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Christmas SpiritDecember 07, 2005 I celebrated the (almost) completion of job #2 by going out: most months in the off-season, these friends host a potluck DVD night. I rarely go to the movies. At most, two movie houses are open in the off-season, and they run relatively new releases in repertory: five or six films will hang around for a couple of weeks, each showing (for instance) Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. So "going to the movies" requires that time, energy, and cash converge on a night that something I want to see is playing. Rarely happens. Also, by the time enough scuttlebutt reaches me to indicate that some flick really is worth seeing, it's left the island for good. I don't have a TV, hence no VCR or DVD player. Last month's movie was Fried Green Tomatoes, which completely fulfilled all the expectations I had based on years of positive hearsay. Last night, as usual, the company and the food were excellent. The movie was Christmas with the Kranks. Evidently the makers and marketers wanted to affirm the "Christmas spirit" (slippery concept, that) and give moviegoers that warm fuzzy feeling. It gave me a daggers-drawn sputtery feeling. Granted, it was not made or marketed for the likes of me -- but that's what made it interesting. There's plenty to be learned from surprise excursions through the looking-glass. Christmas with the Kranks started off promising. Luther Krank tallies up the numbers and discovered that his family of three (himself, wife, and young adult daughter) spent $6,000 on Christmas the previous year. Aha! he thinks. Daughter has just left to join the Peace Corps, so why don't he and wife forgo the presents, the big party, and the rest of the expensive hoop-de-do and take the Caribbean cruise of a lifetime? Cruise costs $3,000; the rest is money in the bank. It takes courage, Luther quickly learns, to "just say no" to Christmas. The neighbors react like a band of McCarthyite witch-hunters. Luther stands firm -- until daughter calls on Christmas Eve afternoon to say that she's on her way home for Christmas, with brand-new Peruvian boyfriend in tow. (Daughter shows no signs whatsoever of having had an out-of-country or out-of-culture experience; I think she found Boyfriend in the casting line.) Luther caves. Neighbors react as if the prodigal has returned. Everyone pitches in to make Christmas happen at the Kranks'. This signifies the triumph of community over selfishness, etc., etc. You don't have to infer this: the characters are so busy patting themselves on the back for rallying around the (provisionally) forgiven Luther that they make it quite explicit. The actual triumph is of conformity over independence; what's being affirmed here is not "Christmas spirit" so much as Consumptional Family Values. (In this neighborhood, Santa Claus, not Jesus, is the presiding spirit; the only mention I caught of Jesus was as part of a joke.) And something else as well: although it's Wife who undermines Luther's resistance, and in the name of the Daughter, the Christmas/conformity enforcers are overwhelmingly male, from the Boy Scouts (accompanied by bullyish leader) selling Christmas trees to the cops who come round expecting their annual contribution for the benevolent association. Christmas with the Kranks is based on a novel by John Grisham -- seems unlikely on the surface, but maybe not? Stripped of the Christmas decorations and moved to the corridors and cesspools of power, the power plays might look pretty familiar.
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