Cruelty In A Christmas Carol

The lesson imparted by Dickens' best-known tale is not to seek joyful connection with your fellow humans, but to wait for your oppressor's moment of illness-induced weakness and strike with impunity.

171 years ago Britain was experiencing a resurgence in the popularity of Christmas wholly foreign to us now, blessed as we are with a Christmas holiday that is attempting to overtake Halloween and must be bludgeoned to death halfway through January. The Industrial Revolution was ending, but the negative effects of high-density urbanization in Britain were devastating to the lower levels of social strata and, therefore, the morale of the country at large. As a result, people leapt at the chance to have their own Christmas tree, recently made trendy along with the Christmas card and public caroling. It may not seem like much now, but it was a remarkably effective way to take everyone's mind off the daily horror of pestilence-soaked London before the invention of Valium and Netflix. Hot on the heels of the new-fangled trees and cards Dickens published his little Christmas yarn, and it is with us now, after having been filmed twenty-one times, adapted for television twenty-seven times, and translated into at least two dozen languages. But, as I will show, we've been getting it wrong for almost two centuries.

The story is well known to you, and I won't rehash any more of it than I absolutely must. In the interest of preventing sloth, however, I decided to not rely on my slightly pickled recollection based tenuously on thirty-four years spent watching the film in a dozen or so different flavors, usually repeatedly and with only a fraction of my attention over the course of fifteen or twenty consecutive days. Details can start to run together due to familiarity, so I thought it necessary to re-read the original text. I set out to write this convinced that Scrooge became startled by his ghostly doorknocker and fell backward down the steps, as any attempt on my part to remember the scene involved that particular. I was entirely wrong, and not just because of the medicinally-applied alcohol. As it turns out, various directors and screenwriters throughout the years have decided that this timeless classic needed a little punching up in places, similar to Michael Bay turning The Transformers into two hours of crayons in a blender while an old Calvin Klein underwear model never quite makes it out of his wet paper bag. These kinds of thing must be resisted, and so in deference to placing far more importance on tiny details than they deserve, Dickens' edition will be the one I refer to.

Do you want a Wahlberg as Tiny Tim? Because Bay will do it.

It should be noted that, across a century's worth of film interpretations ranging from abysmal to your personal favorite, The Muppet's Christmas Carol objectively stands out as the film which keeps onscreen dialogue closest to the original text. Gonzo the Great, acting as Dickens acting as The Narrator, speaks whole paragraphs word for word in the singularly simple yet striking style. You recall the early scene which finds Scrooge arriving home and turning his key in the door lock only to be startled by seeing Jacob Marley's face where the door knocker should be. Dickens describes the specter as having “a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar,” and Gonzo speaks those words on camera. The inclusion of that particular line of narration, a simile for which no amount of explanation can bring clarity if one lacks the understanding, makes this interpretation of the story unlike any other and deserving of appreciation, interminable musical numbers notwithstanding.

Well done, rat and Whatever.

Ebenezer Scrooge was an asshole. That much we can all agree on. His moods and attitudes were such a clear cut stripe of constantly mean-spirited, greedy, and confrontational that his name is now invoked as archetypal shorthand when seeking a way to describe horrible people we know. Scrooge is the progenitor to Snidely Whiplash, the Nazi dentist from Marathon Man, and Mitt Romney. Scrooge is the reason one wheel of a shopping cart is always fucked up, and why the toilet seat is always frigid. To wit: “External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often came down handsomely, and Scrooge never did.” His financial dominance over the town and people in it is absolute, and has created such antipathy toward him that no one will give a moment's thought before taking his dressing gown and bed curtains away to fence before his dead body has cooled, as some of the more timid adaptations choose to omit. When Scrooge arrives on Christmas morning with kind words and gifts for everyone, instead of reacting as any abused people naturally would – with mistrust and wariness – he is joyfully accepted. Dickens would have you believe the warmth of the Christmas spirit had overtaken everyone and elevated them as a community, but this is inexplicable and inconsistent with how the group could reasonably be predicted to react.

On the other hand, you rarely find bloodthirsty mobs in heartwarming classics.

At the opening of the story, a collector comes to Scrooge asking for money to benefit the poor and hungry, and Scrooge sends him away with the suggestion he enlist the services of poor houses and debtor's prisons. When, the following morning, Scrooge pounces on him with gleeful promises of a substantial donation including “many back payments,” the charity worker doesn't react with the derision and scorn one would rightly expect. Instead, man acts gullibly elated at the good news. This doesn't just cast doubt on his selection as a solicitor and handler of money, it paints him as likely too stupid to survive a haircut. When your malevolent overlord becomes startlingly gracious to you without warning, what right-thinking, pattern-recognizing person wouldn't steel themselves for the other shoe to drop on the cruel indignity that is surely to come?

Upon waking Christmas morning, Scrooge publicly engages in behavior that is so drastically far from his normal disposition that it should raise serious concerns among anyone paying the slightest attention. He becomes excessively generous with his money instead of unerringly greedy, displays exceedingly good will towards his fellow citizens instead of enmity, treats his staff as a valued asset instead of a manipulated commodity, and seems to become the philanthropic patriarchal pillar of the community in less time than the sun shines on one of the shortest winter days. Everyone just takes this in stride, for absolutely no reason, and even actively participates. The young boy Scrooge sends to the butcher should never have believed for a second the errand was real, it being far more likely that he would have taken the opportunity to throw a shit-covered rock from the gutter at Scrooge's head. Even more disturbing are the choices of the shop butcher, who is both open for business at dawn on Christmas morning and willing to personally bring one his most expensive items C.O.D. to the town's biggest asshole on the word of a filthy street urchin.

"Isn't this a face you can trust?"

Accustomed as we all are to the moral of the story, and to the unexplained and slightly suspicious desire we all seem to innately have for Scrooge to change his ways and become Tiny Tim's BFF, I think we've let a cynical accounting of the tale remain neglected. Scrooge's turn at the end of the story to become a broad-spectrum beneficiary of mankind is still mildly motivating and heart-warming in a contemporary reading, as well it should be. But as warm and fuzzy as it may make us feel to witness his seamless transition to benevolence and the community's immediate and unconditional embrace of him, as vindicating as it might feel to know Scrooge has sponged away the writing on not only his stone but the Cratchits as well, we have allowed an idea that makes us happy to go unchallenged due to the probable unpleasantness of examining it. In fact, an attempt to check in once more on Scrooge would no doubt be an unpleasant and shockingly ugly rehash of the first fifth of the story with none of the transcendent experiences or redemption of the latter sections. Because of how I say he came about it, Scrooge's philanthropic transformation will likely be brutally temporary, and the resulting backlash as he returns to his normal disposition will no doubt carry with it vicious overcompensation to correct for his resultant shame and embarrassment.

"Mandatory quartz buttplugs for everyone!"

As mentioned before, the extant text has no account of Scrooge suffering any head injury as a result of either falling on his steps or any other accident. Since some of the movies have seen fit to include it, however, there's no harm in taking a look. Falling backwards as he did, Scrooge would have suffered a trauma to his occipital lobe and, one would assume, a countercoup trauma to his frontal lobe. My degree from the Hollywood Upstairs Medical College is enough for me to know that occipital damage could produce hallucinations while frontal lobe damage could create the dramatic behavioral changes. Unfortunately, damage to the extent I am describing would likely be accompanied by a host of other problems like uncoordinated speech and movement. The damage, combined with no witnesses to Scrooge's fall and the missed opportunity to employ the stunning efficacy of Victorian-era medicine means the chances of Scrooge having a cogent exchange with the errand boy regarding the availability of the prize goose, much less awakening from his time-traveling coma, would be slim to none. It's not all depressing, though. In fact, given one of the more striking but common behavioral changes reported in “didn't-kill-you” head trauma, it's a wonder we haven't been treated to Scrooge unceremoniously displaying his Victorian twig-and-berries to the assembled onlookers without provocation. I argue that some old-fashioned British dick-swinging could have made Tiny Tim's final speech that much more poignant.

There's a "third leg" joke in there somewhere...

Another possible explanation for Scrooge's established standard of selfish and miserly behavior could be a simple result of oxytocin deficiency. Oxytocin is a hormone produced primarily in the brain without which society would be harder to maintain than it is now, as its effects are associated with trust, social bonding, and generosity. Artificially-delivered oxytocin creates a predictable result in testing environments, making people more likely to share or empathize, for example. In some people the receptors responsible for uptaking oxytocin are not as plentiful as they should be, due to genetic abnormalities, and these people have marked differences in social interaction and an exaggerated anxiety response. This kind of condition would be completely undetectable to the medical community of the time, and in any case untreatable overnight and could be in no way affected by spectral intercession of the kind Dickens describes.

Some "smoke-tral" intercession, though...right? I apologize.

Since neurochemicals cannot be blamed, and Dickens' own hand precludes head injury, we are left with the most probable explanation, an answer Scrooge himself had known the entire time. When he accused Marley of being composed “more of gravy than of grave,” he was exactly right. Dickens describes early on how Scrooge's evening routine plays out, with him taking “his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern.” Given that Marley's arrival and his dinner can only have been separated by a handful of hours, his evening meal -- which he relates as consisting of beef, mustard, cheese, potato, and the aforementioned gravy -- would not have had sufficient time to incubate enough pathogens to create illness. However, since Scrooge's behaviors as a creature of habit have been spelled out in great detail, it seems reasonable to conclude that a poorly-handled bit of uncured meat or gravy from earlier in the week is undoubtably responsible. Some nasty bout of acute foodborne poisoning delivered from any number of the readily available and nauseatingly disgusting sources in overcrowded and choleric London could be responsible for his feverish hallucinations, and the shock resulting from the mortal terror instilled in his mind due to those hallucinations could then conceivably produce his philanthropy. But, like all moments we consider life-changing while their perfume hangs in the air, the resulting sway these visions had over him and his strength of will no doubt faded with the passage of time. It is truly unfortunate Dickens never gave us a sequel, so we could see Scrooge return to caning orphans in the street on New Year's Eve, once his stomach felt better.

"Quartz! For EVERYONE!"

Turning to the people of Britain now, and their astonishingly out-of-character response to Scrooge's turnaround given his history and character, just a little investigation finds a cleverly hidden moral underneath the many obfuscating layers of lofty community togetherness. Dickens would have you believe that, were your master – a term my contemporaries use sexually, having no understanding of what it would be like to live under the whims of another human being – to appear at your doorstep on Christmas morning, you would throw open your arms and take him into your family celebration without the slightest compunction. Indeed, the way the Cratchits are painted would make any kind of effort on Bob's part to stand up for himself entirely out of character, so it's not a terrible stretch, but no one should believe it for a moment. I ask you to consider the motivation of these people for their instant and inexplicable acceptance. Instead of being an example of redemption through forgiveness, Scrooge is the lame animal who doesn't know enough to try and hide its infirmity. Why would the kind-hearted townspeople take advantage of him? For the same reason you or I would were we presented with a mentally broken Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch handing out diamonds or Rolex watches or whatever it is the superrich keep in their pockets to tip jet bartenders. I say they saw him coming, thanks to advance notice from the street urchin and butcher, and were laying in wait to try and get whatever they could out of him. By presenting all toothless smiles and unbared claws, the townspeople displayed their cynical and shrewd calculation of Scrooge's state as a poorly-stitched moneybag. You know the kind, with the dollar sign on the side that the Beagle Boys used to carry?

Seen here in a historical document on loan from the Library of Congress.

There is no alarm at his condition or investigation as to how his change of heart came to be, but unquestioning acceptance of a Christmas miracle. It is perhaps worth mentioning that this is the first non-religious story to introduce the now-familiar concept of Christmas miracles, though the implied significance attached to arbitrary calendar dates continues to elude my understanding. Had Scrooge become Daddy Warbucks on Saint Swivven's Day, or of his own volition rather than the threats of spectral terrorists, would his charity then be less heart-warming or – if you can stomach it – inspirational?