Christmas Is (1970)

I did not expect to become suspicious of Lutherans this holiday season yet here we are.  I think I was pretty fair to the Davey and Goliath special, on the whole I think I treated the special overall as well-intentioned and heartfelt.  It give give me the impression that a yawning cavern of existential despair was just on the other side of the plasticine models inexpertly held at bay by Christmas platitudes, but that’s not really their fault.

I guess the idea is that the special will finish the sentence?

This was another special produced by the Lutheran Church, this time through Lutheran Television.  I am willing to grant that this one has that same degree of earnestness and sincerity as ‘Davey and Goliath Christmas Lost and Found’ but I’m increasingly unsure about how well-intentioned it is.  Or should I say I’m sure the makers considered themselves to be well-intentioned and honestly believed that the message they conveyed was for the benefit of those watching, I’m just increasingly unwilling to trust their judgement on how useful or meaningful that message is.

              There’s some initial confusion as the special opens with flurry of shots, one of which I was sure involves an eldritch horror hanging in space above the planet but gives way to a succession of children floating in the void that eventually resolves itself into a montage of various cultural displays of Christmas of I’m sure varying authenticity.   It’s at least not purposefully racist, Lutherans of the past continue to do the bare minimum.  This then transitions right to the ongoing rehearsal of a school nativity play.  One thing I’m learning is that Lutherans sure love their school plays.  There are various cast shenanigans, they eventually return to the classroom, and right through to the title screen there’s no indication of a plot or even a main character.  Several kids have been named but none have been focused on to any extent, any one of them could be who the special is about.

After the credits we seem to finally focus on a character named Benji.  He’s complaining to his fellow students about being cast as the second shepherd in the play.  Quite a lot of social worth seems to be tied up in what part you have in the nativity scene as he is in fact teased by his castmates for such a terrible role.  One of them is more sympathetic and as they peel off on their way home he says the part is fine and the conversation turns into how Benji, just like Davey, isn’t really sure what Christmas is all about.  I can’t say the continued emphasis on a confused kid who needs to be taught the ‘real’ meaning of Christmas is all that surprising in this context but it does draw quite a contrast to the other secular specials.  It makes me more sympathetic to what they’re trying to do but the execution continues to leave me a little wary.

Just before he gets home, he runs into another friend who apparently goes to another school who’s all smug that he gets to play an elf in their school play.  Benji is further bummed out and continues home where he’s mean to his dog, Waldo, who this time at least doesn’t talk.  He decides to go over his lines from the play and here we get the rest of the special as both he and the dog are unceremoniously transported to Biblical Bethlehem.

I want to be annoyed at how this is handled but I simply can’t.  It’s clearly some level of fantasy as he’s curled up with his dog in the real world and after a scene transition is transported there on his now flying dog.  It’s never intended to be interpreted as actually real, there’s never a question of not understanding what people are saying, no one is upset by their appearance, but at the same time everything is treated pretty realistically.  They get afraid of people, they get hungry, they seek shelter and even go to sleep overnight at one point, none of which gets explained or even addressed.  The fact that they probably had a meeting where they sat down and thought about how to handle this then just said the Lutheran equivalent of ‘fuck it’ and moved on is kind of great.

There are a few interesting ways this section handles the portrayal of Bethlehem, none of which I’m going to claim are accurate but are generally things I haven’t seen before.  The first and least interesting is that the person they interact with the most is the innkeeper who will eventually allow Joseph and Mary to crash in his manger.  He’s portrayed fairly sympathetically as completely overwhelmed by all the travelers coming to the city.  He’s also harassed by the local Romans, one of which is given a decent number of lines and portrayed as also overwhelmed and not completely unreasonable if, y’know, still a commander of an occupying force.  The innkeeper allows Benji and Waldo to sleep on the floor of the inn overnight. The second interesting thing is the portrayal of those travelers who exclusively talk in exposition speak, both asking and answering questions to each other for the benefit of Benji and his dog and I guess us.  One child does ask the obvious question of why everyone has to go back to their ancestral homes for a census when that precisely defeats the purpose of a census.  This doesn’t get answered but it is an excuse to talk about prophecy and the coming of a messiah, which everyone is sure will be along any day now.  This … is an interesting thing to include, as due to the Roman occupation there was an upswing of Messianic belief at the time that tended to come up whenever the Jewish people were being particularly oppressed.  If you want to dip a toe into this subject look into Jesus ben Ananias or other contemporary messianic figures.

While they’re sleeping the whole Baby Jeebs thing goes down out in the stable, which is portrayed as everyone being woken up by this random bright-ass star outside, which is fairly funny.  Benji and Waldo know what’s going on while everyone else just piles outside to complain about all the commotion.  They start to head back inside, unimpressed by Baby Jeebs, but they notice some shepherds heading towards the stable which is apparently interesting enough to keep them standing around.  Presumably to justify having Benji himself around this special makes the nativity super-crowded, having the inhabitants of the Inn witness everything as well and eventually drawing the attention of a set of asshole Roman guards led by the one from before.

The thing I kept finding most surprising was the continued focus on the occupying Roman forces.  They had to have been there to some extent, and I’m sure their relationship with the locals was tense at best, but this is the first time I’ve seen them have an active presence in a nativity story, but even as prominent as they are they don’t actually have any point.  Giving some background on the innkeeper makes some amount of sense as he was a presence in the story, that also goes for the wise men and shepherds as they do eventually show up in the narrative, especially that second one to inspire Benji, but despite appearing several times to threaten him and his dog and to disrupt the gathering around the Baby Jeebs they’re never mentioned in the nativity play that ostensibly inspired this entire thing and after making vaguely threatening noises they always just go away, affecting nothing.

After talking with the second shepherd Benji tells him his part was so important for unclear reasons while the shepherd replies it is Jeebs who is truly important, then suddenly Benji is back in his room and all hyped up about appearing in the play, and also Jesus.  He rushes out, finds his elf-playing friend, and without any explanation furiously insists directly into his face that he simply must come to their play.  He then rushes off leaving his friend visibly confused.  The play is then presented more-or-less as it as happened in the Bethlehem fantasy and then the special ends.

Once again I’m left at the end of a special fairly sure of the intended message that was meant to be conveyed but more or less adrift on how it went about conveying that message.  With Davey and Goliath I at least got that he had a friend he did a selfless deed for and that inspired him, I was pretty on board with that, but in this one Benji is brought around to feeling that all-important Christmas feeling by … imagining that innkeepers got harassed a bunch back in olden times?  The actual Jeebs portion of the special is maybe a few minutes and most of that is people wandering around the manger wondering why that bright star woke them up, then a shepherd mentions that Jesus is totally great.  I’m not sure how that connected in Benji’s brain to bring him around to loving his part in the school play and how that then led to him both loving Jesus more and connecting with the Christmas spirit.  This doesn’t have a scene where Benji is wracked with ennui and sobs into a pillow so I’m going to have to deduct a few points for that.  The problem might be that this is intended for an audience already on board and it’s more a reminder than a full lesson, but I think losing a scene or two of Roman soldiers being jerks and a little more time questioning man’s relationship to the divine would have been helpful.