Seasons Beatings!
To the members of the tribe, I hope your Hanukkah was merry and bright. To all my Pan-African celebrants, a joyous Kwanzaa to you. To the five percent who abstain, peace be with you and yours. And to those like me — raised in the mystical, Christian-mythopoetic late-Capitalist yuletide mash-up — let me render the full-throated psychotic scream of Jimmy Stewart’s late-stage George Bailey and say unto you “MAH-REE CHRISTMAAAASH!”
I offer this installment of Sleeveen as a Christmas card to you, embedded with various baubles, bangles, and beads, but would like to begin by defining “Christmas,” by which I mean the distinctly eerie, not-so-Christian, pretty-damn-pagan winter holiday imported from Northern Europe and transmitted through post-war North America via Coca-Cola Santa ads and crackling analog media. This is a holiday that’s at its best both festive and spooky, a glimmer of light in the darkest period of the year, this very shortest day, and an unsafe embrace of the supernatural.
Yes: our Christmas runs a bit goth.
From one section of this palate, consider one go-to source of holiday cheer, Peter Sellers’ masterful send-up of the Dylan Thomas chestnut, A Child’s Christmas In Wales: “Such games as Stoning the Lamplighter and Tripping the Muffin Man provided harmless outlets for the release of our boyish energy,” intones Seller’s fossilized BBC narrator. “But the most popular of all our escapades was undoubtedly the one called, quite simply, Setting Fire to The Policeman.” May it warm your heart.
I’m half serious when I say that a chiaroscuro-evoking phrase like “the spectacle of the flaming bobby” sends me into a kind of wistful Christmas reverie. This is a holiday whose most enduring fictions don’t just involve spooks and ghosts but go right up to the grave and look in. To me, Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas stomps on this latent power by being so literal-minded and redundant; Christmas has plenty of Halloween without being so explicit. After all, without foreknowledge of its redemption arc, A Christmas Carol is horror literature.
Dickens wrote it under financial strain, during long nocturnal walks around London, and published it in serialized chapters, which means leaving readers on cliffhangers of a mortal terror kind. While I’m a convert to the amazingly faithful page-to-screen adaptation that stars the Muppets, the definitive film version is 1951’s starring Alistair Sim as a ghastly Scrooge, because it’s so hard-ass terrifying.
Same goes for It’s a Wonderful Life. Although the 1946 film that ruined Frank Capra’s career has since become America’s Christmas Carol, for a good half hour it can go toe-to-toe with The Long Weekend, Sweet Smell of Success, or Man With the Golden Arm for a plunge into the bleak depths of mid-century American despair, and today it still resonates like a gong. What thwarted American mom or dad among us hasn’t stood before their family, deranged by grief and despair, and yelled to their spouse of many years: “Why do we have so many kids?!”
The Capra film and Dickens’ novella do what many great stories do: scare the shit out of you and offer a ray of hope. I assume an effort to keep replicating this winning formula is what’s behind the reported wave of made-for-TV Christmas movies that feature dead parents, for additional evidence of which I’ll cite my new favorite website, the Cremation Association of North America.
As I write this, I wonder if latent holiday Thanatos is behind my own Boston townie family’s otherwise puzzling ‘80s tradition of horror films on Christmas night. (With his gee-whiz affect and dreamy Aspergers-ish presentation, my MIT-minted engineer dad was a minor legend among the geek staff of a Somerville video rental place, a white 40-something Jack Nicholson-looking family man who’d swan in each week to request Eraserhead, Freaks, or Pink Flamingos, and return days later ready for more.) Consider pairing It’s a Wonderful Life with Night of the Living Dead: two low-budget black-and-white films that slipped out of copyright protection and proved to have longer tails than most any entertainment property of the 20th century.
Since it was played so often on TV, It’s A Wonderful Life has, like The Wizard of Oz, become a palimpsest for additional inscription across the decades and cultural spectrum. (Side note: having tried that folk-stoner practice of synching the sound-off MGM musical with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, I can say that the ostensibly eerie synchronicity is a hoax, though it does reveal that the entire Kansas opening is told from the perspective of an angsty, uncomprehending Toto.)
One of the odder and more delightful reemergences of Wonderful Life was a perplexing 1987 Christmas novelty EP by the Los Angeles wunderkinder of Fishbone, who so utterly committed to their postmodern leap into the past that their “It’s A Wonderful Life (We Gonna Have A Good Time)” carves out its own niche in spacetime. (Quoth Robert Christgau: “The pissed-off title track's an original, as are Saint Nick as debbil-cum-wino, Christ as comsymp, and Uncle Scrooge as Uncle Jam.” Dig.
Some years back around this time of year, my NYC friends and I used to do a kind of karaoke with the Capra film (whose porn version is, a friend tells me, Tits A Wonderful Life). We’d meet at someone’s apartment, hand out scripts, pick roles and trade them off, reading our character’s lines along with the actors on the screen. This quixotic effort was definitely abetted by gallons of booze, but the cast is such a treasure trove of bizarre vocal presences — Mid-Atlantic, fake Italian, displaced Bronx, croaking larynx and nasal honk — that it felt like we were all performing some crazy archaic White Folks Oratorio. I remember laughing most of the night.
This is what stays with me, intoxication and freedom, a consensual suspension of disbelief, and a transmutation and release of ancient pains. Christmas is transmitted so directly through family that it retains a logic-defying allure, and its annual appearance is brief enough that it lasts well into your life. And in a sense, it’s like grief in making children of us all.
That last bit is what I get from the most recent addition to my holiday film canon, which, like Rosey Greer gives needlepoint, I give all my friends for Christmas: Julian Temple’s singular document, Never Mind the Baubles, which came out ten years ago, and which I’m embedding below in case no higher-quality stream is available.
While it is in many ways a more revealing Sex Pistols doc than Temple’s actual Sex Pistols doc, The Filth and The Fury, Never Mind the Baubles transcends its sub-genre as a true-life 20th-century Christmas story, one with an almost antediluvian, candle-in-the-darkness magic. It documents an event that feels like a 1977 corollary to the 1914 “Christmas Truce” on the Western front of World War I, only with way better coverage: the Sex Pistols’ last-ever gig in the UK at a benefit for firefighters in the ninth week of a strike in a truly dismal-looking Yorkshire town called Huddersfield. And in the process of playing it, the punk-rock legends are subsumed into a much larger, human drama.
One of the associated Christmas miracles is that director Temple was actually there, at the Ivanhoe nightclub, when this concert happened, and he shot some of the best footage ever captured of the most charismatic UK band since the Beatles. The gauzy film stock adds to the mystical quality of these scenes, which cut to contemporary interviews with band and audience members. Banned from almost all live performance (“even from Holiday Inns," Temple told a reporter. "Like Mary and Joseph"), the Sex Pistols play an evening show for the firefighters and a matinee one for their kids, which is where the film reaches escape velocity.
Scenes from that kid’s matinee show are enough to redeem your faith in humanity. To see a cake-bespattered Johnny Rotten standing in a moshpit of rollicking seven- and eight-year-olds, all of them dancing and laughing and pelting him with frosting as he sings “Pretty Vacant,” is to witness peace on earth, goodwill to men. “Kids can be such a bounce back to reality,” says John “Rotten” Lydon, reminiscing about the effect this had on his friend Sid Vicious in their last days of relative innocence. “That’s when he realized that he’s a kid after all.”
May you all find a bit of his good grace this Christmas season. I’ll be back with you in 2024.
Bless you Chris Norris and god bless us all, every bloody one.