This should be the last entry this year for old Scrooge, the
timeless Saint of Christmas which never seems to wear out. We have another
thing coming if we believe that Scrooge just stepped out of a vacuum as a
stingy miser. Ever wonder why he turned
out the way he was? It’s there in the script. Scrooge’s mother died in
childbirth and his father blamed Ebenezer for that death. He entered life without his mother and
father, blamed for his mother’s death.
Then why blame him for his greed?
He took the only part of the world left to control—which is what greed
is all about. Remember too that his
sister also died in childbirth giving birth to his nephew—Fred, the painful
remembrance of that double death. Fred
then haunts him with “Merry Christmas.” Why blame him for not entering into
relationship and seeking their riches?
There is still the second secret. What is that really changes Scrooge? Is it the sight of his own death—with nobody
concerned for him? I always thought that
the cold steel of greed broke when he beheld his own grave and death. But hold on—that fact was always before him,
especially that Christmas Eve he watched Marley die. As he said at Marley’s bedside—“We all have to die sometime!”
So what changed him?
In the book and movie, Marley’s ghost points to the anguish of the other
ghosts. Now they really see the need of others, and death has robbed them of
the power to intervene and help. Hell is living the loss of helping
others, of being a part of others’ lives.
However, absent from the movie are the critical words from Scrooge as he
gazes on his own corpse covered with the sheets. He does not pull them back. But he feels the
knife like an icicle in his heart that in death, he has lost the chance to help
those in real need. The horror for
Marley has become his own—the eternal separation that leaves him powerless to
help others—and thereby restore his own humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment