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“Ah, there it is,” the adult Ralphie intones in the opening scene of the holiday staple A Christmas Story. “My old house. How could I ever forget it?” Narrator Jean Shepherd, the author whose stories inspired the film, imbues the lines with innocent warmth. Matched with the sumptuous version of “Deck the Halls” that opens the movie, this beginning sets the stage for a nostalgic look at an innocent time in a WASP American boy’s life.
So sweet, so welcoming is the music and narration that we almost fail to realize what, exactly, we’re looking at. Accompanying the words and music is not some Hallmark-ready house, with perfectly ordered rooms, a clean street outside, and pure, white snow in the back. Rather the movie opens on a broken-down car surrounded by trash, with the establishing shot panning past a rickety fence to a regular middle-class home (well, regular in 1940, anyway) cramped together on a small-town street.
Is it nice? Sure! Especially today, it’s impossible to imagine that a single-income family of four could afford such a spot, even in a nondescript locale like northern Indiana. But is it perfect? No, of course not, especially when we see the inside the house, with its cramped rooms, constant drafts, and unreliable furnace. The very fact that we forget the imperfections of the scene testifies to the magic of A Christmas Story.
A Black Christmas Story
A Christmas Story released in Nov. 18, 1983. That’s 17 years after the publication of Shepherd’s short story collection, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, and more than 40 years after the movie’s setting. Even though the film earned praise from critics at the time, it didn’t become a standard in most holiday movie-lovers’ minds until Turner Broadcasting began showing it regularly in the 1990s, culminating in the first “24 Hours of A Christmas Story” marathon in 1997.
Since then, A Christmas Story has become as iconic as How the Grinch Stole Christmas or It’s a Wonderful Life. Everybody’s cheesy uncle pulls out a leg lamp with their decorations. Ornaments featuring Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) hang on trees across the country. Official Red Ryder Carbine Action BB Guns still appear on wish lists.
Yet as kids who grew up with A Christmas Story pull out the movie to show their kids, they’re often met with an unpleasant reaction. A lot of modern kids hate A Christmas Story. Not for the usual “my parents are so cheesy reasons,” but because they think A Christmas Story is scary. They cry when Flick (Scott Schwartz) gets his tongue stuck on the pipe. They shudder at the sight of Scut Farkus (Zack Ward) and Grover Dill (Yano Anaya). They don’t understand why Santa would kick Ralphie down the slide.
And they’re not wrong. A Christmas Story is a scary movie, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given the director. Before making A Christmas Story, Canadian filmmaker Bob Clark (who co-wrote the script with Shepherd and Leigh Brown) made Black Christmas (1974), a nasty, grungy slasher about sorority girls getting massacred over Christmas break.
Like most journeymen directors of the era, Clark had a varied filmography, which included the sex comedy hit Porky’s (1981), and the Sherlock Holmes adventure Murder by Decree (1979), which speak to his ability to work with different tones. But there’s no question that A Christmas Story can be a gross and sometimes even mean movie, from Randy (Ian Petrella) smothering his face with food to the airborne cloud of obscenities launched by the Old Man (Darren McGavin).
Fudging the Past
As unpleasant as those moments are, A Christmas Story isn’t Black Christmas or even Home Alone or The Polar Express: fundamentally mean movies that people excuse because they have tinsel and lights. The story comes from the perspective of the adult Ralphie, who understands that the life or death stakes that his younger self believes he is living don’t actually exist. It’s not really a big deal that he broke his glasses when the BB ricochets into his eye. Daddy isn’t really gonna kill Ralphie for fighting. The secret Little Orphan Annie message is just a stupid commercial.
That adult understanding of a kid’s experience allows the nostalgia of A Christmas Story to work. Too often, nostalgic movies valorize or completely sanitize the past. Forrest Gump too often buys into the self-mythologizing of Baby Boomers. Stranger Things imagines the 1980s as full of the best pop culture and high adventure. So many movies and shows set in the 1960s feature white people being moved by the words of Martin Luther King Jr.
A Christmas Story has no interest in such aggrandizing. It takes seriously child Ralphie’s desires and fears, but also mediates them with his adult perspective. The grown Ralphie understands that he won’t go blind from all the soap used to wash his mouth, but he also understands how scared he was when he said “fudge” in front of his Dad. Adult Ralphie gives Child Ralphie enough dignity to both accurately portray those fears and to keep them at the proper scale.
The Warmth of Nostalgia
That combination of respect and perspective, honesty and admission, makes A Christmas Story one of the best nostalgic movies. It understands how great it felt to be a kid around Christmastime when the greatest fear was the grade he’d get on a theme, and whether or not he’d see Santa Claus. But it also understands that those were kid fears, and that he only got to enjoy that life because his mother (Melinda Dillon) worked so hard to make dinner that she never had a hot meal for herself, and because his father battled the furnace and kept them warm.
When the adult Ralphie begins the movie rhapsodizing about his old house on Cleveland Street, he remembers the warmth inside but not the rickety fence outside. He doesn’t position the past as somehow better than the present. He just says the past matters because it was his, a past he can see clearly for its values and its faults, no matter how much soap he had to consume.
A Christmas Story is streaming on Max and playing regularly on TNT and TBS.
The post Why the 1940s Nostalgia of A Christmas Story Still Works Today appeared first on Den of Geek.
