Play It Again Scrooge
Play it again, Scroogel
Monday, 19 December 2005
I have a very daggy confession to make.
Almost every Christmas since its cinema release in 1993, I have watched The Muppet Christmas Carol. Across several Eriksonian stages now, whatever my levels of scepticism about the world and the hollowness of so much of the Christmas madness, I have sat down and laughed and tapped my feet and smiled and sighed while Michael Caine sings badly to a bunch of hands in socks. Herewith a thumbnail for the uninitiated:
Scrooge is a miserable old man who runs a money-lending firm in London in the 19th century. He hates Christmas for its excess and its insistence that for one day we all have to be nice to each other, seeing this as an interruption to the running of a good business. So, come Christmas Eve, the ghost of his recently dead partner and mentor, Marley, organises for three spirits to visit Scrooge in his bedroom, to show him what Christmas is all about. The spirits show him, respectively, Christmases past, present and future. Through seeing where he has come from, what other lives are like around him now, and what he will become if he does not change, Scrooge has an epiphany and emerges on Christmas morning a changed man. He makes reparations for past meanness, and swears that he will keep the spirit of Christmas all year around.
Puking noises duly noted.
You should know, however, that I am not alone in my fondness for Fozziwig et al. My best mate from school, hardened sourpuss that he was in those days, was known to get right into this little film when we got it out on video at the end of first year of university. I believe he and his wife now own it on DVD. My brother, similarly unlikely to sing to bluebirds in the forest, loves it too, because it was a film we siblings would watch just before the family Christmas to get us in the mood for all that carry-on.
Why does the story work so well? When I am sick of so many aspects of Christmas, like the appearance of the first plastic fir trees in shops in October, and the awful awful reggae version of Jingle Bells they play in Safeway, why can I take in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and its adaptations (fuzzy-featured and otherwise) so many times over without tiring of it?
The scientific answer is that it’s magic. Like Christmas should do, it reinvents itself. Shows me new things every year.
My edition of Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol contains an introduction in which we are reminded of Dickens’ political activism. A contemporary of Darwin, Dickens was writing when the industrial revolution was yet to be tempered by the union movement. Self-made magnates ran factories and workhouses where natural selection, survival of the fittest, ruled supreme – if you fell down at your post, you were stepped over or pushed aside by workers who could not afford to look down after you lest they lose jobs that fed families. Asked outside their churches how they could let such inhumane things occur under their gazes, the magnates would doubtless have reminded one how hard they worked to get where they were, and how generous it was of them to offer employment to these wretched souls at all. They would display a morality that history would soon show to be ill-founded.
So Dickens shows us a mean old man who believes himself to be in the right. Of course, The Right, it would seem, is just what the author is attacking: A man who feels his taxes, which supply jails and poor-houses, are charity enough! Someone that says that if the poor are sick they should hurry up and die and help decrease the excess population!
Why should I care about this 150 year-old blueblood?
What makes me care is seeing what it takes to make Scrooge care. The ghost of Christmas Past shows him his lonely childhood doing homework at Christmas, and his decision to put money ahead of his first and only love, Belle, which lost her to him. Christmas Present takes Scrooge inside the festivities he shuns, and to the home of his diligent employee Bob Cratchitt, whose plucky son Tiny Tim is sick, and cannot be cared for adequately on the wage Scrooge pays his father. And Christmas Future shows Scrooge his own funeral, upon which all rejoice at a wretched life ended not a moment too soon. Tiny Tim is dead, Christmas is hollow and sad, and Scrooge is left in mortal fear of his fate.
Here's the great bit, though, the money shot: Scrooge wakes up the next morning, exhausted after anight of enforced empathy with his fellow men, and realises it's still Christmas morning. It's nottoo late to make amends! He buys tons of food for all, and ensures Tiny Tim lives on to say "God blessus, each and every one". Roll credits! All credit to those spirits for the most effectivepsychotherapy ever performed on a public holiday!
I get a deep sense of joy out of watching Michael Caine have this sudden bonhomie dawn on him. The manic glee that infects all around him, the torrents of generosity, the idea that it’s never too late to be better to people; these delights bring me back year after year. It’s like the bit of me that is most Scroogey gets a day off, with the hope that it might come back to work feeling more charitable.
Perhaps that's the key to A Christmas Carol's lasting appeal, empathy with Scrooge. Dickens does tous what he does to his main character: in showing Scrooge that the people around him are not the villains he makes them out to be, he shows us that Scrooge is no villain either.
Relativism, I think, is what that is. Dickens was way ahead of Victorian England in suggesting that to categorise the world as good and evil, rich and poor, us and them, was a cop-out. A Christmas Carol seems to say that if you look closely enough at other people’s lives, you’ll find the marks of struggle that have shaped their morality. Whether or not you share those morals, you know well the marks; there is more that you and your fellow humans have in common than not.
Everyone has a bit of Scrooge in them: it surfaces every time you feel rage at someone tailgating you,or annoyance with a beggar, or impatience with a sick colleague or friend who is not holding up their end very well. It’s uncharitable, it’s paranoid, and it’s derived from the instinct of self-preservation that got us all off the plains of Africa and into sensible shoes. Dickens hoped we could do without it. I wish we could, but I think we’re a long way off that sort of mutual disarmament. People get scared, bristle and bicker, look after their own, that’s humanity in the 21st century.
Once a year, though, I like to indulge in the fantasy of humanity's reinvention that Dickens storyallows me. I want to believe- that we can be better people, run a fairer society, be nicer to each other. Sure, by Boxing Day it’s back to business as usual, but that doesn’t seem to stop this particular story stopping me in my tracks year after year.
Even Michael Caine prancing about like a dickhead grows on you after ten or so viewings.
Frigmund Pseud