology who could provide greater meaning to consumption. America’s religiosity and resistance to “godless” Russia throughout the Cold War was not an act of renewed faith but necessity for capitalism.
In Violent Night, Santa is portrayed as a repentant, reformed warrior. In Elf, he’s a compassionate but distant patriarch. In Miracle on 34th Street, he’s a Trickster Deity who fools those around him, and ultimately the world, into being happier. In the end, isn’t that the trick he plays on us as the audience? Tricking us into enjoying our consumption with more relish - into contentment within a commercialist paradigm. Even believing we are occasionally transcending commercialism to achieve “the True Spirit of Christmas” because we attach to it an act of faith and goodwill. There are few things Americans love more from their entertainment than the illusion of rebellion.
That desire to feel rebellious might explain the recurring popularity of the Grinch who’s had more theatrical remakes than probably any other Christmas character icon as the ultimate anti-Christmas icon. Unlike Scrouge, who’s just generally unpleasant toward Christmas, he has a radical anti-Christmas philosophy.
In fact, the Grinch has more in common with Kris Kringle and his righteous mission to destroy commercialism. He might be a little meaner about it, but he’s ultimately more effective. Where Kris Kringle makes a couple of speeches explaining how commercialism betrays the spirit of Christmas, Grinch’s problem with commercialism is just the noise, noise, noise. That’s not only simpler and more relatable, it also carries more philosophic weight. Commercialism, in its essence, depends on perpetual dissatisfaction that disquiets the soul. It’s a lot of inner noise. Todd McGowan writes in Capitalism and Desire:
Capitalism has the effect of sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire. As subjects of capitalism, we are constantly on the edge of having our desire realized, but never reach the point of realization. This has the effect of producing a satisfaction that we don’t recognize as such. That is, capitalist subjects experience satisfaction itself as dissatisfying, which enables them to simultaneously enjoy themselves and believe wholeheartedly that a more complete satisfaction exists just around the corner, embodied in the newest commodity. (p. 11)
According to Dante, Hell’s punishment for thieves is always being pursued and never getting a chance to rest. I guess this is better. Here we are the pursuers.
But what truly makes the Grinch stand out is he, unlike Kris Kringle, actually takes radical yet nonviolent action against commercialism. Committing to breaking-and-entering and vandalism. It’s weird the Grinch requires an epiphany to think of this plan because it isn’t particularly subtle: he just steals everyone’s material possessions - leaving behind nothing but a speck too small for even a mouse. In effect, utter desolation.
In desolation, there is silence. But in this silence, there is chance for renewal. On Christmas morning, having nothing left, the Who’s sing in rejoice. First there was noise, then there was silence, now there is harmony.
With no commodities, there is nothing left to commercialize and so commercialism has lost its power over the elusive Spirit of Christmas. Far from being bitter, the Who’s are grateful and the Grinch is free to celebrate Christmas without the pollution of commercialism. This is “unrealistic” but it makes sense. As McGowan says in the closing chapters of Capitalism and Desire:
Psychoanalysis doesn’t make existence fully satisfying for the subject by giving it a fully satisfying object. Instead, it turns the subject’s attention to the integral role that loss has in its satisfaction and reveals the inexistence of a fully satisfying object.
The psychoanalytic cure involves leading the subject to the point where it can embrace the partial satisfaction that the lost object provides…The partial satisfaction of not having always trumps the illusory total satisfaction associated with having the object of desire. This is the lesson of psychoanalysis in a nutshell. (p 160)
In other words, commodities provide the illusion of happiness by revealing our own dissatisfaction to us and promising an object of desire that will quell that dissatisfaction. It is a lie every time. Accepting the sense of loss and dissatisfaction innate in existence and understanding the next material object will not fulfill that loss leads to more satisfying outcomes. By removing the commodity, the Grinch forces the Who’s to accept an alternate source of satisfaction (which ultimately proves more fulfilling) or fall in despair clawing at the missing things that never would have done them any good to begin with. The Who’s choose the former.
While the Grinch ultimately returns that which was stolen, it is as a community gesture. The gifts themselves are rendered secondary. The ending scene is about community as he carves the Christmas ham. And, in the end, isn’t that what Christmas is all about?
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