Ever since Ken Hudson Campbell, playing a jaded but well-meaning Santa (--in his first role, it turns out), put out his butt and pulled up his beard to accommodate one last request (in Home Alone of course), I, and perhaps every adult American my age, have been uniquely attuned to Hollywood’s penchant for ironizing — prematurely, some would say — the myths and fairy tales that would otherwise populate our youth. Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) himself seems designed to embody this perplexing contradiction. An immature, rascally troublemaker, on the one hand, and a grown-up-too-fast adult on the other, he brings to life, as a character and as a concept, a happy, if impossible, reconciliation of two stages of life collapsed into one.
Though this kind of character probably isn’t quite as new as we think it is, its enduring popularity signals a uniquely post-modern turn in its development. Today’s family film and the recent string of Disney animations all seem to make concerted use of this formula. Just think of the ‘family’ Santa film genre. Nearly every one that’s come out in the last thirty years — Santa Claus (1985), the The Santa Clause trilogy (1994, 2002, 2006), Fred Claus (2007) — is built around some ironic, disenchanting reinterpretation that ends, sure enough, with a sentimental attempt at recuperation. But why, we should ask, is it so important for children to view Santa through a specifically bureaucratic, legal, or corporate lens? Is it enough to say that the Santa myth has merely been ‘reimagined’ or ‘adapted’ to modern sensibilities?
We do, I think, live in an age of snark, as David Denby put its. His May 2007 review of Shrek the Third is in this regard illustrative.
But there’s a mystery here. Did the girl’s parents read to her from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen? Has she seen “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” or any of the other drippy-beautiful Disney animated features, with their butterflies and wondrous glades and shimmering harp glissandos? DreamWorks must assume that she has, and has no tender feelings for them, because the “Shrek” movies are filled with parodies of the old, honeyed Disney style. The parents may get more of the jokes than the children do, but the kids are being fed non-stop satirical hobbledehoydom, in which past and present, Gothic dungeons and Valley Girl talk, are all jumbled together. The “Shrek” phenomenon is one of those seeming oddities in our culture—children being entertained with derision before they’ve been ravished by awe. Maybe seven isn’t too early for irony after all. “Shrek” is postmodernism for towheads, pastiche for the potty-trained.
Does our culture, as a general rule, expose children to the parody before exposing them to the object parodied? And if so, why? Do the writers even realize that the children aren’t actually seeing Santa as ironically translated into a legal-bureaucratic milieu but only Santa-as-bureaucrat (with no prior model to deviate from, ironically)? Or is this no different from how it’s always been done — i.e. every new version of an old myth can only appear ironic? After all, isn’t this just what they said about Disney’s Pinocchio, vis-a-vis the darker, less toothless short story on which it’s based?
Recent Comments