‘Christmas Vacation’ provides a Marxist critique of capitalism—here’s how

From The Dialy Dot:

There’s a specter haunting National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation—the specter of communism.

Some of our most vaunted Christmas movies assail the very underpinnings of the consumerist machine churning furiously at the heart of this season of consumption for consumption’s sake. A Charlie Brown Christmas provides little more than a takedown of Christmas consumerism with a thin religious veil. A Christmas Carol, in all its cinematic iterations, gives a downright hostile perspective of the supremacy of capital, positing that a more equitable society can only be achieved through threat of life and limb against the monied class. It’s a Wonderful Life displays an ice-cold capitalist predator threatening the well being of working families, featuring George Bailey, the people’s hero.

But no holiday film confronts the vicious class struggle created and inflamed by the logic of capital better than Christmas Vacation, wherein the capitalist dream—the American dream—becomes skewered, mocked, and vilified amid cartoonish hijinks and Chevy Chase’s goofball one-liners. Watch Christmas Vacation through a critical lens and you’ll see that it’s not just a source of holiday lulz, but a Marxist critique of capitalism and class struggle in the United States.

Such a critique goes best with eggnog served in a moose head-shaped glass, naturally.

Clark Griswold: The pitiable chaser of the American dream—and all its hollow, materialistic promise. Griswold represents what’s known in Marxist literature as the petty bourgeoisie, a sort of in-between class that shares some interests with the lowly proletariat, but often aligns itself with the bourgeoises, or capitalist ruling class. Clark, an inventor working for a giant U.S. corporation, belongs to a class of small proprietors and handicrafts folks living more comfortably than the proletariat, but still far from the power and luxury of the bourgeois life. Clark’s allegiances, therefore, constantly divide. The internal struggle is at the source of much of the movie’s comedy, as Clark strives for what he believes to be a classic Christmastime—the one he experienced as a child in the 1950s. Almost everything he does is a strategic move to exit the petty bourgeoisie and join the rulers in their mansions and gated communities; cozying up to those above him on the class ladder, pandering to them, kissing their asses.

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