How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Bomb Rating: 

Basically, little Cindy Lou-Who is just a patsy for the Church.

Like I'm not already sick enough of Christmas -- I have to go see this film, which, despite the presence of the Grinch (Jim Carrey), is really little more than an affirmation of a dominant paradigm. Is the moral of the story "we should love everybody despite our differences?" No, it's not. The moral of the story is this: Conform to the majority way of thinking or we will condemn you to a life of loneliness and unhappiness. Ho, ho, ho!

It strikes me as just a little bit scary that no matter where you go, you can't get away from Christmas. Even inside a snowflake, in a town called Whoville where everybody certainly looks different and acts a little different, Christmas is still celebrated. Unfortunately for Whoville, however, there's one person in their entire universe who threatens to make their celebrations just a bit less cheerful -- The Grinch. Why are they afraid of the Grinch? He doesn't celebrate Christmas. Why does he live alone in the top of a mountain? Because he's green and looks different from the Whos, and they've basically exiled him there.

The religious connotations of this film are fairly obvious. The Grinch is green because green represents money. In terms of religion, green represents Judaism since, throughout history, the Jews have been associated with money. So, there's one Jew in this entire town and they hate his guts so much that they run him out of town and now he's the bad guy for not feeling particularly affectionate toward the Whos. Whose fault is this?

Fortunately, there's one Who, little Cindy Lou-Who (Taylor Momsen), who recognizes that the Whos have become too materialistic in their Christmas celebrations, so she tries to reconcile with the Grinch by inviting him to lead their Christmas celebration. This is fairly typical Christian propaganda -- conversion masked as good will. Basically, little Cindy Lou-Who is just a patsy for the Church.

Another of this film's typical assertions is that their newborns float down from the sky in little baskets (this is how the Grinch got there). This little fairy tale is just a big cover-up for the fact that there's a whole lot of Who-fucking going on and these religious zealots want to pretend that there's not. The choices the Grinch gets, between being miserable and celebrating Christmas, between following his own way and following the Who's way, is really no choice at all. There's only one way of thinking in Whoville and everybody else be damned. They're basically funny-looking fascists.

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