A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
A lifetime of despair
A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
Directed by Bill Melendez
It’s hard to overstate how weird and innovative this short animated film was, when it debuted in 1965. It’s a television comedy without a laugh track. It takes a dark view of the Christmas season it’s supposed to celebrate. It’s a children’s show with a jazz soundtrack. The network expected it to flop. Instead, it became a holiday classic.
Perhaps the most lasting gift to the world contained in this film is the jazz soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi. While deemed mediocre by many jazz critics (though they do allow that “Christmas Time is Here” is a modern classic), the collection of holiday songs, rendered in modest cool jazz with an occasional country inflection in Guaraldi’s piano, is a favorite of millions. My wife uses it year-round as a calming influence.
But there’s something else. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” captures and satirizes the nascent dissatisfaction of the baby boomer generation who — taking their cue from the Beats — had begun to criticize the garish, hollow nature of middle class America. Charlie Brown:
What's this? (With mounting dismay:) 'Find the true meaning of Christmas. Win money, money, money. Spectacular, super-colossal neighborhood Christmas-lights-and-display contest.’
'Lights-and-display contest'? Oh, no! My own dog, gone commercial. I can't stand it.
Lucy, incomparably:
Boy, what a sound! How I love to hear that old money plink, that beautiful sound of cold, hard cash. That beautiful, beautiful sound. Nickels, nickels, nickels. That beautiful sound of plinking nickels.
All right, now, what seems to be your trouble?
Even before this short film’s debut, I was a huge "Peanuts" fan and I identified greatly with Charlie Brown. I too loved baseball but was terrible at it. I too didn't have any real friends. But when "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was first shown, on Dec. 9, 1965, I was dumbfounded at the accuracy with which it captured the experience of every child who was not on Team Jingle.
Charlie Brown: “Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel. I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees, and all that — but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.”
Linus: “Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem.”
That was the year I began to be bullied in school. And no one was helping, or intervening, or even noticing. I wasn’t dissatisfied with Christmas, I was dissatisfied by the trap I was caught in. The subject of dissatisfaction, the source of my angst, wasn’t the point. The point was that you say you’re unhappy, and they gaslight you and say you’re the one causing a problem.
Seeing this play out on national TV made me feel vindicated. Finally, I thought to myself, age 9 — the same age as the title character — finally they are admitting it. Instead of pretending that Christmas, that childhood itself, is a happy, carefree time, they're admitting how awful it can be. They're showing that it's a lie. It was such a revolutionary message that I thought that the producers might actually get in some kind of trouble, as if by telling the truth about childhood they might be breaking a law.
So I felt very seen, my feelings validated (though we didn't have that language then). But the program gave me even more: a way out when I feel despair.
Charlie Brown is offered a project that sounds like an honor to be offered and to perform: direct the Christmas pageant. He quickly finds out how hard it is: no one follows his direction, but they’re quick to blame him when things go wrong.
Without the resources to fix anything, the other children's disdain and bullying finally drives him out. He quits his director post, drags himself and his pathetic little pine tree outside into the snow, and "kills" the tree by hanging a single ornament on it, crying "Augh! Everything I touch gets ruined!"
Then, raising his eyes, he sees the stars. The words of the angels as read by Linus come to him as the stars sparkle, and his equilibrium is restored.
This moment resounded so powerfully for me that I made it a practice for myself. Anytime I'm feeling desperate, I go out and look up at the stars. Even if "everything I touch gets ruined," I can't touch the stars. I can't ruin them. They are -- at least in terms of my own life against theirs -- eternal. I'm comforted by this, and so is Charlie Brown.
The other children have followed him out into the night. Maybe they're struck with remorse for their behavior, or maybe it's just morbid curiosity -- the film doesn't indicate why they come outside. But they come upon the tree and are able to strengthen and decorate it, where Charlie Brown couldn't. "What's going on here!?" he sputters. They shout a Christmas greeting and begin to sing about the herald angels. The end.
But there's a danger here. During the whole show, despite starting out depressed and going through despair, Charlie Brown is, after all, the main character. His suffering is deemed interesting and honorable enough for the nation to consume. And by all readings of the "Peanuts" strip, nothing changes for the character for the next, what, 50 years until the death of Charles M. Schultz. He continues to suffer -- bad at baseball, friendless, scorned even by his dog. He never wins the attention of the little red-haired girl; he never even gets a valentine from anybody.
A boy who progresses from childhood to adult like this, and never matures, risks becoming frozen in this state. Our word for it today is incel. But even if one escapes this extreme fate, the affliction of Main Character Syndrome still raises its head. A form of narcissism, this disorder prevents one from developing empathy for others, seeing them as merely "supporting actors" in the epic of one's own life. Charlie Brown, perhaps, grows up to become not a classic antihero like Steve McQueen’s “Cool Hand Luke” or Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” but a miserable loner like Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul in “The Conversation”: he finds a niche, but is so weak as a person that others use his stunted personality and isolation against him.
Depression is a powerful condition caused by adults who don’t listen to children and who inspire the next generation to act out their rage against the weakest among them.
I’m grateful I found a way out. But that opening monologue of Charlie Brown — it gets me every time.