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Films
Santa Claus: The Movie
Chris Vaughan says “Bah humbug” to consumer society.
Santa Claus: The Movie (1985) is without doubt, and intentionally or not, a bold statement about how capitalism hijacked Christmas. It did so at some point during the Twentieth Century and in much the same way that early Christians absorbed the Roman festival of dies natalis solis invicti (‘The Birthday of the Invincible Sun’) on 25th December into their own ideas of divine birth in order to appease the party-going Roman public.
Had Eric Fromm (German sociologist and philosopher, 1900-1980) lived just five more years, no doubt he would have seen this movie and shouted, “I know where they are coming fromm!” For Santa Claus: The Movie essentially embodies the central arguments of his 1955 book The Sane Society. Like other Frankfurt School philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, Fromm’s main concern was the alienation of humanity through the rise of consumerism. He expands on Marx’s description of a steadily growing dissociation of the worker from their work in industrial society, presenting a detailed story of how consumer culture causes widespread human alienation from life.
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