How The Grinch Stole Christmas is perhaps my favorite Christmas cartoon. What I love about it most is how it has several layers of meaning and those layers become more apparent to you as you grow older. It is, in essence, a cartoon you must see many times over your life to fully understand. Consider some of these ideas:
● Good Will Triumph: The first meaning you probably took from The Grinch when you were a kid was that good will triumph over evil. Simple. As a kid, it was obvious that the Grinch was the villain. He's a mean one. He wants to ruin everything for everyone. He's not even nice to his dog! And he tries to ruin everyone's Christmas. But he fails because Christmas is such a powerful force that it melts his evil heart and he actually returns everything he stole. For a child, this is a simple and reassuring message. It is what we want to believe about the universe and, at Christmas, all things are possible.
● The Real Meaning of Christmas I (people matter, not things): Over time, as we mature, we start to see another meaning in this story. Rather than simply seeing that good will defeat evil, we start to focus on why good defeated evil. This brings us the next level of meaning. In this instance, we realize that the reason the Grinch lost was because he valued the wrong things. He thought the gifts were what made Christmas so special, and he never realized that what gave Christmas its joy and meaning was the people we love, not the things we exchange. Since he could never take that away, he could never win. Thus, the true meaning of Christmas is that the people in our lives are what matter, not the things in our lives.
● The Real Meaning of Christmas II (redemption): As a corollary to our discovery that Christmas is about the relationships of the people in Whoville, and not the gifts they exchange, we also see the Grinch decide to give the gifts back. There are many possible reasons for this, but the one we are told is that the Grinch suddenly felt the Christmas spirit and decided he wanted to make their Christmas brighter.
But if you think about it, there is something strange in this. For one thing, if Christmas isn't really about the gifts, then what does it matter if he gives the gifts back? Indeed, if he couldn't kill Christmas by stealing the gifts, then he can't restore Christmas by giving gifts), ergo his return of the gifts is ultimately a hollow gesture when it comes to the harm he tried to inflict. Hmm. So does this mean the Grinch still doesn't get it? Well, no.
By taking the gifts back, the Grinch is atoning for his sins. He is trying to make right the wrong he has done. But the real atonement isn't in the return of the gifts, it is in doing so publicly. Basically he is submitting himself to their judgment, and in the process is seeking forgiveness. Had he simply left the gifts at the edge of town, he would not have been redeemed. Thus, the meaning of Christmas according to this story is that the Grinch can be redeemed, and if such a villain can be redeemed by atoning for his sins, then so can you. All you have to do is seek forgiveness.
Now we get more complex.
● The Real Meaning of Christmas III (forgiveness): There is another lesson here, and it's the one most people have forgotten in the modern age. The people of Whoville must forgive the Grinch to make his redemption possible. If they don't, then he cannot be redeemed. If he cannot be redeemed, not only will he go back to his evil ways, but then there would be no possibility of redemption for any of them. Thus, the most complex lesson is forgiveness. If someone seeks redemption, the right thing to do is to forgive them. This is a lesson that is all but lost in our cynical world, but it's true.
● Loyal Max: The loyalty of Max is another interesting message in this story. Yes, Max is a dog and therefore presumptively loyal, but he knows that the Grinch is wrong. You can see it. And what's interesting about his loyalty is that he doesn't sell out or abandon his friend. Instead, he does his best to change the Grinch's mind. The lesson I take from this is actually "love the sinner, hate the sin." If Max had walked away he wouldn't love the sinner. He would have just left the Grinch to his unredeemed ways. If he had turned the Grinch in, he wouldn't have helped either because he would have denied the Grinch the one thing he needed for redemption: a chance to change his mind on his own. So by telling him that he was wrong and letting the Grinch reach the conclusion himself, he gave the Grinch exactly what he needed.
● Who's The Grinch: Finally, there's one last lesson, which is probably the hardest for most people to see -- what made the Grinch into the Grinch and set him off on his life of crime was his intolerance for the happiness of others. The Whos never did anything wrong to him, but he came to hate them. And the reason he hated them was that they had something he did not, they had happiness. What's more, they found their happiness in something he did not understand. This is the same impulse that gets people complaining about "those kids today." If the Grinch had focused on his own happiness and had been happy for the Whos that they had found happiness, rather than being upset that others found happiness in things he did not and trying to bring down their happiness, then he never would have woken up one day to find that he was alone and in desperate need of redemption.
That's an awful lot of layers to stick into a cartoon, but it's all there.
Thoughts?
All good points and well argued!
ReplyDeleteThanks Kit!
ReplyDeleteI love the cartoon (and hated the remake), but...
ReplyDeleteI think all the nastiness could've been avoided at the outset, if the Whos had just displayed enough common courtesy to simply dial the noise down several decibels... then the Grinch and Max could've been miserable in peace --is that too much to ask?
So what you're saying is the Grinch was the victim here? LOL! Those dastardly Whos and their lying propaganda!
ReplyDeleteYup! Ever been stuck in a restaurant, near a party with a bunch of screaming kids, your dining experience ruined? Just like the Whos! Besides, it's quite obvious that the Whos breed like rabbits!
ReplyDeleteI see the Grinch as a tragic figure, driven to his dastardly deeds by nervous stress from a world turned upside down, like Michael Douglas in FALLING DOWN. Then poor Grinch gets brainwashed by their chanted mantra, and absorbed into their Jim Jones hippie cult (the weak-willed Max succumbs much earlier on, like Michael O'Keefe in SPLIT IMAGE). Or, to put it into a Star Trek context, The Whos combine the worst aspects of both Tribbles and the Borg.
The ending, with poor "happy" Grinch smiling vacantly, is as chilling as the end of THE STEPFORD WIVES or PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR. No wonder they got Boris Karloff to narrate it!
One odd thing, though.... all those Whos running around, and not a T.A.R.D.I.S. in sight.
LOL! Tribble-Borgs.
ReplyDeleteYou know, your interpretation would probably make for a pretty funny dark reboot of this happy tale (totally Tim Burton material)... especially the Jim Jones cult part. Bravo.
My roomate in college had an interesting theory: He claimed that the Road Runner cartoons were merely a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war. Two andorgynous, amorphous beings waging total warfare in the wasteland with government surplus.
ReplyDeleteHe would always add: Of cours it could just be about a coyote who wants to eat a roadrunner.
Dr. Seuss was a brilliant fabulist. I just had to put this on while I read the article: You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch as sung by the uncredited Thurl Ravenscroft. (Also, my favorite cover.)
ReplyDeletePikeBishop, Wasn't that from a movie?
ReplyDeletetryanmax, He was absolutely brilliant. Nice cover!
ReplyDeleteAndrew the "crtypo fascist" term was uttered by Robert Downey Jr.s character in "Back to School" describing "violent ground acquisition games like football" My friend glommed it onto his original thought about those cartoons.
ReplyDeleteAh, ok. I knew I'd heard that somewhere!
ReplyDelete"Crypto-facist" was also used by Gore Vidal to describe Bill Buckley during the 1968 DNC fiasco.
ReplyDeleteRegardless of it's origin (Vidal was probably familiar with German sociologist Theodor Adorno's use of the term) "crypto-fascist" is such a hilariously wonkish term that it's best uses are comedic.
ReplyDeleteAndrew - while we are on Chuck and Jones Dr. Suess, please queue up "Horton Hears a Who" for the toon-arama treatment. I go back and forth on wheter is it a holocaust or abortion allegory. "A person is a person, no matter how small".
ReplyDeleteNice rundown, Andrew!
ReplyDeleteYou know, I'll just say it--I like the Jim Carrey movie. Is there a lot of mindless filler? Yes. Is it way overly sappy and crap at the end? Yes. But, it hits most if not all of these same points, does a fairly good job of it, and it critiques the whole holiday consumerism issue much more boldly than the original did. Granted, it probably didn't need to, but that doesn't make it bad. It's not a winner by any means, but don't hate.
Andrew....."...and a child shall lead them." Cindy Loo Who is the pivotal character in this film. Without her, none of the redemption would occur.
ReplyDeleteSo, innocence and pure love for our fellow man (er..Grinches, since the Grinch used to be a Who at one time, right?)...is the trigger for The Grinch's heart to grow and find love again.
Aaaah....memories. This was one of my favorite Christmas season cartoons.
" Narrator: He brought everything back, all the food for the feast. And he, he himself, the Grinch - carved the roast beast."
tryanmax and Kit, I agree about the crypto-fascist term. It sounds like something a comedian would say.
ReplyDeletedjskit, I'm not sure Seuss was that political. "A person is a person, no matter how small" fits perfectly with the ideas he otherwise espouses of respect everyone including children.
ReplyDeleteI'll look into it and see if there's anything on it.
Thanks T-Rav! You may well be right about the film, but Carrey had lost me by that point and I found his routine tiring, so I didn't really care for the movie because of his usual stuff.
ReplyDeletePatriot, Seuss is all about innocence, and I think that's part of his brilliance. He's able to show us that someone who is non-cynical can see the world for what it should be, so his message is that each of us should be a little less cynical and a little more open. It's a solid message.
ReplyDeleteAndrew - your forte is finding conservative messages in unlikely or un-inintential places. I doubt the authors intent was a political message, but I submit that it is right there to be found.
ReplyDeletedjskit, Let me think about it. I think that the messages you point out certainly draw from the same points Seuss is making -- all life is precious and deserves protection, no matter who you are. So you can certainly apply those messages to abortion or the Holocaust. My only hesitation would be in suggesting that he intended to make that show an allegory for those issues.
ReplyDeleteAndrew, that's fair. Certainly the acting was nothing to write home about. And the girl who played Cindy Lou grew up to be a real nut job, so I can't look at her the same way again.
ReplyDeleteI'm with T-Rav on liking the movie and it is one of my kids' required Christmas viewings. The only real disappointment in it is the origin story. And it's a disappointment because, well, it's an origin story - and a bad one. I think it helps justify Grinch's character, making him a victim and less responsible for his evil ways. He does bad things because he wants to be avenged, but he keeps missing the target - the one boy who humiliated him.
ReplyDeleteIf an origin story was necessary - and I would first argue it was not - would it not have been better to let Grinch, embarrassed by how different he is, exclude himself from the Who children's company, despite the fact they never treat him badly? This would keep the Whos innocent and make a statement about our ability, through our own insecurity, to shut ourselves off from those who would love us.
KRS, I think it loses the point of the show to make the Grinch into a victim. The whole point to the story is to show that the Grinch has let his darker nature (he jealousy) take control and that makes him desperately unhappy. He becomes so unhappy that he lashes out. Only then does he see the mistake he's made. Turning him into a pysch case who is struggling with bullying wipes all that out. It goes from a lesson about human nature into a clinical study for counseling.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting. While the original Grinch is justified through his repentance, the new Grinch is justified through having been a victim himself.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the flaws of victim culture: it requires bullies, but every bully can be shown to have been a victim. Thus, instead of breaking the cycle through forgiveness, it perpetuates it by denying a particular bully/victim his "redeeming" victimhood and so persecutes him. Because this is a generally arbitrary mechanism, it is inherently unjust. This is not meant to overlook the important facets of repentance and restitution, which must precede and follow forgiveness respectively. But with the removal of forgiveness, these facets become largely irrelevant. Forgiveness is only assigned to those who can be shown to have been sufficiently victimized themselves.
In the strange case of the Grinch, I don't think that his assigned backstory rises to the level of his eventual crimes. But, he is a minority, so there is that.
tryanmax, I concur. This is a really messy view of the world.
ReplyDeleteNo one is at fault for anything because they are just acting instinctually in response to their own victimization. So there is no right or wrong in any consistent sense. Whether you are right or wrong depends on (1) whether or not WE think you enjoy being evil, and (2) which ever person we view right now as the greater victim. That's a messy way to run a world, but that is liberal criminal law in a nutshell.
The problem becomes this. Evil cannot exist without cause in this brave new world. Why? Because if it does, then you are back in the dark ages of Christian/Western thought. So evil must have a reason... "people aren't just evil."
Ergo, evil is the result of prior victimization -- bullying, cycle of violence, child abuse, etc. Ergo, it is not the result of conscious behavior, it is the result of instinct. Ergo, there can be no redemption because there is no responsibility, i.e. it's not your fault. Basically, you just need to get over it, just like overeating and drinking too much.
Whoa, guys - I'm not looking to make him a victim. Remember, my original point is that Grinch doesn't require an origin story - I could not possibly care less what made him the Grinch.
ReplyDeleteMy point was that, if Opie absolutely had to have an origin story for his Grinch, it should have been one where the Whos were blameless for the Grinch's descent into evil, EVIL grinchyness.
Btw, I don't think shutting off other people and living an insecure and self-pitying lifestyle makes you a victim of yourself - I think it makes you a jerk.
KRS, that wasn't directed at you. That was just an examination of the film as-is.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, even Opie's Grinch was evil as a baby when he floated down to Whoville and his basket knocked another one away from the home where Grinch landed. If Op had just taken that start and made Grinch a clever little brat devising sinister and funny ways to make Whos' lives miserable for the sheer joyof it ... well, I would have liked to have seen that.
ReplyDeleteKRS, That would make for an interesting film, but for one problem: In movie language, that sort of setup--especially as a backstory--conveys that a) the Grinch is not where he belongs and thus b) he is inherently different from the Whos in ways that cannot be overcome so c) his behavior is merely nonconformist and not sinister.
ReplyDeleteObviously, you have to bring certain elements of that thinking to the film in order to take that away, but that formula has been pretty well impressed upon a large chunk of the populace. It's the same logic as is behind the unstated but tacit leftist assertion that things like criminality, poor education, and general thugishness are "black" things, and so should be valued equally with "white" values like law-abiding, learning, and courtesy.
In other words, it's leftist crypto-racist BS. ("Crypto-" is a handy prefix.)
There's that word again... crypto. I think I'll have a crypto-sandwich for lunch. :)
ReplyDeleteKRS, I didn't think you were suggesting that at all. I thought you were pointing out that the film takes that position, which ruins a lot related to the character.
Andrew, in that case, I'm on a crypto-diet this holiday season.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's healthier than a cookie-diet. :)
ReplyDeleteAlthough I do not deserve the privilege, let me be the first to say it:
ReplyDelete"Crypto-Borg Tribbles."
Hmmm, still not scarier than, "progressives."
LOL! Nice! They need their own film, they really do. :)
ReplyDelete