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The Nightmare Before
Christmas
Jack Skellington ....... Chris Sarandon
....... Danny Elfman (music)
Sally
.................. Catherine O'Hara
Mayor
.................. Glenn Shadix
Oogie Boogie ........... Ken Page
Lock
................... Paul Reubens
Shock
.................. Catherine O'Hara
Barrel
................. Danny Elfman
Evil Scientist
......... William Hickey
Touchstone presents an animated film
directed by Henry Selick. Produced by Tim Burton
and Denise Di Novi. Written
by Caroline Thompson; based on a story and
characters by Tim Burton. Adaptation by Michael McDowell.
Photographed by Pete Kozachik. Edited by Stan Webb. Music by Danny Elfman.
Running time: 76
I have never been a great fan of Tim
Burton, the producer of this film and the director of such previous films
as "Edward Scissorhands," "BeetleJuice," and "Batman"
I and II, though his vision has been hailed by many critics. Certainly he
is technically able and creative; he always takes an
unexpected approach to his material. But he seems to delight in
weirdness for its own sake, and his universe seems most of the time to
be dark, disgusting, unkempt, trashy. There is humor in his
movies, but never enough to redeem all the dreariness.
This new film is a stop-action
animation feature about two kingdoms: Halloween Land and Christmas Land.
The hero is Jack Skellington (he's a skeleton,
get it?) the Pumpkin King, who is beloved by the inhabitants of Halloween
Land because he always produces the most wonderfully scary Halloweens.
Halloween Land is populated by witches, skeletons, vampires, a
(literally!) two-faced mayor, Frankenstein
monsters and other monstrosities of all descriptions. Sort of an extended Addams Family. Looks a bit like Burton's
Gotham City from "Batman."
On Halloween, Jack sends these creatures out to the real world to scare
everybody out of their socks.
However, Jack is a sensitive soul at
heart, and he feels that there must be more to life than scaring people.
These feelings he expresses in songs written by Danny Elfman,
who also supplies Jack's singing voice. Eventually Jack wanders into
the woods and finds a grove of trees with various holiday symbols
on them: a turkey for Thanksgiving, an egg for Easter, and so on.
He taps the one with a Christmas tree and eventually finds himself in
Christmas Land, which is all bright colors, happy elves, toys, and of
course old Santa himself. Naturally this is a Hollywood version of
Christmas; not a hint of Christ or of any religious symbolism. The values
here are not at all theistic, but those of the secular Christmas:
indiscriminate peace and goodwill.
Jack is inspired to return to
Halloween Land in order to mobilize his friends to put on a Christmas
celebration. That will be something different; but these folks have done
an excellent job at producing Halloween, why not Christmas too? To
facilitate the plan, Jack arranges to have Santa kidnapped from
Christmas Land, so that the Halloween crew can replace him in
distributing toys. (The youthful kidnappers first abduct the Easter Bunny
by mistake!) Jack intends this to be a friendly kidnapping, a kind of
vacation for Santa; but Santa falls into the hands of a really bad guy, Oogie Boogie, who intends to torture and kill him.
Jack's Christmas turns out to be a
disaster, as his rag doll female admirer Sally (put together by the
local Frankenstein) has prophesied. The
Halloween folks, with perfectly good intentions, make toys for the kids
which they think will be fun. These include shrunken heads, toy animals
that attack the children and so on. Everyone is scared to death, so much so
that the real world people shoot Jack and his reindeer sleigh out
of the air. Eventually he recovers and returns to Halloween Land
in disgrace. He rescues Santa, however, who has time to give the kids
some real toys before dawn, and everybody is happy.
In a more traditional kids' movie,
the Halloween people would be moved by the Christmas spirit to embrace the
values of love and goodwill to all. This one is more, well,
"realistic." The Halloween creatures decide to let Santa handle
Christmas and to restrict their own holiday-making to Halloween,
which, doubtless, will continue to be as ghoulish as possible. The lesson
to Jack is to stick with what he is best at, to manage his own holiday and
to leave Christmas to Santa and the elves.
The idea is fascinating, ridiculous,
outrageous, funny. Perhaps that is enough to justify the making of the
movie. But one suspects a more serious point behind all this. All Burton's work seems to be saying that in the final
analysis, dark is better. One should bet on the weird, the evil, the
perverse. For all the best efforts of good people, the most interesting
things are done by the wicked (e.g. BeetleJuice,
the Joker). Even a nice fellow like Jack (or Batman,
or Edward Scissorhands) must eventually
capitulate. People who grow up in a sleazy environment have no choice,
Burton seems to say, but to promote its values.
Perhaps, indeed, Europe would have
been wise, on this basis, to retain its Halloween paganism rather than to
embrace the values of the new religion that came from Palestine.
Of course, if we find that sort of point in the movie, we must remember
that what it presents as Christmas is very far removed from the actual
gospel of Christianity.
Of course, the film does make
legitimate points about how leopards cannot change their spots. It is
certainly true that a Halloween person cannot by sheer force of will
transform himself into a Christmas person. This illustrates the biblical picture
of the antithesis between believers and unbelievers. Fallen man often puts
on a veneer of Christianity without experiencing actual
heart-regeneration. The effects of this sort of Christianity can indeed be
horrible to contemplate, and the attempt of Jack's friends to combine
Halloween and Christmas is a good parable of that horror. Of course, we
should not assume that such parabolic meaning was in the minds of these
filmmakers; their ignorance of the actual meaning of Christmas rules out
any such homiletic intent. But they know, as we must, that
combining two fundamentally opposed world-and-life views leads to
disaster.
I'm amused to think that for
Halloween people to produce a Christmas celebration is a little bit like a
Hollywood movie team trying to produce a film about Christmas. The results in both cases are not
terribly different.
Christianity is fundamentally
opposed to both of the world-and-life views presented in this film. A
Christian will find the values of Halloween and Christmas Lands
equally unpalatable: romantic peace and love, versus moral anarchy. If these
are opposed, as the film suggests, they are together even more opposed to
biblical Christianity.
Burton prefers the Halloween ideology, the standpoint of moral anarchy. But he is relativistic enough to say in effect that Christmas (as he understands it) is fine for those who are so inclined. Neither his preference nor his relativism are particularly edifying. Like so many Hollywood films, this one celebrates and supports the very ideas (and lack of same) which are most ruinous to our society. But we may be thankful that this film clarifies for believer and unbeliever alike the necessity of making a choice. And it shows us that it is more difficult than most people imagine to escape from the presuppositions of our world-view once we have determined to live under its authority. In other words, despite the filmmakers' intentions, the movie has something to say about the necessity of divine grace.