My brain makes weird connections.
Today my wife and I ended up watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and I happened to read this article at Salon about an hour later and the neural pathways in my brain lit up like 25,000 light bulbs on a Midwestern house.
And just to be clear, right at the beginning, I’m not accusing Chevy Chase or the movie Christmas Vacation of being fascist.
But there is a scene and a theme in the movie that could have been a warning sign for all of us some 30 years ago and might help all of us today understand what writer Matthew Rozsa was trying to get across in his article today about a man who wrote more than 80 years ago. That writer was Walter Benjamin who I had the pleasure of studying some in grad school about 15 years ago. He was a Marxist and a Jew who lived through Hitler’s rise in Germany.
The key passage in Rozsa’s article points out the key passage in Benjamin’s writing on fascism and it illuminates like so many holiday lights the connection of a thirty year old movie with Donald Trump’s grip on America today:
The key passage from Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which was published in 1936, deserves to be quoted in full:
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
The addition of bold italics is mine.
An attempt to express what, exactly?
For that, let’s go back 30 years to the climax of Christmas Vacation. Clark Griswald, played by Chevy Chase, has gotten a Christmas bonus from his company every year for 17 years. (And he worked for the same company for 17 years!?!?!) But this year, when he is depending on that money to put a down payment on a pool and when the bonus comes in the mail it’s not a check but a subscription to a jelly of the month club. This leads to one of the most epic breakdowns in movie history. It’s really worth watching.
To summarize, Clark rants that he wishes his boss was delivered to him with a bow so he could tell him...well...exactly how he feels. There’s a lot of expletives and impolite speech. So you’ve been warned. Here it is in text form from Rotten Tomatoes movie quotes:
Clark W. Griswold Jr.:Hey! If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I'd like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here, with a big ribbon on his head, and I want to look him straight in the eye and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?
Where’s the Tylenol indeed. This movie came out in 1989, at the tail end of a decade that for those of us who live in the Rust Belt and other parts of the Midwest was…rather rough. Companies had been given free rein to make gobs of money but instead of letting it trickle down to us they’d decided to cancel Christmas bonuses—and close plants and ship jobs overseas where they could pay people even less because they’d never even heard of things like Christmas bonuses. And we felt pretty damn powerless to do anything about it.
And middle-class Americans who’d been promised a certain kind of American Dream were really pissed off. But in the real life version of the movie, the rich boss found a way to connect with the way the employees FELT by going on angry, expletive and invective filled rants that expressed just what the Clark Griswalds (and Eddie, though I don’t have time in just one article to go into THAT part of the class dynamics in the movie here) were feeling. But then directed that anger largely at the neighbors.
Remember Todd and Margot? They were childless. Modern. Very hip (was that the 80s term? I wasn’t hip in the 80s so I’m not sure). Easy to hate. So smug. So superficial. So elitist. They are so easy to hate though they have about zero character development in the movie.
So yeah, in the real life version the boss found out he could give all the pissed off people a way to express their anger mostly at people who are their neighbors instead of at the very rich people who live in different neighborhoods altogether. Because let’s face it, the religion that gave us Christmas probably has to teach us to love our neighbors in part because they are sometimes the easiest people to hate.
I’m not sure what my point is here. I just wanted to share that an article I read illuminated the ways in which a thirty year old movie illuminated our current political predicament. That rant is what so many of us who grew up in the Rust Belt swing states have felt all our lives. Yeah, we know we still have it better than a lot of others who never even got to have the American Dream taken away from them because they were never given it to begin with. But that doesn’t change how damn mad you feel when you watch what you did have snatched away.
I don’t know that Democrats need to go on profanity laced tirades against rich people or anyone else. But we have got to find a way to unite those different kinds of anger—anger at never having had and anger at having what you had ripped away. Because that’s a coalition that would win across a lot of swing states for years to come.
And maybe that movie and that article helped me understand Donald Trump’s appeal a little more. He gets to rail at all those smug “elites” in the way most of us are only comfortable fantasizing about. And that forms an emotional connection to people that goes way beyond reason.