Two Single Men. Together In An Otherwise-Empty House. Late At Night. One In Bondage.
My original plan for this blog was to write a list of the top ten Christmas villains of all time. You know…out of all the bad guys, which ones (The Grinch, Heat Miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, Ayn Rand) are the coolest and/or most intense. That was my plan.
I say “was” because when I consulted the Google Oracles they foretold that such a blog would land, crashing, ablaze in an inferno of redundancy. All I had to do was type “Christmas villains” into the search engine and lo, there appeared at least ten or twenty similar projects done over the past several years.
I like to think of these lists as lineups of “the usual suspects”. Several characters appear across multiple lists, but some of the lists are a little more innovative.
This list from AlternativeReel.com is fairly typical. This list from Reelz Channel takes the time to add live action film characters to a roster of animated antagonists. And, hell, this list from equivocally-named yesbutnobutyes.com takes it a step further and names socio-economic forces as villains (along with an anti-intellectual dig at that advocate of reason, Albert The Mouse).
You get the drift.
Why all the fuss about those characters contrary enough to debate the resolution that Christmas needs “saving”? I suspect it’s because we identify with them. Well, not all of them. Or at least, not literally. Heat Miser lives in a volcano. The eponymous vanquished militia in Santa Claus Conquers The Martians calls the red planet home. Not too many of us can aspire to hang our hat in those locales.
But we do need these characters as a sort of safety valve to release our collective doubt, bitterness, and (in some cases) outright disgust for the holiday season and the human race in general. They give voice to a phenomenon similar to the Freudian “death-force” of thanatos, a force (I would argue, in each of us raised with this celebration) that subconsciously wants to “kill” Christmas and call the whole thing off.
I think the most interesting Christmas “villain” is Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens pulls off quite a trick with it, actually. By writing A Christmas Carol in second person, in Scrooge’s point of view, he makes you identify with the bastard! But wait, he goes one further. He makes Scrooge both the villain and hero of the tale. Perhaps better put, the “villain” of A Christmas Carol is complacency, or even life-inertia. Scrooge does what he does because its what he’s always done. Like Victorian society itself, he is not so much consciously cruel as he is habitually unaware of the consequences of his actions on others. It is not until the death of his only friend triggers a series of spectral visitations that he changes.
And boy does he change. He emerges from the night of torment with a new spiritual perspective. Like Thich-Nhat-Hahn-in-a-top-hat he proclaims, “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!…The Spirits of all three shall strive within me.”
Dickens left out the part where Scrooge takes up yoga, and (sadly) never even had time to complete a planned sequel to A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer becomes a bitchy yoga instructor, tormenting his students with muscle-aching downward-dogs and the like.
Now that would be evil.
