Bad Santa/Its a Wonderful Life
at IFC Center
Is there a keen cross-demographic strategy behind the IFC Center programming a one-week double bill featuring It’s a Wonderful Life and Bad Santa? Frank Capra’s quintessentially sentimental ode to holiday cheer strikes an indisputably separate tone from Terry Zwigoff’s raunchy tale of seasonal thievery. Billy Bob Thornton, as the hard-drinking womanizer slovenly wearing a Santa suit in an annual scheme to pilfer the nation’s shopping malls, hardly emerges from the everyman tradition of Jimmy Stewart (that award goes to Tom Hanks). Regardless of any commercial strategies, a closer look at the juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate works suggests more in common than three letters and a holiday milieu.
It helps to work backwards. When it was released in 2003, Bad Santa gained immediate cult stature for comically subverting Christmas cheer, but beneath the heavy vulgarities, Zwigoff was still telling a conventional story of spiritual redemption. Thornton’s despondent character, Willie, loses his passion for swindling; forced to confront holiday sincerity up close as a Santa at the mall, he grows to envy the bland satisfaction of a settled life. Observing the tribulations of a detached prepubescent boy after breaking into his home and, thanks to the obliviousness of his senile grandmother, moving in, Willie cultivates sympathy for another person—which leads to his newfound contentment.
In the 1946 Capra classic, Stewart’s George Bailey follows a related trajectory. The movie is remembered as a blithe celebration of convivial harmony, but it doesn’t start out that way: An angel named Clarence gets assigned by heavenly manager Joseph to examine George’s case before proceeding to fix it, and the prospects look bleak. George loses a bank deposit, becomes frustrated with his family, and eventually plots suicide. Clarence intervenes at a crucial moment, granting George’s bleak wish that he’d never been born. Witnessing how much worse the world would be without his existence, George appreciates his life—and returns to it, eager to handle his problems.
Willie and George are equally plagued by deep funks before out-of-left field twists conveniently provide their salvations: Willie feels for a bullied kid and George gets to peek at an alternate reality. The solemn protagonists fail to discover complete reclamation of self-confidence until they hit their ultimate lows—and, in both cases, this means the verge of suicide (George considers drowning himself, while Willie prefer asphyxiation). It’s interesting that suicide wasn’t considered a narrative taboo at the time of Capra’s film, unlike sex and booze, the two main vices that Willie learns to overcome.
Despite their varying degrees of indecency, the characters bear similar signs of psychological disarray. The celestial beings reach a verdict about George that’s not unlike the one given by Willie’s disparaging partner-in-crime, Marcus (Tony Cox). In the Capra film, Clarence wonders if George is ill. “No—worse,” replies his superior. “He’s discouraged.” That summation gets repeated in Bad Santa when Marcus abruptly tells Willie that he’s “got no discipline and got no initiative.”
The resemblance between the movies isn’t an accident. In an interview with the New York Times, Zwigoff designated It’s a Wonderful Life as “the last Christmas movie I really liked,” considering it “schmaltzy,” but “not without its dark moments.”
There’s a postmodern schmaltz at work in the crudeness of Bad Santa, and both movies end on life affirming notes, although Capra can’t resist taking a gooey optimistic route in the final frame, while Willie’s future remains ambiguous. Their journeys are comparable, but the finales differ. In a way, Bad Santa serves as a reply to its antecedent. Consider It’s a Wonderful Life as a philosophy situated against the dissenting response offered by the initials of Bad Santa. Zwigoff’s message holds nothing back.
at IFC Center
Is there a keen cross-demographic strategy behind the IFC Center programming a one-week double bill featuring It’s a Wonderful Life and Bad Santa? Frank Capra’s quintessentially sentimental ode to holiday cheer strikes an indisputably separate tone from Terry Zwigoff’s raunchy tale of seasonal thievery. Billy Bob Thornton, as the hard-drinking womanizer slovenly wearing a Santa suit in an annual scheme to pilfer the nation’s shopping malls, hardly emerges from the everyman tradition of Jimmy Stewart (that award goes to Tom Hanks). Regardless of any commercial strategies, a closer look at the juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate works suggests more in common than three letters and a holiday milieu.
It helps to work backwards. When it was released in 2003, Bad Santa gained immediate cult stature for comically subverting Christmas cheer, but beneath the heavy vulgarities, Zwigoff was still telling a conventional story of spiritual redemption. Thornton’s despondent character, Willie, loses his passion for swindling; forced to confront holiday sincerity up close as a Santa at the mall, he grows to envy the bland satisfaction of a settled life. Observing the tribulations of a detached prepubescent boy after breaking into his home and, thanks to the obliviousness of his senile grandmother, moving in, Willie cultivates sympathy for another person—which leads to his newfound contentment.
In the 1946 Capra classic, Stewart’s George Bailey follows a related trajectory. The movie is remembered as a blithe celebration of convivial harmony, but it doesn’t start out that way: An angel named Clarence gets assigned by heavenly manager Joseph to examine George’s case before proceeding to fix it, and the prospects look bleak. George loses a bank deposit, becomes frustrated with his family, and eventually plots suicide. Clarence intervenes at a crucial moment, granting George’s bleak wish that he’d never been born. Witnessing how much worse the world would be without his existence, George appreciates his life—and returns to it, eager to handle his problems.
Willie and George are equally plagued by deep funks before out-of-left field twists conveniently provide their salvations: Willie feels for a bullied kid and George gets to peek at an alternate reality. The solemn protagonists fail to discover complete reclamation of self-confidence until they hit their ultimate lows—and, in both cases, this means the verge of suicide (George considers drowning himself, while Willie prefer asphyxiation). It’s interesting that suicide wasn’t considered a narrative taboo at the time of Capra’s film, unlike sex and booze, the two main vices that Willie learns to overcome.
Despite their varying degrees of indecency, the characters bear similar signs of psychological disarray. The celestial beings reach a verdict about George that’s not unlike the one given by Willie’s disparaging partner-in-crime, Marcus (Tony Cox). In the Capra film, Clarence wonders if George is ill. “No—worse,” replies his superior. “He’s discouraged.” That summation gets repeated in Bad Santa when Marcus abruptly tells Willie that he’s “got no discipline and got no initiative.”
The resemblance between the movies isn’t an accident. In an interview with the New York Times, Zwigoff designated It’s a Wonderful Life as “the last Christmas movie I really liked,” considering it “schmaltzy,” but “not without its dark moments.”
There’s a postmodern schmaltz at work in the crudeness of Bad Santa, and both movies end on life affirming notes, although Capra can’t resist taking a gooey optimistic route in the final frame, while Willie’s future remains ambiguous. Their journeys are comparable, but the finales differ. In a way, Bad Santa serves as a reply to its antecedent. Consider It’s a Wonderful Life as a philosophy situated against the dissenting response offered by the initials of Bad Santa. Zwigoff’s message holds nothing back.
