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The Most Unsettling ‘Christmas Carol’

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 12 › the-best-version-of-a-christmas-carol › 676916

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the past few years, I’ve reminded you of the best Christmas specials and talked about some classic Christmas music. This year, it’s time to clear the field for the greatest adaptation of the greatest Christmas story.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Colorado Supreme Court just gave Republicans a chance to save themselves. The Colorado ruling calls the originalists’ bluff. Trump insists he hasn’t read Mein Kampf.

The holidays are a time to look back on a long year, but also to look forward to the new one. Give an Atlantic subscription to someone close to you and they’ll get a year of the best coverage on the most important stories—to stay informed and inspired as we enter the new year.

An Actual Ghost Story

Christmas, no matter what your religious beliefs, is a wonderful time to cherish our friends and family but also, in the season’s spirit of reconciliation, to recognize and embrace our common humanity with people everywhere. In the approaching depths of winter, we can recommit to kindness, peace, and joy. That’s why I would like to take this opportunity, right before the holiday, to make you all mad one more time with one of my cultural takes.

There are some good adaptations of the Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, and many bad ones, but only one truly great version, and it is the 1984 made-for-television movie starring George C. Scott.

Wait. Hear me out.

I know that many people are intensely loyal to the 1951 version (titled A Christmas Carol in the United States, and released in the U.K. as Scrooge), starring Alastair Sim. I understand why. It’s charming, in its way, but it is also enduring because so many of us grew up with it. For a time, it was like It’s a Wonderful Life, the black-and-white wallpaper always there in the background after Thanksgiving. And Sim is wonderful: He was only 50 when he filmed Scrooge but he looks much older; his Scrooge is so deformed by sin that his transformation later in the story is almost a physical change, wondrous and giddy.

But for me, too much of Scrooge is formal and stagey. And let’s not even talk about the other versions from the 1930s, or the Muppets, or Bill Murray, or the cartoons, or the more arty takes. Some of them are truly awful. (I’m looking at you, Guy Pearce.)

When I first saw the Scott version, however, I loved the tighter connection to the book, and especially the attention to detail and atmosphere. No, it doesn’t really snow that much in London, but the 1984 version is so evocative that you can almost smell Scrooge’s musty bedroom, the happy stink of the open-air butchers and fishmongers, and the scrawny goose roasting in Mrs. Cratchit’s tiny kitchen.

Most important, just as Sim carried Scrooge, this version is Scott’s movie, despite the outstanding actors around him. Scott was an American, and his British accent slips now and then—I always wince when he tries to get his tongue around “I wonder you don’t go into Parl-ya-ment”—but years of hard living gave him a face, a voice, and a stare that no other Scrooge could match.

And yes, he was fat. Scrooge, in most other iterations, is a scrawny geezer who doesn’t eat much or drink or “make merry” at Christmas. But Scott’s Scrooge is a barrel-chested bully, an imposing and nasty piece of work. He’s not particularly disciplined or monkish; he’s just a corpulent old bastard who can’t remember that he was once a human being.

Then there are the ghosts. They’re deeply unsettling apparitions, which makes Scott’s version a bit more PG-13 than most of the other adaptations.

Frank Finlay’s Marley, in particular, is not some old pal coming to issue a friendly warning. Marley is a damned soul, wailing and doomed. He’s a rotting corpse, for crying out loud. Angela Pleasence is a radiant and annoying Ghost of Christmas Past. At first, I found her off-putting, and then I realized: She’s supposed to be annoying. She’s not guiding Scrooge on a nostalgia tour of his youth; she’s taking acidic delight in showing Scrooge what a jerk he’s become. Every Scrooge loses his temper at these “pictures from the past,” but Scott’s anger seems especially justified as Pleasence smirks at him.

Edward Woodward, however, steals every scene he’s in as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Instead of some phantasmic simp gently reminding Scrooge of the need for Christian charity, Woodward is a striding giant, a knight of Christmas whose mirth barely conceals his moral rage. When observing Bob Cratchit’s family doting on Tiny Tim, he snarls to Scrooge: “It may well be that, in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child!” Woodward delivers it not as a rebuke but as a threat, and that moment still sends a chill through me.

I also have a very personal reason for loving Scott’s version more than any other.

My father was, if not a Scrooge, something of a Grinch, as my mother called him every year. He growled about how Christmas was a giant, expensive pain in the ass. But my dad was a churchgoing Christian, and he harbored a secret love for the holiday. Despite his bah-humbug approach, he insisted on a real tree every year, leaving the decorating to me and my mother. He wrapped his own presents, if you can count “rolling them through paper and tape” as “wrapping.” He and I would go to Christmas Eve services (in Greek Orthodox churches, they’re usually in the late afternoon or early evening) every year while my mother prepared dinner.

But my father was also a very difficult man, and my parents had an extremely volatile marriage. Like many men, my father carried his share of sins and secrets. And like most men of his generation, he did not often speak of them. Some, I know, weighed on him to the very end of his life.

So I was surprised when, one night in the mid-1980s, he joined us to watch A Christmas Carol. We sat in our dark living room with a small fire and no light but the blinking tree. He was chatty and seemed to enjoy it, but he became very quiet toward the end, when Scrooge realizes that at a not-so-distant future Christmas, he is dead and no one cares. Alone in the darkness and the snow, Scott pleads for mercy not like some accomplished thespian in the scene of his life but like an old man at the edge of the abyss, one who now fully understands how his own actions brought him to a desolate end.

I looked over at my parents. My mom was holding my father’s hand. And my father, quiet in the dark, had tears on his cheeks.

Until that moment, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen my father cry, including at his mother’s funeral—and certainly never at a movie. Scott got to him, perhaps because Scott’s Scrooge was a man my father could understand: loud, tough, and full of anger and regret, rather than the effete, pinched-face slip of a fellow played by Sim and others.

In later life, I sometimes feel the same tears welling in my eyes when Scott pleads for one more chance. These tears are not only for my father, who struggled with his own burdens to the end of his life, but for myself as well. It’s easy to hate Scrooge when you’re young and think you have plenty of time to straighten yourself out. When you’re older, you start to wonder how much time you’ve let get by you, and whether you and the elderly miser have more in common than you might like to admit.

Scott’s A Christmas Carol isn’t perfect; it has some especially cringeworthy and twee moments with Tiny Tim. But this isn’t Tim’s story. It’s about looking into the grave and realizing that on Christmas—or any day, really—it is always within our power to change our heart and to become, like Scrooge, “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew.”

To borrow another line from Dickens: May that be truly said of all of us.

Merry Christmas. See you next week.

Related:

We need a little Christmas (music). The most beloved Christmas specials are (almost) all terrible.

Today’s News

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived in Egypt for talks with Egyptian officials about a possible new cease-fire in Gaza and hostage swaps. After three years of negotiations, the European Union reached a provisional agreement to overhaul its asylum and migration laws. Pending ratification, the pact aims to make it easier to limit the entry of migrants while still protecting the right to asylum, according to EU officials. The World Health Organization designated the new JN.1 coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest” yesterday because of its “rapidly increasing” spread.

Evening Read

Pablo Delcan

My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

By Tim Alberta

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day …

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals … Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Talks on Gaza cease-fire and freeing more hostages as Hamas leader is in Egypt

Euronews

www.euronews.com › 2023 › 12 › 20 › talks-on-gaza-cease-fire-and-freeing-more-hostages-as-hamas-leader-is-in-egypt

The top leader of Hamas was in Egypt for talks Wednesday on halting the war in Gaza and securing the release of at least some of the estimated 129 Israeli captives held by Palestinian militants.

Meta's oversight board says AI alone isn't enough to moderate Israel-Hamas war content

Quartz

qz.com › metas-oversight-board-says-ai-alone-isnt-enough-to-mode-1851113842

Meta’s oversight board does not agree with the company’s decision to take down two videos pertaining to the Israel-Hamas war—one of hostages kidnapped from Israel by Hamas, and one showing the aftermath of the bombing of Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital by the Israel Defense Forces.

Read more...

Xi Jinping Is Fighting a Culture War at Home

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › international › archive › 2023 › 12 › xi-jinping-china-culture-war › 676896

In October, a Communist Party–run television network in the province of Hunan aired a five-episode program called When Marx Met Confucius. In it, actors portraying the European revolutionary and the ancient Chinese sage pontificate on their doctrines and discover that their ideas are in perfect harmony.

“I am longing for a supreme and far-reaching ideal world, where everyone can do their best and get what they need,” Marx says. “I call it a communist society.”

“I also advocate the establishment of a society where everyone is happy and equal,” Confucius responds. “I call it the great unity of the world.”

The program’s message is that modern Chinese culture should be a synthesis of Marxism and China’s traditions—a fusion achieved by another great philosopher, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “There has been endless debate about how traditional culture should be treated,” one scholar on the show explains. But finally, thanks to Xi’s wisdom, “the problem was truly solved, and people’s bound thoughts suddenly became clear.”


[Read: The most dangerous conflict no one is talking about]

The Marx and Confucius show is just one small part of Xi’s campaign to fashion a new ideological conformity in China. Its apparent aim is to foster unity in preparation for struggles at home and abroad—but with the ultimate purpose of tightening Xi’s grip on China. Chinese leaders “want to have a very powerful, socialist, ideological framework that can congeal the population, and this is of course under the party’s control and guidance,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. “What’s a more powerful way to centralize power than to control people’s thought?”

Xi’s push for communist conformity might seem anachronistic in the age of social media and the global digital commons. But it’s only one way he is dragging China back into an older, darker time. He has reversed decades of market liberalization in favor of renewed state intervention in the economy, returned to Cold War–style confrontation with the West after a period of fruitful cooperation, and reestablished one-man rule to a degree unseen since the days of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder. Now he is attempting to restore the intense ideological indoctrination of earlier years of Communist rule—the era of Mao’s Little Red Book—in a quest for national “unity,” as he defines it, and total Party dominance.

In this sense, China is in the throes of a culture war—one that the state has been waging against society for some time, using the measures of repression available to its leader. Xi has already intensified censorship and strangled private education. Now his campaign is picking up pace. In October, he unveiled a framework he calls Xi Jinping Thought on Culture, the latest installment in a growing corpus of his “thought” meant to direct foreign affairs, the military, and other aspects of policy and private life. With this pronouncement, according to the state news agency Xinhua, Xi’s aim is to “provide a strong ideological guarantee, spiritual strength,” and “a socialist ideology that has the power to unite and inspire the people.”

[Read: China changed its mind about World War II]


Nor is this indoctrination meant to stop at China’s borders. “Profound changes in the international landscape prompt an urgent need to increase China’s cultural soft power and the appeal of Chinese culture,” Xinhua noted. In a related move in March, Xi introduced the “Global Civilization Initiative,” a manifesto in which he advocates “respect for the diversity of civilizations” and that “coexistence transcend feelings of superiority.” Countries, he adds, should “refrain from imposing their own values or models on others.”

That’s Xi-speak for denying the existence of the universal rights and values that undergird the global primacy of democracy. Xi’s culture war has geopolitical implications in this regard: In seeking to undercut the West’s cultural influence abroad, Beijing appears to realize that winning its battle with the United States will require not just missiles and microchips, but media and messaging as well.


Chinese leaders have a long history of trying to control thought. In 213 B.C.E., the first emperor of the Qin dynasty became irritated with scholars who compared him and his policies unfavorably to rulers of the distant past. His solution, so the story goes, was to confiscate suspect texts on history, philosophy, and other subjects and burn them. He did this, one ancient historian commented, “in order to make the people stupid and ensure that in all under Heaven there should be no rejection of the present by using the past.”

Two thousand years later, Xi Jinping is attempting something similar. In October, a Chinese book distributor recalled a recent reprint of a biography of the Ming dynasty’s last emperor from sellers without a clear explanation. The Chongzhen emperor, as he was known, hanged himself when his dynasty collapsed in 1644. Perhaps the book’s cover language, which advertises that “Chongzhen’s repeated mistakes” had “hastened the nation’s destruction,” could be construed as an implicit criticism of Xi amid the country’s mounting economic problems and geopolitical tensions. Whatever the reason, today’s censors, much like the Qin emperor, seem to prefer that readers not compare present and past.

Xi’s vision for China’s present includes old-fashioned and supposedly “socialist” morality. In October, the Chinese leader shared his view that women’s proper role in Chinese society is to stay home and have babies to reverse the country’s population shrinkage, brought about, in part, by his party’s misguided policies. He urged women to follow “a new trend of family” and stressed the need to “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing.” In a sign of the times, Lisa, a member of the K-pop group Blackpink, was recently suspended from the Chinese social-media platform Weibo for unspecified reasons; the ban came after she had performed a burlesque show in Paris that was controversial in China. The Hong Kong celebrity Angelababy was also banned, perhaps because she may have attended the performance.

Others with lifestyles that the state considers unhealthy for communist society have also come under pressure, most notably members of the gay, lesbian, and transgender communities. In 2021, censors barred imagery of “effeminate” men from local television and closed dozens of social-media accounts associated with LGBTQ groups. Just this month, the government’s top internet watchdog announced a crackdown on short social-media videos that have sexual content or images of cross-dressing.

[Read: Chinese Leaders Are Scared of Their Country’s History]


Ethnic minorities have fared still worse in this ideological framework. Xi has used his notion of national culture, largely defined by the Han Chinese majority, as a bludgeon for forcibly assimilating the country’s Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other such groups. Touring Xinjiang—home to the Uyghurs—in 2022, Xi made the case that minority societies were all part of a greater “Chinese culture,” because they have been connected to Chinese civilization from time immemorial.

That narrative is inaccurate. Uyghurs and Tibetans, for instance, have their own languages and religious practices. Their societies have distinct cultural roots and have been governed by entities largely independent from China for most of their histories. Xi nevertheless instructed local officials that his version of the relationship had to be taught more concertedly in order to “firmly forge a China heart and Chinese soul” across the region’s diverse peoples. This effort to amalgamate minorities into a single category of “Chinese”—as opposed to “citizens of China”—may be behind the severity of Xi’s suppression of minority traditional life: The government has smothered Uyghur culture by destroying religious sites; curtailing the study of Uyghur culture, literature, and language in schools; and associating the practice of Islam with extremism. A 2020 policy reduced the study of the Mongolian language in favor of Chinese in schools in northern China, leading ethnic Mongolians to protest.

The West is subject to a parallel erasure. In a recent video that went viral on Chinese social media, Jin Canrong, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Renmin University, in Beijing, argued that “there is a question as to whether Greece and Rome existed.” Aristotle, he claimed, is a fabrication: No single person could have written so much on so many topics. Even the writing materials for such a volume of words would have been unavailable in antiquity, he claimed. By contrast, ancient Chinese works were relatively short—and, by implication, more likely to be real. His listeners got the point. “It’s just common practice for European leaders to make up philosophies and philosophers in order to rule and spread their ideology,” a commenter on Weibo opined.

During China’s decades of reform, culture and ideology took a back seat to national development and the pursuit of wealth. Xi has apparently seen fit to reverse this pragmatic turn, and to do so by promoting a new concoction of Chinese traditions and socialism. Promoting this cultural fusion, he said in a recently published speech, “is the strongest assurance for our success,” because “only with cultural confidence can a nation stand firm and tall and traverse great distances.”

Xi’s government isn’t just urging the public to adopt his new culture. He’s imposing it. In October, China’s rubber-stamp legislature passed the Patriotic Education Law, which mandates the intensive teaching of ideology, national defense and security, “ethnic solidarity,” and the “deeds of heroes” in schools, according to Xinhua. The purpose, a spokesperson for the legislature told local media, is to “guide people to deeply understand the trinity of loving the country, the Party, and socialism.”


Such heavy-handed efforts might seem poorly matched to the times. Sources of information abound, and large numbers of Chinese people travel and study abroad—surely the government can’t restrict them to state-approved ideas.

But only a small proportion of the Chinese populace possesses the interest, language skills, and resources to seek out information beyond the censors’ firewall. The majority still depend on Chinese media and other sources of state-sanctioned information. Chinese authorities use this extensive control not just to keep undesirable content from the public’s eyes, but also to actively shape what people believe. Throughout the crisis in Gaza, for instance, Chinese state media have fed the public a steady stream of pro-Palestinian messaging that has contributed to an upsurge in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel discourse online. Censors could easily suppress such sentiments, but they don’t, because they help build domestic support for Beijing’s foreign policy.

The potential consequences of Xi’s culture war should worry the world. An ever more isolated, indoctrinated, and politicized Chinese populace could become that much more hostile to the West and more supportive of nationalist causes, such as a military assault to claim Taiwan. Xi’s quest for social control presents risks for the Communist regime as well. Though some Chinese people may find Xi’s conservative and nationalist values appealing, the segments of the population that do see beyond the firewall, or that have grown accustomed to a more open environment, are likely to bridle. As a result, “you might see some significant polarization within Chinese society,” Mary Gallagher, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Michigan, told me.

The precedent for such tensions is not encouraging. Back in 1966, Mao’s Cultural Revolution convulsed the country in violence, as radical Red Guards sought to stamp out ideas and practices they saw as corrupting. That campaign, too, was the work of one man determined to preserve his power.