Coal and der switches: JINGLE ALL THE WAY

When it comes to holiday entertainment, nothing tops the "heroin-smuggling nuns" episode of the BIONIC WOMAN that played Xmas eve back in the 70s and has never been seen again. But we must settle. Mom settles for CHRISTMAS STORY marathon on TNT ("you kids loved that movie as kids, remember?" My brother and I roll our eyes since we endured high school with co-star Scottie Schwartz). My brother Fred likes BADDER SANTA but that kid grosses me out. I vote for pagan solstice celebration of THE WICKER MAN! There's no kid at all in that, until the end and her name's Rowan, which is badass. We settle, always, for them all...

Bridgewater-Raritan HS's Scourge

We always also wind up seeing SCROOGED and just stop watching once Bill Murray starts his lengthy rant about how we should all sing soul music together because he's finally learned the meaning of Christmas. And in the film I'm going to recommend this year, we have a dad who gives Bill Murray's self-righteous Scrooge a run for his abundance of money as far as Münchausen-by-proxy syndrome, the Xmas version, which I call Coal and Switches Syndrome: it's that thing where an egotistical workaholic dad proceeds to create pointless disasters wherein Xmas is almost canceled, all so he can race in at the 11th hour and save it. Beside Murray's Scrooge, there's Nic Cage in The FAMILY MAN (2000) and Arnold Schwarzenegger in JINGLE ALL DER WAY (1996).


And here's a thing about Hollywood's insistence on putting kids in the center of kids' movies:  I've never known a kid who likes seeing other kids in movies. As kids we want to see adults doing the things we imagine ourselves doing as adults, that's why we loved STAR WARS and JAWS. If kids could be anything they wanted, more than anything they'd want to be old enough to move out. They don't ever imagine themselves as kids. There wasn't a single kid in STAR WARS because Lucas understood this (but then forgot it).  Boys especially want to see themselves as men, not as children, misunderstanding this fundamental rule of viewer identification processes led to the idiotic decision to create sidekicks like Robin and Superboy and all those movies where we don't just see what a kid would imagine, but a kid imagining it.

I mention all this because Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of those men children like to identify themselves as. His overly muscular body is almost a burlesque of how we confused muscles with fighting ability. We love his accent and his straightforward way with a catch phrase. Here Arnold is just an ordinary gym owner/personal trainer and largely absentee father, avoiding his son's karate performance subconsciously or not it would mean some other athlete getting the applause. His playing an average suburban dad in JINGLE ALL THE WAY (1996) makes him suspect, he's like a superhero alter-ego with no superhero to turn into. Arnold needs to realize he is not, and has never been, an average dad, not in our minds. In the symbolic structure of the film, though, this is a crime tantamount to neglect and he must atone by finding an unavailable/sold out super hero action figure, which is itself a burlesque of his impotent male (child) rage. Arnold wants to be the action figure, the superhero, but such a character is defined by his absence and in the guilt trip nanny state PC 90's this is tantamount to neglect, so he has to bow down to a plastic imitation because his son prefers the totemic phallic signifier. It's a bit like Jesus being told he's not a good messiah unless he buys all his disciples Christmas presents, on his own birthday.  

There are hints of turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself here (which Guy Debord dubbed détournement - often expressed via subversive graffiti on advertising or re-word ballooning comic strips), the film digs a canal into the rotting roots of the American Xmas tooth, only to fill it at the last minute with items available for purchase in the lobby. Like any good capitalist product, JINGLE knows how to incorporate its critique against itself within itself.

One way Arnold tries to become the action figure is through this CSS I've mentioned. He ignores his secretary's notes that he needs to go to his kid's karate practice, so that he can speed down the emergency lane to get there late through a terrible traffic jam; he combs through every toy story in town on Xmas Eve only to be laughed out of the stores. Before it's all over he will trash a department store, throw a fellow dad into a toy display, smash up the DJ booth of an innocent local radio station, push and shove old ladies and children, resist arrest, trash a kid's jungle gym in the mall, willfully commit various traffic violations, impersonate an officer, terrify innocent pedestrians, break into his neighbor's house, punch out his neighbor's reindeer and inadvertently interfere with a bust on a bootleg toy factory (run by schemers dressed as elves and Santas in the film's funniest bit).  In short he is the worst thing about American foreign policy, the idea that America's needs and anxieties are every other country's responsibility and that normal rules don't apply to it when its emotions are aroused. It's the kind of willing myopia we first saw first perhaps in ALLY MCBEAL and global warming summits and though Clinton was in office at the time JINGLE came out, it's very very George Bush Sr. It was the era of drowning men, Michael Douglas in FALLING DOWN (1993) and so forth.


I imagine we're supposed to sympathize with this amok dad, but the only ones who could possibly relate are the Hollywood elite who aren't off their cell phones more than a few minutes a year, and would be as dumbstruck as Arnold if they suddenly had to do their own Christmas shopping. It would be believable if Arnold was a toy come to life, fresh out of the box, believing his own cover story, like a Buzz Lightyear or post-Recall Quaid, but he's supposed to have been present at this family suburban house since you know, before his kid was even born.


When all his feigned ignorance and willful bull-in-a-china-shop methods fail, Arnold eventually solves it all by becoming the real life version of toy, by positing himself as the kind of father who's not afraid to use a jet pack to trash an African American family's living room as they're sitting down for Xmas eve dinner, praying, Arnold missing their heads for their heads are lowered in prayer, the only mention of God or Jesus anywhere in the film. All this to prevent another African American from stealing the toy he's (unfairly) awarded to his own son by taking over a costume he's not been authorized to wear, and endangering the lives of pedestrians through unauthorized jet pack usage. Needless to say, this was before 9/11 and now seems less comical and more unnerving. We don't need satires and jet packs any more to point out the monstrosity of consumer-driven Xmas, just look at this:


Who is to blame for this madness?

1) TOY MARKETING STRATEGIES: Perhaps it makes sense from a PR standpoint for toy companies to deliberately limit production on certain popular toys to drive the demand up, but in the scheme of consumerist reality there's a real harm done in a country like America where everyone's self-worth as a parent hinges on providing their child with whatever they 'wish' for. There's no reason that in the most productive country in the world (China) any demand for a molded piece of plastic shouldn't be met. (in America). Movies themselves do this all the time. Disney lets their classic titles go "into the vault" to drive up resale value and ensure higher sales during releases / promotions, and certain rarefied cult director iconoclasts insist on releasing their own films on their own label, like David Lynch, Russ Meyer, ensuring the price never gets too low and avoiding middleman and PR fees. But kids don't understand supply and demand, they only know that if they don't get the toy they want, there is no Santa, and so end up a derelict drug addict.

2) MEASURING UP ANXIETIES: I don't have kids so I don't quite understand, but from movies like JINGLE I glean a certain fear of measuring up to some paternal ideal that, to be honest, I don't remember seeing when I was a kid in the 70's. Parents looked after their own good time first (as on MAD MEN) and got us some, not all, presents we wanted. In general we were much more bored than kids today, we had no internet or cell phones, etc, but in knowing our father didn't need us to feel validated we at least felt secure. We could hate him with all our might for not giving us a certain toy, but he made sure the electricity stayed on, and our beds were warm and there, ready for sleeping in, right where we last left them. Arnold's kid might get the toy he wanted but pays for the luxury with a great deal of collateral anxiety. That toy might have cost him his bed, or college fund. If the son says he wants a jet ski, the next day one might be waiting in the driveway, but then the kid feels guilty because he sees dad's car is missing, sold to pay for the jet ski. It's a "be careful what you wish for" scenario. The indulgent yet largely absent father figure granting consumer good wishes at the cost of security and genuine nurturing, using money the way moviegoers use their coats to hold their place while they go get popcorn. What the kid needs is a good pack leader, what he gets is a needy space cadet.


3) CAESAR MILAN: The "pack leader," is a Dog Whisperer term. If you don't assert your dominance your dog assumes you are weak and thus takes over as pack leader, which makes it a nervous wreck. Kids with needy parents wind up in the same position. Adults are able to navigate the social order and assess dangers far better than dogs or children. But if they are too weak-willed to be stern and authoritarian when need be, then the children or dogs feel, however unconsciously, that they have to step in. This is why the red states are so unnerved when Obama bows and scrapes before other dignitaries; they feel they have to be America's pack leader. They know that if a leader is too skittish to make big tough unpopular decisions, if he is dependent on constant validation and says anything that will win him popularity even if its at the cost of bankrupting the country, then we all become as nervous as that skittish dog pack leader.

Arnold is just such a weak leader, illustrated perfectly when he calls his wife to tell her his car is totaled in pursuit of the doll, and Hartman answers the phone saying he's eating Arnold's wife's cookies while she takes a shower. Arnold shouts into the phone: "Put that cookie down! Now!" It's gone on to become quite the meme and gives Arnold the quid pro quo revenge excuse he needs to Grinch up Phil's tree :


While we're expected to root for Arnold it's actually Sinbad who is the most complex and the only one worthy of sympathy: first he's the only one at the store who doesn't sneer at Arnold's confusion over the absence of Turbo Men, and he offers to join forces, an offer which Arnold coldly rejects. As we're treated to then-relatively unusual sights like people macing and tazing each other over X-Boxes at the department store, what's most amazing and sad is how completely oblivious Arnold is to the idea that he is not the only dad in the world who waited too long and is now paying capitalism's harshest price for tardiness. He genuinely believes it's his right as an American dad to use excessive force in pursuit of his individual needs. Even having a coffee with Sinbad, his only friend, Arnold shoves him aside to be the first caller into a radio station then seems genuinely shocked and hurt when Sinbad does the same to him.


But I adore that Arnold shares a beer with the reindeer he knocked out the previous shot, his moment of alleged redemption, making up for decades of bad blood between him and the animal kingdom from when he drunkenly punched out a camel in CONAN. And even if it skirts around being a total anticonsumerist parable, the film brutally satirizes the consumer mindset and the father-in-crisis while endorsing them completely, that's the unique problem only noticeable in a land like the US, which has thrived on its shockingly free press, namely that once an institution incorporates its own critique, nulling all criticism by depicting the critic criticizing it, of having the thing itself critique its own thinghood. There's nothing left to say because it's already been said, like the kid who punches himself out so the bully doesn't get him first. Arnold wouldn't know about that, because he can only fight big guys and have it be fair....just like Rock Hudson has to wait until the end of GIANT before he finally finds someone in his same height and weight class.


The point is, fatherhood's integrity takes a bullet in the name of commercial fetishization and makes us wonder: who is it that thinks kids most want to see parents suffering indignities on their behalf? Arnold's kid is an emotional blackmailer. He NEEDS to have his father not get him the action figure, to feel that terrible sting and get over it. But this is a kid's movie, a rampant unrestrained Id, and kids don't understand that since America consumes 95% of the world's resources we shouldn't whine like Oliver if we can't have some more. And we shouldn't condone emotional blackmail. In JINGLE, adults like Arnold are not avatars of how boys want to imagine themselves. They are stooges, cautionary tales, figures of revenge. Comical, neutered, pleading, desperate, pissing themselves in vain attempts to win their children's fickle favor. Ideally, these kids should be sickened by this horrible reversal. A kid trying to impress his father is natural and helps his growth. A father trying to impress a kid is unnatural and stunts the world. But this is the new world, a new man. This is what feminism, the nanny state, equal rights, maternity leave, and anti-smoking legislation hath wrought. A very handicapped man once said "we let 'em smoke, vote and drive, even put 'em in pants! And what do ya get? Russian roulette on the highway, a Democrat in the White House, you can't even tell male from female.... unless you meet 'em head on." That old man was played by Stuart Lancaster, and the movie was the Russ Meyer's 1965's FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL! It's currently out of print, but if ever there was an Xmas movie worth running someone over for... RIP Haji... you were some kind of a woman.