Brief note: The Man Who Invented Christmas

This is no doubt the sort of blog post that should be written around Christmas, when The Man Who Invented Christmas was originally released in the USA, but I fear that my sense of obligation did not quite equal my lack of interest in the travel time (round trip, longer than the film) to see it when it first came out.  However.  Writing a book is one of those activities that has historically resisted dramatization, given that its most interesting aspects are in the author's head.  Cinematic representations of novel-writing tend to adopt the "found object" approach, in which the novel exists in bits and pieces in the author's world, leaving the author nothing to do but assemble, reassemble, and scramble the components until the story somehow successfully emerges.  In its representation of Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas remains true to form.  We do in fact know that many characters from A Christmas Carol were inspired by people Dickens encountered at some point or another (including Tiny Tim), but the film consistently collapses the distance between "inspired by" and "transcription of"--as when a wealthy businessman delivers one of Scrooge's more miserly speeches word-for-word.  Everything is a quotation or an allusion, as if Dickens existed in the TV series Dickensian.  This approach coincides with another familiar trope: authorship as psychotherapy.  One of the key conceits of The Man Who Invented Christmas is that Scrooge is effectively Dickens' unconscious, the penny-pinching side of him that reacts against his father's spendthrift ways; Dickens only discovers how to work through his novel's conclusion when he has discovered Scrooge's "origin" in the blacking factory, in part thanks to the inspiration of his own personal Tiny Tim, the optimistic Irish servant Tara (who is perhaps more Pollyanna than anything Dickens wrote).    These two visions of literary creation exist in tension with the film's insistence on Dickens' imaginative prowess, the proof of which resides outside the film, in the audience's acquaintance with A Christmas Carol and everything else.   The film does rather better with its representation not of writing but of writer's block, as the characters turn comically uncooperative and Scrooge starts writing his own speeches on rational self-interest.  

In terms of its design and overall conception, the film is not Victorian so much as it is "Victorian."  The exterior sets look like what you would expect from a Hallmark adaptation of A Christmas Carol; the interiors are sometimes comically overstuffed, as if clutter was the essence of Victorianness.  ("Oh, look--Dickens' desk!" says the viewer.)  Even the darker images, like the children at work in the blacking factory, are filtered through a post-Oliver! lens.  That is, the film is unapologetically a nostalgic twenty-first century fantasy of Christmas in Victorian England, the fantasy that Dickens turns out to originate. A Christmas Carol, anachronistically substituting for, of all things, Varney the Vampire (which wouldn't begin its run for another two years), becomes the morally uplifting, socially transformative alternative to the kinds of sensational pleasures linked to vampires, blood, and damsels in distress.  (There are some eerily Victorian class and gender politics at work in Dickens swapping his Christmas Carol for Tara's Varney.)    Similarly, in its drive to make Scrooge and Dickens one, the film's happy ending grants Dickens the kind of character rebirth that rings rather hollow if one knows anything about the future of his marriage (although Dickens did in fact reconcile with his father).  It's as if we are in Dickens' own self-construction, not the more ambivalent accounts that became available during the twentieth century.