Why I Hate A Christmas Carol

The most done to death movie in all Hollywood must be Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. A new version comes out every Christmas season, so done to death that producers desperately look for some new twist to give it some hint of originality. The reason it is so done to death is obvious -- its seasonal nature makes it a natural to keep redoing. But if Hollywood has to do a movie to death, couldn't they start out with one that had some life to begin with?

So what's the problem with A Christmas Carol? More than anything else, every time I see it, I come away with the feeling that Dickens has done poor old Scrooge a great wrong – he’s violated his character. Every time the latest version ends up with the cuddly, lovable Scrooge at the end, I keep missing the mean guy at the beginning. Flat and cardboard cutout as he was, the mean Scrooge at least seemed more genuine than that awful impostor. The mean Scrooge was at least himself.

This may seem like an odd criticism. After all, aren’t some of the best works of literature about people undergoing character development and becoming someone better and more human at the end than they were at the beginning? Yes, but that’s not what happened to Scrooge. To undergo character development, you have to have some depth and texture of character to begin with. Now, granted, some fictitious characters who undergo development initially seem as cardboard as Scrooge. Part of their character development is discovering that the cardboard cutout is just a facade, that they are a lot more complex than they appear on the surface. This, in turn, leads to an exploration of why they have chosen to present such a two-dimensional front to the rest of the world, to rediscovery, in many cases, what they have hidden even from themselves. It means breaking through their defense mechanisms, and discovering why the rewards of their three-dimensional self outweigh whatever advantage they saw in presenting only two dimensions to the world.

This is precisely what does not happen with Scrooge. He does not develop any depth or texture; he simply flips over from a cardboard cutout curmudgeon to a cardboard cutout saint. There is nothing really wrong with having cardboard cutout characters; there simply is not enough room in fiction to give most characters the complexity of a real person, after all. But if you are going to draw characters as cardboard cutouts, then they have to stay fixed and unchanging. To flip them over into a new cardboard cutout is not character development at all, just character violation.

Furthermore, really convincing character development necessarily takes place slowly over time, with the character taking an active role in his or her redemption. Scrooge does nothing of the kind. He starts out as a simple caricature of a mean old miser. When the three Spirits come along, he sits as essentially a passive audience to their Christmas pageant, and then emerges as a totally different character. In fairness to Dickens, Scrooge is allowed some minimal reaction to what he is seeing, and we do see his turning point. He greets Marley’s ghost and the Spirit of Christmas Past with hostility, but after seeing his past, he is duly stricken with remorse. From then on, he humbly approaches the other spirits, eager to learn whatever lesson they may have for him.

Most productions of A Christmas Carol therefore give more attention to Christmas Past than Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come, and rightly so. It is by understanding Scrooge’s past that we can understand how he got to be what he is today and how he can change. Only Dickens does nothing of the kind. Instead of allowing us to understand how Scrooge became what he is today, which would have given him some depth and texture and made his conversion more plausible, Dickens simply shows us four set-pieces, each with its neat little moral for Scrooge to learn. First we see him as a poor boy. (Moral: The poor are people too). Second, we see good master Fezziwig throw a real Christmas party. (Moral: This is what you should have done). Third, we see Scrooge's girlfriend leave him over his greed. (Moral: This is what you lost because of your greed). Finally, we see her happily married with many children the night Marley died. (Moral: This is what you could have had if you had made other decisions). What we don’t see is any indication how Scrooge really got to be Scrooge.

Furthermore, Scrooge’s past shows no apparently connection with his present.* His present admittedly does logically lead to his future. But what future is he supposed to fear? When we first meet Marley's ghost, the implication is damnation, being doomed to wander the earth as a ghost in chains. Later on, we see a more secular doom -- the prospect of dying alone and unmourned.** That's all right so far as it goes, but it is, after all, just a more secularized version of warning Scrooge to mend his ways or face the hellfire. Either way, he is being brought to change by threats, the most superficial form of character development. Real character development would come not from the threat of some terrible future, but from Scrooge looking at his present and seeing just how empty it really is -- and realizing that the future holds nothing but more of the same. Once a character realized that, we can say he has experienced real development.

In short, we are shown a cardboard cutout caricature of a miser and misanthrope, shown four neat little skits of his past, each with a lesson, and threatened with dying alone and unmourned unless he mends his ways. He then flips over into a totally different, but less convincing, cardboard cutout and they all live happily ever after. No wonder Hollywood gets tired of that same story each year! In my next post, I will discuss two modified versions that (I think) significantly improve on the original, and have no doubt much influenced the above post.

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*The one exception is his nephew, who is the son of Scrooge's sister, now deceased, who we met in the first skit of his past.

**Scrooge is rather annoyingly obtuse about the unnamed man who has just died alone and unmourned. On the other hand, denial can be a powerful thing, so maybe that part is more plausible than I give it credit for.