Introduction

Sure, A Christmas Story is not the end-all, be-all of classic American pictures (hell, it really isn’t even the end-all, be-all of Christmas movies; this respectfully goes to A Charlie Brown Christmas or a little movie directed by Frank Capra). However, what it lacks in technical brilliance it makes up for in a charming, meandering story about the nature of nostalgia and the spirit of an America long gone. It looks at the past through a rose-tinted glass, with pangs of modern-day cynicism creeping in every now and then courtesy of director Bob Clark’s sinister sense of humor. From the moment the mother (played by Melissa Dillon) tastes the soap and immediately spits it out to the wide-angle POV shot of a dimestore Santa Claus callously kicking Ralphie down a slide to his doom, it is littered with moments of grotesque intrigue that have made it a wonderful mainstay in American pop culture.

The Parker family is comprised of a trio of outstanding actors. Melissa Dillon (who originated the role of Honey in a Tony-nominated performance of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and who was nominated for an Oscar for her role as the mother whose children are abducted by aliens in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind) plays Ralphie's mother. She is high-strung as hell, unbearably doting, but has a zaniness to her character that makes her an object of pity and amazement. Darren McGiven (whose notable roles include playing the American tourist in David Lean's best work Summertime and the title role in the TV series Kolchak, the Night Stalker) is The Old Man, Ralphie’s father. He seems oblivious to his family’s Christmas spirit, instead more obsessed with his arousing Leg Lamp with the fishnet stocking than anything that his son might conjure up. And Ralphie himself is played twice: in live-action by the googly-eyed Peter Billingsley, and in two-fisted reflexive voiceover by Jean Shepard, whose writings inspired the movie.

The film itself is a pastiche of loosely connected subplots and stories that encapsulate the doe-eyed wonder of a 1940s Christmas as seen through the eyes of little boy Ralphie. It makes one more aware of the nature of nostalgia: how what we might remember today may become irrelevant as early as tomorrow. It is intriguing because it is a museum relic of a museum relic: it captures the deceitful wholesomeness of the era (Ovaltine commercials, esoteric knowledge about the Lone Ranger) in an era which is now degenerating into the recesses of today’s minds as equally innocent. “I wish I could live back in [Current year – 40],” is the wish of everybody who watched the movie in 1983, and those who watch it today. But Bob Clark wisely keeps his distance whenever he can. Besides his humor, what better example comes up for this than the film’s penultimate sequence? The Parker family has just had Christmas dinner ruined for them by manic dogs, and are forced to spend it with the Chinese restaurant which is open on Christmas Day. In a sustained long take, Clark’s camera is positioned outside the window of the establishment as the workers serenade the Parkers with a dubiously-racist rendition of “Deck the Halls” (Fa-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra!) The Chinese owner is perturbed at their inability to pronounce the “L” sound, while the chef comes out with their banquet: a lone Peking duck, whose head is promptly chopped off in front of the Parkers to the horror of Mrs. Parker. Clark seems to suggest that with the nostalgia we have of the past, we must remember that them golden days weren’t really that golden to begin with. He keeps his distance, both figuratively and litereally, in A Christmas Story to show people how the past isn’t really what we glorify it as.

And yet, the cycle continues.

OUR FEATURE PRESENTATION

A Christmas Story, directed by Bob Clark,. written by Clark, Jean Shepherd, and Leigh Brown.

Starring Melinda Dillon (Mrs. Parker), Darren McGavin (The Old Man), and Peter Billingsley (Ralphie Parker).