Thoughts on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

2010.12.19
Days Remaining: 163

01.01. One of my favorite personal habits during Yuletide is to read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I grew up with the general cultural awareness that most Americans (and English people) have of the plot and characters (including seeing film versions by Rich Little and at least parts of the George C Scott film), but I didn't actually read the book until I was in college. My sophomore year of college my roommate, Octavian, went home during finals period, leaving our dorm room to me for a week. One Saturday night I walked to the now-closed independent bookstore on Main Street in Newark, DE, and I found a copy of Christmas Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens (a 1992 St. Martins' Press collection of stories that were originally printed in a variety of separate books and magazines). I bought it and returned to my dorm room, where I read it from cover to cover by candlelight with the window open so a cold draft moved through the room (the candlelight and cold were major parts of the aesthetic experience which made that first reading especially memorable). Since that night, I've tried to read A Christmas Carol every year, preferably close to Christmas Eve (I hope that at some point, when they are older, I'll be able to read it to my niece and nephew on Christmas Eve, and share it with them). I have also begun to collect film versions of the story, and some years I have watched one version a night for several consecutive nights. It's always better at night, and with low (candles or Christmas tree lights are preferable) lighting. One of the casualties of the past few years is that, because the Christmas holiday was especially tense and difficult, I have not always been able to either read the story or watch the films. So I have made a point this year of trying to work the story into my schedule.

01.02. On Thursday night last week I watched the Robert Zemeckis/Jim Carrey computer-animated version of the story. I'm afraid that my response to this was less positive than I had hoped it would be.
First, the positives:

1. the scenery (whether urban London or the country side) was incredibly lovely,
   
2. the special effects were well-done,
3. the framing device (going into and out of a leather-bound copy of A Christmas Carol) was, though not terribly creative, presented well.
   

Second, the negatives:

1. the animation of human characters was not quite right. They were firmly in the uncanny valley (a critical theory idea that says there is a psychological response point between comfortably non-human and fully human where things are not...quite...human and therefore are all the more disturbing - this is why so many people find mannequins or Howdy Doody and similar things to be upsetting or creepy. For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley).
   
2. I also couldn't turn off my "that's Jim Carrey" awareness as I watched the film, perhaps because he has made a career mugging for the camera so when he acts all I can think is "that's Jim Carrey acting." I think he was miscast.
   
3. Finally, they changed the plot, as is very, very common in film adaptations. In this case, however, the change actually worked against one of the major themes of the book, which is to "walk abroad amongst one's fellow-men." This comes to the fore when Scrooge (in the book) is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present. Their entire interaction is spent walking (or flying between walks) among people (Scrooge and Ghost are invisible) so that Scrooge sees other humans as something besides economic opportunities. In the Zemeckis film, Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas present fly over the city and get what the Ghost calls "a divine view" of people, which is nice, but misses the point of human sympathy and fellow-feeling.

01.03. Last night I watched the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol (conveniently available for streaming on Netflix). This is one of my favorite film versions of the book in general. I think that Scott does a very interesting Scrooge, one that acknowledges an interesting point that is often missed by other performances: Scrooge has a(n underused) sense of humor, and is very self-satisfied. On the other hand, this version underscores an intriguing problem for any film or stage adaptation: how to present the three Spirits in a way that is responsible to the book.

02.01. It should, on the face of it, be simple. First off, the three spirits are all versions of one another (imagine one being at three different stages of life), something that is often obscured in film versions (I'll explain why later). Second, they are all anthropomorphic (though Christmas Past presents some particular challenges). Third, Dickens actually gives detailed descriptions of all three. Fourth and finally, even where Dickens' description provides some ambiguity, film ought to be able to overcome or integrate them. But in all of these cases, interestingly, there has developed a sort of tradition about how to present them, and subsequent productions incorporate or respond to preceding ones, rather than to the text.

02.02. So, the three Ghosts:

1. Ghost of Christmas Past: is an old man or a young child (though the latter impression is primarily based on its size - it appears as if viewed from far away) with long, flowing white hair (and, despite being described as an old man, the skin is unwrinkled). Dressed in a white tunic, with the hems embroidered colorfully with "summer flowers," and wearing a lustrous belt; its arms, hands, legs and feet are all bare. Holds a branch of holly in one hand, and carries a (one imagines oversized) candle extinguisher under its arm. From the crown of its head shot a column of clear, white light. The primary complication with depicting this figure is that it literally flickers, the various elements of its body coming into or out of focus, and even disappearing momentarily (so that sometimes it seemed to have only one leg, at other times twenty, or was a body without a head, or a head without a body, and so forth). This, I have always thought, would have been incredibly difficult on stage (though I think one might be able to simulate some of it with the use of mirrors), but on film shouldn't be particularly difficult at all. (Interesting side note, many critics have observed that elements of this character's appearance are comparable to a blearily seen lit candle -the color, the lit top, the extinguisher nearby - and so there is a minor side-tradition of pushing that through into the visual depiction - in the Zemeckis film the Ghost is literally a vaguely anthropomorphic candle, which rather misses the other features Dickens describes).
   
2. Ghost of Christmas Present: the most often correctly depicted of the three, because this is where the British Father Christmas and the American Santa Claus show a common ancestry or type. This Spirit is a "giant" young man with dark brown hair, worn long (it is unclear if he is bearded in the written text, but the earliest illustrated edition, which had Dickens' approval, depicts him with a beard - which matches traditional British images of Father Christmas). He wears a dark green robe or mantle trimmed with white fur, which hangs open so one can see his chest. His feet, when visible, are (again) bare. He wears a rusted and empty sword sheath, and is crowned with a holly wreath, on which are several icicles (it's unclear if they hang down or are arranged to stand upright like a crown). He carries in one hand a brightly lit torch shaped like a cornucopia. As his time with Scrooge progresses (in the book they actually walk together, invisible, through the entire twelve days of Christmas, and part at midnight on Twelfth Night), he visibly ages, so that when Scrooge sees him last the Ghost's hair is gray.
3. Ghost of Christmas Future: Is actually not a skeleton, despite the very common decision to show his hands as claws or composed only of bones. In fact, this figure is best imagined as a concealed, younger version of the Ghost of Christmas Present (hidden because the future has not yet come). The reason so many people think it's a skeleton is that the only visible part of its body is a hand, which is sometimes described as "spectral." But that only means "ghostly" and is due to it being a Spirit. If anything, the emphasis on the hands of other two Spirits elsewhere in the text strongly suggest that this should be a young man's hand, made all the more incongruous for being matched to a terrifying tall, dark, entirely obscured figure.
   

02.03. Of these three, only the Ghost of Christmas Past has any features that would be particularly hard to depict (the flickering and the light shooting from the top of his head). But more importantly, we often miss the fact that these figures are all versions of one another. The Zemeckis film has them all depicted by Jim Carrey, but the depictions are so unmoored to the text (especially for Christmas Past) that one cannot see them as a part of a single continuity. In my ideal visuals for a film version, the same actor (who would be different than the person portraying Scrooge) would play all three, and that would neither be obvious (there would be no effort put into bringing this to the viewers' attention) nor would it be obscured other than by the different costumes and activities.

03.01. I'm always struck, upon re-reading A Christmas Carol, about how much Dickens' language has either shaped, or is congruent with, my own ways of thinking about the holiday (his repeated and varyingly oblique references to Christianity notwithstanding - Dickens' religion is a whole other topic). He repeatedly refers to the year as "rolling" or to Christmas as "coming round again," and the circular imagery resonates with my own thinking in that I consider this holiday to have its origins in paying attention to time, to the cycle of seasons, and to the ongoing alternation between darkness and light (if I had my way, we'd celebrate on 21 December, the Winter Solstice). This is one of the reasons why I emphasize the sameness (at different stages) of the Ghosts in A Christmas Carol: they're personified moments in history, the flickering indeterminacy of the Ghost of Christmas Past is the result of being all of the past combined into a single repository image (even if, according to the Ghost, he is there for Scrooge's past in particular). So even as we mark a turning point in the year, we also move forward in time, coming around again to a different version of the same point.

03.02. Dickens also emphasizes shared food far more than presents (the widespread practice of giving presents at Christmas time actually started, in an institutionalized fashion, around the same time Dickens wrote his book): feasting, dancing and games far more than gifts. And Dickens loved giving gifts, so this was clearly a deliberate choice on his part. As I grow older, I find that I prefer Dickens' version more and more; I'm not averse to giving gifts (and, had I the money to do so, would give them quite happily), but I enjoy the social gathering elements of the holidays more. My favorite part of the holiday is actually Christmas Eve, because I've made a point, for years, of going around that day and visiting with friends (those within driving distance) that day, and then spent the evening at my parents' house with my family. Christmas morning is devoted to presents for the kids, which I love watching, but in general I prefer visiting and spending time together to gifting.

04. And that's about it for now.