Post by The Human Being on Dec 2, 2013 14:33:44 GMT -6
2013 Advent Calendar - December 1st
Arthur Christmas
by Tereglith
Arthur Christmas
by Tereglith
There’s a reason many people think it’s cruel to fool kids into believing in Santa; because the inevitable disappointment and disillusionment they suffer isn’t worth it. Any time a story shows us a world where a real Santa causes real happiness, it is implicitly telling us, whether now or when we eventually realize that Santa’s a fraud, that that world isn’t ours, and never can be. When we find that out, all the Yes Virginia letters in the world can’t make things right again. Any serious look at Santa will have to address this somehow, or simply be fluff.
Now, when you’re telling a story about Santa, there’s nothing wrong with being fluff. There’s only a few non-fluffy stories it’s possible to tell about Santa. One would be my idea for a Batman Begins style gritty remake of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and the other is Arthur Christmas, which even so seems like fluff unless you’re as overanalytical and obsessed with Santa as a character as I was in 2011 (and apparently still am, judging by the length of this thing. Go grab a snack, you’ll be here for a while if you’re willing to read the whole piece).
How does one tell a fluffy Santa story? Well, the hallmark will be that any summary of it will contain some variation on the phrase:
“So, how does Santa deliver all those toys?”
It’s a valid question, to be sure. No rational 21st century kid will accept that it’s ‘magic’. But it’s also an easy out for storytellers. Don’t want to bother looking at the deeper aspects of Santa? Just come up with a clever explanation for his logistics and you’re in the clear! Whether it’s creative (the massive, blimp-sized bag of 2004’s creepy The Polar Express) or half-assed (Yup, time just slows down for Tim Allen to make unfunny mistakes as Santa… somehow), essential to the plot (Elf’s Chekhov’s Jet Engine) or incidental (Rudolph’s end credits umbrella delivery system), well-realized (Prep & Landing’s extensive North Pole job market) or ill-defined (‘Time will travel with you’ as you fight John Lithgow, Santa Claus: The Movie), just about any story involving Santa takes a stab at answering that basic question.
Not Arthur Christmas. Arthur Christmas swings a giant bladed chainsaw at answering it.
Hardly anybody watched AC when it came out just over two years ago, but those who did will likely remember the S-1. Three miles long, capable of travelling at 150,000 miles per hour, and containing tens of thousands of paramilitary Elf special forces drop teams that can plant presents across an entire town in less than twenty seconds, it’s the only tech-based Sleigh solution that actually works from a mathematical standpoint. It takes the entire notion of deconstructing the logistics of Santa and tosses it out the window for all future storytellers. The S-1, and more broadly the playfully revisionist technological eye-candy that fills this story’s version of the North Pole, is enjoyable at a completely surface level, and that’s how most viewers and critics seem to have appreciated the movie. But looking at it as existing in dialogue with other depictions of Santa, the movie has a whole lot more to say than just “isn’t this techno-Santa cool and funny?”. Sure, it does say that, but it also says “This is the logical endpoint of a Plausible Santa that you’ve all been pussyfooting around for two decades. Now that we’ve gotten there, can we move on to more interesting questions?”
And then, without waiting for anybody else to pick up the invitation, Arthur Christmas does move on to more interesting questions. Because the S-1, while it was the focus of the advertising, is far from the focus of the film. Its size, capabilities, and sheer awesomeness are quickly established within the first ten minutes. After that, the film wisely moves on to an equally important, and much more interesting question, one that seems so obvious that hardly any stories have bothered trying to answer it: Who is Santa, really?
I’ve been intrigued by this conundrum for a long time. Santa is such a central figure of an entire holiday mythology, but despite decades upon decades of works featuring him, we don’t know much about Santa as a character. Clement Moore’s seminal poem devotes three whole stanzas to his appearance, and a scant half a line to his personality. The prototypical Santa is “old”, “lively and quick”, and “jolly”. That’s all we know about him as a person. His wardrobe, thanks to the efforts of Haddon Sundblom and Coca-Cola, has been cemented in precise detail for eight decades. Anybody can draw Santa, but hardly anybody could be expected to relate to him; he’s an icon more than a character.
A ton of different character traits have filled this vacuum of personality over the decades, and the resultant characters don’t always come out looking like the paragons of Yuletide joy that we all think Santa should be. Santa’s been a bigoted, preoccupied dick (Rudolph); a lazy hypochondriac (The Year Without a Santa Claus); a loopy, possibly dementia-ridden weirdo (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians); a hapless corporate idiot trying to adjust to hideous nonconsensual changes happening to his body (The Santa Clause), Ed Asner with very little change (Elf); and, in perhaps the most in-depth look at his character until Arthur Christmas came along, a charming, roguish outlaw who staged an ideological revolt that eventually toppled a dictatorship, cementing his reputation and allowing him to spread his generosity across the world (Santa Claus is Coming To Town).
Even Coming To Town, however, fails to delve too deeply into Santa’s psyche, choosing to focus on the (admittedly clever) reasons behind all the aesthetic trappings of Santa. The immortal, inhuman Santa is simply too alien to easily build a compelling story around. There’s a reason why most of the best Christmas stories of all time feature Santa only incidentally, if at all - Scrooge and the Grinch are round and compelling characters. Santa, the icon, is not.
The brilliance of Arthur Christmas begins in its acceptance of this fact. What allows the story to work at all is the decision to delegate the iconography of Santa onto an abstract, inherited title. This isn’t a story about Santa. It’s a story about Arthur, Steve, their father Malcolm, and his father, and how all of these characters relate to Santa, the concept, which just happens to be the family business.
The setup is quickly established by a long pan across a hall of portraits, starting with Saint Nicholas himself and including a dozen or more subsequent generations of men who have been Santa, in seventy-year increments. We quickly find out that the current Santa, Malcolm (Jim Broadbent, managing to always sound as though he’s about to yawn) is on his seventieth year on the job, the traditional cutoff point. His cantankerous father Grandsanta (a hilarious Bill Nighy), long retired and incredibly ancient, watches grumpily from the sidelines. Elder son Steve (a brusque Hugh Laurie) is the one actually running the show, organizing Christmas with the managerial genius and callous number sense of a Fortune 500 CEO, plus an amazing Christmas-tree-shaped goatee. And finally, the eponymous Arthur (James McAvoy), Steve’s gangly, obnoxiously enthusiastic and innocent younger brother, whiles away his time in one room of a vast letter-response mill, answering children’s mail with incredible sincerity.
There is no villain in the film, and no Threat To Christmas Itself (at least not to begin with). In fact, by the time the first fifteen minutes are over, Christmas has been 99.9999% completed. The presents are safely wrapped and under their trees - all except for one. When Malcolm got into a scrape delivering the single ceremonial present he’s tasked with dropping off in each country, a single elf pressed a single wrong button, and the bike of one Gwendolyn Hines fell off of a conveyor belt. As inciting incidents go, it’s far short of Santa being kidnapped by Martians, or deciding to take a year off, or adopting Will Ferrell; the entire plot rests on the type of error that happens hourly in package-processing facilities across the world.
At least, that’s how Steve views it. And that’s what’s really important; the way that the bike impacts the members of the Claus family, Arthur in particular. The rest of the story proceeds not as a result of relentless outside incident as in many Christmas stories, but from the release of the interpersonal tensions and crises of identity established in the opening scenes. The circumstances that drive the story aren’t set up in the lair of a dastardly, Christmas-hating villain, but at the pathetic 4 am Christmas Dinner shared by the quarrelling Claus family.
Malcolm, terrified that he won’t have any identity outside of being Santa if he retires, decides to take the unprecedented step of signing on for a 71st outing in the sleigh, but even that can’t stop him from worrying about his increasing obsolescence. Steve, prepared to accept the mantle of Santa, goes from triumphant but stressed out to incredibly disappointed and jealous in one wrenching moment, resenting his father’s selfishness and his grandfather’s crotchetiness. Long-retired Grandsanta bemoans and ridicules his son and grandson for their reliance on technology, and pines for the old days. And Arthur, painfully optimistic and naive, tries to hold the family together through sheer force of positivity as they’re torn apart by the job he idolizes, and that he, as the younger son, thinks he’ll likely never have. The hypercompetent and eerily serene Mrs. Claus (Imelda Staunton) hovers in the background, attempting to smooth over the issues her boys are having while simultaneously negotiating trade agreements with Greenland and getting into scraps with polar bears (Fortunately, she’s taken an online course for every situation that crops up).
Once the bike is discovered by the incredibly chipper mohawk-sporting gift-wrap elf Bryony, Arthur sees it as an incredible transgression against the concept of Santa. If one child wakes up unhappy, then Santa has failed, and that’s something the incredibly idealistic Arthur cannot accept. Steve, meanwhile, sees the bike as a rounding error, and in true corporate fashion says that they’ll be able to get a replacement bike to her in five to eight business days. When Arthur points out that it doesn’t matter, because then it will no longer be Christmas, Steve brushes him off. When the two appeal their points of view to their listless father, Malcolm is won over by Steve’s statistics (specifically the quantity of ‘aughts’) and decides to go back to sleep. But Arthur’s not having it.
Grandsanta, witnessing his grandson’s discontent, offers another way: the old sleigh still exists. Evie was built in the 1830s and mothballed after World War II, and Grandsanta’s been maintaining it and breeding reindeer as a side project ever since. Once it’s been loaded up with exotic isotopes harvested from the Aurora Borealis (colloquially ‘magic dust’, as close as the film gets to explicit magic), it’ll be able to ride again in all its steampunky glory. So Arthur and Grandsanta ride out to give Gwen her bike before the sun rises.
Around the time that they’re crashing through Toronto (hear anything on Christmas 2011, SBT?), Arthur and Grandsanta find out that Bryony has stowed away with them. Meanwhile, Steve discovers that the trio is missing, and begins trying to track them down. The hijinks continue around the globe, including stopovers in an African nature reserve, rural Kentucky, and Gwen’s exact town and street address… but in Mexico instead of England. But the real meat of the story comes from the character interactions, cut loose from any specific location, as Arthur is gradually betrayed by all his male relatives as they put their own pettiness before the importance of delivering the bike.
As soon as Steve manages to call them up via Bryony’s video phone, he delivers to Arthur the emotional bombshell that their father is sleeping the night away, completely unconcerned with Gwen’s bike. Having idolized his father as the ideal Santa all his life, Arthur is crushed to realize that his dad is just a man, and doesn’t even have the Christmas spirit that he does. He clings to the Santa identity not because of the pathological need to give that Arthur feels, but because he doesn’t know what he’ll be if he isn’t Santa. Arthur thought of his father as being the most selfless person in the world; the fact that he can sleep while Arthur is driven to fly halfway across the globe shows that to be false.
Malcolm, more than Grandsanta or Steve, is a deconstruction of the classic Santa tropes. He’s a figurehead, an icon that does nothing, but into which love and adoration is poured, just like the iconic Santa that pervades the real life Christmas season and takes the credit from all those hardworking parents. But unlike every other generic Santa, his crisis of identity over his very genericness is what drives him into being a unique character. It’s hilarious, but also melancholy, when he reveals the presents he’s chosen for his own family: “checks for the boys and cash for father”. He’s nominally the greatest gift-giver in the world, but he can’t even decide what to give to those closest to him.
Steve is almost willing to help - until a stray remark from an elf causes him to realize that getting the single, statistically insignificant present to the right house under extraordinary circumstances would give Arthur more recognition and praise than Steve got for successfully organizing the delivery of the other two billion. Steve is a great character that in a lesser film would have been the villain and tried to hinder Arthur; instead, he decides to simply abandon Arthur and Grandsanta to screw up on their own while he uses the S-1 and his superior technology to deliver an even better bike even faster, and nab the glory (and the position as Santa) for himself. Of course, his hubris prevents this, in one of the film’s funniest moments.
And, as Arthur turns to Grandsanta for help, he finds that even the oldest, most traditional Santa fails him. Grandsanta is more concerned with showing the newer generations how it’s done by showing up with eight reindeer and a wooden sleigh than he is with Gwen actually getting her bike; he’d rather spend time trying to uphold the tradition (even if it means prying a metal reindeer off a car dealership) than forgo the antique trappings in favor of generosity. There’s a bit of backstory revealed concerning a post-retirement joyride interfering with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it bears less weight than the allegorical implications that are becoming clearer at this point in the story.
While there is a lot of excitement left in the plot (including a shipwreck in Cuba, a Predator drone scrambled by a confused UNFITA, and an incredible race against time action scene in which Arthur rides Gwen’s bike through the town while Bryony gradually wraps it up), the aspect that impacted me the most was the very satisfying way that the film takes its characters and uses them to finally answer the question I posed above, the question the characters themselves have been dealing with in various ways: Who is Santa?
It’s by no means explicit, but it’s very easy to read the family as a prismatic look at the history of Santa; Steve is the modern, technologized toy industry, the impersonal machinery of commerce that must exist to create and distribute two billion presents. Malcolm is the icon, the Santa of Rankin-Bass and Coca-Cola, the beloved character we see everywhere but never understand. Grandsanta is the tradition, the homespun, nostalgic, that’s-the-way-it-was-and-we-liked-it Santa that my grandparents recall when they tell me that I shouldn’t be buying toys online in March because when they were kids, there were no toy stores, and the only toys appeared at Christmas, and even then they were just Raggedy-Anns and Pinochle boards and other things that wouldn’t satisfy a modern kid for ten seconds. The preceding eighty minutes weren’t just a fun, clever Christmas romp; they were a dissection of why, on their own, these visions of Santa don’t work. They can’t work.
Arthur’s emotional journey shows us that even in a world where Santa exists, even in a world where Santa is your relatives, the conceptions we have of Santa are too fundamentally flawed to work, and that disillusionment will still happen. Many kids are traumatized to learn that their parents were Santa; Arthur has known all along that Santa is actually his dad, but feels just as betrayed by his realization that his dad (and grandad, and brother) are only human. Even when they’re hiding in the closet of the very girl they supposedly set out to help, the three Santas can’t overcome their petty bickering and just give Gwen her bike.
But Arthur can.
Who is Santa? That’s what Arthur ends up asking himself, at his emotional nadir, stranded without a sleigh on the Cuban coast. If none of his relatives are Santa, Arthur reasons, then nobody is and nobody can be.
But that’s not quite true. A picture - one that was drawn by Gwen herself, with no knowledge of the intergenerational squabbling of the Clauses - makes him realize the truth. Santa’s not an inherited title - it’s a free-floating concept. And Santa’s not whoever wears the coat and drives the sleigh - Santa’s whoever delivers the presents. And that means Malcolm can be Santa, and Steve too - but so can the elves, and so can Arthur. And so, for that matter, can the parents of you, the viewer, who either know this to be the case already or are about to find out in a few short years. Hell, you can be Santa! You, watching the movie, right now! It’s not that Steve, Malcolm and Grandsanta don’t help Arthur - they do, a lot, in heartwarming ways. But none of them can do it on their own. They don’t have to fight over who’s Santa, since they all are.
It’s sort of a hokey message, and one that’s been around since the Yes, Virginia letter. But it never really resonated with me until I saw it in Arthur Christmas. Other attempts at delivering the same basic message seem to do so as a cop-out. “Okay, kid, I know you’re disappointed that there’s no real super-cool Santa, but guess what? Santa is within all of us! Why are you still sad?” What sets Arthur Christmas apart is that it delivers the necessary corollary to that message, one I’d never seen before; that the “Santa is us” message works not just in real life, but even in a fictional universe where Santa exists, where Santa is your dad. Not only that, but it also shows that any other answer is unsatisfactory, whether in real life or a fictional universe.
Santa is us, and that works both ways - if he existed, he would only be a man, with at least some of our flaws. When he doesn’t, we all get to be him, with at least some of his perfection.
*****
If you managed to get through that entire wall of text (it was six pages in Google Docs!) then, congratulations! Your present is the:
Discussion Questions!
1) What’s your favorite depiction of Santa, from TV or movies?
2) If you ever have kids, what’s your stance on the whole Santa thing?
3) Do you ever recall believing in Santa?
4) If you watched the movie, do you think I’m completely overanalyzing it?
5) If your parents did the Santa thing, how did they handle it? Did he bring all the presents? One big one? What was the best gift you received from ‘him’?