Gremlins begins with a loaded image: a white man in a hat, looking sort of like a film noir antihero. Maybe Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, only slightly thinner and gentler-looking, enters a Chinese antique shop looking for a Christmas present for his son. The antique shop is run by a very old opium smoker with a glass eye, played by classic yellowface actor Keye Luke himself. This is a racist image, but we will soon discover that if the film has a racist viewpoint, we need to regard that as little more but a starting point. We discover that the white man is an inventor. I suddenly recalled the Intro to Mass Media class that I took last semester. The Chinese invented the printing press, but it never took off. It took off in England after being introduced by Johannes Gutenberg. (Well technically, Germany first, then England, and then eventually America. This here is mostly details.) The reason that it succeeded here, but not in China, was in part because the English alphabet has far fewer characters than the Chinese alphabet. A printing press is just more practical there. But two other major reasons were: 1. Americans were motivated by profit, whereas the Chinese were motivated more by hobby. After all, there wasn't a market for a printing press in China. They already had block printing, moveable print wasn't very practical, and then there was the second reason. 2. The Chinese value elegant calligraphy and literary merit, none of which is really conveyed by the printed word. In the comparison you can see how America is portrayed as a society that is driven by profit and technological advancement, but is artistically sterile and wholly aspiritual. The Chinese have been said to resist change. They like things the way they are. This is of course the enemy of profit and technological advancement. But you can see how contentment is proof of something more soulful than profit and technological advancement. That's why the white man in the hat is the inventor and the Chinaman owns an antique store that is losing money. (The old man's grandson sells him Gizmo because he says that they need the money. The grandson by the way is wearing a baseball cap, and speaks perfect unbroken, unaccented English. He's not Chinese in other words; he is thoroughly American.) Now quickly, not all Chinese people are how I have described them, and things have changed in the last millennium. (The Chinese movable type came about in around 1051.) The Chinese are romanticized in Gremlins. There is a mystery of the Orient that us honkies can't penetrate or really appreciate. That's all necessary, though, and we are forced to establish that so we can move to what is really going on here.

Gremlins is essentially about how the Christmas season has been defined by Americans as a holiday to earn lots of profit and accumulate lot of crap. The miserly Mrs. Deagle (who we will talk a lot more about later) and a fairly deliciously annoying Judge Reinhold directly represent the former. You can see the latter throughout the movie. Nobody comes out and says it, but the disdain for the stuff that we get for Christmas seems very clear. The Gremlins play video games in the movie, which is sort of funny as the film itself was so popular that it eventually had to be made into a video game. The Gremlins stuff their faces with cookies and booze and it all drips down their faces. It's a gross-out moment, but it's gross because they are practically eating frosting out of the tube, not because they are eating something obviously nasty. The film's climax happens in a department store. You notice an E.T. doll in there, and you realize that the film has been dated. One of the Gremlins pays homage to Flashdance while wearing leg warmers. I think that it's a deliriously funny moment, but it dates the picture in a way that lets us know that it is going to date itself. There aren't many moments like that, and it sticks out. What the film is saying is that it is going to not let us forget that we humiliated ourselves in the first place by making Flashdance part of our popular culture. We take and use this TRASH, and then we throw it away. Flashdance isn't something that we still have much use for anymore. Including a reference of it in the film makes the picture dated. The inventor in the film, representative of white America, has never invented anything that works. He is directly contributing to the accumulation of useless crap in America.

The point isn't as much to put Christ back into Christmas. There is nothing in the film that indicates that it upholds any Christian values or concepts. Somebody who has never been introduced to Christianity would not come out of the film with any idea of what Christianity is about. The film's plea is more general. It wants Christmas to have some sort of value. This is THE holiday. When people talk about the holiday season, this is generally the one that it all revolves around. And generally you have to admit that what it really comes down to profit and accumulating lots of junk. The film works on the premise that Christmas is the basis for the American identity, and shows how empty our culture is. Christmas has its roots in pagan winter ritual, Christianity, and I think then largely interpreted and defined by the commercial culture. The History Channel showed a documentary two days ago about the history of Christmas. The Germans created the Christmas tree, but England and Americans did not adopt it until they saw that Prince Albert, who married into the royal family, had one as portrayed by a drawing in the papers. Santa Claus, was of course, the saint Nicholas, redefined as an elf that lives on the North Pole, the creation of a cartoonist and a novelty poem. If I am to believe the History Channel documentary, the Christmas spirit didn't even exist until popular author Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. (Stephen King says that he isn't the modern equivalent of Charles Dickens, as people claimed he was when he wrote The Green Mile. Of course purely in terms of production and popularity, he really is.) Christmas is then several times removed from anything resembling religious ritual. Probably the best line of Gremlins is when Phoebe Cates says that she doesn't celebrate Christmas and Zach Galligan's Billy exclaims, "What are you? Hindu?" Hinduism is probably the furthest thing from this character's mind. He may be ethnocentric, but that is not what the line is about. It's about how Billy does not really identify Christmas with religious preference. It's not a religious holiday for him, and it's absurd to think that a Jew or an atheist or something would not celebrate Christmas because they do not believe in Christ the Saviour.

The community in Gremlins is very transparently a parody of Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life. They even show It's A Wonderful Life on one of the many televisions featured in the film. The score by Jerry Goldsmith overemphasizes all the "magic,” and reminds us of its artificiality. The It's a Wonderful Life imagery has a certain sick edge to it, however. The first image we have of Kingston Falls is of a kid throwing a snowball at another kid. He throws it pretty hard however. It has a thud to it. There is a subplot involving old Mrs. Deagle who is the richest person in Kingston Falls. She is trying to get one woman's house foreclosed on. With kids in arms, the woman sees Mrs. Deagle and pleads that they give her a break, offering that it's Christmas. Mrs. Deagle snears at them, "Well, at least you'll know what to ask Santa for." We then linger on the family. The kids tell their mother that they are hungry, and she replies that she is too. Kingston Falls exists in the real world, and colorful cruelty is really cruel. The DVD includes some deleted scenes where we find out that Mrs. Deagle closed down the factory where everyone worked, and is trying to get their houses foreclosed so she can sell the land to some people who want to build a chemical factory. This clarifies exactly who she is, but overstates the character a little too much. It probably overstates the case a little when we find out that she is the widow of a suspected stock swindler at the end of the film where a TV news station eulogizes her. I think that screenwriter Chris Columbus and Joe Dante created Mrs. Deagle just so they could justify her PROFOUNDLY DISGUSTING, TASTELESS AND VERY FUNNY demise. (The Gremlins mess around with the wiring of a chair she uses to climb down her steps, making her zoom out of her doorway and break her neck).

I haven't checked out what director Joe Dante feels about these scenes, but I think that he realizes that it doesn't have THAT much to do with plot of the movie, which is about stopping the Gremlins from taking over, and is just there for color. I think that that is OK, though. Whatever its reason for existing, this subplot is fascinating. At the end of It's a Wonderful Life, the attitude is that it doesn't really matter if Potter stole that money from George's drunken uncle. Bedford Falls sticks together and will get through whatever happens. The situation in Gremlins is more severe. We realize that Mrs. Deagle really has all the power in the world, that is it is all unearned, and there really is nothing that we can do about it. As grisly as her demise is in the film, it is, of course, conjured out of thin air. Her exaggerated cruelty feels brutal enough, but the solution to it does not. It makes the fantasy element of Gremlins a very sticky subject indeed. (Believe it or not, she is the only one who is murdered in the film. There is an implication that Dick Miller and his wife in the film, played by Jackie Joseph, were killed by the Gremlins but sure enough they come back in the sequel. After all, would you really want to kill off Dick Miller?)

The Dick Miller character in the film is a vocal xenophobe. One of my favorite scenes is of him watching a bawdy Christmas show when the Gremlins mess around with his antenna making the television change to a cheesy French tearjerker. Miller gives the characters in Gremlins a name. He says that they were little creatures that got into all the machinery, making watches break and plane engines fail, et cetera. He traces back their existence to World War II, and I think may even indicate that the problem with foreign machinery is that it contains Gremlins. It is infected. My thoughts on this concept are complex. It is appropriate that the Gremlins are seen as an antagonist to our machinery, but I do not think that deep down the Gremlins are a foreign presence exactly. At the end of the film, the Chinaman complains that we have ruined the Mogwai, just as we have ruined all of nature's gifts. He's talking about Christmas of course, from St. Nicholas to Santa Claus. But the line also reminds us that the Gremlins are all-Americans. The Mogwais are magical creatures from a Chinese culture, whereas the Gremlins are magical creatures from an American culture. They are ultra-rude consumerists, the ugliness of our non-culture incarnate. There is, of course, no real explanation why the creatures die when exposed to sunlight, multiply when splashed with water or turn into Gremlins when they are fed after midnight. However, the film establishes that these are laws to be obeyed, and shows us the consequences that we suffer we hold them in disdain. We haven't that sort of discipline. The Gremlins are an American perversion of the Mogwai. Dante makes it fairly clear that they are not demons straight out of hell. Mrs. Deagle sees them that way when she first encounters them. "They're coming for me," she cries, "but I'm not ready to go!" But I think that she is wrong. She was picked for no real reason at all, except the Gremlins thought it would be fun to murder her. At the end of the film, the head Gremlin, “Spike,” melts in the sunlight like Nosferatu in the Murnau 1922 version. It is so theatrical that we know that we can't take it seriously. Dante is joking with us. The Gremlins cannot truly be evil because they are part of a society without any true sense of spirituality.

The sequel to Gremlins, called Gremlins 2: The New Batch, is not as good as the original. It is, however, still a very good movie. When I was little I thought that it might be the best film ever made. That film was mostly the bar sequence (which included the Flashdance scene and a lot of other scenes of the Gremlins acting funny) repeated again and again in different variations. Keeping in with the theme of bashing American culture, it is set in a cable TV station. The visual gags in the film are totally off the wall. At one point the Gremlins get into your local theaters movie projector and stop it. Hulk Hogan or John Wayne tell them that they are going to kick their little green kiesters if they don't turn back the movie. I think that Joe Dante was a little baffled and disheartened by the acceptance of Gremlins into the popular culture and especially it serving for a number of inferior knockoffs (considering the film's roots, that is a serious "what the fuck" moment), and so when he had to make a sequel he just plain lost his mind. Without the Christmas stuff it doesn't resonate as much as the original, but it has more method to its madness than Moulin Rouge or Austin Powers: Goldmember and is certainly a better film. I think that Joe Dante made it exactly the way that he wanted to. And I somehow sense that he really loves this movie. Enough to bring the absurdity and anarchy tumbling over across the edge.