Charlie Brown Underground

Charles Schulz's 1965 Charlie Brown Christmas special is an undeniable holiday classic, one of the few that I dust off and re-watch every mid-December. The child in me remains delighted by the joyful simplicity of the animation, the voice acting which mirrors the cadences of children's speech, and the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack which somehow remains listenable through the length of the holiday season. The adult in me, which has been vigorously trained to criticize things, is less charmed. For the past decade or so I have been walking away from the Christmas special with a vague sense of disgust that I haven't been able to place until recently.

As a child, I had always resignedly empathized with Charlie Brown, mostly because it seems like the creator intended for the viewer to do so. Schulz's alter ego is a portrait of the cartoonist as a young loser: the outsider artist, ill-understood by his contemporaries, investing a special sense of destiny into his social maladjustment, though less the Joycean nuance. Indeed, Schulz lays on the melodrama rather thick; his protagonist is constantly confronted by the hostility of the other children—especially the girls—who surround him, berate him, and withhold the social approval that he tries ineffectively to gain. We never doubt that Schulz expects to earn our allegiance as viewers, and yet...

If pressed, the adult viewer might be forced to concede that there is nothing endearing or redeeming about Charlie Brown, his embittered Weltanschauung, or the defeated way he insists on moping around, fault-finding, and wallowing in failure. Rather than garner our sympathy, his self-loathing invites us to agree with him. The only thing that allows us to tolerate the character is the fact that he is a child, and as such he seems to be the victim of forces beyond himself. We are secure in the notion that the challenges he faces will forge him into a psychologically resilient adult, and one who will create a beloved comic strip documenting his tribulations.

Charlie Brown never grows up, though. He is trapped in this seventeen-minute film, bemoaning his own fate, criticizing others, and digging himself ever deeper into the mire of poor decisions that he himself has made. This self-imposed sense of outsiderdom, this rejection of society in favor of his own dark rumination, recall the nameless narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Both characters stand on the cusp of a new era: Russia in the 1860s saw the abolition of serfdom and looked West for a model of statehood; meanwhile, the U.S. in the 1960s saw the struggle for civil rights, workers' rights, and the rise of the anti-war movement. And yet each character, even in the context of unprecedented historical progress, chooses to nurture his own narrowly-informed misanthropy, to recede into a psychological ambivalence that annihilates the will to engage in the pursuit of social and political change.

Perhaps the most grating thing about Charlie Brown is his moral solipsism. He is stubbornly convinced the holiday season was created for the express purpose of making him feel bad. Like a troll littering the internet with invective from the safety of his mother's basement, Brown views himself as the center of a universe that he senses but refuses to acknowledge is expanding rapidly without him. He claims to enjoy the holiday spirit but is eager to dampen the spirits of others. He laments that he has not received a Christmas card, but never pauses to consider that he might begin by sending one. It is this inability to look beyond his own horizon, to extend to other people the sympathy which he is constantly eliciting for himself, that should cost him our allegiance.

The second most grating thing about Charlie Brown is certainly his performative disdain for materialism. He rejects his dog's participation in the holiday lights and decoration contest, bristles at Lucy's wish for real estate, and bemoans the pecuniary interest of his younger sister's letter to Santa. The performance leads us to infer that he is deep—far deeper than those around him—and that he has rejected the commercialization of Christmas because he has intuited some deeper, atavistic meaning to the holiday that allows him privileged access to its spiritual ethos.

And yet, like any run of the mill kind of hipster, Charlie Brown's politics are fraudulent. He never articulates a fixed set of values. His disdain for commercialism is not informed by solidarity with the working classes (and it well might be, considering that the César Chavez-led Delano grape strike, a short three hundred miles southeast of Schulz's Santa Rosa, was contemporaneous with the release of the special). Nor does he embrace a concern for the violent excesses of American imperialism (consider, too, the contemporaneous escalation of the ground war in Vietnam). To the contrary, Charlie Brown's grievances are vague, personal, and exceedingly trite; he confesses to a sense of malaise that separates him from the joy to which he feels entitled.

The inauthenticity of Charlie Brown's politics is brought into full view in the context of his stint as pageant director. For someone who is quick to pass judgment on the moral failings of others, he is content to have his vanity stroked when Lucy insists that he direct the Christmas pageant. Charlie Brown fundamentally misconstrues the role of the director, operating under the assumption that the title is prestigious and not purely managerial. This leads to a complete breakdown of order within the auditorium as his lack of management skills collide with his inflated estimation of the importance of his role. He impotently rages and struggles to make himself heard over the din of the actors, oblivious to the fact that their extemporaneous performance is far more entertaining than anything he could ever hope to organize. "It's the spirit of the actors that counts," he fulminates to a comically indifferent crowd, "the interest that they show in their director!"

The irony of his stance against "commercialism" is made further evident when we pause to consider the value that he places in his role as director. It is only under the triumph of modern market capitalism—its codification and valorization of the intellectual property rights of the individual—that the figure of the artist has attained its reified status. It is hypocritical to bemoan the excesses of capitalism on one hand, while seeking to exploit the culture of artistic reification that has been facilitated by the legal apparatus of the selfsame economic system on the other. And it is Charlie Brown's hypocrisy that should lend the death blow to any sense of empathy we might otherwise be tempted to extend to him.

Cognizant that Charlie Brown has failed, Lucy sends him out on a fluff mission to choose a Christmas tree. While we may not agree with the aesthetic judgment of the children who urge him to return with a pink aluminum tree, we must certainly concede that this choice was supported overwhelmingly by the group. It is his defiance of the "modern spirit" and the "big Eastern syndicate" running Christmas that moves him, instead, to select the puny and febrile branch that will come to be recognized as a "Charlie Brown" tree. The children are livid when they learn that he has deliberately—in deference to his own fraudulent politics—vetoed their democratically-sanctioned referendum for a nicer tree.

When the argument over the tree escalates to a full confrontation, it is not Charlie Brown but Linus who articulates the "true meaning of Christmas." Linus recalls the birth of a messiah who will deliver mankind from strife. His recitation of Luke 2:12-14, "peace on Earth and good will toward men," echoes through Charlie Brown's mind as he turns his gaze to the stars. We are led to believe that our protagonist has assimilated an important message about a divine grace that transcends all earthly quarrels. But Charlie Brown's hermeneutic faculties are dull, and he has missed the point yet again. His moment of clarity is ever-fixed on his own desire for social approval. He rushes home to prove that he can redeem his tree, even as it continues to shed more needles than it appears to bear.

Charlie Brown arrives home resentful to learn that his dog has won first prize in the holiday lights and decoration competition. "I'm not going to let this commercial dog ruin my Christmas," he mutters, as though he has fixed on some kind of righteous epiphany. As adult viewers, we may well be moved to wonder what particular pathology might cause an individual to begrudge his own dog a victory. Truly, it cannot be "commercialism" that Charlie Brown disdains, but the spirit of competition; on some level, he is aware that he lacks the skills and the emotional wherewithal to compete. Like any sore loser, he resolves the disparity by cheating. He steals the decorations from his dog's winning display to vindicate his poor choice of Christmas tree. At this point in the special, we are no longer surprised to learn that even in cheating, he fails. The first ornament causes the branch to buckle under its weight. Horrified, he reacts not by removing the ornament, but by running away from the tree that he believes he has killed. While his solipsism and hypocrisy should cost him our allegiance, it is his cowardice—his unwillingness to reverse an action he believes to be criminal—that should move us to disgust.

Perhaps on a surface level, A Charlie Brown Christmas is about the ways in which a socially maladjusted youth is reunited with the community that scorned him in order to restore the lost spiritual depth to a holiday that has devolved into an over-commercialized shadow of its original meaning. But I think that this interpretation misses the mark. As adult viewers, we realize that Charlie Brown enjoys a fleeting moment of joy in spite of his inability to set aside his petulant angst and forge meaningful connections with his peers. Surely, this contradicts the wisdom that we've gleaned from the experiences that shaped our adulthood. Instead of providing a model for growth, he holds up a mirror to the contemporary American viewer, forcing her to confront the most stubbornly misanthropic and antisocial elements of her own character. Like Charlie Brown, we stand on the cusp of a new era. Our historical moment promises great social and political change if we are able to articulate and manifest the values to which we lay claim. And yet in what ways do we echo Charlie Brown's moral solipsism, his hypocrisy, vanity, and cowardice, in the face of situations that emphatically demand our empathy and engagement?

You may well wonder why, in light of the arguments I have presented, do I continue watching A Charlie Brown Christmas? Charlie Brown, after all, incarnates some of the most troubling archetypes of the last two centuries: he is the Underground Man whose dystopian vision threatens to undo the hard-won victories of progressive enlightenment; he is the politically ill-informed and shiftless hipster, railing against the very institutions that he relies on for psychological integrity; he is the "cishet white male" who has colonized and appropriated the culture of the other to his own lackluster ends. Surely, he must merit—if not our disgust—at the very least our disapproval.

I suppose I continue watching Charlie Brown because I believe that Snoopy is a sufficient foil to offset my frustration with Charlie Brown. But on the topic of Snoopy I must demure. Surely, he merits a series of essays unto himself...