One of the things I've become a little bit interested in as my life travels past is symbology.
Symbology, as far as I understand it, is where people leave messages in some form or another to try to teach us about the things that we're seeking answers for.
Art, in all of its aspects, is based around symbology, the artist sees the world and tries to transmit a message to help you or to make it better or to bring you joy.
Robert Zemeckis is a film director, and you've probably already heard about him.
If you want to know some of the films that he's done that you might recognise, try Romancing the Stone in 1984 or all of the Back to the Future films, or Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or his Oscar-winning Forrest Gump.
If you want a Christmas film that he's done, you may have heard of The Polar Express, but in 2009, for Disney, he also did a version of A Christmas Carol.
This is the animated Christmas Carol version with Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge, so you might have already seen this (I hope you have). If you have not, though, can I recommend that this become your Christmas film, or at least one of the Christmas films that you watch?
The holiday is beautiful.
And there are lots of messages in Love Actually.
Elf is funny.
The Grinch is brilliant, again, with the messages about Christmas.
But A Christmas Carol and the version by Zemeckis are profound.
It's profound because he retains a lot of the original Dickens' narrative and line, and how he weaves that into the most extraordinary animated film is utterly beautiful, from the first scene where Ebenezer Scrooge takes the coins off Marley's dead body and rubs them between his fingers to the scene where Ebenezer and his fiancée separate. It tells us everything we are supposed to know about what Christmas was for.
We completely and utterly lost sight of the Christmas thing, didn't we?
Totally more and more now, you speak to people who don't buy presents for Christmas. Not for their partners, and less and less for the children. Hardly anyone I know sends Christmas cards. More and more people are beginning to understand that the excess and gluttony of Christmas don't make them feel happy and don't make them feel great when the dark nights return without the lights at the start of January.
What Christmas is for, though, is absolutely explained in the symbology of the interchange between Scrooge and his fiancée.
Just to help you out, it's 55 minutes into the film, and so you can fast forward there if you want to get there. His fiancée is Belle; they became a couple when they were both poor, and they decided that they were going to work together to build their life to make it as rich as they could.
They expected to improve their fortune together, but then she accuses Scrooge of falling in love with another idol.
The kicker here, though, is that she says to him that if they were not already engaged, and he met her now.
Would you choose her, a poor girl without wealth or status?
And she finally releases him from their engagement, saying that although he will feel pain, it will be brief, and he will ultimately dismiss the engagement as an ‘unprofitable dream’.
Christmas was to celebrate together, to be together, about love and lights, about music and sound.
It was never about Black Friday or Xboxes or televisions.
Blog Post Number - 4387