I know this is a betrayal of the Institute's core mission, but I would like to take a moment to engage in some Gremlins 1 studies. In particular, the way in which the Gremlins seem to be xenophobic caricatures while simultaneously being avatars for consumer products.
Many have written about how Gremlins taps into a certain suburban paranoia (similar to some of Dante's other works), a fear of the outsider. Billy's neighbor comments that Gremlins are being put in machinery by foreigners as an act of sabotage.
Gremlins was released in 1984, in the midst of the Reagan years, and is set in a small, mostly white town of Kingston Falls. There is definitely a current of fear and racial anxiety that is projected onto the Gremlins. A current which is still very much present in the American id
But there is also much to suggest that the Gremlins are in some way associated with consumerism. Billy's father has made a career off of creating useless inventions and novelty goods. In this context, Gizmo's name even suggests a relation to such products.
The film is also set on Christmas, and Gizmo is given as a gift. The finale of the film takes place in a department store. All this suggests the Gremlins are a manifestation of rampant and wasteful consumerism. But how does this interpretation coexist with the xenophobia?
Somewhere in the American subconscious, the wires have been crossed between consumerism and xenophobia, and the Gremlins are the result. The reason why lies in the origin of consumer goods, the price that is paid for the proliferation of cheap products.
The production of a cheap novelty good requires a certain amount of violence and misery. Conflict minerals, sweatshops, the military power used to maintain a vast global empire in order to secure these supply chains. But all of this happens elsewhere, far from Kingston Falls.
This violence is also enacted on people who do not look like the inhabitants of Kingston Falls. This violence may be hidden away, across the globe, but most suburban Americans know of it to some extent.
This buried guilt manifests itself as fear of retribution, which leads to a militant xenophobia. The Gremlins are the perfect avatar of this fear: what if all the diffuse violence of commodity production was brought to bear on the consumer of these products?
This is also why Gremlins is a subversive Christmas film. The holidays have become a ritualized consumer orgy, and the Gremlins enact all the violence and wastefulness of this event on the small town.
From this perspective, the darkness of Kate's Santa story doesn't seem out of place or jarring. It takes this theme to its conclusion, juxtaposing a figure of joyous gift-giving and death, decay. This disgusting image is the soul of Christmas under consumer capitalism.
It is also the epitome of Freud's unheimlich, or "unhomely". Kate's family home is the site of this horror - not unlike the way the Gremlins attack Billy's mother in her home, and are murdered by domestic appliance (blender, microwave, etc)
Ironically, Gremlins would go on to generate a vast amount of merchandise, participating in the very consumerism the film was criticizing. This seems to have an impact on director Joe Dante, and it explains why Gremlins 2: The New Batch had to create new methods of subversion.
