you'll shoot your (other) eye out! a christmas story in context

The most prescient and important line in Robert Graves's sweeping psudeo-historical fiction I, Claudius occurs at beginning. Claudius, who unexpectedly became Emperor of Rome, is an aged man crippled with congenital birth defects and paranoia who decides, as the empire tears itself apart from under him, to pen a memoir. One of his earliest recollections is of Thallus saying to Aristarchus, "The theater isn't what it was," to which Aristarchus wryly replies, "No. And I'll tell you something else: it never was what it was."

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Seeing 1983's cultural icon A Christmas Story is something between a tradition and a force of  nature. Despite it's beloved status, I doubt many people decide to watch it -- it's just on. Two stations in the basic cable lineup spin the reel for 24 hours straight leading up to and through Christmas Day, and it worms its way into the standard cannon of network holiday movies, endless mid-90s Charlie Brown updates and Viagra commercials.

My fiancee had never seen it before, and I had only vague memories -- kind of like the Greatest Hits version of the movie rather than the whole deal -- so when we had a break cooking for the next day's family gathering, we sat down and decided to watch A Christmas Story. About two-thirds through, she turns to me and asks, "Is this when America was great?"

We'll get to that.

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My memory was better than I thought it would be, particularly remembering that it is, as an objectively judged film, awful. It looks -- and sounds -- bad, even for '83 standards. It's set in an apparently alternate-universe 1940 where a mid-western family wasn't crippled by the tail end of the Great Depression, wracked with anxiety over a second war in Europe, and where Indiana desegregated its schools nine years early. If the setting feels artificial, that's because the story actually comes from radio humorist Jean Shepherd's In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, which wasn't written until 1966 (Shepherd also lent his radio talents and narrates the movie as adult Ralph). The book was billed as a novel, but is actually a collection of Shepherd's broadcasts rendered into short stories, and those unrelated stories are cobbled together into the final movie. The stories themselves are fictional accounts of Shepherd's childhood, all taking place in Hohman, Indiana (itself a fictional Hammond, Indiana, Shepherd's hometown). While there isn't anything inherently malicious about presenting your own rose-tinted view of your childhood, plunking a black kid in the background of a public school c. 1940 is galling kick in the junk. It is also inappropriate but thematically consistent to say that history has junk since the movie is oppressively male.

Straddling the line between a genuine comedy and a marshmallow-fluff Hallmark movie, it doesn't fit neatly into either and can be best be labeled a children's movie of the classic "boy's adventure" variety. To be clear, there is a major difference between a story that is about children and a story that is for children, and A Christmas Story is the latter. Good stories about children frame the adult world through a child's eyes, but it is still very much the adult world -- think It, E.T. or more recently Stranger Things. Ralphie's parents on the other hand, behave in a way that a child would expect an adult to behave. In real life, this is a developmental disorder, and in filmmaking, it is how one chooses an audience.

We all know the plot: little pudge-faced Ralphie Parker wants to get his pudgy fingers on a Red Ryder BB gun, and spends the movie conning his parents, teacher and the creepiest mall Santa this side of an unwashed Billy Bob Thornton amid cries that he'll shoot his eye out.

Given the tone along the way to the goal, I can't help but think that A Christmas Story is perhaps the most misplaced cinematic gem in the American heart. Shepherd refused to write down his comedy broadcasts, and before being published as In God We Trust..., they appeared serialized in "Playboy" -- yes, that "Playboy," which begins to explain some things. Ralphie's vignettes and the resulting lessons have an air of cynicism to them, and we both found it difficult to find anything endearing about them. The lamp, based on the short story "My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art," is a pretty clear shout-out to Shepherd's syndication in a nudie mag and a glimpse into the horror show that is Ralphie's unnamed parent's marriage. One particular detail I never noticed until now is the singular square inch of ass at the top of the lamp. Not sure why, but it made the entire B-story feel somewhat wrong, maybe a little too real. That Mr. Parker throws the lamp up in the window to show off to the neighbors compounds it, and makes the scene where Mrs. Parker smashes the thing uncomfortable. The notion that older, married men must are slaves to their lust and must be corralled by jealous wives has been used to justify all manner of sexual crime since crime existed, and this holiday gem doesn't even do us the service that A Charlie Brown Christmas does with subtext.

Ash, being a teacher, was doubly horrified at the scene where Flick sticks his tongue on a frozen pole and his friends abandon him. Grade school teacher Mrs. Shields is perhaps the only adult in the story who doesn't act like a pod person sent from Planet Lunchables, promptly getting help and later both giving Ralphie stinkeye at his bribes and asking some serious questions about his desire to cap a sucka.

Another thing: none of the adults get first names or even call each other by first names, which I find a little disconcerting. It has the same air of quaint good-'ole-days politeness that St. Hartman's homophobic rantings in Full Metal Jacket have in relation to anything that's supposed to be inspiring.

A Christmas Story is sometimes effective. Ralphie works his pudge off to get the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring only to find out the secret message is an ad for Ovaltine -- the overpriced chocolate milk mix he'd been guzzling for weeks on end to get the ring in the first place. The entire bit has an air of Voltaire's intense cynicism. Which leads me to the conclusion that perhaps the legion of fans who gather 'round the sectional when it gets cold out to relive the Misadventures of Ralphie Six-Shooter and the Adults that Were Replaced by Cylons have A Christmas Story pegged wrong. It's a cliche to say that Christmas is a holiday that has been co-opted by retailers since the turn of the century, but the early holiday classics such as Charlie Brown and It's a Wonderful Life at least take the pains to give their protagonists some sense of magic at the end. Ralphie, like Shakespeare's eponymous King Lear, digs a hole into the earth to find some kind of refuge. But sometimes the effort is rewarded with crazy Tom O'Bedlam. Or a crappy marketing scheme.

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"[The girl] is the spirit of want, and this is the spirit of ignorance. Beware the boy."
- A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Story's popularity endures -- I think -- because of its bottomless paper bucket of optimism. Ralphie spends the whole of the story acting like a two-timing little shit, beating up the town bully and dropping an F-bomb in front of the fam, but is rewarded with his precious pellet blaster regardless. There's a heartwarming scene where Mr. and Mrs. Parker take a pause in hectic, marathon Christmasing to listen to some carolers. Even the fact that Ralphie shoots himself right in his stupid pudgy face the second he takes the gun out for a whirl ends up alright in the end.

Of course it has already been established that the world of A Christmas Story doesn't exist, and its visage of America was one cooked up by aliens or Doc Brown or the T-1000. It was a world where there were no consequences: Mr. Parker could ogle a hunk of plastic and his wife could destroy it, and it was just another cah-razy day in the heartland and not cause to rethink one's life choices. Ralphie could shoot himself in the face with a fake gun and come away unharmed - hell, today he'd be lucky if he came away from that alive. It was a world where parents could safely stick soap in their kids' mouths or smack them around and they didn't have to grow up into a generation of serial killers in the 1970s. It was an America teetering on the brink of war and Mr. Parker blithely complains about all of that "politics slop" taking up space in his newspaper.

All of these things together stitch together a story that is more parody than nostalgia, like Lovecraft's fictional town of Innsmouth, which appears all normal to the outside observer, but for the murderous fish-men that lurk below the waves. Lovecraft, of course, was a racist, and his monsters were a stand-in for the various social minorities and immigrants he saw dotting the pristine New England of his childhood. A Christmas Story might not feature any tentacle monsters, space radiation or Satanic rituals, but if you remove the stack of dusty commemorative plates, it is an empty table indeed. It's a place where a kid begs for a gun and shoots himself and where the stigma of divorce is worse than a marriage that has long outgrown its own uselessness. A Christmas Story is a sad, desperate painting of a great America that never was, and from the outside, looks pretty much shoestring-budget holiday movie, where the actors aren't paid enough and the crew, shooting outside on a cold winter morning, doesn't even get a cup of hot Ovaltine.