A favorite movie

Unlike some folks, I don't have a huge library of movies. I have a few favorites (most of the Miyazake oeuvre, "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," "Babe the Sheep Pig," "This is Spinal Tap")) that I can happily re-watch.
I also have "A Christmas Story." Yes, even though one of the basic-cable giants tends to do a 24 hour marathon of repeating it on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. But I really kind of want to watch it *before* that. So I bought a dvd of it. (It's a pretty basic dvd - not much additional material, no booklet in the case. I suppose next year, when it hits its 30th anniversary (and now I feel old) they may do something).

One thing about this movie: I remember when it was released, it was a fairly "little" movie. Not widely publicized, not considered a blockbuster. I knew one person who went and saw it (a friend of my mom's, who declared it "cute and funny and in tune with how kids think"). But it's snowballed over the years and become what some people call a "cult classic." And this is where I roll my eyes over every hyped advertising campaign that declares some new thing coming out (and usually it's either a holiday special or a movie aimed at children, or both) as "destined to become a classic." Things do not become "classics" by fiat of the advertisers. You can't declare it and make it so. Things become "classics" because they are GOOD, or because they capture a mood ("zeitgeist," maybe, if that's not too pretentious to say). For example, I would hold up as The Classic of Classics of Christmas TV specials: "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Almost EVERYONE in America knows this show. Even people born long after it was produced know it. And many of us - even some of us who are very chronologically out of its originally intended demographic - wait for it and look forward to it every year.

And yet, it's not slick. The animation is a bit jumpy in places and they hadn't really totally perfected transforming a static panel-comic into a moving cartoon. (Some of the head positions are a little weird, if you watch closely). But it has such HEART, and also, I don't think it's coincidental that it was first released in an era when Baby Boomers would (mostly still) have been young enough to want to watch it - and that it was faithfully repeated every year for Generation X and now Generation Y and whatever the nameless new generation of kids is now. (I remember thinking about how odd it seemed to me that the special I was watching was made five years before my birth, back when I was a kid.)

I think "A Christmas Story" is similar in some ways. I love the movie dearly, partly, I think, because it's not treacly: it doesn't coat childhood in some kind of false glow. Kids AREN'T wonderful to each other: there are bullies and toadies (and the nameless rabble of victims). Even friends are rude to each other at times ("Whaddaya think I'm doing, pickin' goobers?"). The children lie to their parents (Ralphie's explanation of how his glasses got broke, when his gun recoiled and knocked them off). There's more than enough humor to cut any saccharine quality. And yet, there's a fundamental good-heartedness to the movie: the idea that sometimes, even if we really don't deserve it (and might "shoot our eyes out"), we get the thing we want the most. Just because.

For me, another reason I love the movie is the setting. Granted, I grew up some 30 to 35 years later than the fictional Ralphie Parker. But my grandparents' houses had some of the same touches (no, not the horrible coal furnaces, nor the overloaded electrical sockets). But the color scheme was similar, and the layout of the house seems familiar. And also - I do think even though I grew up in a different era, there are some things in common. (Sometimes I suspect I have more in common with Ralphie's upbringing and milieu than a kid growing up today would have with mine - we had no internet, no cable television, most stores closed on Sundays, there were no cell phones....). I find myself looking at the sets and the clothing (since I mostly know the dialog off by heart and could probably recite much of the movie from memory. The types of wallpaper. The style and positioning of the chairs.

As a knitter, of course I notice the knitted stuff: Randy (the little brother) has a pair of mittens that almost copy one of the old Sanquhar knitting patterns (and he has a cap with a band of a similar pattern on it). The mom (and I have to say, I think Melinda Dillon was really good in the role, even if Ralphie and "The Old Man" get most of the commentary) has an interesting lightweight cable sweater (which looks machine knit to me) and sort of a dolman-sleeved greenish one in a couple of scenes. And there are lots of striped stocking caps on the kids....A lot of the knitwear at least looks handmade, which would have been accurate for that era (I suppose knitted goods were available in stores, but in most families it would have been far cheaper to have someone knit it themselves. Not so today, not with the cheap (though at what real cost?) Bangaladeshi or Chinese labor....)

Another thing I love about the movie is Jean Shepherd's ironic commentary as an "adult Ralphie." He was the one who wrote the original stories on which the movie was based, so of course he was the natural choice to narrate. But I love the turns of phrase he uses; that is part of what makes the movie for me: "first-nighters, packed earmuff-to-earmuff, jostled in wonderment before a golden, tinkling display of mechanized, electronic joy," "Scut Farkus staring out at us with his yellow eyes. He had yellow eyes! So, help me, God,"
"We plunged into the cornucopia quivering with desire and the ecstasy of unbridled avarice."

There's a rhetorical term (bathetic irony, perhaps? It's been a long long time since high-school English) to describe this - where you use very flowery language and complex syntax to describe something rather commonplace. But it's something I personally find VERY funny (and probably do in my own writing here, at least occasionally) and I love the movie more for having it. 

Oh, and one scene that made me chuckle and think of something else: when the mother crashes the leg lamp, and the Old Man comes in to see, and she looks up at him, and says something like, "I don't know what COULD have happened," I immediately pictured Derpy Hooves in one of those 1940s-style aprons, going "I just don't know what went wrong!" Makes me wish I could draw....I would do Derpy as the mom there, and Dr. Whooves in a cardigan sweater as the "old man." And of course, the broken lamp would have to be a HORSE'S leg in a fishnet stocking. (Though the internet being what it is, I would not be at all surprised if someone else already had that idea and had actually done that drawing).






After I watched the movie through, I discovered from the menu (even though it has few add-ons) that the movie had a French dub version. So, as someone who (at least used to) understand spoken French fairly well, I decided I wanted to watch at least part of it in French. Of all the characters, The Old Man sounded most like "himself"....the mom, in particular, her voice was harsher and more "mature" sounding in the dub. 

As I listened, my ability to understand got better - at first, I thought, "Either they got the most street-French voice actors possible to redub this, or they're using Quebecois to do it"(the Quebec accent is different - more gutteral - from the "typical" French accent). But eventually my ears recalibrated and I was able to get most of it. I listened mainly to see what they did with some of the terms and idioms. One I remember was that "pushing up daisies" (when Ralphie daydreamed about chasing off "Black Bart's" gang) became "manger les pissenlits par la racine" ("Eating dandelions root first," as a literal translation). And when he spoke of Randy's lying there like a slug ("It was his only defense"), slug was "Limace" (which is, in fact, the French word for slug.)

I really wanted to hear the "Queen Mother of Bad Words" to see what they used. (Those familiar with the movie know the scene: Ralphie is helping change a tire, his father bumps the hubcap Ralphie is holding containing the nuts, they fly everywhere, and you see Ralphie in slow motion saying, "FFFFFFFFUUUUUDDDDDDGGGEEE," only as he notes, he "didn't say fudge"). They used "mince" as the euphemism and referred to it as "le mot de cinq lettres." I am ASSUMING (but could be wrong) the word was "merde," which would translate as the "s word" (for excrement) in English.  Though, that surprises me a little....elsewhere in the movie I think I heard a couple of the kid-characters saying "merde" and anecdotally (someone I knew who traveled in France), apparently saying that word doesn't even have the same impact that saying the "s word" would have over here. (I remember her saying, "Everything over there is the s-word and the f-word, all the time. People are so CASUAL about it."). I do know French has its version of the "F word," but apparently (if the person I knew was right), it's not even seen as bad as "merde" would be. 

So, I don't know. I do know that "Latin" countries tend to have different attitudes from "Anglo-Saxon" ones. (And I have also heard - also anecdotally, but this is from several different people - that at least in Quebec, if you really want to use the "bad" swears? You use (literal) profanity rather than obscenity - you profane the name of a saint, or the Virgin Mary, something like that. Of course, Quebec is (IIRC) generally more devout than France itself (probably a matter related in part to the Revolution of 1789, though I do know there existed anti-clerical sentiment in France before that). 

So maybe that didn't have the same impact in French or a French-speaking culture as it would in an English-speaking one. Even in the 1970s, when I was growing up, to have said the F word or the S word - or even to say "damn," at least in my family - in front of your parents, even under a situation of some duress (like Ralphie was under), would get you in considerable trouble. Maybe not having to sit in the bathroom with a bar of Lifebuoy in your mouth (though my brother did get his mouth washed out with soap once. I will note that I *never* did, but then I was a goody-two-shoes), but in trouble nonetheless.

(And I got in - well, not exactly TROUBLE, but I got a pretty disapproving look from her - when I was in my 20s and my mom and I were driving somewhere and an electrical transformer on an electrical pole blew up in front of us and fell to the street, and I exclaimed "Holy s***!" (but that really was under duress; an exploding transformer is a pretty darn scary thing)