2020 Christmas Special: Meet Me In St. Louis

Originator of one of the Top 5 Christmas songs of all-time, and, if you can believe it, the “clang clang clang goes the trolley” song (which it won an Oscar for) Meet Me St. Louis is the theme of this year’s Christmas Special article.

An article which doesn’t try that hard because it’s the time of year to sip Bailey’s and fall asleep on the couch, but an article that’s still fun in a timely-but-timeless way, I’d like to think.

Meet Me In St Louis, Part 1: We Need To Talk About Tootie

Meet Me In St Louis is thought of as a Christmas movie, but it only ends at Christmas (with an epilogue in Spring).

It’s actually a year long family saga about…trying to marry off your daughters?

One of the daughters (Judy Garland) is the main character, but much like Gone With The Wind this screenplay is all over the place.

We’re so used to screenplays written by people who grew up watching movies, screenplays with 100 years of practice, with professional teams to polish them.

The pacing of modern movies is formulaic, but when you watch old-timey films you realize: that formula is kind of a good thing to have.

Sure, the most dynamic, artistic directors and writers can play around with the 5-act structure successfully. But most movies are better off following some sort of established dramatic arc.

Despite that, one of the strangest and most satisfying 7 minutes in film comes from the middle of Meet Me In St. Louis, a movie I’ve watched 3 times but can’t exactly tell you why one scene follows another.

Depicting Halloween as celebrated by children in, at least what 1944 thinks is, 1903, (what 1903 was to people in 1944 is what I imagine the 50s are now to old white people: a simpler time, a pre-any World Wars time, or what the 90s are to me: a simpler time, a grunge and coffee-drinking pre-9/11 time) the 7 minutes doesn’t really earn its length or focus at the middle of the film, only adding to its wtf-ness.

Before I describe the scene, I have to make it clear how much the children are not the main characters of the movie. The lead is definitely Judy Garland. But as for the rest of the family? None of them have a segment of their own quite like Tootie.

So, it’s 1903, and like, 2 7-year-olds are wearing creepy ass Victorian era Halloween costumes, standing in a kitchen, begging adults for flour. Just classic 1903 stuff.

One adult is startled by the terrifying children and says to one of them, “I thought you were a drunken ghost”.

Agnes, one of the children, responds by saying, “she’s a horrible ghost and I’m a terrible drunken ghost” which Tootie adds onto with, “I haven’t even been buried cause everyone’s too afraid to get near me”.

Amazing. The dialogue of the children in this movie is amazing.

The adults then willfully provide flour to the children for them to throw in people’s faces.

Apparently, ding dong throw some flour in someone’s face was a game they played in 1903 because that is what happens when you don’t have television.

So now we’re outside, low to the ground, following Tootie and Agnes as they take their flour (make sure to get it wet, says the grandpa) to throw in someone’s face when we’re immediately confronted by a gang of children surrounding a bonfire in the middle of the street. Because child street fires is what happens when you don’t have television.

Where the children are getting the chairs and bed frames to throw on the fire is not explained.

After a few badly acted attempts at peer pressure, the kids get Tootie to face-flour the scariest house on the block, before she’s on her way, reminding her, “If you don’t hit Mr. Braukoff in the face with flour and say ‘I hate you’ the banshees will haunt you forever”. Because that’s the kind of things you say when you don’t…

So Tootie spends minutes of film time, I mean, at least a minute of film time (a decade in modern movies), walking up to the scary house, before ringing the doorbell, and successfully face-flouring Mr. Braukoff.

Tootie then runs away, back to the growing street fire, in what is one of the most impressive, modern looking tracking shots in the film.

“I killed him”, she declares.

The street children gather round her, distracted momentarily from their street fire, and start yelling, “Tootie’s the most horrible!”

Then they hand her a chair and say, “here, throw this chair on the fire”.

Tootie closes out the scene by chanting “I’m the most horrible, I’m the most horrible” while throwing a chair on the fire.

Real, honest wtf stuff.

Why the film take 7 minutes to follow kids around a weird sequence of things-we’re-expected-to-believe-are-traditions only becomes kind of clear much later, in a scene (not seen, but explained) where Tootie is hit by a streetcar, or, as the film (in what now appears poor taste) so boldly foreshadowed earlier, with its joyous “clang clang clang(ing) goes the trolley” rendition.

“The Trolley Song” plays weird the second time around when you know it’s just gonna hit a kid later, and all these adults going to work are super gung-ho about the onomatopoeia of their morning commute.

It’s funny to think of trolleys as an old timey thing, just as it’s fun to call history “old timey time” but it’s actually fucking tragic.

Meet Me in St Louis, Part 2: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, 2020

There are, using the 1944 definition of the word, many bangers on the Meet Me In St. Louis soundtrack: “The Trolley Song”, the most iconic version of “Skip To My Lou” put on film, an instrumental called, wait for it, “I Hate Basketball” (wtf), and the pretty-catchy-for-probably-racist-white-people title song, “Meet Me In St. Louis”.

But the stand out by far is, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”.

And the song – along with its best line – was almost lost to history several times.

Hugh Martin said he had a melody he “couldn’t make work, so I played with it for two or three days and then threw it in the wastebasket”.

But Martin’s (disputed) writing partner Ralph Blaine had heard Hugh playing with the “madrigal-like tune” and convinced the duo to root around in the trash to find it.

Even then, the song was sadder than the one we know today.

Several people involved in the production of Meet Me In St. Louis – including Garland – thought Martin’s original lyrics (like, “it may be your last, next year we all may be living in the past” which became “let your heart be light, next year all our troubles will be out of sight”) were too depressing.

But “muddle” was kept, along with several other lines, that, in 2020, are more apropos to the context of the original 1944 version (WWII still raging) than perhaps at any other time since: over 40 years AIDS has killed more Americans than any other disease, attack, natural disaster, or entire war, but no other single event besides it has caused the deaths of more Americans since WW2, than the Coronavirus.

And remember that one lyric, “hang a shinning star upon the highest bough”?

Sinatra had Martin write that lyric to cover up the “we’ll have to muddle through some how” line when Sinatra wanted to cover the song for his 1957 A Jolly Christmas album because, apparently, “muddling” wasn’t fucking jolly enough for old blue eyes.

A lot of people react strongly to muddling it seems.

But what might be most surprising about “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” in 2020 is, how no advertisers are going anywhere near it.

Read these lyrics (and, by the way, I owe this entire insight to my fiancee) from “Merry Little Christmas” and tell me Facebook couldn’t make another sad ass commercial like the one they released on April 7th this year:

• “Next year all our troubles will be out of sight”
• “Next year all our troubles will be miles away”
• “Once again, as in olden days, happy golden days of yore/ faithful friends who were near to us, will be dear to us, once more”
• “Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow/ until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow”

You know what? It’s the whole fucking song.

The entirety of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is about Christmas in 2020 (thanks Jayme).

I guess I never really understood “muddling” until the Coronavirus.

In 1944, there were so few cars on the streets of New York, due to gas rationing for the war, that people joked about traffic.

By early September 1945, only a couple weeks after the ration was lifted, the streets of New York had become jammed to pre-war levels, as Robert Caro describes in The Power Broker, “streets and highways, so empty for 44 months filled up with astonishing speed” causing the “cheers [of post-war relief and ration lifting] to turn to groans”.

What I took away from that passage was the part about the streets of New York City (“the city so nice they named it New York“) being “so empty for 44 months”.

It’s something I can actually relate to now.

The sacrifice (though forced) of rationing might be the most overlooked aspect of World War II. At least, it feels that way as someone who grew up being taught about the war from 1990s’ textbooks.

I never could relate to World War II as it was portrayed in movies because I’ve never jumped out of a plane onto a French beach, or road in a tank, or shot at Nazis, all activities still actually possible for my generation.

But now I understand a bit better what my grandmother and all her friends and family went through while my grandfather was serving the country: how they served their country as well.

Rationing: the unglamorous side of war, so unglamorous its not even in the “unglamorous depictions of war” movies like Saving Private Ryan or Letters From Iwo Jima

Can you imagine the sheer volume of Walmart-based protests that would happen now if Americans were forced to sacrifice anything even close to this?

“Everyone, including children, was issued a ration book, each of which had a certain number of rationing points per week. Meat and processed foods, vital for soldiers abroad, had high points. Fresh fruit and vegetables had no points.”

The amount of white guys punching journalists would have risen through the roof if they were asked anything close to what was asked of Americans 75 years ago,

Supplies such as gasoline, butter, canned milk and sugar were rationed so they could be provided for the war effort. Many people got three gallons of gas a week. The people here were standing in line for sugar, the first and last commodity that was rationed. The allocation was half a pound a week, half of what Americans typically consumed.

Source

Proud Boys rioting and attacking journalists in DC. pic.twitter.com/kw9ASyMqNG

— Chad Loder (@chadloder) November 15, 2020

And so, muddling seems to be something we once were capable of.

Now any slight inconvenience is exploited and politicized by people who are stupid and bad and, increasingly, in power.

It’s a relatively basic observation (comparing the Coronavirus to WWII), and I’m not writing this to glorify America in 1945. It was a terrible place for many, and we probably learned a lot of the wrong lessons from World War II (atomic bombs = good, military industrial complex = more please, reflection on what it means to firebomb entire nations while never having been invaded yourself = no thank you).

But I can say that I probably understand Judy Garland better than I ever could have before a worldwide pandemic.

And that’s a sentence that, if one ever gets an opportunity in one’s life to write truthfully, one must.

The Facebook ad that became the template for so many noxious “we’ll get through this together” or “be grateful for what really matters” sentiments put forth by so many derivative ad men and women during this pandemic seems to have been a high point, and emotion conveying-success, that everyone is ok with never going near again.

It’s as though advertisers know that if Judy Garland were to waltz her sad way into our living rooms this Christmas, with her quivering vibrato and haunted eyes, we would not be capable of keeping our gaze. We would, as a nation, be forced to look away, lest we wipe away the tears of what we’ve become once more, lest we be reminded of what we’ve gone through again, lest we remember the days where hope for a different outcome was still a possibility, and languish in our living rooms, reminded of how long the people dear to us have not been able to come anywhere near to us, how Mitch McConnell held stimulus checks hostage so he could fight for the right for companies not to get sued by their employees when companies force employees to work in unsafe environments and then those employees contract Coronavirus because of it and how none of that will make us want to buy a fucking Lexus.