One confronts false impressions more often as one ages, especially of the self-glorifying “in my day …” variety. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that the holidays didn’t always span the final three months of the year, with a month accorded for Halloween and two months devoted to the season that is most pervasively branded as Christmas. There was anticipation in the old days, and a few things were received and consumed on Christmas Eve, but I think Christmas basically happened on Christmas, Halloween on Halloween, etc. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t remember stores clearing out Halloween stuff for Christmas in mid-October back in the 1990s, or clearing out Christmas in mid-December for whatever generates consumer spending in January.
There is a cinematic accompaniment to this “more, more, more, go, go, go” lifestyle, and that is an escalating cultural obsession with what constitutes a Christmas movie. Gen Xers, remember when you thought that you were the only person wicked enough to call the violent and exceptional Bruce Willis vehicle “Die Hard” a Christmas movie? Just because the terrorist game of cat and mouse unfolds over the holidays? Now? Last year I bought my girlfriend a “Die Hard” Christmas storybook, and the movie is a tradition at most theaters this time of year, including the venerable Byrd. If you’re a Richmonder, you haven’t seen “Die Hard” until you’ve seen it at the Byrd in the month of December.
My theory: The rise of streamers, coupled with the worst isolationist moments of COVID a few years ago, forged a new and supersized movie marathon culture. It could be the end of the world next month, so why not celebrate Halloween for three weeks? And it’s true, why not? If you are presuming that I’m working my toward a self-righteous rant about the commercialization of the holidays, fear not. There are enough of those to go around. Watching holiday movies during the holidays is safe, cost-friendly, and a profound bonding agent among humans. There’s not much downside.
Except at parties when some bro, circling his third or fourth drink, starts insisting that [insert ironic title here] is actually a Christmas movie. I love watching uncomfortably dark, intentionally disreputable holiday movies. My only problem with “Bad Santa” is that it pulls its punches just when you’re ready for it go all in on its depressive nihilism. Bob Clark’s 1974 film “Black Christmas” is not only far superior to Clark’s more commonly played Christmas staple, “A Christmas Story,” it is also among the finest slasher films ever made. Far scarier and nastier than John Carpenter’s “Halloween.”
But when you tell me that Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 “Eyes Wide Shut” is a Christmas movie, I start to rebel. “Bad Santa” is actually a Christmas movie, made in response to how cheerfulness-on-demand this time of year can be soul-crushing for those on the margins of society. It’s an R-rated Grinch. Harold Ramis’ underrated “The Ice Harvest,” a noir character study with Thornton once again, as well as John Cusack and a host of other good actors, was made with similar sentiments on its mind.
Hell, even the 1987 action classic “Lethal Weapon” is actually alive to how the holidays push people over the edge. On its own profoundly debauched terms, it shows how a suicidal man can be brought back into a hopeful light. He must kill hundreds of people in order to do so, but let’s not get hung up on the particulars. People go on about “Die Hard,” but “Lethal Weapon” is livelier, and also phenomenally acted and directed.
On the other hand, I find it difficult to believe that Stanley Kubrick, who near the end of his life averaged one movie a decade, embarked on the process of relentlessly honing “Eyes Wide Shut” in order to achieve a movie to which people sip eggnog before the parents arrive from out of town for dinner. My guess is that Kubrick was as interested in making a Christmas movie with “Eyes Wide Shut” as he was a Halloween movie with “The Shining.” These are movies, full-stop. While I’m not as breathless about Kubrick as most cinephiles, he was undeniably a specialist in singular works of art. I’m not sure if I even like “Eyes Wide Shut” or “The Shining,” but I’ve seen each of them a dozen times, and typing this compels me to watch “Eyes Wide Shut” again. Kubrick is a master of movies that pull you into their hypnotic orbit almost in spite of yourself.
To confront Kubrick’s strange and personal study of marriage, a nightmare odyssey that ends with an oddly hopeful catharsis, and simply label it a Christmas movie is to be radically dismissive. Am I overanalyzing a meme and a joke, a game of “is this a Christmas movie?” Certainly. But there’s a reductive side to our endless obsession with classification. In fact, classification is the pure heroin of reduction. Cinephiles like to play variations of this game, too. They love especially to pronounce that weird and severe movies are comedies in order to bolster their bona fides as iconoclasts. “Eyes Wide Shut” has been called a comedy, which will baffle anyone who’s ever actually seen one. So has “The Shining,” which I have to admit is disconcertingly hilarious at times. But one doesn’t exit it with the cumulative impression of having seen a comedy, to put it lightly.
If one must take the “Is it a Christmas movie?” thing on its own terms, however, and we all know it isn’t going away, here is my criterion: Can the movie exist without Christmas? “Die Hard” can. “Lethal Weapon” could, but it loses considerable impact. “Bad Santa” cannot. “It’s a Wonderful Life” could not. Any version of “A Christmas Carol” could not. The very funny Bill Murray movie “Scrooged” could not. Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” one of the loveliest movies ever made, technically could get by without Christmas, but I can’t imagine it without the holiday as a driving concern, so it’s a Christmas movie. I’m already waffling on my simple rule.
Because rules, in art, are stupid. Watch whatever you want during Christmas, whether it’s tailored for the times or not. No rationalizing is required. The holiday police will not jail you. You will still belong.
