![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
One o' my favourite films (used to be) Bad Santa. For a while it was something of a christmas tradition for me to watch it on christmas day.
For those not familiar, Billy Bob Thornton plays an alcoholic Santa and safe cracker, because that's plausable. Every year, he and his accomplice, having spent the shopping season as a mall Santa and helper, rob the mall of all it's cash takings. There are lots of other sub-plots, somehow Santa gets involved with a bullied kid who appears to have no parents, but lives in a huge house with his vague grandmother. And hooking up with a woman who works behind a bar because she has a Santa fetish.
I've watched this film a lot of times, at least six times over the years. And during this here pandemic, I've been re-watching familiar films because that's all my mind can really cope with. So after about a decade, I fished out Bad Santa. And... something's changed. I found it really distressing. Santa clearly has delirium tremens, his shaking hands are presented mockingly often in the film. The bullied kid is largely left to his own devices, having no responsible adults in his life, and befriends... what the fuck is his name in the film? Willie, of course. The kid befriends him because he thinks he's really Santa, and eventually Willie moves into his house - without ever bothering to learn his name.
Somehow it felt slightly exploitative. Most of the characters are shown as degraded losers, in fact that's the basis of most of the film's humour. I actually found myself feeling sorry for them.
I'm not sure what's changed. Maybe the film hasn't aged well. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm becoming more sensitive as I get older. I am also a father now, although I'm never going to be that "Speaking as a father..." kind of man. Parenthood does, however, radically alter how I respond the stories involving children in distress or simply not being cared for. I got about five minutes into the file Grave of the Fireflies before I had to turn it off when a child dies unwanted in a train station. I find myself desperately concerned for, say, refugee children I see on the television.
Or maybe I've been spoiled by more and better films and indeed television shows. When you know what a medium can do, when you've seen some amazing stories, maybe it makes you a harder judge of older material...
For those not familiar, Billy Bob Thornton plays an alcoholic Santa and safe cracker, because that's plausable. Every year, he and his accomplice, having spent the shopping season as a mall Santa and helper, rob the mall of all it's cash takings. There are lots of other sub-plots, somehow Santa gets involved with a bullied kid who appears to have no parents, but lives in a huge house with his vague grandmother. And hooking up with a woman who works behind a bar because she has a Santa fetish.
I've watched this film a lot of times, at least six times over the years. And during this here pandemic, I've been re-watching familiar films because that's all my mind can really cope with. So after about a decade, I fished out Bad Santa. And... something's changed. I found it really distressing. Santa clearly has delirium tremens, his shaking hands are presented mockingly often in the film. The bullied kid is largely left to his own devices, having no responsible adults in his life, and befriends... what the fuck is his name in the film? Willie, of course. The kid befriends him because he thinks he's really Santa, and eventually Willie moves into his house - without ever bothering to learn his name.
Somehow it felt slightly exploitative. Most of the characters are shown as degraded losers, in fact that's the basis of most of the film's humour. I actually found myself feeling sorry for them.
I'm not sure what's changed. Maybe the film hasn't aged well. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm becoming more sensitive as I get older. I am also a father now, although I'm never going to be that "Speaking as a father..." kind of man. Parenthood does, however, radically alter how I respond the stories involving children in distress or simply not being cared for. I got about five minutes into the file Grave of the Fireflies before I had to turn it off when a child dies unwanted in a train station. I find myself desperately concerned for, say, refugee children I see on the television.
Or maybe I've been spoiled by more and better films and indeed television shows. When you know what a medium can do, when you've seen some amazing stories, maybe it makes you a harder judge of older material...
