Charlie Baltimore Fights Christmas

The season for amnesia.

See the index of anti-Christmas reviews.

Another anti-Christmas entry for you; this one originally appeared on my Patreon some years back.

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Every Christmas movie has an anti-Christmas movie inside it. This is virtually a structural necessity. Christmas, as a theme and a symbol, is narratively static; Christmas in America, is about happy domestic bliss and goodwill towards all. It's the opposite of conflict—the end of a story, not the beginning of one. A story about the Christmas spirit and nothing but the Christmas spirit isn't much of a Hollywood film (though it might be a Christmas special on television.) There has to be a dark to stick the light in. Without Scrooge's anti-Christmas message of bitterness and greed and skepticism, there is no Christmas Carol.

Often films are structured so that Christmas concludes and rectifies the anti-Christmas. Love, Actually, for example, uses universal Christmas love to resolve its various troubled romance plots. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is about a happy Christmas ending repeatedly and frustratingly deferred until at last it is not. Christmas works well as a stopping point, and many films use it that way.

There's another group of films which might be called Christmas Break movies, in which Christmas is not a resolution, but a kind of benign stasis, which is ruptured by anti-Christmas, and then must subsequently be repaired.

The most famous example is It's a Wonderful Life, in which Capra establishes Bedford Falls as a kind of small town embodiment of American communal and domestic virtue—a Christmas town. When honest banker George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) faces embezzlement charges and ruin, the film (and perhaps the character) suffer a kind of psychotic break, imagining that George never lived and that as a result Bedford Falls turns into Potterville, an anti-Christmas nightmare of capitalist estrangement, sex workers, single women, and jazz. The terror of the urbanized, decadent anti-Christmas reminds George of the goodness of his Christmas reality, and the film ends with the community chipping in to save him.

Other Christmas Break movies include Gremlins (a direct response to It's a Wonderful Life) and the much discussed Die Hard, in which John McClane's domestic reconciliation with his wife is interrupted by a convenient terrorist plot. This reminds his wife and him of the virtues of manliness and traditional gender roles, leading to a traditional Christmas denoument.

For this essay, though, I'm going to focus on a less well-known Christmas Break movie; The Long Kiss Goodnight from1996. It's a film which opens with schoolteacher Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) cheerfully preparing for the holidays, in another idyllic small town.

Sam has a job she loves, a cute adoring boyfriend, and a little girl. She also though has a mysterious past; eight years before the start of the film she woke up on a beach with no memory of her former life, and two months pregnant.

This doesn't bother her much, until driving a drunk friend home after a holiday party she hits a deer and bashes her head. The trauma shakes loose her past, and with the help of a low rent private detective named Mitch (Samuel Jackson) she discovers she is actually a superspy named Charlie Baltimore. Charlie has to fight off various assailants from her former agency, but eventually wins the day and saves her daughter, returning to the happy Christmas domesticity that the genre plot improbably interrupted.

Charlie is not just a superspy; she's also Scrooge. Many Christmas movies have someone—the Grinch, George Bailey—articulate a repudiation of Christmas values, attacking Christmas' stifling crass smarm and necessarily (given an imperfect world) hypocritical touting of goodwill towards all.

Charlie is an unusually eloquent Christmas basher, because she's got the genre pleasures of the film on her side. She thinks Sam is boring and frivolous. Sam doesn't smoke, she doesn't swagger, she let Charlie's ass get big. And of course she can't defend herself from violent agents with guns. When Samantha is tortured, tied to a water wheel and repeatedly submerged, you end up actively rooting for her to change into her superskillful, badass alter ego. Christmas is all fine and dandy when you're hanging with the kids, but when the bad guys come, turning the other cheek doesn't always seem like the ideal solution. You want some of that anti-Christmas grit.

The movie is aware that Charlie is more attractive to genre movie goers than Sam, and it works to counterbalance that. Geena Davis as Sam is a hugely appealing protagonist, effortlessly goofy and charming, sending her daughter's friends into peels of giggles with silly faces and jokes about her own amnesia (she pretends she can't remember where the kitchen is.) Domesticity and Christmas with her look like a lot of fun, even if you're really there for the superspy.

The film also makes the scruffy Mitch an improbable advocate for Sam and the Christmas ending. After Charlie has taken over, she offers to sleep with Mitch. He's mentioned he finds her attractive before, but he nonetheless turns her down, insisting that he likes the Sam persona, and that Charlie is only using him to try to distance herself from her daughter and old boyfriend. If Christmas is domestic harmony, anti-Christmas is seedy sex and self betrayal.

Anti-Christmas is also in this case an interracial relationship. Blackness is linked to the anti Christmas rupture in It's a Wonderful Life too; part of the evidence that Bedford Falls has gone to hell is that it includes a bar with a black jazz performer. Mitch, and the movie, insist that Sam is the good part of Charlie; the bit she repressed. But Sam is also the bit of Charlie that lives in a notably all white world. Christmas harmony is a particular vision of American Christmas hegemony. If Charlie's life is built on excluding the Sam part of herself, Sam's life is also built on other, perhaps less obvious, but still important exclusions.

Another of those exclusions is money. Sam supposedly woke up eight years ago with nothing but the knowledge that she was going to be a single mother. Yet somehow, when we see her, she's got a teaching job and is living what appears to be a very comfortable middle class life. Did she got to school to get a teacher certification? Where did she get the funds to make a life out of nothing?

The film provides a somewhat confused answer. She got the money from Charlie—though out of chronological sequence. When Charlie's memory comes back, she recalls that she has a fortune squirreled away in a safe deposit box. At the end of the movie, after Charlie has saved the nation from a terrorist attack, the president of the US offers Charlie a job in the intelligence service. Charlie refuses, telling him that teacher's salaries are higher than he might think.

The joke is that she's living on her (illicitly gotten?) fortune, not on her salary. But the joke also is that Sam's life was not actually made possible by the teacher's salary; the affluent domestic Christmas existence was an illusion, enabled by anti-Christmas with its spycraft, cynicism and violence. The money for Christmas came from anti-Christmas. There is a plot hole and what you find when you fall through it is not just anti-Christmas, but the necessity of anti-Christmas.

Christmas in The Long Kiss Goodnight is a kind of amnesia; it's predicated on forgetting the violence—including a notable eye-gouging—which made the innocent cheer possible. Charlie's daughter is an immaculate conception, as far as she knows, because she's forgotten that she "bumped pelvises" with her former target, the cheerfully murderous Timothy (Craig Bierko). Sex, like eye gouging and race and money and swearing, is outside Christmas, but shapes Christmas. The rupture is not just a break; it's a glimpse at the way that anti-Christmas is just Christmas with a different dye job.

At the end of The Long Kiss Goodnight, Charlie returns to Sam's family, picking up her former life with a lot more money and some added knife-throwing skills. Christmas and anti-Christmas are a dialectic that resolves into a new whole—sort of. The truth is that resolution and wholeness are Christmas tropes in themselves, so if there's a new synthesis, it's tilted decidedly towards Bedford Falls.

This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by Charlie's phone call with the president. Charlie's agency was trying to kill her to prevent her from revealing their misdeeds. Angry at budget cuts, Charlie's boss hired terrorists to blow up a town and kill thousands of people, in the hopes that the deaths would make national security a priority. The president is in no way implicated, and is grateful for Charlie for foiling the plot.

That's a far cry from what happened 5 years later, when an actual terrorist attack led the actual president to manufacture evidence for a costly and unnecessary war. Charlie's paranoia and cynicism were not paranoid an cynical enough. The film's final message of trust in family, Christmas, and America, turns out to be overly sunny on at least one front.

The title "The Long Kiss Goodnight" refers to Sam's relationship to her past. She had reconciled herself to leaving it behind her, or kissing it goodnight—but the kiss turned out to be longer, and perhaps more sensual, than she originally intended. Christmas break movies, and Christmas movies, keep insisting that anti-Christmas can't win because, contradictorily, anti-Christmas won't go away. Or perhaps, The Long Kiss Goodnight suggests, because Christmas is so omnipresent, we need to remember something else.