1: The Oddness Of A New Years Movie
The origins of our current calendar used in the United States where I live (and indeed most of the world) comes from the ancient Romans. If you’re like me and have some rudimentary notion of latin numerals you might wonder why October, the month starting with “oct”, which normally refers to the number eight (like octagon or octopus) is the tenth month of the year; or why December, the month starting with “dec” which normally refers to the number ten like “decade” or “decathlon” should be the twelfth month of the year. It turns out that the earliest known Roman calendar (originally ascribed to the founder of the city of Rome, Romulus) had ten months, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. Martius, Aprilis, Maius, and Junius are named after the deities Mars, Aphrodite, Maia, and Juno respectively, at which point Romulus apparently got tired and named the remaining six months after the numbers for Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten. Martius, Maius, October, and December had 31 days, all the other months had 30, for a total of 304 days of the year. Now we of course know that the solar year consists of approximately 365.25 days, and the ancient Romans did as well. It was simply assumed that so very little happened during the depths of winter after the end of December until the winter got a little less bitter and the days started getting a little longer some 20 days before the Vernal Equinox that it simply wasn’t worth keeping track of what day it was. The philosophical if not practical sense of this was clear, the year ended just after the winter solstice, in the darkest days as the weather turns bitterly cold, and the year begins as the sun starts creeping back and as the snows start melting in central Italy and a sense of renewal begins wafting through the air.
Of course through reforms (first from Roman monarch Numa Pompilius who created the months of January and February, and subsequently Julius and Augustus Caesar who affixed the days at 365.25 per year, renaming the months Quintus and Sextus after themselves for the trouble) people started to count the days of the bitter winter, and in doing so were faced with a terrible irony. The new year, a time of new beginnings and fresh starts now happened as the days were at their shortest and the weather was at its coldest, hardly a time for fresh beginnings. This terrible irony continues to the present day, as we’re pressured via societal expectations to resolve to get more exercise, to eat better, and cut down on the hooch at a time when going outside to go on a run chills one to the bone and the only cure is a warm bowl of mac and cheese with a glass of wine to go with it.
New Years Eve / New Years Day looms large in American culture both as an opportunity to turn over a new leaf and also as an opportunity to have a kind of secular Shrove Tuesday. “I’ll cut down on the liquor and the fatty foods next year, so this is my last opportunity for shots and cheesecake” we tell ourselves in our revelry, but New Years doesn’t loom terribly large in the popular arts, especially film, and once again the Romans are to blame.
A few days after the winter solstice, as the natural philosophers could confirm that in fact the shortest day of the year had happened, and as the last of the fresh produce was about to go off, the Romans had a feast day. It was called Natalis Invicti. It commemorated the birthday of the sun deity Mithras, who was born of a woman who had never had sex with a mortal man, who lived among humanity and delivered divine wisdom to them, who was killed by his enemies and who rose from the dead after the discovery of an empty tomb three days later. As Christianity swept across the Roman Empire, a religion that celebrated simultaneous God and man Jesus Christ who was born of a woman who had never had sex with a mortal man, who lived among humanity and delivered divine wisdom to them, who was killed by his enemies and who rose from the dead after the discovery of an empty tomb three days later; it just so happened that early church leaders figured out that the birthday of Jesus happened to also fall three days after the solstice, on December 25, the same day as Saturnalia. An aspect of the celebration of the newly created holiday of Christmas was the remembrance of the three wise men giving gifts to the Christ Child by giving gifts to friends and family. This was originally done on January 6, twelve days after Jesus’ birthday (the twelve days being the amount of time it took the Magi to follow the star to Bethlehem to present their gold, frankincense and myrrh).
Eventually though in 1823, the American poet Clement Clarke Moore anonymously published the poem “A Visit From St Nicholas” (more commonly known by its first five words “twas the night before Christmas…”), which established in the English-speaking world both the mythology of Santa Claus / Father Christmas / St. Nick, and also the entire notion of gift-giving on December 25th, the first day of Christmas, rather than on the feast of the Epiphany on January 6, the 12th day of Christmas. Bookkeepers in consumer goods companies were elated at the move, as it meant that the rush to purchase gifts by the 25h meant that the companies would experience an end of the year bump and end the year in the black. Gift giving, commerce, and art entered into a feedback loop, with Christmas themed art being an easy and seasonally appropriate gift, leading to publishers soliciting more Christmas themed material. An unbroken line can be drawn from Moore’s poem through Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, O Henry’s Gift of the Magi, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, the song (and subsequent television special) “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”, Dr Seuss’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and the 2003 film Love, Actually.
The immediate proximity of New Years Day to Christmas, and the fact that Christmas has an artistic industrial complex to go with it that New Years simply does not, means that it’s difficult to encounter a film with a New Years presence that is not also fundamentally a Christmas Movie. Nothing exemplifies this so much as the fact that arguably the best known motion picture whose action takes place primarily on New Years Eve, and indeed whose climactic scene revolves around a midnight singing of the only New Years song, Auld Lang Syne, is listed by the website Rotten Tomatoes as the best Christmas movie of all time. I speak of course of the Frank Capra classic It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). New Years is profoundly difficult to decouple from Christmas, especially when it comes to film. While barrels of ink have been spilt on the genre of the Christmas movie*, I can think of all of five films that are are New Years focused without being Christmas focused: the 1960 original Ocean’s 11, the 1996 anthology film Four Rooms, the 1999 screwball comedy 200 Cigarettes, the 2011 Garry Marshall film New Years Eve, and the 1994 Coen Brothers underappreciated masterpiece The Hudsucker Proxy.
The fact of the matter is that a New Years movie has the deck stacked against it from the onset as no one wants to go to the movies on a New Years Eve, and no one wants to leave the house on a New Years Day. Christmas movies (as well as end-of-year-oscar-bait features) benefits from the fact that once the presents are open hanging out with our extended families can get a little awkward and going out to the movies fills some time beautifully. Scary movies released around Halloween benefit from having an entire month of preparation of putting skeletons in the yard and costume preparation to get us in the mood. Going to the movies for a date night on Valentine’s Day is a wonderful excuse to snuggle in your seats in the theater. New Years doesn’t benefit from having a real “season” to go with it, as the entire point of the holiday is as Old Moses says in his introductory monologue of Hudsucker, we’re all “trying to catch hold of one moment of time, to say ‘right now, this is it!’ ‘course by then it’ll be past”, and New Years Eve itself is intended as a social holiday, to hang out and revel with others, in a way that apparently can’t be done properly in a movie theater.
New Years Day is however a perfect day for old movies. The day is a commonly taken off that has no social obligations, and maybe one spent a little hungover on the couch. The Hudsucker Proxy, while it is ostensibly a love letter to Frank Capra and the old Hollywood studio system and thus was intended to be seen on a big screen, it’s also a movie that crams a lot of plot, characters, and gags into a short period of time, and thus is a film that rewards repeat watching, allowing its tiny details to unfold slowly upon each subsequent view. Every year on New Years Day as I drink coffee on my couch and let the collard greens and the black eyed peas simmer, I rewatch The Hudsucker Proxy, and it rewards me every time.
*if you’re interested in reading some of that spilled ink I especially recommend film critic Alonso Duralde’s 2010 film guide “Have Yourself A Movie Little Christmas”, if for no other reason than the fact that it retires the notion that anyone is being contrarian and edgy when pointing out that Die Hard (1988) is in fact a Christmas movie, but does offer a substitute in case one still feels like being an edgy contrarian by being able to point out that Stanley Kubrick’s swan song Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is in fact a Christmas movie.