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| Bridgewater-Raritan HS's Scourge |
To get back to the kid's thing. If kids could have any wish, could be anything they wanted, more than anything they'd want to be adults. They don't ever imagine themselves as kids. There wasn't a single kid in STAR WARS because Lucas understood this (but then forgot it). Boys especially want to see themselves as men, not as wide-eyed kiddies. Misunderstanding this fundamental rule of viewer identification processes led to the idiotic decision to create sidekicks like Robin and Superboy and all those movies where we don't just see what a kid would imagine, but a kid imagining it.
I mention all this because Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of those men children want to be. His overly muscular body is almost a burlesque of how kids confuse muscles with prowess; we love his comically stern accent; his straightforward way with a catch phrase, wherein you can't tell if he gets the joke or not. But in JINGLE, Arnold is just an ordinary gym owner/personal trainer and largely absentee father, avoiding his son's karate performance because (subconsciously) it would mean some other athlete getting the applause. Arnold thinking he can get away with being an average suburban dad in the first place makes him suspect. He's like a reverse superhero alter-ego with no superhero to turn into but also totally unconvincing as a normal person.
Arnold needs to realize he is not, and has never been, an average dad figure. He is not all-American Joe material, if he was, why would we bother paying to see him? In the symbolic structure of the film, though, being unaverage is a crime tantamount to neglect and he must atone by finding an unavailable/sold out super hero action figure for his emotionally blackmailing son, the superhero itself a burlesque of impotent male (child) rage. Arnold wants to be his son's action figure, but such a character is defined (in a child's mind) by his absence. And in the guilt trip nanny state PC 90's a absence is tantamount to neglect, so he has to bow down to a plastic imitation of himself because his son prefers the totemic imitation phallus to his dad's genuine absence. It's a bit like Jesus being told he's not a good messiah unless he buys all his disciples Christmas presents, for his own birthday.
JINGLE has hints of turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself (which Guy Debord dubbed détournement - often expressed via subversive graffiti on advertising or re-word ballooning comic strips): the film digs a canal into the rotting roots of the American capitalist frenzy Xmas tooth, only to fill it at the last minute with souvenir gift items available for purchase in the lobby. Like any good capitalist product, JINGLE knows how to incorporate its critique against itself within itself.
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| my attempt at a detournement |
In short he is the worst thing about American foreign policy, the living embodiment of America as perceived by Communist and third world countries, so frenzied in our consumption and desire we trample every country who gets in the way, barging in wherever we smell oil and trampling any ecosystem that dares gets in the way like it's some slow-moving old lady shopper.
I imagine we're supposed to sympathize with Arnold's amok American dad, but the only ones who could possibly relate are the Hollywood elite who aren't off their cell phones more than a few minutes a year, and would be as dumbstruck as Arnold is if they suddenly had to do their own Christmas shopping (fine in itself, but don't expect our sympathy). It would be more believable if Arnold was a toy come to life, fresh out of the box, believing his own cover story, like a Buzz Lightyear or post-Recall Quaid than how it is here, where he's supposed to have been present at this family suburban house since you know, before his kid was even born.
When all his feigned ignorance and willful bull-in-a-china-shop methods fail, Arnold eventually solves it all by becoming the real life version of toy, by positing himself as the kind of father who's not afraid to use a jet pack to trash an African American family's living room as they're sitting down for Xmas eve dinner, praying, Arnold missing their heads for their heads are lowered in prayer, the only mention of God or Jesus anywhere in the film --all to prevent another African American from stealing the toy he's (unfairly) awarded to his own son by endangering the lives of pedestrians through his unauthorized flight. Needless to say, this was before 9/11 and now his behavior seems more unnerving than comical, like showing your son you love him by leaving unmarked black suitcases around an airport. We don't need satires and jet packs any more to point out the monstrosity of consumer-driven Xmas, just look at this:
Who is to blame for this madness?
1) TOY MARKETING STRATEGIES: Perhaps it makes sense from a PR standpoint for toy companies to deliberately limit production on certain popular toys to drive the demand up, but in a country like America where everyone's self-worth hinges on providing their child with whatever they 'wish' for, it can create real stress on the national fibre. There's no reason that the most productive country in the world (China) can't meet the demands of the most demanding country in the world (U.S.) so the blame becomes personal. Movies themselves do this all the time. Disney lets their classic titles go "into the vault" to drive up resale value and ensure higher sales during releases / promotions, and certain rarefied cult director iconoclasts insist on releasing their own films on their own label, like David Lynch or Russ Meyer, ensuring the price never gets too low and avoiding middleman and PR fees. But kids don't understand supply and demand. They only know that if they don't get the toy they want, there is no Santa, and so they may as well become a derelict drug addict.
2) MEASURING-UP ANXIETIES: I don't have kids so I don't quite understand, but from movies like JINGLE I glean a certain fear of measuring up to some paternal ideal that, to be honest, I don't remember seeing when I was a kid in the 70's. Parents once looked after their own good time first (as on MAD MEN) and got us some, not all, presents we wanted. To get us all was considered bad form, 'spoiling' us. Overall we were much more bored than kids today. We had no internet or cell phones. But, in knowing our father didn't need us to feel validated, we at least felt secure. We could hate him with all our might for not giving us a certain toy, but he made sure the electricity stayed on, and our beds were warm and there, ready for sleeping in. Arnold's kid might get the toy he wanted but pays for the luxury with a great deal of collateral anxiety. If the son says he wants a jet ski, for example, and the next day one is waiting in the driveway, what a great dad! But then the kid feels guilty because he sees dad's car is missing, clearly having been sold to pay for the jet ski. Now the kid can't even get a ride to the lake to use it. The indulgent yet largely absent father figure granting consumer good wishes at the cost of security and genuine nurturing, using presents the way moviegoers use their coats to hold their place while they go get popcorn.
3) NO ONE LEARNS THE RIGHT LESSON FROM CAESAR MILAN: If you don't assert your dominance over your dog, your dog assumes you are weak and thus feels he must take over as pack leader, which makes your dog a nervous wreck --how can a dog take care of a family when he can't even open the front door? Kids with needy parents wind up in the same position. Adults are able to navigate the social order and assess dangers far better than dogs or children. But if they are too weak-willed to be stern and authoritarian when need be, then the children or dogs feel, however unconsciously, that they have to step in. This is why the red states are so unnerved when Obama bows and scrapes before other dignitaries. They know that if a leader is too skittish to make big tough unpopular decisions, if he is dependent on constant validation, then we can't chillax knowing he's got it covered.
Arnold in JINGLE is just such a weak pack leader, illustrated perfectly when he calls his wife to tell her his car is totaled in pursuit of the doll, and Hartman answers the phone saying he's eating Arnold's wife's cookies while she takes a shower. Arnold shouts into the phone: "Put that cookie down! Now!" It's gone on to become quite the meme and gives Arnold the quid pro quo revenge excuse he needs to Grinch up Phil's tree :
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While we're expected to root for Arnold, it's actually rival doll-seeker and uncouth mailman Sinbad who is the most complex and the only one worthy of sympathy: first he's the only one at the store who doesn't sneer at Arnold's confusion over the absence of Turbo Men. He even offers to join forces, an offer which Arnold coldly rejects. As we're treated to then-relatively unusual sights like people macing and tazing each other over items at the department store, what's most amazing and sad is how completely oblivious Arnold is to the idea that he is not the only dad in the world who waited too long, that he is just another dopey sucker paying capitalism's harshest price for waiting to buy but buy. He genuinely believes it's his right as an American dad to use excessive force in pursuit of his individual needs, never questioning the rightness of his Coal and Switches Symplex. Even having a coffee with Sinbad, his only friend, guarantees nothing: Arnold shoves the poor mailman aside to be the first caller into a radio station then seems genuinely shocked and hurt when Sinbad does the same to him.
But I adore that, after he hits bottom, Arnold shares a beer with the reindeer he knocked out the previous shot. It's his moment of alleged redemption, making up for decades of bad blood between him and the animal kingdom from when he drunkenly punched out a camel in CONAN. And even if it skirts around being a total anti-consumerist parable, I applaud the film's brutal satirization of the consumer mindset and the Coal Switches Syndrome, even while endorsing each in the end. That's the unique problem of a country with a free press, namely that once an institution incorporates its own critique, it nulls all criticism by depicting the critic criticizing it, of having the thing itself critique its own thinghood. There's nothing left to say because it's already been said, like the kid who punches himself in the face so the bully doesn't get him first. Arnold wouldn't know about that, because he would never punch himself in the face, but can only fight big guys and have it be fair....just like Rock Hudson has to wait until the end of GIANT before he finally finds someone in his same height and weight class. (Sinbad comes close, as does this guy:)
The point is, fatherhood's integrity takes a bullet in the name of commercial fetishization and makes us wonder: who is it that thinks kids most want to see parents suffering indignities on their behalf? The same idiots who think kids want to see kids seeing at all? Arnold's kid is an emotional blackmailer --he NEEDS to have his father not get him the action figure; he needs to feel that terrible sting and get over it, it's part of the maturation process. But this is a kid's movie for kidswho don't understand that emotional blackmail only hurts themselves in the end. Adults like Arnold in JINGLE are not avatars of how boys want to imagine themselves, but stooges, cautionary tales, figures of revenge. Comical, neutered, pleading, desperate, pissing themselves in vain attempts to win their children's fickle favor. Ideally, kid audiences should should be sickened by this horrible reversal. A kid trying to impress his father is natural and helps both parties grow, but a father trying to impress a kid is unnatural and stunts the world, for the kids now have nowhere to grow but down. This is what feminism, the nanny state, equal rights, maternity leave, and anti-smoking legislation hath wrought; they have taken the balls from out the father and then kicked him where they used to be, saying 'if they were there, man that would hurt, so you're welcome!'
A very handicapped man once said "we let 'em smoke, vote and drive, even put 'em in pants! And what do we get? Russian roulette on the highway, a Democrat in the White House, you can't even tell male from female.... unless you meet 'em head on."
That old man was played by Stuart Lancaster, and the movie was the Russ Meyer's 1965's FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL! It's currently out of print, but if ever there was an Xmas movie worth running someone over for it's this one. RIP Haji... you were some kind of a woman... and ballsier than most men.
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