Too much ho-ho-hokum

It isn’t easy hating Santa Claus, but somebody’s got to do it.

Really, for the 100 million or so of us who loathe the phony cheer of Christmas, the slather of sanctimony that hides the greed, the subtle extortions that underlie most family transactions and the awful music and lights, nobody tees us off like that bloated fraud with his fat red cheeks and his goofy red suit, and that cottony swath of unkempt beard and the twinkly eyes of a serious crackhead.

He’s not even real. He’s a fusion of marketing and cleverly twisted mythology. While it’s not quite true that he was invented by Coca-Cola in the ‘30s as an attempt to sell its hot-weather beverage in the cold months (“Hmm, it’s 40 below, what I need is a nice, ice-cold glass of Coke!”), the Coke people certainly standardized the look via a series of extraordinarily evocative advertising images. The artist was Haddon Sundblom, who gave the old man’s flesh a ruddy, pinup-gal density, while the Coke bottle in his hand glinted with the silky sparkle of a garter calendar.

Before the Coke ads, elements of Santa could be found in St. Nicholas, a 4th century bishop in Myra, Turkey, known for his kindness to children; in the Dutch figure “Sancte Claus”; and in a German-derived figure named the Christkindl (the Christ child), who was helped by an elf named Belsnickle, imitated by adults in furs who brought gifts. All these things mutated and merged, producing Kris Kringle. They were codified by Clement Moore in 1822 in “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (‘Twas the night before blah blah blah).

Then, in his Civil War-era Harper’s illustrations, Thomas Nast codified the image further into the familiar fat boy with lots of presents and that white beard and those eerie, gleaming eyes. And all this was years before Coke sold jillions of dollars of brown caffeinated bubbly sugar water under the fat guy’s recommendation.

So what I’m saying is: Santa’s not ancient and venerable. He’s not from anything. He’s not holy. He just represents the tendency of modern culture to mix things together until it achieves the right harmonic balance for mass marketing and, at that point, standardizes them into icons.

But even worse than old St. Synthetic are the movies he occasionally stars in, ho, ho, ho. These things can ruin a week faster than a broken bottle of bourbon or a missed call from an agent. In fact, it’s no surprise that the best of the holiday movies usually sidestep the whole Santa thing and focus on more genuine issues of family or community.

Of these I count many attempts, many clones, but two masterpieces: Frank Capra’s 1946 “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which completely ignores Santa and concentrates more on Christmas as an expression of community cohesiveness and support, while at the same time bravely evoking the savagery and despair of family crises.

And, of course, the classic 1951 “A Christmas Carol,” with Alastair Sim, the best transfer of Dickens’ masterwork to the screen and, again, a look through the prism of one desolate heart, that of a man coming in the nick of time to appreciate family and community, the spirit of love, the thrill of generosity. Neither of these films has time for that fat fake in the beard.

Passive and soulless

The reason, of course, is that Santa isn’t a character -- he’s a logo. He’s passive, a symbol upon which we project various of our issues. Fathers see in him the ritual of provision: I am the father, I take care, I provide, that is how I show love. Mothers evidently still buy into that image, even today, for the figure hasn’t been much feminized, though so much of society has. Corporations see a sales mechanism. Kids see a font of pleasure that confirms their sense of their own centrality in the universe. Angry essayists see a shortcut to a payday.

But there is nothing of the virtues of drama: There’s no conflict in Santa; his crises, if they exist, are small, not soul-deep. He’s happy in his work, his eyes twinkle, but he has no angst, no complexity. He’s not trying to get through the night, just down the chimney. Compared with him, Rambo looks like Faustus. And few movies have done anything remarkable with him as a character, as if the storytellers have thrown up their hands at the prospect of getting much of the human condition, or even a laugh or two, out of such a passive figure.

Usually the film that gets the nod as best Santa movie of all time is 1947’s “Miracle on 34th Street,” with John Payne, Maureen O’Hara, Edmund Gwenn and the young Natalie Wood, directed by George Seaton. The underlying family dynamic has a weird prescience of modern times: The practical single mom is so busy careering as a Macy’s exec that she has no real use for Christmas (or her own daughter or her lawyer boyfriend). But when her yearly Santa impersonator maintains he’s the real thing and the newspapers get hold of it, the ensuing scandal forces her to confront the reality of the holiday. Gwenn is superb as a slightly off-center old man who persists in believing that he is Santa, despite the power of the rational machinery of a literal-minded world to break him of this delusion.

“Miracle on 34th Street” works today mostly as a nostalgia wallow, as it calls up for aging baby boomers the days of their dimly remembered pasts, when giant department stores ruled Christmas and no holiday was complete without a trip to the megastore in a magic land called downtown. Kids, brace yourselves: Once there were no malls. Can you believe such apostasy? Kids, look up apostasy. But, kids, all the big commercial action was a bus or train ride away in a mythic place called the city. There, you looked at all the fabulous windows (Christmas always looks its best in a department store window), maybe saw the new Disney “Peter Pan” and had a pretty good meal in the department store restaurant. Yes, they had good restaurants in downtown department stores, hard as it is to believe today.

Anyway, “Miracle on 34th Street,” which is set against the background of Macy’s proprietary interest in Christmas, at least acknowledges the commercial mechanism behind the Christmas campaign, even if it builds toward a moment when no less a power than the U.S. Postal Service validates Santa Claus and practical single mom O’Hara falls into lovelorn lawyer Payne’s arms and little Natalie smiles heartbreakingly at the camera, her youth and beauty captured for eternity.

The movie is successful largely because of little Edmund Gwenn, who plays the old fellow with the slightly confused air of a man who doesn’t get what the big deal is. Gwenn was one of those superb character actors who turned in decades of distinguished ensemble work and made every movie he was in better. He transformed the giant-ants-attack-Los Angeles “Them!” into a classic in 1954. The rue and melancholy he brings to “Miracle on 34th Street,” the sort of humane naturalism, really make the movie work.

Dark looks at Santa

Now let’s consider a couple of pro-Santa films and some anti-Santa films of the sort that have defined the modern movie age. The biggest of the pro films was “Santa Claus: The Movie,” of 1985, engineered by a European father-son team who had ridden to movie power on the strength of their “Superman” successes. These were the guys, Ilya and Alexander Salkind, who paid Marlon Brando millions to play Jor-El of Krypton! So much for taste. Anyhow, they conceived of Santa Claus as a superhero and unleashed a fairly rancid, bloated, FX-cracked story about him, with no less a then-star than the great Brit Dudley Moore as Patch, the elf.

So the truth is it was really more an elf movie than a Santa movie, much in the way that “Ben-Hur” is much more a chariot movie than a Jesus movie. It was the big news of 1985 and seems to have inspired a number of deeply disturbing websites (KringleQuest.com, for one), but despite the hype it remained utterly inconsequential and seems not to have entered into any wide cultural zone of reference.

Another elf movie was last year’s “Elf,” with Will Ferrell. Now people really liked that one, and if you know why, you’re one up on me. I just saw bad physical comedy based on one joke: the idea that Ferrell’s zero-learning-curve, rather large magic being was a perfect literalist in a world gone all zany with irony.

Of late attempts, probably the two best are the recent Santa-as-regular-guy films starring Tim Allen, during the few weeks he was a movie star. The films -- 1994’s “The Santa Clause” and 2002’s “The Santa Clause 2” -- never quite achieve mythic status, but they’re not bland either, propelled by Allen’s extreme likability.

But along the way this wholesomeness, this freaking cheer, got on some folks’ nerves, and some shrewd fellows decided to counter the Santa-love with an equally repellent Santa-hate kind of thing. Thus in the 1980s began the run of “Silent Night, Deadly Night” in various iterations (there were five in all), which usually featured a sociopathic, knife-wielding Santa in low-end adventures that involved a lot of stabbing. They were never as well done or propulsive as some of the “better” (better being a relative word) killer-psycho movies such as the various “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” films, but the first one at least attracted undue attention because of its brazen exploitation of a supposedly hallowed image.

Given that no one over 18 besides film critics was seeing slasher movies in those days, the whole scandal seemed pretty overblown. Those were the years of high slaughter in the nation’s multiplexes, and every Friday a new slew of teenage victims came to town to be whacked by this or that sociopathic freako. The “Silent Night, Deadly Night” atrocities were no worse than any of the others.

Thus it is almost by default that we end up at “Bad Santa,” probably the all-time anti-Santa classic, but in its queer way, a really good Santa movie. This is the only movie since “Miracle on 34th Street” to give Santa a personality. OK, so he’s a dog. Billy Bob Thornton -- Bill Murray turned the part down -- plays him as a sleazy, crummy monster in a movie that feels sometimes as if it had been directed by John Waters rather than Terry Zwigoff. Santa: con man and criminal, bilious reprobate, drunk, selfish, perverse. But like most Christmas stories, this one heads toward redemption, after the same journey traveled by that other seasonal reprobate, Ebenezer Scrooge.

Though he ends up being shot by the cops, Santa ultimately does what Santa does most winningly: not sell soft drinks in wintertime, or get moms and pops down to Macy’s, but reach out and make a lonely kid feel that there is a little love in the world somewhere.

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Stephen Hunter is a film critic for the Washington Post.