The Childhood Christmas Crisis
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more
—Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
Meet Me in St. Louis, directed by Vincente Minnelli, 1944.
The Curse of the Cat People, directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, 1944.
IT’S A measure of how much is unconscious in our pop-culture consumption that classic Christmas movies have the reputation of being heartwarming and cozy, when in fact these narratives often find modern psychological equivalents for midwinter anxieties about annihilation. To give the most drastic examples, the turning point in both Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner is a character’s suicide attempt, averted in the first instance by divine intervention, in the second by chance.
The character experiencing the Christmas crisis does not have to be an adult faced with such harsh realities as bankruptcy or marital infidelity, however. Tootie, in Vincente Minnelli’s , and Amy, in the Val Lewton supernatural classic (both released in 1944), are firmly
