What My Brain Looks Like on 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'

Honesty is a hell of a drug

I’ve been asked before how I’m able to write about movies the way I do, and the answer is, quite simply, that I’m just honest about what I experience when I watch any given film in question. Frankly, that’s all you really need to do anything, but it’s especially true of engaging with or creating art.

This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, but the value of art isn’t actually realized until we humans get to create an experience out of it. This can mean making the art, and this can mean — in the case of film — watching/seeing the art. Value itself is a human artifice, so it tracks that art’s value doesn’t take shape until it collides with humans.

All this to say, everything I have to say about a film doesn’t actually reflect the film so much as it reflects the things that are inside of me, because those are the things that I have access to. The film, meanwhile, is something that I only have partial access to, since I can only experience it by witnessing it. The key is that this is something that we all have partial access to. The film, then, is a junction; existing not to hoard human space, but to help us find space in each other.

So when I tell you that The Nightmare Before Christmas is a robustly metamodernist examination of the intersections between Christianity, paganism, scientific thought, and mythopoeic thought (and what that all means for the human condition), I’m not insinuating some objective depth to this film; I’m insinuating the very-objective fact that this is the sort of thing that happens in my brain when I watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, and mapping the receipts of this experience via film criticism is how we use art to talk to each other about who we are. How do you respond to my experience? How might I respond to yours? What’s your experience of the film when you utilize the mapping I’ve introduced here? At the core of all these questions is the pursuit of honesty, and the richest honesty seeks a beholder.

And in the spirit of honesty, here’s the story behind what you’re about to read: I wrote the following piece in November 2022 at my old job, where my Managing Editor (the divinely effervescent Josh Conrad) gave the green light for me and my coworker (the also-divinely effervescent Nahila Bonfiglio) to co-author a piece on The Nightmare Before Christmas after our opposite takes on it — me believing it’s a Halloween movie, her believing it’s a Christmas movie — became a running joke/feud on our Slack. We put our takes together and then published them in the same article, which you can read here.¹

I’ve edited it very heavily so as to better reflect the truth of my experience with this film and also remove it from the context of the aforementioned debate, but the core observations all remain intact. Now let me explain all there is to explain:

Here we have Jack Skellington, the film’s protagonist and our champion of Halloween. He’s fed up with the monotony of his holiday and is desperate for change. Jack soon selects Christmas as the saving grace for his boredom, and this is where the dichotomy between Christianity (Christmas) and paganism (Halloween) starts to take shape.

First principles: Christmas is historically rooted in spiritual Christianity, whilst Halloween owes its origins to the more earthly paganism²:

• Paganism — to speak plainly — places value on the observable world, with all its earthly pleasures and kinships.

• Christianity, meanwhile, places value on the spiritual, and behaving in a way that adheres to the purported will of something unobservable (God), in hopes that they may earn its favour and be rewarded (getting into heaven).

  • This generally doesn’t take into account whether the behaviours feel or are otherwise observably beneficial to them in the moment; in this case, the Earth is a stepping stone/proving ground for heaven, rather than an end in its own right as paganism would decree.

Both paganism and Christianity can even be traced up to some of the nuances we come across in the modern-day iterations of their respective holidays. On Halloween (paganism), we acquire and eat large swaths of candy (earthly indulgence and pleasure for the sake of pleasure), while Christmas (Christianity) is predicated upon believing in an unseen figure (Santa Claus) in hopes of gaining their approval (“Have you been good for Santa this year?”) and receiving a a reward (Christmas presents).

All of this to say that these two holidays stem from two completely different belief systems/realities, and this is something that Jack fails to consider when he seeks to essentially cut and paste what he knows (i.e. Halloween) over to a Christmas celebration, which culminates in the disastrous, macabre fiasco he creates on Christmas Day.

To prepare for his Christmas campaign, Jack consults a book titled “The Scientific Method,” which is a deceptively important detail here. By directly introducing scientific thought into a film that’s already predicated upon a dichotomy of belief (Christmas-Halloween), that invites us to contrast scientific thinking with mythopoeic thought, creating a binary that shares similarities with the one we’ve already been greeted with:

• Simply put, mythopoeic thought understands the world on the basis of accepting it, born from a desire to live alongside and respect the Earth and its other inhabitants as peers. Very pagan-coded.

• This contrasts with scientific thought, which seeks to understand the world on the basis of puzzling out its machinations so as to declare an understanding upon it. This evokes the hierarchy found in the elemental Christian perspective of God and man. God → Man → Earth.

• If you were to ask both types of thinking something like “Why does the river run?”, you’d get the following answers:

  • Scientific: “The river runs because of inclines and gravity and weather and shit.”³

  • Mythopoeic: “The river runs because the river wants to run.”

In case it isn’t clear, scientific thought is a form of domination, seeking to make the world more convenient for the thinker to navigate. The world — according to scientific thought — is not a thing to live alongside, but a thing to serve our capacity for knowledge, which in turn serves the existential itch/hunger that resides within us all.

Importantly, it also tends to reinforce and validate one’s current understanding of the world, as scientific conclusions become the basis for more scientific thinking to take place, with the aim of making even more of the world convenient for the thinker to understand.

For example, we understand a tree as a tree, but we only understand a tree as a tree because we designated it as such using language. So, a tree being a tree is not an absolute truth, but simply an understanding that’s convenient for us.

When we have the word “tree,” we can then understand “oak,” “fig,” and “gingko.”

Now, Jack’s understanding of the world consists entirely of Halloween-centric ideas and vibes and motifs, and because he approaches Christmas with a blitz of scientific thought, he of course winds up forcing his resting understanding of the world — one completely incompatible with Christmas — upon the holiday, and the results are ghastly.

Jack is quick to realize his mistake, and the accompanying gut punch is made even worse through his confrontation with the villain Oogie Boogie, a monster who’s addicted to gambling, which alludes to the harmful side of indulging in pleasure for the sake pleasure (in this case, the dopamine hits that help create the addiction). Oogie Boogie is maladaptive paganism — commitment to the earthly — made manifest.

Put another way, Jack is forced to recognize — through the Christmas disaster and Oogie Boogie’s antagonism — that his understanding of the world is imperfect and exploitable, and this challenges him on an existential level. It was never about the monotony of Halloween; it was about the banality of his perspective on it.

But now that Jack’s worldview has collapsed, he also has the opportunity to build it back stronger than before. And indeed, the musical number around this point in the film, “Poor Jack,” firmly indicates that this experience has granted him a renewed appreciation for/perspective on Halloween and all that it represents, on account of having his horizons expanded from his exposure to and participation in Christmas (which, again, is a spiritual way to experience the world, as opposed to Jack’s pagan comfort zone of Halloween):

What have I done?
How could I be so blind?
All is lost, where was I?
Spoiled all, spoiled all
Everything’s gone all wrong

What have I done?
What have I done?
Find a deep cave to hide in
In a million years they’ll find me
Only dust and a plaque
That reads, “Here Lies Poor Old Jack”

But I never intended all this madness, never
And nobody really understood, well how could they?
That all I ever wanted was to bring them something great
Why does nothing ever turn out like it should?

Well, what the heck, I went and did my best
And, by God, I really tasted something swell, that’s right
And for a moment, why, I even touched the sky
And at least I left some stories they can tell, I did

And for the first time since I don’t remember when
I felt just like my old bony self again
And I, Jack, the Pumpkin King
That’s right, I am the Pumpkin King

And I just can’t wait until next Halloween
‘Cause I’ve got some new ideas
That will really make them scream
And, by God, I’m really going to give it all my might
Uh oh, I hope there’s still time to set things right
Sandy Claws

So not only has Jack found a way to freshly re-embrace Halloween and all of its pagan, earthly history and implications, but he also identifies that, in order to save Christmas, he needs to enable the person who can save Christmas: Santa Claus.

This marks Jack’s break from scientific thought and taking up of mythopoeic thought; he is no longer declaring his own pre-existing, Halloween-centric understandings upon Christmas, but is instead choosing to live alongside it and understand it as its own entity that cannot be defined by his pre-existing knowledge. Santa Claus himself, then, represents this separateness of Christmas that Jack is now respecting.

Thus, Jack’s lesson is one of a metamodernist intersection where it doesn’t become a matter of swapping out the old-to-him (Halloween) with the new-to-him (Christmas); it’s a matter of what these two things can learn from each other in pursuit of the most humanistically nutritious outcome. Scientific thought has its place, certainly, but its hierarchical and epistemological⁴ assumptions/nature renders it harmful when it comes to matters of people and culture, as exemplified by Jack’s colonial torpedoing of Christmas.

Consider also that the film ends with a kiss between Jack and Sally, the latter of whom had consistently warned Jack of the dangers of his scientific thought-driven campaign — she is, of course, very familiar with how scientific thought can go wrong, as represented by Doctor Finkelstein, her father/captor.

By instead embracing mythopoeic thought in these contexts, we become each other’s students. We acknowledge that we don’t know a culture better than it knows itself, and so the best we can do is learn from it, and see what their ideas can teach us about our own cultures and vice versa.

For Jack, this means exposing himself to the culture of Christmas, which expands his horizons to the point where he can consider his own culture — Halloween — from a more nuanced perspective now rooted in possibility rather than monotony. Where he once sought to co-opt Christmas out of selfishness and pessimism for his own culture, he learns to interact with it out of cooperation and curiosity for both Halloween and Christmas, which we can directly extend to paganism and Christianity (and, by further extension, any two ways of being).

I think my enamourment with metamodernism stems from its lone and total foundation of honesty, meaning it needn’t bother itself with logic systems or the weeds of justification that so often serve to create dissonance within the self; dissonance that some are happy to create, because they do not want honesty.

I see it often as a trans person. You would not believe the perverted mental gymnastics that some people will commit to in order to avoid admitting that they simply aren’t comfortable with the existence of trans people.⁵ I see it in genocide deniers saying “Well, technically, the land wasn’t stolen” instead of looking at the mass child graves and thinking “You know what? Maybe the colonial state isn’t as trustworthy as I thought” at least. Martin Scorsese — via an open letter — saw it back in 1993 after The New York Times ran a jarheaded polemic on foreign films⁶:

It reminds me of a beer commercial that ran a while back. The commercial opened with a black and white parody of a foreign film — obviously a combination of Fellini and Bergman. Two young men are watching it, puzzled, in a video store, while a female companion seems more interested. A title comes up: “Why do foreign films have to be so foreign?” The solution is to ignore the foreign film and rent an action-adventure tape, filled with explosions, much to the chagrin of the woman.

It seems the commercial equates “negative” associations between women and foreign films: weakness, complexity, tedium. I like action-adventure films too. I also like movies that tell a story, but is the American way the only way of telling stories?

The issue here is not “film theory,” but cultural diversity and openness. Diversity guarantees our cultural survival. When the world is fragmenting into groups of intolerance, ignorance and hatred, film is a powerful tool to knowledge and understanding. To our shame, your article was cited at length by the European press.

The attitude that I’ve been describing celebrates ignorance. It also unfortunately confirms the worst fears of European filmmakers.

Is this closed-mindedness something we want to pass along to future generations?

If you accept the answer in the commercial, why not take it to its natural progression:

Why don’t they make movies like ours?
Why don’t they tell stories as we do?
Why don’t they dress as we do?
Why don’t they eat as we do?
Why don’t they talk as we do?
Why don’t they think as we do?
Why don’t they worship as we do?
Why don’t they look like us?

Ultimately, who will decide who “we” are?

“Why don’t they X like us,” “Why don’t they Y like us”; these are the questions of science, not the humanities. Why, then, apply them to matters of humanity? We all saw how that worked out for Jack.

Indeed, politics and the humanities are not a matter of knowing that you’re right or being convinced that you’re right; it’s about recognizing the sheer undeniability of your emotional truth, and the right you have to express it. The question is whether you’re secure enough in your emotional truth to not only express it, but also accommodate the existence of other emotional truths with socially-cooperative curiosity as opposed to selfish pessimism about oneself (and, therefore, others).

Metamodernism — as evident in The Nightmare Before Christmas — seeks new ways of being by adhering to none and all of the ways that already exist. It demands ideas on the basis of honesty, and the honesty begins in the individual.

And so I ask again: How do you respond to my experience? How might I respond to yours? Perhaps most importantly: How do you respond to your own experience?

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1. Dear God, am I ever a better writer now than I was back then.

2. Celtic paganism, to be exact.

3. I am not a scientist.

4. (epistemology = the theory of knowledge, regarding validity and scope, among other things)

5. The tell is that they never account for the safety/continued visibility of trans people. Implicit in something like “Trans women shouldn’t be held in women’s prisons because cis women might get raped” is the suggestion that it’s okay if the trans woman — who, for all you know, has had bottom surgery — gets raped in a men’s prison. Why not instead take issue with the prison system that can breed any of this sexual violence in the first place?

Same thing with bathrooms. Why not mandate gender-neutral public washrooms to protect all people from all bad actors regardless of what demographic they occupy? God knows I’m scared of going into women’s bathrooms in case a bad-faith transphobe tries to pass me off as a predator.

6. Credit to Cole Haddon for documenting this on his newsletter 5AM StoryTalk.