Red Line
Categories: Christmas movies, Christmas, Rudolh
Tags: Christmas movies Christmas Rudolh
A blast from the past, from my pre-website Voice years, just in time for Christmas:
"We all pretend the rainbow has an end/and you’ll be there my friend someday..." And so goes the chilling, enigmatic bridge verse to "There’s Always Tomorrow," the key ballad in boomer America’s most protean air burst of televised Christmas mythology, 1964's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The first and most resonant of the CBS-broadcast holiday puppet passions, this deep-dish freakazoid may not be the greatest find in AMMI’s "Wishing You an Animated Christmas" series starting Dec. 20 (that would be Lev Atmantov’s 1957 restored The Snow Queen), but it is, metaphorically speaking, the mother lode.
Nearly all Christmas tales, from Dickens on down to Jingle All the Way, are capitalist parables at heart — it’s what Christmas is all about, to quote Linus Van Pelt out of context — and Rudolph is as Adam Smithian in its politics as it is Jack Smithian in its nutlog extrapolation of the Johnny Marks’s original carol. Like it or not, the story’s dynamics hinge on the North Pole’s alarming reindeer unemployment problem — only eight tenured positions and so many applicants. Rudolph begins as a mutant (born too close to the factory?), and is quickly deemed an unprofitable embarrassment by everyone from his Member of the Board dad Donner to Santa himself, the unforgiving nabob at the local industry’s helm. "Shame on you," Santa tells Donner —not for hiding Rudolph, but for having him at all.
While a snowman sings "Silver and Gold," Rudolph tries to prove himself worthy of cost-effective membership in the machine despite his "noncomformity," all the while skirting the advances of the Abominable Snow Monster — the subSiberian Cold War specter of Communism. A spry little Horatio Alger, Rudolph embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery until Santa, focused as always on efficient trade practice, realizes how he might profit from Rudolph’s inflamed uniqueness and enthusiastically formulates a new frontline team position for the young buck. "I knew that nose would turn out to be useful!" an ass-protecting Donner exclaims, and Rudolph becomes Christmastown’s first freelance consultant. But his is a per project application — won’t Rudolph get laid off when the weather is clear?
Along the way, Hermie the Elf Dentist evokes the obsolete craftsman losing his soul on the Industrial Revolution assembly line (complete with barking foreman), and Yukon Cornelius embodies the pre-industrial entrepreneur scrambling after the American Dream, penniless, semi-deranged and running amok in the wilderness. The Island of Misfit Toys — a kind of fascistic monarchy of capitalist castoffs eventually rescued from a gainless limbo — is clearly Cuba. Fearlessly righteous, the narrative assures us that every sensibility, even the finally toothless shell of Communism, can be folded successfully into the system.
But there's a price to be paid: during the end credits, the gift-delivering elf aboard Santa’s sleigh throws a bird overboard without an umbrella — not knowing the bird is a misfit toy and cannot fly. It’s never been said that mass production wouldn’t have casualties, only that we shouldn’t care. What’s more vital is Rudolph’s expression of rampant Americanism: not simply to join, but to lead.
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