I just finished watching The Santa Clause 2 ...

[capri0mni]

And is it me, or is the actor who plays Bernard (chief elf) the same actor who plays Charlie on Numb3rs? I kept expecting Bernard to answer when anyone said: "Charlie..." (heh)

And also, this is going through my head, recently, what with the novel I was working on for NaNoWriMo:

I'm a born-again agnostic with a wide sympathetic streak for the atheists among us, and it's really starting to bother me that "Being Good" = "Believing in Santa" (and this movie also fit that mold). For the rewrite/polish/completion of that novel, I'm even considering having some of the elves, themselves, be non-believers.

It's one reason why I think the remake of Miracle on 34th Street can't hold a candle to the original. In the original, the lawyer "proves" that the man who calls himself "Kris Kringle" really is Santa Claus, because the workers at New York's Dead Letter department deliver all the letters to Santa to the courtroom where Kris Kringle is being tried, and the preciding judge rules that if a branch of the U.S. government recognizes him as Santa, then it's not up to the state to declare otherwise. In the remake, the lawyer proves Kris is really Santa by producing a flying reindeer.

In the original, "Santa" is real if the people around him decide they want him to be real (whether their motive's to save the economy, shift their workload on to someone else, or just don't want to see a very nice old man to be shipped off to an insane assylum). In the remake, only evidence of the literal truth of a supernatural version of the story counts toward Santa's reality.

I wonder why the change was made, in the remake. Was it simply because the movie makers had the technological means to create special effects? Or was America just a smidge more secular in 1947? Or both?

Oh, and when did the tradition of Mrs. Claus begin?

Comments

[uncacreamy.livejournal.com]

IMDB says that is indeed the same actor. I think in the Santa genre, he stands for innocence, magic, and everything bright and good in Christmas. Thus, not believing in him is either a sign of being bad, or being too taken over by grownup issues.

What really bothers me is the paradox in these movies. If your children are getting presents you didn't give them.. then there's a Santa. Why wouldn't they believe in him?

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. In the original movie, Santa Claus is seen as the power of the imagination, and believing in him means that you're open to possibilities in the world that are wider than what you see right in front of your nose. But, on the other hand, there are lots of people in the film who don't believe that the man calling himself "Kris Kringle" is really Santa Claus who are still portrayed as good people.

And, at the end of the movie, it's still left an open question as to whether he's really Santa, or not (though the circumstantial evidence is mounting that Kris was telling the truth all along).

I was chatting with indefatigable42 a few weeks ago, and she was saying that, to her, Santa Claus always seemed like "religion with training wheels." That's the feeling I myself was getting as I was writing the internal monologue of my non-believing protagonist. And as I believe that religion is superfluous to morality, I was kind of scrambling, mid-story to clarify that it was not his disbelief that put him on the naughty list. And it's something I'm still grappling with, before I tackle the rewrite.

As my protagonist puts it, while waiting in the Santa line at the mall with his little brother: when kids are really little, they're terrified of Santa; when they get old enough to understand what he's supposed to be and do for them, he becomes a focus of their greed, as they make lists of all the things they want. So where's the innocence or magic in that? And then, parents expect their kids to stop believing at a certain age. So why start telling the story in the first place?

I don't agree with my protagonist, but he does raise fair questions, and, since I'm the author, I kind of have to answer them in the course of my story. At the moment, I'm kind of leaning toward "The Nichol" standing for the power of generosity, and the value of teaching your little kids about him is that he helps introduce the habit of thinking beyond your own tight family circle -- that the world itself can be generous, and that you can be a generous part of the world. So you're not always thinking "I got mine, Jack!"

But that's pretty subtle, and I'm wondering if I can pull it off...

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Oh, and btw, where did you get the quote you posted to your LJ on Dec. 15th? That's great.