Around Black Friday the first itch hits me.
They creep in, dull yet unmistakable, around the fringes of my Turkey coma, pulsing in the back of my brain. If I ignore them they grow worse by weekend’s end, evolving into a kind of withdrawal headache and a sense that something is missing.
There’s only one antidote: Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) stapling thousands of lights to his house and accidentally catching his own sleeve, or sledding down a mountain at 100 miles per hour, or being trapped in the attic while his family goes shopping, or watching Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) abduct his boss.
My name is Matthew, and I am a National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation addict.
This addiction began in the throes of my sixth Christmas (1992…it was a very good year). The film was in heavy holiday screening on NBC at the time, and my Dad was interested in seeing it (And, in the golden age of the VCR, recording it.).
I don’t remember my first viewing of the film as being something that was particularly revelatory, largely because I could only vaguely figure out what was going on. As a six-year-old, Christmas movies were things with stop-motion reindeer and sardonic, lasagna-eating cats. But it was on repeat viewings later that same season that I began to realize John Hughes and company were on to something.
These days I’m watching this particular holiday flick at least a dozen or so times each December (I’ve already been through five of my 2010 viewings as of this writing.), and it never loses its luster. The wackiness of it is an obvious appeal to someone of my…idiom, shall we say, but the love of the film has gone deeper than that. For all its comic mugging and slapstick irreverence, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is, at its heart, a film about the bittersweet peculiarity of the modern holiday experience.
It might sound like I’m attempting to project a false profundity onto relatively lightweight cinema fare, but go watch the film so many times that it seeps into your dreams and then talk to me about whether or not I’m wrong. I’m not arguing that Christmas Vacation is not a light film. It absolutely is. You can turn it on right now, watch it through several times, and do nothing but laugh at the unabashed zaniness of it all, from Clark Griswold’s desperate attempts to get his Christmas lights to turn on to Cousin Eddie’s unceremonious disposal of the contents of his RV septic tank. You can do this, quite enjoyably, while giving no thought to whether or not there’s a deeper meaning. In fact, it’s quite possible that the filmmakers themselves had no real inkling of what was lying beneath their comic flights, even as they were filming the thing.
But we are talking about a film written by John Hughes, the late, great pop auteur of the 1980s, the man who brought us The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Home Alone. Hughes had a knack for inserting deeper meaning even when things seemed at their most shallow. His films are of a kind so deeply associated with the American spirit: highly commercial, over the top, even slightly implausible, but packed with a yearning for a genuine sense of truth and emotion. People who think it’s just pre-packaged, supergloss box-office cash-in aren’t looking hard enough for what’s really going on.
Which brings me back to Christmas Vacation. It’s a film about a man (Clark Griswold) who wants nothing more than to create the perfect Christmas for himself and his family. His overeager, often hapless pursuit of this, is largely selfless, even when it seems destructive. He wants to be that father, that husband, that son, who creates a holiday for the ages. His problem just happens to be that every single thing goes wrong. The lights don’t work, the tree catches fire, the turkey is dry, the Christmas bonus is nowhere in sight, the relatives are unappreciative, uncaring or just plain senile and the wife and kids are simply trying to dodge all of his well-intentioned misfires.
It’s all very funny, and you can take it as just that, but it’s also a film about our constant yearning for the idealized Normal Rockwell glow that we all wish would materialize in our own living rooms. It’s a film about trying to build perfection out of what will always be chaos, and about discovering that sometimes that chaos is perfection. It’s that undertone, that snow-crested, holly-wreathed quest for a wonderful life, that makes the film so watchable, even when you’re someone like me who’s seen it 200 times.
Of course, if you don’t find all that there, you can always just wait for the moment when the dog chases the squirrel around the house.
Merry Christmas.
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