19 December 2016

What Comes to Mind at the Name of "Scrooge"

As I watched the concluding scenes of a Muppet Christmas Carol for probably the third or fourth time I was struck again at the strange way in which Mister Scrooge's change of heart is represented on screen.  Scrooge, now possessed of the fullness of Michael Caine's charm, wanders the streets of London followed by an entourage of creatures hoping to be showered with the largess of the conversion in the form of various material goods wrapped in the ubiquitous red bows.

At the height of my own cleverness I quipped to my fellow viewers, "What if they had just increased the income tax rate for his bracket and gave it to everybody else?  Then we could have dispensed with this whole conversion story and got on with our lives!"

Of course that would have made for a less interesting Muppet film, I suppose, and we would have lost all the other wonderful adaptations of the Dickens story that have come to us through the ages, including the annual performances at the Indianapolis Repertory Theater at which I have been a regular for several years (thanks, Jill!).  I always leave the theater reconsidering my own hardness of heart that has revealed itself through the course of the year and which I attempt to ignore most of the time.  I do harm to others by these attitudes, but it is true that I am the one harmed most of all.

This year, however, I have come to realize that the story has a message that may be a bit too subtle for modern times to take in.  The reason I find the Muppets' Scrooge to be so bizarre is that the "end-game" is so materialistic.  It is as if what we needed from Mister Scrooge was the very thing that made him  evil:  his love of money.  How could he toss around these wonderful and life-changing material goods if he had not already amassed his ill-gotten fortune on the backs of so many foreclosed mortgages?   Cast in more modern terms, we need the "1%" who spend all their time collecting wealth to the detriment of their fellow man to give it, under duress, to the "99%", who are presumed to deserve it more. In the midst of this, we don't care at all about the conversion of the many "Scrooges" we see in the world today.  It is much easier to write them off as lost causes, if we are charitable enough to suggest they could be thought of as a cause at all.

We tend to forget entirely that Dickens' most important message is about human nature.  Scrooge is happier when he cares about other people and deals with them justly.  He becomes a new man from the ashes of his former acquisitiveness.  This is a conversion we never see in the character of, for example, the pawn broker, a man who is not as rich as Scrooge, but just as evil prior to the events of the story. 



Somehow the evil of Scrooge's first state is what sticks with us today, such that to call someone a "Scrooge" is to indicate that they are an irredeemable miser.  What it should mean, based on the content of the story, is that they have given up their old ways and now strive to the good of their fellow man--a good that cannot be reduced to mere objects tied up in red ribbon.