A mason jar full of tea sat near my left elbow. The tea’s assignment was to keep me alert on this short and dark December day. My headphones pumped Brandenburg concerti into my ears; their beauty and symmetry would help me focus. And then I began to read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for the umpteenth time.
I was rereading ACC because I had just watched Spirited, an Apple Studios, 2022 retelling of the Dickens classic. In spite of its star power, Spirited is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Its failure struck me as symptomatic of the influence of Woke and the West’s abandonment of its roots.
The West’s increasing retreat from the Judeo-Christian tradition has inspired much discussion. Will we discover that Dostoyevsky is correct, and “If there is no God, everything is permitted”? Our traditions, though, have affected more than our morality. Narrative, that is, the stories we tell, the stories that direct our lives, and the stories that simply make sense to us have been fashioned by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Anyone doubting this need only sample traditional narratives from the Ancient Pagan Mediterranean, Africa, East Asia, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. Characters, plots, and structure differ so greatly from those found in traditional Western novels that an American reader might not even recognize a traditional text as a story at all. When I assigned such material to my students, they were overwhelmed and confused. The words on the page were in English, but the stories’ scaffolding, their worldview, were untranslatable.
There are many ways to conceive of human life. One way, popular in India, sees life as a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; note the wheel at the center of the Indian flag. The Christian view of a human life is a straight-line trajectory. A human is born, once. He is a unique individual empowered to make choices, and he responsible for those choices. He then dies, once, after which he inhabits the eternity his choices dictate.
Confession requires Catholics to meditate on their actions and motivations. A plot emerges, one that demands individual change: one is a sinner; one chooses confession; one is purified. That focus on the interior life of even common people, and that past, present, future plot trajectory, when applied to literature, populated novels with dynamic, individual, choice-making characters, characters capable of change, characters not found in literatures more focused on transcendence or on a rigid and unchanging group, rather than individual, identity. In a Western narrative, a slave can be a hero, a handsome person can be wicked, and characters can behave in ways contrary to the position they were born into.
Rereading A Christmas Carol surprised me. Given that I’d seen multiple adaptations, and have committed some lines to memory, I expected the reading to be a boring chore. In fact my mind and heart were Dickens’ playthings from the first line. I felt real goosebumps; I laughed; I’m not ashamed to admit that I shed real tears. News flash – this Dickens guy is a great writer.
I had remembered ACC as a secular text, about as religious as a shopping mall Santa. In fact ACC is suffused with Christianity. For example, the three spirits can be seen as an allusion to the Trinity. Scrooge is to be visited over the course of three days; an allusion to Jesus’ time in the tomb.
“Marley was dead”: the first three words. Dickens’ emphasis on Marley’s death, and that death as a terminal condition, is abundantly Christian. Marley lived his life badly. He was suffering an afterlife of pain for his bad choices. He would never reincarnate, never dissolve into the Atman, never fade into nothingness as those on earth who knew him forgot him. Not all Christians believe in an eternal Hell of torment, but certainly that is the dominant view, and without that Christian view, ACC would make zero sense.
Christophobes like to bash Christianity for this understanding of human life and destiny. In fact the Hell implied in ACC is a very flattering concept, one that vivifies lives if understood correctly. We humans matter. The creator of the universe is lovingly noting our every thought and action. We are powerful; we write our own fates. We can, with the turn of a heart, earn an eternity in paradise. A conviction of personal meaninglessness torments many. The Christian concept of eternity suffuses human life with deep meaning.
“God save you,” Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, calls out to him, early in the tale. That’s exactly what transpires in the following pages. God saves Scrooge. Again, a loving God intervenes to rescue us from our own bad choices, while never taking away from us our free will to make those bad choices. Fred reminds Scrooge of the day’s real meaning. Christmas is “due veneration” because of “its sacred name and origin.” Because of that, on Christmas, we should be “kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant.” At Christmas, we should remember that even those persons of different social stations to ourselves are “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” This insistence on equality is a very Christian idea.
The opening pages of ACC repeatedly emphasize how dark the day is. “The fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages … The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible.” Of course it’s dark; the sun would set in London before four p.m. on a late December day. Dickens’ dark is astronomically accurate but it’s also symbolic. Scrooge is living in the dark; the salvation offered by the God who is the light of the world will, at the end of the tale, brighten Scrooge’s vision.
Dickens cites Satan as the antagonist of Saint Dunstan, who gained fame by besting Satan in their repeated folkloric encounters. Clearly, Dickens wants us to know he is telling us a fabulous tale, a scary tale, a funny tale, but ultimately a tale about the battle between good and evil.
When Marley haunts Scrooge, Marley’s face “came like the ancient Prophet’s rod.” The prophet here is Moses. Moses famously offers pharaoh multiple opportunities to save himself, just as Marley offers Scrooge the same opportunities. Marley is terrifying, but Scrooge had previously been offered, by Fred, an invitation to the joy of Christmas. He rejected the God of joy, so now he gets the God of wrath.
When Marley’s ghost unwraps the scarf around his face, “its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!” I don’t know if Dickens intended an allusion to Robespierre, famous and deadly enemy of Christianity, but it’s what I thought of. When the machine of Terror that Robespierre had enabled finally arrested him, he attempted to shoot himself, but he only damaged his jaw. At the guillotine, the executioner removed Robespierre’s bandage and his damaged jaw fell.
Marley, even as a ghost, expresses that emphasis on individuality that is the signature of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Hinduism your reincarnation is significantly dictated by your caste. Marley, though, writes his own eternity. His Hell is his own “incessant torture of remorse.” God isn’t torturing Marley; Marley is torturing Marley. His fellow damned souls make “wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory.” Even after death, there is a “self” to accuse. Even the damned retain individuality in the afterlife. This is a Christian concept. One damned soul attempts to help a starving mother and child; this is an allusion to Luke 16:19-31.
Marley says that his job wasn’t just to worship; it was “to do unto the least of these as I have done unto you.” That is, as Marley puts it, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.” Light could have saved Marley, had he but seen it. “Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!”
No one believes that there was a real man named Scrooge who was visited by three spirits. And yet the tale raises real goosebumps. How? Dickens’ ample mastery includes his ability to tell deep truths in the midst of entertaining fantasy. Scrooge is believable as a sarcastic bastard who has convinced himself that he has all the answers. “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” he asks, when asked to donate to the poor. Like an arrogant New Atheist, Scrooge has a snarky comeback for everything. When Scrooge drops the snark and begins to exhibit fear, the reader feels that something serious is going on. When Scrooge, visiting his own lonely childhood, wishes he could relive the moment when he was offered the chance to be kind to a poor child singing Christmas Carols, but was, instead, cruel, this reader cried real tears. A moment as real as a flower blossomed from a dry, lifeless page recounting unreal events.
Scrooge is as overwhelmed by his life review as are Dickens’ readers. Still resistant, still clinging to his own ego rather than accepting, with his open hands, the salvation offered to him, Scrooge struggles to kill the light emanating from the head of The Ghost of Christmas Past. “He seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head … the extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.” This passage echoes John 1:5. The next spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, makes its presence known through light. Scrooge is terrified. The spirit, “being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts.”
The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to numerous difficult settings, where the poor work ugly jobs. Even so, they encounter “an air of cheerfulness … that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavored to diffuse in vain.” Men stationed at a remote lighthouse “had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea.” Humans’ choice to embrace and spread light, in spite of the misery of immediate circumstances, “was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death.” Again and again, the poorest of the poor are endowed with the ability to change their fates. No, they can’t snap a finger and become rich, fathom life’s imponderables, or evade death; rather, than can choose to focus on the light offered them, and to spread that light. Dickens not only harkens back to John 1:5 here. He prefigures Viktor Frankl’s insights in Man’s Search for Meaning.
Dickens, the magician, packs a powerful punch in the visit of the final spirit. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his own death. Again, we know this is fantasy; we know neither this encounter nor anything like it has ever occurred. But Dickens moves us to our core. How?
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge a corpse. The corpse’s face is covered. “The cover was so carelessly adjusted that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon Scrooge’s part, would have disclosed the face. He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it; but had no power to withdraw the veil … there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.”
Dickens invites us into Scrooge’s arrogant, pathetic, ego-based self-delusion; that depiction of a frail human ego, a self-satisfied atheist who has all the answers, too rigid and timid to accept the vast and overwhelming reality of the Divinity, is what moves us. The reader knows that Scrooge is witnessing his own death and its ugly aftermath. Scrooge can’t accept this, and so he refuses to see this, and he attempts to bargain with this spirit’s revelations. Scrooge is not just afraid of death. He is afraid that death is indeed not the end, as he has told himself. There will be an afterlife; there will be a reckoning; there will be an eternity when he himself will choose to bear the consequences of his earthly arrogance, cowardice, and refusal to accept the light.
When I was reading this encounter, I was not just deeply moved; I was in awe of Dickens’ authorial skill. Scrooge, the “old screw,” will be changed by an encounter with the truth – a motif that would certainly occur in a scrupulously realistic text. In fact that is the narrative that is supposed to occur in Freudian psychoanalysis.
Dickens closes this encounter with defiant words. Death is not the big deal. The big deal is that a man has lived his life hiding from the light. Men who embrace the light can indeed say, with Chaplain John Donne, “Death be not proud.” Dickens declares, “It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!”
“Golden sunlight” floods the scene after Scrooge’s conversion. Scrooge “went to church,” and then performed acts of charity. ACC begins “Marley was dead;” it ends, “God bless Us, Every One!” ACC would simply not make any sense without the underpinning of a Judeo-Christian worldview.
Spirited is a 2022, Apple Studios remake of A Christmas Carol. It stars Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. Ferrell is Scrooge, who, in this version, has been haunting people on Christmas for almost 200 years, successfully convincing them to reform their lives. Ryan Reynolds is Clint, an unscrupulous political operative whom Scrooge attempts to reform. Spirited was directed, co-written, and co-produced by Sean Anders. Its runtime is two hours, seven minutes.
Spirited is an inept and incoherent jumble. Bodies and objects, plot points and attitudes galumph around the screen like drunken dinosaurs in a hopelessly misguided ballet class. The film includes maudlin tear-jerking, failed attempts at humor – example – “It’s weird to see a Canadian without mittens” – refusals to commit to anything authentically human, a musical quote from Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, an allusion to Busby Berkely dance routines and to the movie Elf, cameos by Judi Dench and Jimmy Fallon, and product placement ads for the French-beauty-care brand Sephora.
The narrative keeps running off the rails. Characters begin songs or dances and another character says don’t sing or dance now. Scene aborted. During a genuinely spooky scene, a character makes a sarcastic comment; scene aborted. A song begins; a character breaks the fourth wall and explains to the audience, “This is a musical.” Scene aborted. Suddenly a troupe of overweight tap dancers start their stomp, stomp, stomp, strenuously attempting to communicate, perhaps through morse code.
Why is Ferrell’s Scrooge wearing basketball sneakers and an unstructured quilted jacket that looks most like a Mao suit? No idea. Sunita Mani, The Ghost of Christmas Past and the token Asian, wears a red night shirt, an oversize, misshapen white hoodie, bare legs and ankle-high boots. Why is she – and no one else – costumed thus? Ask the tap dancers.
The tonal shifts are as jarring as the shifts in sets and costumes. Spirited depicts two deaths by suicide, alcoholic parental abuse – involving a puppy, no less, cancer, and a burning human being running from a bombing. All this is interspersed with smug sarcasm that is never funny enough to justify its callous intrusions into what are transparent, unearned manipulations of the audience.
Dickens, in Scrooge, gave us a believable villain. Spirited just gives us cute, charming, smug Ryan Reynolds being cute, charming, smug Ryan Reynolds. He displays the same twinkly eyes and dimples he displays in romantic comedies. He does not require redemption, so the plot stalls.
Ferrell, as Scrooge, never so much as attempts an English accent. Reynolds, playing an American, does attempt a Cockney accent so wretched that he makes Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins sound like Michael Caine.
The lead actors attempt to sing and dance. They fail. Apparently the idea that one should be able to sing and dance to star in a musical is another antiquated, elitist -ism that we must reject.
It’s as if Samuel Beckett, who gave us the absurdist drama Waiting for Godot, where the choppy undermining of Western narrative’s traditional trajectory is actually the whole point, had written a Christmas story.
In the original Christmas Carol, “Marley is dead” is the first sentence and death is a narrative fulcrum. In Spirited, characters choose to die and come back to life. Clint dies; no matter; he still hangs out in the mortal world. Scrooge is dead. On a whim, he returns to the physical world. He then attempts suicide. He then takes on a new human life.
In Dickens’ ACC, “good” and “bad” are objective realities, and there is an important difference between the two. In Spirited, Scrooge (Ferrell) regrets that “I’ve been obsessed with wrong and right.” Smug and charming Clint (Reynolds) has taught Scrooge that “the line between good and bad is not so clean.”
In the original, the spirits exercise the authority of weighty truth, a truth Scrooge must acknowledge when he confronts death in the form of his own corpse. In Spirited, the spirits sent to save Clint exercise no authority. They are awkward failures. Clint sexually seduces Mani, the Ghost of Christmas Past. Clint makes a laughingstock of Scrooge, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and drives him to suicide. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, as voiced by Tracy Morgan, is a wannabe stand-up comic whose so-funny-I-forgot-to-laugh catch phrases include “Welcome to the Bone Zone.”
In the original Christmas Carol, Scrooge initially makes arrogant snarky comments to fend off his confrontation with truth. In Spirited, Clint’s arrogance and snark are the authority. Ferrell’s Scrooge, who believes in such old fashioned concepts of good and bad, truth and lies, life and death, or sin and redemption is rendered a buffoon.
Again, Catholic confession reinforced a Western concept of telos, of past-present-future. I was a sinner; I am now repenting; I shall soon be redeemed and washed clean. Spirited argues against redemption, against change, and against hope. Ferrell’s Scrooge is stricken with overwhelming depression. Though he has been successfully saving souls for almost two hundred years, sunk in blinding despair, he convinces himself that he is unredeemable, that no one ever changes, that he has never saved anyone, and that he must kill himself.
Modern psychiatry would diagnose Ferrell’s Scrooge as suffering from major depressive disorder. Catholicism teaches that when a mentally healthy person despairs, he denies God’s ability to redeem his creations; thus, in a healthy mind (as opposed to one crippled by mental dysfunction) the conscious choice to despair is a sin. In Spirited, Ferrell decides to kill himself after initiating a romance with Kimberly (Octavia Spencer), a vulnerable woman who would no doubt be destroyed by her loved one’s decision.
Spirited, meant to be a bouncy Christmas Carol update, in its rejection of God’s salvation, plunges its characters into a completely different conception of time, and therefore narrative. If, in the world of Spirited, there is no such thing as good or bad, and people don’t change, and people are unredeemable, we are all doomed perpetually to marinate in our own unchanging, debased natures.
But wait. Spirited does offer a light at the end of the tunnel.
Diversity!
Spirited opens with a subplot that never recurs in the rest of the film. It bashes that modern villain, Karen. “Karen” is a racist, misogynist, Woke insult for white women. In Spirited, a white woman named Karen Blansky – note the Polish last name – is not Woke. Christmas spirts teach her the error of her ways. She resolves to become Woke.
Karen lives on an ice-bound suburban cul-de-sac of McMansions. In the streets, neighbors play ice hockey. The players are a black woman, a Chicano man, and a Chicano child. Well, no. Anyone playing ice hockey in this setting is going to be a young, white male. A black woman and a Chicano man are shoehorned into this scene, not for their own benefit, not to tell their story, but to cover the filmmakers’ backs.
When a ghost first appears to Ryan Reynolds’ Clint, Clint asks, paraphrase, “Why save me? There are worse people.” Who are those worse people? “Racists,” Clint replies. Woke can smash all religious norms, yet sin remains, and its name is racism. Spirited’s demographically dishonest miming of diversity provides redemption.
Scrooge works with a team of soul savers. One, for no discernable reason, speaks Japanese to a character who speaks only English. Similarly, characters briefly speak Spanish and French, again to English speakers. One man sports an elaborate braided hairdo; another man wears a mustache, dangling earrings, and a supercilious look; the suggestion is that these men are transgendered.
Ferrell’s Scrooge, who assumes the “Ghost of Christmas Present” role, is a white man; Christmas past, Sunita Mani, is an Asian woman; Christmas yet to come is a black man: the diversity trifecta.
Ferrell’s Scrooge is always the center of attention. Mani and Morgan, the Asian woman and the black man, are never more than afterthoughts. Their identities mean nothing. Their roles could have been assigned the identity of Eskimos or Greek diner owners or Basque shepherds; there would be no need to change a single line of dialogue or a stitch of their costumes.
An Indian-American’s story might involve immigration, high hopes, arranged marriage, caste, and advanced placement classes in STEM. No effort is made to weave that unique story into the plot. The filmmakers merely exploit Mani’s brown skin and big, dark eyes as a corrupt purchased indulgence that earns Ferrell and Reynolds their ticket to the Heaven of stardom.
Dickens describes The Ghost of Christmas Past in detail. That ghosts’s appearance serves the narrative in a vital way. Remove Dickens’ description of how this ghost looks and the narrative is the weaker for that exclusion. Mani’s Asian appearance and her random costume mean exactly nothing. In place of a contribution that advances the plot, Spirited leaves an empty space. Those who enjoy Mani’s presence enjoy her presence not because of story, not because of art, but because her presence allows themselves to pat themselves on the back about how “tolerant” they are of “brown” people.
Clint first appears at a convention of Christmas-tree growers in British Columbia, Canada. In some shots, the majority of Christmas tree growers are black or female. In real life, British Columbia is one percent black, and, in real life, the majority of Christmas tree growers are white men.
Spirited features a dance-free, song-free “song-and-dance” number set in Victorian England. Oliver Twist, a famous fictional character, makes a cameo appearance. Twist begs Reynolds and Ferrell, “May I have some more?” This line comes from Dickens’ novel. Oliver Twist, a starving workhouse orphan, begs for food. Here is that scene:
The gruel was served out … The gruel disappeared … Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity,
“Please, sir, I want some more.”
The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds … The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.
“What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.
“Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”
The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle …
“That boy will be hung,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. “I know that boy will be hung.”
Dickens is recording the very real starvation that the poor faced. In Spirited, the starving boy’s appeal is a joke; it is made to rhyme with “whore.”
A-List celebrities, Reynolds and Ferrell, two white men, dominate the foreground. Behind them, in many shots, the majority of Victorians are black. Their black faces serve one purpose, They are there to provide forgiveness to the filmmakers for starring two white men.
Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist may have been inspired by the life of Robert Blincoe, “At four Blincoe was abandoned to a workhouse, never to see his family again. At seven, he was sent 200 miles north to work in one of the cotton mills of the dawning industrial age. He suffered years of unrelenting abuse, a life dictated by the inhuman rhythm of machines.”
William Blake also wrote of England’s children, virtually enslaved to deadly labor.
“My father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ” ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.”
The treatment of child chimney sweeps, aged between five and ten years old, was abusive and, ultimately, deadly. See here.
“In London, in 1830, the average life span for middle to upper-class males was 44 years, 25 for tradesman and 22 for laborers. Fifty-seven of every 100 children in working class families were dead by five years of age.” At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, height differences between the rich and poor increased to five inches. The poor were so much shorter than the rich because they were malnourished.
In America, Lewis Hine exposed the dark side of child labor. My dad was one of those kids; he was a child coal miner. Children were chosen because they could fit into narrow mine shafts. Like many who grew up poor, my dad was short; raised in a different America, his sons all grew to over six feet.
Photos convey what words cannot. Please view this photo of a child in Victorian England, his back scarred from abuse. Similar photographs from the Liverpool City Library document the lives of real children like the fictional Oliver Twist.
The filmmakers’ choice to depict Victorians as blacks is inaccurate. Victorian England was majority white. The workhouse widows and orphans, the street urchins about whom Dickens wrote with such power and such impact, children like Tiny Tim who sickened and died from malnutrition, were white. That Apple Studios distorts reality to serve Woke is what the Woke themselves would call “cultural appropriation.” And they would call it something worse were anyone ever to commit the obscenity of staging a song-and-dance number on an antebellum plantation and depicting the slaves as majority white, and their pain as the punchline of an obscene joke.
There is a well-placed, diverse actor and character in Spirited. Academy-Award-winner Octavia Spencer is a 52-year-old, fat, black woman. In Spirited, she plays Kimberly, who performs opposition research for Clint, research that could damage people’s lives. Kimberly is conflicted about her work, calling herself a “terrible person.” She does it, though, because her mother was a cleaning woman, and she regards her high salary as a sign that she has achieved “The American Dream.” We look at Spencer, see her ethnicity, her age, and her physical condition, and we know that if Kimberly were to quit her morally questionable job, she’d never find any other job that would pay as well. In this case, the actor’s appearance is not just Woke window-dressing. The actor’s appearance serves the narrative.
Who is the God of Spirited’s High Church of Woke, and where is Spirited’s Heaven? God is a filmmaker. Heaven is a movie studio. Scrooge and his soul-saving colleagues produce cinema. Throughout the film, Scrooge and his fellow soul-savers speak movie-industry jargon into head sets. They say things like “Cue scene,” “That’s a wrap,” “Cut!” and “Costume department.” Assistant producers, after hauntings, deliver coffee. In a literal sense, Spirited’s filmmakers jettison the Judeo-Christian tradition and replace it with themselves, that is, with Hollywood.
But wait, there’s more. Clint is killed when he stops Scrooge from committing suicide by standing in front of a bus. The bus hits Clint instead. Clint replaces Scrooge in the heavenly movie studio. He applies his skills as a political operative to doing the work of saving racist white Karens. But not only. He tells one of his co-producers that he wants a Ramadan Carol and a Hanukkah Carol. Because ya know inclusion. Here Spirited treats Islam and Judaism exactly as it treated the black women in the ice hockey scene, the black women at the British Columbia Christmas tree growers conference, the blacks in the Victorian crowd scene, Sunita Mani and Tracy Morgan.
You want a scene with black people playing sports in the streets? Basketball. And not a suburban cul-de-sac crowded with McMansions, but an urban playground. You want a conference scene featuring black women? Not a Christmas tree growers’ conference, but a conference of church ladies or small business owners. You want a holiday story honoring Judaism or Islam? Judaism and Islam are not Christianity. They are their own religions with their own worldviews, narratives, heroes, and value systems.
When, at the end of Spirited, Ryan Reynolds announces that he wants Ramadan and Hanukkah versions of A Christmas Carol, he is not being truly diverse or inclusive. Rather, he is exploiting Islam and Judaism to trumpet his own inclusiveness. In fact he is suppressing the unique, non-Christian identity of Judaism and Islam. All diversity is absorbed into the Woke Borg. Ironically, the real story of Hanukkah exactly is resistance to any such absorption.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
Thank you for the spoilers lol, and saving my grandchildren the pain of watching this.
I took out a free subscription to Apple TV and can confirm that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing on there without a political woke message being thrown into your face. Every single thing we watched was the same, they have some amazingly beautiful scenery but nothing entertaining.
The “Woke Borg” says it all. Thank you for this thoughtful review!
“Narrative, that is, the stories we tell, the stories that direct our lives, and the stories that simply make sense to us have been fashioned by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Anyone doubting this need only sample traditional narratives from the Ancient Pagan Mediterranean… Characters, plots, and structure differ so greatly from those found in traditional Western novels that an American reader might not even recognize a traditional text as a story at all. When I assigned such material to my students, they were overwhelmed and confused.”
Do you mean “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”, Homer? Do you mean Greek and Roman mythology? Do you mean Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes? Have nothing to do with the themes and stories of Western novels, movies, plays, poems, songs, operas, symphonies, or the Western tradition? Your students find them foreign, overwhelming, and confusing? Where do they live, under a rock, or in a cave in the Himalayas?
“This insistence on equality is a very Christian idea.”
“The early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. I must, so to speak, give the angels their due. In particular, the idea that man has a value as an individual — that the individual soul is precious — is essentially a Christian legacy to the West; its first appearance was in the form of the idea that every man, despite Original Sin, is made in the image of God (as against the pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians). But notice a crucial point: this Christian idea, by itself, was historically impotent. It did nothing to unshackle the serfs or stay the Inquisition or turn the Puritan elders into Thomas Jeffersons. Only when the religious approach lost its power — only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy — only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
Read the book. It is quite short and STILL powerful.
Dickens, be his book short or long, is always worth reading. He was one of the greatest of 19th century novelists, in a century that included great novelists of many nationalities.
“The West’s increasing retreat from the Judeo-Christian tradition has inspired much discussion. Will we discover that Dostoyevsky is correct, and “If there is no God, everything is permitted”?”
No, because even if there is no God, there exists immutable reality. In other words, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. A rational morality for living this life one earth successfully, for achieving happiness on earth, moral behavior, is based on accepting and consistently applying that fundamental principle of reality.
Do you want to live? You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Do you want to love and be loved in return? You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Do you want to be happy? You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Do you want to prosper? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
A rational morality for achieving a rational happiness on earth consists of you choosing rational values and then pursuing them rationally which means, WITHOUT CONTRADICTIONS. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
You want to live but you also want to die on a cross for others, you can’t have both. You want to love a virtuous woman but you want to have your side-chick too, you can’t have both. You want to pursue your personal happiness but you have irrationally chosen to define happiness as sacrificing your life to save Muslims in the Muslim world, as Kayla Mueller did, my heart breaks for self-sacrificing Kayla Mueller, but she could not have both.
I think the idea of “without contradictions” — as straightforward as it seems — may have its own problems.
It goes back to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem which says (more or less) that a list of rules can be complete or consistent, but not both. Moving from mathematics to the rest of the world is a big jump, But (at least as far as I’ve been told) it has lead to things like Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem on the incompatibility of (somehow) of ranked-voting and fair voting principles.
Further, I would suggest that perhaps people do not and cannot be purely rational creatures. That we’re largely emotional creatures that then like so spray a thick epoxy resin of rationality over the top of what’s mostly decided on a visceral level.
You’re correct you can not divorce emotions from reason. They are united like brain and mind or hand and fingers. But you can differentiate between them. But this is a skill that has to be learned, acquired, and constantly practiced. Sometimes in the heat of intense anger, intense fear, or some other intense emotion, this is easier said than done, but that does not change the fact that man does possess the capacity for self-awareness, introspection, and self-guidance. To be rational does not mean to repress or get rid of your emotions but become aware of them, inspect them, and guide them.
“An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception . . . .
In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?” – Ayn Rand
It is entirely possible that few have the time or inclination to sit on a lotus flower, and acquire the skills that have to be learned, and constantly practiced.
But since you are truly are the ultimate egghead, at least we know what you do all day. Are there bathroom breaks from the lotus flower?
Every society of the last 500 years that put reason over religious beliefs ended up totalitarian, yes there are still some totalitarian religious regimes but when you remove religion the results are always worse.
Please define reason. So we can establish that we are speaking of the same thing.
The last 500 years? 500 years ago the Aristotelian Renaissance (the rebirth of Aristotelian reason and logic) was at its beginning. It was Thomas Aquinas’ introduction of Aristotelian logic to medieval Christendom that began the end of the Christian Dark Ages.
The Roman Inquisition, Spanish Inquisition, the 300 years of the brutal wars of the Protestant Reformation and Counter Reformation, were not wars based on reasoning about the demonstrable, verifiable, facts of reality. But brutality based on arguments and disagreements based on faith in the supernatural, the undemonstrable, the unverifiable, claims that were and are beyond reason to confirm, to demonstrate, to verify, to understand. God works in mysterious ways they say, a mystery for reason.
What stopped the brutality? The slow and tortuous, growing, ascendancy of reason over faith. Eventually after bloody centuries the religious people finally came to their natural senses and decided that that which could not be proven by reason should be better left to the private discretion of the individual believer. The separation of Church and State was born through reason.
Yes the separation of church and state was based upon reason because individuals abused their power and always do. Convid hysteria and climate change denial being today’s examples. But at the heart of Judaism and Christianity there appears to be individual freedom and personal responsibility and most importantly personal choice.
Who decides what is reasonable and rational?
The Ten Commandments seem to be the heart of all reason, you might not agree with the Honour your parents one but, assuming they are not evil, it is a good idea to respect them.
“Who decides what is reasonable and rational?”
I’ve given you the answer to this question several times because you’ve asked it several times and you keep asking it. I guess the answer goes right over your head or you don’t even bother to take the time to understand the answer.
Should I give you the answer one more time? Is it even worth bothering to do so?
“The Ten Commandments seem to be the heart of all reason, you might not agree with the Honour your parents one but, assuming they are not evil, it is a good idea to respect them.”
A “commandment” is a command from the Almighty Authority, the Almighty Boss, you don’t get to pick and choose how you will interpret a command. A commandment is not a rational moral princile to think about and apply contextually, it’s a comand to OBEY.
You really should stop asking us endlessly to define reason. Who’s reason? your reason? Rand’s reason.
Unfortunately no one will be able to scale the heights of your reason to sufficiently give you the pre-cooked answer you so desperately want and need.
Besides, you beat us over the head on a daily basis with your version of reason.
“I’ve given you the answer to this question several times because you’ve asked it several times and you keep asking it. I guess the answer goes right over your head or you don’t even bother to take the time to understand the answer.”
Oh THX….your answer. And since I refuse to accept your definition of reason why would I understand your answer? You represent the height of conceit
Looks like most folks don’t really accept your version of reason. But hey keep trying.
Insanity is the act doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
You really have a plethora of mental issues don’t you.
Maybe someday you will be offered the three chances that were offered to Scrooge. “Marley is terrifying, but Scrooge had previously been offered, by Fred, an invitation to the joy of Christmas. He rejected the God of joy, so now he gets the God of wrath.”
Now it really doesn’t matter if you believe or not. But if you reject the good you will receive the wrath…..most assuredly.
Good review and thanks…now whatever regrets I have on my death bed, “I wasted two hours of my life watching Spirited” will not be among them.
I guess like a lot of leftist principles, “cultural appropriation” is situational; it’s OK when we do it but if you, say, are not Hispanic but you want to sell tacos, that’s racist or whatever.
As to Ramadan or Chanukah carols, oh, yes, let’s drain religion, everyone’s, of any distinctiveness and just have some sort of mass feel-good mess.
Ok, it’s a strange comparison. I’ll admit it up front. Dickens reminds me a bit of Jiro in the move “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” He’s focused on a narrow thing, but so tightly concentrated and relentless that he reveals all kinds of depths and color and nuance to a thing. In enjoying his book, you’re enjoying something really meant to be read and enjoyed in detail, not gobbled down like a chicken nugget.
In Spirited, it’s like someone looked at Jiro’s restraunt and said, “You know, that’s nice, but not everyone like fish. And this place should be more modern and up-to-date.” And they end up adding hamburgers, tacos, and gyros to the menu. And, in doing that, they annihilated the sushi restaurant, without ever acknowledging the fact that they erased it.
There’s a reason that there’s a choice between breadth and depth. When switching between the two, it’s important to treat the existing setup with tenderness and even fragility. You have to really respect something for what it is before you have any business adding to it.
I think it’s a great comparison.
Thanks Frontpage mag for the warning about Spirited, though I have tried to avoid the product of Hollywood for a long time anyway. And yes, can Dickens write!
I liked this: “Reynolds, playing an American, does attempt a Cockney accent so wretched that he makes Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins sound like Michael Caine.” Now that, in fairness, is quite an achievement.
And thanks Dr. Goska for pointing out that Hollywood takes time out to “unter” us Poles/Polonians – yet again.
And while I am here may I recommend to everyone the book you referred to: “The Real Oliver Twist” by John Waller – a harrowing read, but a salutary one.
And, finally, the teaching of the immortal soul is not a Biblical one, not found in either the Hebrew or the Christian Greek Scriptures (Old and New Testament), as they tell us, simply and clearly, that the dead are conscious of nothing at all. There are no dreams in the sleep of death, and it would have saved Hamlet a lot of soliloquising if he had only known that. But the Bible assures us that for many, for both “the righteous and the unrighteous”, there can and will be a joyful awakening from the dreamless sleep of death.
A thing to think of “at this festive time of year”. I love ACC and I can’t count the times I read or saw various ( read as all ) versions of it in movies, audio, and stage. The message is important and shouldn’t be fouled in word or spirit.
Sad to waste such talents as Ferrell and Reynolds. I’m pleased to say I’ve never considered Apple TV.
Keep up the good reviewing and protecting us from slop.
Sad waste of comic talents. Thanks for saving us from slop.
I am always delighted when I check frontrpagemag.com and see a Danusha Goska essay. It makes my day. I love this discussion of Dickens’ “Christmas Carol.” It is such a good, classic story, And Goska brings out aspects that I hadn’t before noticed.
For me, the most memorable line in the book is when Marley says: “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link and yard by yard. I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” Goska demonstrates how this is also the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, and, perhaps, to a certain extent, of many of us.
What else will they throw at us beside this stuff? Get ready for Islamic version of A Christmas Carol where scrooge converts to Islam
I am absolutely thrillled by this essay by Danusha V. Goska.
First, for the spoiler which has saved my valuable time.
Second, for digging in deep and showing us what woke culture is at it’s core-cultural imperialism by a self-proclaimed “enlightend” minority utterly intolerant of differences. Whoever proclaims everything to be “the same” and to “love everybody equally” does so with regards to no one…. But him/herself.
I think I will get a copy of the original as I have not been aware of how existential and Christian and….Western it really is. Without this essay, I don’t think I would
Have ever know about the death of ACC.
Prof. Goska is incredible at connecting dots you might not have known they existed, like Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Please more of such insights!
Another well thought out, insightful, and pointed review from this author-scholar.
The „woke borg” is masterful. Thank you for this deep and thoughtful review, I will certainly not waste my time watching this travesty.
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Why are current producers and directors so keen to butcher the works of art on which they are basing their films? It happens here with TCC, it happened with Amazon’s Rings of Power, it happened with Netlifx’s Witcher. The combination of arrogance and incompetence which all those people exhibit really does not bode well for the future of entertainment.
Professor Goska, this was a beautiful piece in itself on ACC. It would serve well too over at Crisis Magazine’s In A Nutshell series on the great works of the western canon, if you are so inclined to submit a version there too.
I come to FPM just for your writing! Thank you for your clarity and honesty.
Thanks for the idea of taking the time to read A Christmas Carol. A much better use of an hour or so than going to see a travesty like Spirited
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Thank you so much for your research. Our community often puts off medical advice and intervention let alone the stigma associated with mental illnesses.
Hello, I enjoyed reading the article. Finding significance and a clear plan of action might be challenging for many people because they are so bogged down in the mundane. You provided some incredibly insightful advice on how to achieve this.
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