On Christmas Movies

There are only two Christmas movies I like.

Well, that's not exactly true. I like Elf and A Christmas Story, some of the Rankin/Bass stuff, etc. But I enjoy those movies the same way I enjoy other movies, regardless of holiday affiliation. What I mean is that there are only two movies I like because they are about Christmas. A lot of movies that brand themselves as "Christmas movies" do so by treating the Christmas holiday as some intangible abstraction that's an entity unto itself—for example, Santa Clause cancelling Christmas in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV movie or the way that "Christmas Spirit" saves the day in Elf. It's fine if people find joy in that, but I don't. When I grasp at it, it becomes a hollow and vague mythology I don't quite understand. People don't seem to like this about me, and I get it; it's no fun when someone's unenthusiastic about your traditions.

Still, the two I'm thinking of are the only ones I've found (with the possible exception of my recent realization that Catch Me If You Can is maybe a stealth Christmas movie) that render the experience I know as Christmas with any sort of fidelity, enough so that they move me to tears every single stupid year. I'm not going to be blowing anyone's mind here: those two movies are 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas and 1946's It's a Wonderful Life.

In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey has dreams. He wants a big suitcase. He wants to see the world. Time after time, he's offered the opportunity to realize those dreams, and time and time again, he chooses to stay home. This comes to a head one Christmas Eve when George—thousands of dollars in debt, still trapped in his falling-to-pieces home in his same small town full of provincial people and dead-end careers—surveys his life in despair and decides to end it.

We of course know how this turns out. But I think it's worth lingering on that moment of despair, because the movie itself does. People remember the movie's uplifting ending, but we sometimes forget this for the first 3/4 of the film, this is the story of an individual's dreams being systematically crushed by his own allegiance to the people he knows. It's a feature-length inquiry into the cost of ambition, and that cost is the human relationships you have in the present; it's also a feature-length inquiry into what it means to decide that cost is too high.

A gentler variation of the same happens in A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which Charlie Brown spends most of the film's 25 minutes reconciling himself to the fact that celebrating Christmas the way others tell him to makes him miserable and the holiday meaningless. He invests in playing out the conventions of the holiday season—decorations and trees and pageants and presents—in much the same way that George Bailey walks through the beats of a small-town domestic life, and both end up finding this path crushingly unsatisfying. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, this is perhaps best exemplified when he takes that twig of a tree, determined to do right by it, only to find it wilted by the weight of the single ornament he hangs. "I've killed it," he cries, followed by the most anguished sigh children's animation has ever produced. "Everything I touch gets ruined." He defers to what people ask of him, and he's given back a cold, quiet despair. "I know I should be happy, but I'm not," Charlie Brown tells Lucy near the movie's beginning; he knows he should be happy because that's the expectation when you are surrounded by friends at a holiday.

But that is life with people: an existence at times overwhelmingly defined by alienation, frustration, and despair. I know this sounds like stylish broodiness, but I mean it in the most sincere way I can muster. There's a shot in It's a Wonderful Life several minutes before George decides to kill himself when, as Mary explains to her husband all the holiday festivities the family has lined up, George grabs his son and hugs him, staring over the boy's shoulder into empty space, and James Stewart's face as he begins to sob shatters me every time; the in-the-moment explanation for his distress is that his uncle and business partner has just lost $8,000, but it's clear that it's not just this financial woe that's passing in front of his eyes—he's thinking of the honeymoon money, college, New York City, and every other time he passed up on what one character calls "the chance of a lifetime," every choice that's brought him to this exact moment, and he's crippled by the thought that he's made a mistake. That the choices he made that brought him his friends and the loving family around him, engaging in fun, kitschy Christmas traditions, have rendered his life meaningless. Unless you've had one of these moments yourself, I don't know that it's possible to know just how real that look is that flashes across James Stewart's face.

Neither of these movies end here, obviously.

The most common interpretation I've heard of when the angel swoops in and shows George what his life would be like if he'd never been born is that it's a celebration of altruism—i.e. affirming that George Bailey has been a good person and that his life has meaning. And the text of the movie bears this out. George is a saint, and the positive effects of his having lived his life the way he did are gigantic. But I don't think it's George seeing the sudden worsening of the quality of life of his family and friends without him that makes George choose life. What truly strikes terror into George's heart in the Pottersville sequence is the fact that nobody knows who he is. His wife screams as he tries to embrace her; his mother sneers "George who?" when he arrives at her door; "This is George Bailey! Don't you know me?" he asks his former employer, Mr. Gower, to which the doddering man confusedly replies, "No." The horror of Pottersville isn't that Bedford Falls has suddenly gotten a bunch of nightclubs and cool movie theaters; it's that George is given a glimpse of what life would be like without any of the human contact that has kept him from realizing his ambitions—in other words, to be alone. And it's Hell.

Likewise, a lot of people latch onto Linus's sermonette detailing the Christmas story as told in the Gospel of Luke as the sort of culminating message of A Charlie Brown Christmas. And that's definitely part of it. The religious significance of the holiday in contrast to the commercial ends to which modern life has twisted it is clearly central to Charles Schulz's thesis on Christmas. But that's not where Charlie Brown's despair resolves. His moment of anguish with the tree, his "I killed it" moment, is after Linus reads the Bible. The movie's resolution comes, as in It's a Wonderful Life, with a supernatural event that leads to an embrace of the worth of being part of a community of people. Charlie Brown's friends encircle the collapsed tree and, after musing that "maybe it just needs a little love," they grab some lights and Linus's blanket and transform the twig into the small but unmistakable form of a lush evergreen fir. Charlie Brown returns, and seeing him, they wish him a Merry Christmas and all together sing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" as a timid smile spreads across Charlie Brown's face.

This is what dissolves Charlie Brown's despair: this group of people who, only moments before, made him so very unhappy. Put another way, to answer Charlie Brown's insistent question, this is what Christmas is all about: neither cultural traditions like trees nor religious ideas like the birth of Christ, at least not in isolation—it's these things linked with the idea of communing with other human beings.

This is what makes Christmas one of the most difficult holidays: it forces the confrontation of the tension between individual fulfillment and communal connection. You may be deeply miserable around people, but it is existentially terrifying to have no one. The only thing worse than being with people is being with nobody. It never feels this way in the moment. It is blessedly tempting to choose isolated independence and personal ambition over the conservative warmth of a community. I want to do what I want to do, and people get in the way of that. Both movies show why exactly this is so appealing: in Wonderful Life, we see the lack of autonomy and existential frustration inherent in human relationships; in Charlie Brown, we see the alienation that comes out of incompatible approaches to life goals. But what makes these movies so quintessentially Christmas is that they don't let their protagonists stay there. They bring George Bailey and Charlie Brown to the idea that even though human connection is alienating and frustrating and restrictive, it is the better way to live. "It is not good for man to be alone," to quote Genesis, and even if the act of not being alone isn't necessarily a path to happiness, it's a path to meaning.

"No man is a failure who has friends," says the angel's final note to George at the finale of It's a Wonderful Life. It's easy to sentimentalize this, but that statement is one of the most hard-won ideas in all of American cinema—the idea that the people you know and love are more important than your own individual ambitions. It's an idea that nearly drives George to suicide. It's an idea I find incredibly difficult to wrangle. People are irritating and taxing; they are weights who make independence difficult; they are mean, and I am mean to them. But they matter. And that's Christmas. Christmas is a rebuke of the individual in favor of the loving collective. I am terrible at acting out this idea, but that's what it is.

Now of course, even being presented with this choice between people and individuals is a privilege, and even among those who have that choice, there are legitimately abusive and harmful communities that individuals should be able to separate themselves from. Christmas is not about an obligation to all communities. And I know that this isn't what Christmas means to everyone else, and that's fine. What I'm describing here is intensely personal to me specifically, and I'm honestly not sure how many peers I have in these ideas. And maybe this post is corny and maudlin and melodramatic. Maybe. But even considering all that, every year, without fail, I end up tearing up at the end of It's a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Being brought face-to-face with the compelling necessity of human communities, despite my most lonesome urges—that's the holiday for me.

Until next time.