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Merry Christmas Movies . . . NOT!
Part
2 — Anti-Christmas Movies
Edmund
Connelly
December 25,
2008
Earlier this
week, in Part
One of this column about the War on Christmas, I wrote that “the Jewish
dominance of Hollywood is so obvious and undeniable that Los Angeles Times’
columnist Joel Stein recently made it official.
What else can you say when all eight major film studios are run by Jews.” I’ve
written on this theme extensively in The Occidental Quarterly (here,
here,
and TOQ Spring 2008).
In The Culture-Wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World, Theodore Baehr and Pat Boone argued that “whoever controls the media controls the culture.” And a lynchpin of that media is Hollywood and its associated TV studios and networks.
Why does it matter that Jews control Hollywood? In essence, it matters because it represents the loss of power of one group—majority white Christians—to a group with a long history of hostility toward the people and culture of the West. Jewish control of Hollywood has been a crucial means for dispossessing majority whites from their place in the country they built. As some have argued, the twentieth century was “a Jewish century,” and much of this was because Jews controlled the image factory known as Hollywood.
Again, what Kevin MacDonald demonstrates
in The Culture of
Critique, cannot be repeated too
often: “The Judaization of the West means that the peoples who created the
culture and traditions of the West have been made to feel deeply ashamed of
their own history — surely the prelude to their demise as a culture and as a
people.” And, as I argued
earlier, the treatment of
Christmas shows how Jews
“have been able to translate this hatred of Christ and his birthday into
increasingly scandalous imagery, thanks to their domination of Hollywood and TV
studios.”
Today I’ll
talk about how that has affected the kind of Hollywood films we get with respect
to Christmas. In essence, it means that in the last forty or so years, the
Christian aspect of the holiday has vanished on screen. The best we can hope for
is a positive, feel-good portrayal of the season, such as we had in Tim Allen’s
The Santa
Clause (1994) or Tom Hanks’ The Polar
Express ten years later.
Too often, however, films have associated the Christmas season with negative or even horrific stories. Perhaps the best example of this is Silent Night, Deadly Night. This is a 1984 slasher film that begins with a young boy named Billy witnessing the murder of his parents by a man dressed as Santa Claus. Billy ends up at St. Mary's Orphanage, where he is beaten by Mother Superior. Later, morphing memories of his punishment at her hands with images of Santa, Billy grows up to become a killer teenage Santa. At work, for example, he strangles a co-worker with Christmas lights and then dispatches the girl with whom the co-worker was having sex.
After a string
of other Santa murders, Billy returns to the orphanage, with the police hot in
pursuit. Tragically, they shoot and kill Father O’Brien, a deaf priest dressed
as Santa. Sneaking into the orphanage, Billy, dressed as Santa, swings his ax at
Mother Superior, but a policeman shoots him down. Imparting his central message,
Billy assures viewers, "You're safe now... Santa Claus... is gone." Not exactly
a happy message at Christmastime.
In 1984, such
imagery was still able to rile the population. Siskel and Ebert condemned the film,
going “so far as to read the film's production credits on air, saying ‘shame,
shame’ after each one.” Angry mothers protested the movie around the nation, and
TriStars Pictures, its distributor, quickly ceased advertising the
film.
Silent
Night, Deadly Night
did have antecedents. Black Christmas was a 1974 movie set in a
sorority house during Christmas break. A maniac is making calls from within the
house, killing the coeds one by one. The movie also takes every opportunity to
pair beloved Christmas songs with chilling scenes, a phenomenon that was later
repeated in Gremlins, as we will see. Another, Christmas Evil
(1980), features a delusional Santa stand-in who murders three church-goers in
front of a church. (He stabbed one man in the
eye with a toy.) Later, while wearing a ragged Santa outfit and being
chased by an angry mob, our main character drives his van off a bridge,
imagining himself to be Santa in his flying sleigh.
As Austin
Pearl, a Jewish reviewer, approvingly wrote, “Christmas Evil ruins
Christmas unlike any other movie.” In particular, this reviewer liked “all the
vividly disturbing images of Santa sprinkled throughout the movie.”
It’s no
surprise that Pearl also liked the 2003 Billy Bob Thorton film Bad
Santa, which was a concerted ethnic effort to trash Christmas. Jewish
director Terry Zwigoff
made the film under producers Ethan and Joel Coen for the Disney
subsidiary Miramax, run by two more Jewish
brothers, Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Billy Bob
Thornton stars as the bad Santa of the title, going about his life boozing and
swearing with abandon. At one point he has anal sex with an overweight woman in
a changing room, while elsewhere he goes to a mall drunk and destroys a reindeer
display in a drunken rage. Ho ho ho.
Near the end
of this dark film, he is shot by a group of policemen but survives. Despite his
obvious guilt in numerous crimes, he is pardoned because "the Phoenix police
department shooting an unarmed Santa Claus in front of children was more fucked
up than Rodney King."
According to
Wikipedia, critics described it as an "evil twin" of Miracle on 34th Street, the
inspirational Christmas classic. No wonder Austin Pearl wrote glowingly
that “Bad Santa is perhaps the most subversive, offensive Christmas movie
ever made—with Thornton as a truly despicable character who, for once, does not
receive a total personality transplant by the movie’s
end.”
Director
Zwigoff intended this film for impressionable teenagers, the vast majority of
whom are, one would assume, Christians. When asked if he thought the film would
do well, Zwigoff answered, “I think it might. Every teenager in America is dying
to see this film. Though they won't be able to get in unless they have a very
open-minded parent.” Clearly he was aware of the film’s subversive content.
Two years
later came another Jewish-directed anti-Christmas movie. The Ice
Harvest, Harold Ramis’s “grisly
black comedy/film-noir,” sees Billy Bob Thornton return to a mayhem-filled
Christmas. One reviewer
intoned that The Ice Harvest “is a must-see for fans . . . in the mood to
see one of the worst Christmas Eves in the history of cinema.” Roger
Ebert was also impressed. “I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues
humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal and spectacularly
complicated ways to die.” In other words, Hollywood’s version of Merry Christmas
stuff.
Perhaps the
most unsettling Christmas movie was the original Gremlins (1984).
Though directed by Joe Dante, Steven Spielberg's production
company, Amblin Entertainment, released it. Time magazine characterized
the film as being "developed and 'presented'" by Spielberg and being one of his
"children too."
Stylistically, too, this film is completely Spielbergian, beginning with a typical suburban paradise. Snow is on the ground as local residents prepare for Christmas.
The drama begins when
protagonist Billy receives a cute "mogwai" from his inventor father, but the
creature spawns siblings that are far from full of holiday cheer. On the
contrary, they bring violence, mayhem, and death to this otherwise happy time of
year. Their mischief is methodically paired with normally positive symbols of
Christmas. For instance, when Billy's mom is home alone making Christmas cookies
and listening to Christmas music, she is attacked by a squad of ghoulish
gremlins, long in tooth and with murder on their minds. After stabbing one
through the heart, she dispatches another with a deft push of the blender
switch, turning the previously Christmas-cookie-aroma-filled kitchen into a
bloodbath. Retreating to the living room, she is literally attacked by the
Christmas tree, which is full of gremlins. This conflation of joyful Christian
symbols with diabolical evil is a central device to the whole
movie.
Another example comes
when the police pass by Billy's neighbor's house and are greeted by the
neighbor, dressed as Santa Claus, running about helplessly as gremlins eat into
his brain. Next, Christmas-caroling gremlins arrive at grouchy old Miss Deagle's
door, only to send her flying out the second-floor window of her house in a
malfunctioning motorized chair.
The scenes which most
firmly tie this movie to a distinct Jewish sensibility, however, come with two
extraneous dialogues between Billy and his girlfriend Kate. Passing a group of
Christmas carolers singing "Silent Night," Kate suddenly and soberly states that
Christmas is a time when "a lot of people get really depressed. . . . While
everybody else is opening up their presents, they're opening up their wrists.
It's true. The suicide rate is always the highest around the holidays." When she
volunteers that she doesn't celebrate Christmas, Billy asks, "What, are you
Hindu or something?" Historically, the non-Christian group in America with mixed
feelings toward Christmas is not Hindus, but Jews. Here the mask is in place but
the true message is easily discernible.
Much later in the movie, after the gremlins have wreaked havoc on Kingston Falls, Kate launches into a startling horror story about Christmas, one that seems completely gratuitous since it is independent of the blood-thirsty gremlin theme. Surveying the rubble left by the marauding gremlins, Kate relates how she now has another reason to hate Christmas. It seems that when she was nine, she and her mother were decorating the tree on Christmas Eve, waiting for her father to come home from the office. They waited, but he never came.
Then, four or five days
later, as the temperature dropped, Kate went to make a fire. "And that's when I
noticed the smell."
"Mr. Hankey's Christmas
Classics”
Finally, we arrive at what must be the most blatantly hostile and offensive portrayal of Christmas ever found in the mainstream American media. The creators of the animated series South Park concocted a Christmas character to replace Santa. This new character is "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo," an animated human feces. Mr. Hankey was introduced in a 1997 episode that showed the young Jewish boy Kyle brushing his teeth. Mr. Hankey, wearing a Santa hat, jumps out of the toilet bowl and sings a song about Santa and Christmas. The starkest comment in the scene comes when this animated feces writes "Noel" in excrement on the mirror. (This early version can be viewed here.)
Two years later, the more extensive Mr.
Hankey version was released as Mr. Hankey’s
Christmas Classics. (A parallel
CD of the songs includes the delightful "Merry Fucking Christmas”). Here Mr.
Hankey besmirches the faces of children singing Christmas songs. He then
introduces us to the next scene, Christmastime in Hell, where Hitler is shown
crying over his Christmas tree. Later, when Jesus and Santa sing a duet, Santa
gets miffed that there are far more songs about Jesus than about him, so he
leaves the stage. When Jesus implores him to return, Santa speaks the cheery
words, “Aw, fuck you, Jesus!” (Read the script here.)
This episode is a parody of the Charlie Brown Christmas
Special in which everyone yells out "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!" only after
Charlie has realized the true meaning of Christmas—which has Christ at its
center. In the South Park version, the characters wish the Jewish boy Kyle a Merry
Christmas only after he has taught everyone, through Mr. Hankey the Christmas
Poo, that Christmas and Christianity are shit.
Replacing Christmas with the
Finally, this
brings us to Christmas this year. More than ever, the focus will be on Jewish
themes rather than Christian. As a recent New
York Times article admitted, Holocaust-themed Christmas releases have
been the norm for years. Sophie's
Choice, for example, debuted in December 1982, Schindler's
List was released in the same month in 1993, and The
Pianist opened two days after Christmas in 2002.
This year is no different: On Christmas Day the new Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie will debut. This film features Cruise as a German officer who plots to kill Hitler, prompting Cruise to joke in an interview, “Go kill Hitler on Christmas!” We will also have Defiance and Good, two more Nazi-oriented films, which will premier a week after Christmas. Then there is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, “which tells the story of a forbidden friendship between the son of a Nazi officer and a Jewish boy imprisoned in a concentration camp.” And don’t miss The Reader, which features Kate Winslet being tried for her years as a concentration-camp guard. Finally, there is Adam Resurrected, starring Jeff Goldblum as a Holocaust survivor living in a mental institution. The title seems to posit the death of Jesus at Christmastime and his replacement with a Jewish resurrection.
Out with the
old religion, in with the new. A friend wrote: “I've seen the previews for
Valkyrie. Good grief! And to release it on Christmas Day
— it really doesn't get more obvious
than this. Sort of like saying, ‘Don't you realize, THIS is your new
religion, not all this Jesus business!’"
Three years
ago, Fox News Channel
host John Gibson wrote The
War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is
Worse Than You Thought. Well, it has gotten worse than
we thought. But Gibson’s parting words are still the only formula for a reversal
in this war. “Those who
would ban Christmas and Christians should not mistake the signs on the horizon.
The Christians are coming to retake their place in the public square, and the
most natural battleground in this war is Christmas. The war on Christmas is
joined.”
And may the good guys win. It's a battle we can't afford to lose. Merry Christmas!
Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.
Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-ChristmasII.html
