Thread by @owenbroadcast

'the nightmare before christmas' was released 31 years ago today.

a strange film: after three decades, its still a feature of the cultural landscape (year round), you see its imagery often - it clearly has a special relationship to us.

this year, i tried to figure out why

...

some people seem to instinctually take on this movie as part of their personality. i remember going to a girl's room once and she had a nightmare before christmas blanket. "yeah, that makes sense". people wear shirts of it, bumper stickers - all year, not just at either holiday.

this is noteworthy because it's a holiday film that transcends the holidays. this is usually the opposite of what holiday movies do. they're usually especially confined to their seasonal domain. someone wouldn't really wear christmas movie gear in spring, as a general rule.

its also noteworthy that this movie seems to lack an obvious folkloric / mythical / archetypal resonance. im sure we could shoehorn something in, but it doesn't fit an obvious pattern or precedence, to me. that just makes the above facts, it's archetypal resonance, even stranger

II. on what is called "spooky", and magic.

spooky can mean many things. something that reveals a hidden other world is spooky. the place jack is from, halloween town, is not that type of spooky. they live in this realm, it is not an "other world" to them.

the spookiness here, which is native to jack - which is, really, his entire world and paradigm - is that of the bizarre, disturbing, or inverted. it is the aesthetic of spookiness. we could call this creepy: his world is obsessed with the dark and bizarre for its own sake.

enter: christmas. he experiences many aspects of christmas, all from the perspective of an outsider. his christmas experience is parsed as, "wow, amazing, what is this?" (the main song is called 'what's this?'). he's completely charmed and entranced, but its essence eludes him.

his experience of christmas is self-described as the feeling of missing some hidden core: the thing that really makes it what it is. the whole point of it. that's the main theme: here's the lights, here are the bells, he even boils an ornament in his lab. he has all the stuff.

but the stuff isnt the answer for "what is christmas?". he correctly intuits that the stuff is superfluous. he's on the surface level. he knows he is clearly missing the thing christmas is really about. he cannot see or grasp the thing at the core that makes christmas what it is

III. secular

my posit is that the reason this movie has an instinctual resonance in our culture is because jack's experience is the experience of the modern person, here explicated as their experience of the holidays.

this is what christmas is like for the modern secular child

we (especially children) are native to a world that is just kind of creepy and dark - then our culture chooses to focus on those things and highlight them. we also present a lot of it to children

to extend the metaphor, halloween is very creepy and dark. its also a kids holiday

then, you see christmas, and it's the total opposite of this. nice, warm, love, light, inviting - everyone loves christmas, just like jack. it's intoxicatingly beautiful. you love christmas.

the modern secular child or adult loves christmas. it's most people's favorite holiday.

these modern secular people can participate in christmas in a variety of ways, but, like jack, they are totally locked out of its core: being a modern secular person literally precludes you from fully being a part of what christmas is actually about.

notably: jack never figures it out - because he can't. its precluded from his universe. he is correct in his assessment, 100%: the magic of christmas is not about any of the things he sees or participates in or obtains

its all downstream of something he never even gets close to

IV. so, what is christmas?

christmas is, literally, a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. to even point this out feels like proselytization - but that is simply a matter of actual fact. paradoxically, this is both comically obvious and totally obscured in modern christmas

jack never gets this information, his his issue is real. "what is this magical enchanting thing really about? i feel that i'm only on the surface level". that is true. the lights, gifts, decor, and so on, are all literally about celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.

this is a perfect analogy for a secular child's experience of christmas. theres this magic space, i want to inhabit it. but its not "of you". its other. its not your world. you don't actually believe in the thing that, at the core, is what it's all about. you are not part of it

jack is from halloween world. that's who he is. so, when he participates in christmas, he makes it like halloween. that's the whole movie.

that's the modern secular person. you can see the stuff in this other realm, and the stuff in it is so cool and magical. you really love it

but the core of it, the thing that makes it what it is, is antithetical to you. so, when you try to participate in it, you make it more secular. you make it more like your world - when what drew you to it in the first place is that it's the opposite of your world. you are jack.

and thats what happens in the movie. this is why people instinctually resonate with this tale. this is the modern secular person's experience of christmas, especially children

you could also extend this out to other phenomena that have their origin in religion

thats it. thanks

my manager said if i spent the time writing this i have to plug my [general operation]

book in pinned tweet. comics in highlights tab. ad for the lab below (posted notes for this there last week).

bonus pic: thats me last year (pumpkin vibes)

second footnote: speaking of children’s media, here’s a thread we did recently of children’s book recommendations (featuring real pumpkin)

i am glad people responded to this post. very cool

if you liked this you may enjoy some of my other stuff, for example: a comics anthology about the intersection of having a baby and religious philosophy, or my first kid's book, below:

happy halloween.

going to add this at the end here: a pastor / author drew a similar conclusion as me (independent of me, posted before). he wrote a more in depth article on substack, and a thread in his pinned tweet tying it into ‘a secular age’ by charles taylor, if you want to check it out: