fredherman

At a party a few years ago, I finally saw A Charlie Brown Christmas, a frightening early work of horror animation.

While he is uncredited, the H.P. Lovecraft influence is clear throughout, even in the setting: a ramshackle little town in the middle of what has to be a dark New England winter wasteland. No streets are visible, only a very small number of ominous little houses standing together in the snow with a jumbled lack of organization, in the middle of a white nothingness, with only the silent trees for company. The sizes of the houses are mismatched; their angles and corners, the whole visual perspective of the town, is subtly off. The foreboding aura of the town is only heightened by what we see as the camera moves in: a line of children skating together on the snow, linked like the pilgrims following Death at the end of The Seventh Seal. They are led, not by any adult--for reasons that soon become implicit, there are no adults--but by the capering, giggling form of a white dog that skates like a man, whose antics ultimately lead the story's only relative innocent (Charlie Brown, the poor village fool who doesn't understand what the festivities are really about) to be thrown headlong into a pole. Knowing nothing better, Charlie Brown never thinks to question his treatment, even after recovering from his apparent skull fracture.

It gets worse. The children with whom he shares the town convince Charlie Brown to direct their "Christmas play," and he never considers the implications of the fact that all elements of the actual play--script, actors, props, instruments, a theater--have already been prepared for him. Nor is he concerned when he passes by the house of the white dog--given his apparent autonomy and ceremonial leadership position in the town, clearly their Dog God--and finds the dog nonchalantly adding to a gigantic pile of bones standing beside his house, the remains of his just-finished meal. Once we reach the actual theater, and preparations begin for the play, we are faced with the truth about these parentless children: all of them have the same face. (Some, including not only Charlie Brown but a couple of the girls, are already balding.) This is a town whose inhabitants have been inbred, perhaps for centuries, living unnaturally long lives, rarely seeming to eat--or at least, we do not see what they eat--guided only by a gibbering half-dog, half-human thing.

As preparations continue, the ugly nature of what is to come becomes clear to the audience, though Charlie Brown is too innocent to see it; he knows that the current town activity follows traditions that go back to the arcane rituals of ancient Babylon, but he does not realize why. The children dance in a bizarre collection of chaotic individual capers evoking something undeveloped, unformed, demonic. As part of the ceremonial setting-up of the boy who is, we realize with a start, the yearly sacrifice, the Dog God leads his followers in ostracizing Charlie Brown on the flimsiest of excuses: Charlie Brown's Christmas tree isn't large enough. (Of course, if the worship of the Dog God shares any tenets at all with, say, those of the religion of Summerisle, it's entirely possible that his tree--so to speak--isn't big enough, which may be another reason for his imminent sacrifice.)

To settle any question of where this is going, Linus--armed with his robe of office, the blanket which he says, significantly, will be his "coat" when he grows up--performs a dark, ironic, falsely innocent soliloquy which retells mainstream Christianity's story of the origin of Christmas... and he does so before a theater which is largely empty. But Charlie Brown, having been psychologically softened up (thus completing a process begun by Lucy, the dark gatekeeper of the town's religion), has been brought to a state in which he believes that he is once again a part of the group. He decides that his tree is good enough, and returns. Outside the theater, the other worshippers surround him and begin to sing carols, trapping him with dark irony. The pathos of the scene is that Charlie Brown joins in in their song.

Unseen by him, some of the worshippers return to the house of the Dog God, which is covered with gaudy, even obscenely flashy ornaments praising the creature and declaring its dominance and power. Waving their arms around in the performance of crazed ceremonial magic, the crowd magically transports a layer of those trinkets onto Charlie Brown's tree, which also grows a sudden layer of vivid green leaves--leaves like none known to nature. The tree has been overwhelmed and engulfed by the power of the Dog God... and as the credits roll, it is clear that Charlie Brown, surrounded by the laughing chorus of his former friends, is about to be added to the pile of bones.

I mean, wow. They don't make horror like that anymore.

Behind the beautiful are stones,
or vacuum, or fluttery little wings.
Welcome then the ugly,
who have no surface to break.

Waiting for the end you craved,
still you had the presence of mind, like a spark
far away in a darkened house, to blow a kiss
and change the antiseptic room to your apartment,
to chicken broth and macaroni, to refuge
from Lithuania and Mexico and my school.
And all the things I could not say seemed, with a kiss,
forgiven. They didn't notice, but that was heroism;
and if I could send thanks to you in heaven,
I hope you'd recognize the flavor.

The sparrow is a sparrow;
it will not be engaged.

Onlinity skews you to imitation of the young;
you chase after similes, hold to the toys of the mind,
jump up and down like cartoons. And like cartoons,

it is all on paper. Like cartoons, it is scenery,
slow to move. And all the certainties,
the solid whumpfs of endings, are properly spaced

like the punctuation lives do not have.

I, too, felt the grasping walls,
and pushed them away when they smiled;
and your very pushing, I think,
seemed mirrored skin

where I traced the contours
of what I do not show.