Jingle Most of the Way


You know what movie I don't want to watch all the way through? Arnold Schwarzenegger's Jingle All The Way, the cringingly funny Christmas classic that Netflix offered up for a 20 minute thrill. I think it's funny that he's threatened by his disgusting hipster liberal intellectual neighbor, who is decidedly a villain and a demon upon closer inspection (as are they all), but overcomes him with good old-fashioned American hatred and head-down dogged determination. Nevermind that our protagonist is emotionally unavailable and his wife is drowning in a manicured, ticky-tacky mental prison of her own demise, her deep-seated loneliness and depression are no match for what I'm sure is another in a long string of promises and false lessons from our silk-shirted huckster hero. There's nothing that can get some stupid toy into the hands of a needy child quite like the pure intensity of the reddest Austrian you know, and as symbols of devotion, protection and dedication go, action figures might as well do.

It strikes me that we open on Arnie desperately grasping at straws in his sales job spouting flatly empty promises to who need ridiculous and impossible things, and telling them that they're his #1 priority because they simply cannot be told that they aren't. Whether he's reading that correctly or not, he has to bend to their every whim, because the consequences for not are unthinkable. As with the toy, Arnold's wife will take his child away if he doesn't somehow pull off this Christmas miracle. Nevermind that he wastes his life buried in paper behind a desk shouting into a telephone while micromanaging spreadsheets. It's common practice for his assistant to hold up and flip through signage to communicate messages to him because the idea of having adequate time between phone calls to speak like a human isn't realistic. He bleeds desperation and pressure, everything about this strikes me as a comic dystopic outtake from a much better movie, something in Brazil's B-reel. It's far too sympathizing for me to decide he's an asshole ten minutes later.

Nevermind that he slaves this way to feed and clothe the family he's decried for neglecting. Motherfucker I am out here feeding you, is that not perfectly clear? The man is a lion; he laughs at hobbies and personal reflection. He needs money, because that's how his family interprets love. Do you see where they live? In 2015 that kind of area is gated when built. 2016, sorry.

Whatever. There's some goofy shit and he's so loud and it's awesome when people fall down. Everything about this is fucked, the essence of consumerism and an absolute boiling point of misdirected intention intersecting at a terminal endpoint that would give any sane person a nervous breakdown and force a total reevaluation of priorities, which his family seems to demand but likely might not accept. You cannot tell me it would have meant the same to that kid for his Dad to have been home with him all that time rather than scouring the malls all hours like some verminous post-apocalyptic scavenger. He needs it Christmas Day. Bitch you need to be thankful Christmas came at all, there'd be no presents for three Christmases if I knew the legitimacy of my contribution to my family after 8-10 hours a day of pressure-cooker sales 50 weeks out of the year was ultimately proved worthy by whether or not the right toys were under the tree.

The movie is about misplaced values. It's about putting too much emphasis on the wrong things, and I agree that their family would have been better off in a smaller, shittier house, with fewer toys, and more time for the father to be around making stuff with the son and doing family projects. If the point of the movie is that Arnold needs to stop grinding away at the wrong things and focus more on the important stuff, family love and enjoyment, I support that entirely. I'm imagining Arnold learning his lesson here and staging a Jerry Maguire walkout, demanding to know "wchooos camin' wit meh?!" He loves, he looses, he loves again, he has heartfelt realizations about his deepest issues and displaced priorities and focuses on his artistic side. They move out of the suburbs and into a lower rent community, but Arnold is working with a not-for-profit and finding he doesn't miss his suburban now that what he does with his time means real change for helpless people.

I wonder how pleased his wife and son would be then. Maybe they'd be amazed at the openness and warmth of their new patriarch. Or, it could be that this man wasn't the gripping acquisition-driven man his wife married, that she liked nice things, and took pride in having the kind of house and accouterments that comes with a successful husband who knows how to close and just wants to spend his free time loving the people he sacrifices all his free time for. I wonder if it ever occurred to these people that they got more out of telling Arnold that he was fucking everything up than they would from having him smiling and blinking from across a coffee table every night, asking them what they wanted to do. Particularly if that meant a hit in quality of life, and little Jordan or whatever his name is didn't get to have his clearly brand-name shit. There's a benefit not often perceived by young people to having their AND-1s and crisp preppy stuff, those who don't have it recognize it the most and those who are also at this level often take it as a baseline for prospective playmate material. But that's none of my business. You don't need to be rich to give your kids a good life, but I do understand the impulse to try to give them the best. The movie tends to reassure us this guy is an asshole repeatedly, and I'm like, yeah. He is an asshole. I don't want to hang out with this guy. But they tend to attract and raise people like these, for whom I have little sympathy as well. The whole thing gestures toward a cultural ouroboros nobody can benefit from, elbowing me in the ribs and going, "THAT guy doesn't know how to work the system." It's a broken, garbage system, and I don't agree with working it, and I don't admire people who do. So. In letting go of the emotional bonds Jingle likes to tug at we can all take pleasure in giggling at Sinbad shrieking.

Watch the parade scene and the warehouse scene in Jingle All the Way.