hen James Taylor announced that his first post-Sept. 11 release would be a holiday song -- in fact, a 57-year-old melody that one critic dubbed "the most melancholy Christmas carol ever written" -- music industry executives questioned Taylor's rationality. But Taylor insisted that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which he released this month online, is a song for our time. And indeed, it is.
No song has ever boasted a more auspicious debut. Sung by a young and luminously lovely Judy Garland, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" premiered in December 1944, the centerpiece of MGM's classic musical, Meet Me in St. Louis. That month also marked America's third year of war.
The audiences who first heard Garland sing Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin's bittersweet lyrics knew that Allied victory was inevitable. But they also knew that enormous sacrifice and numbing losses were equally unavoidable. Even as moviegoers marveled at Garland's snowy set, the American army, fighting in Belgium, was suffering its worst winter since Valley Forge. "Someday soon we all will be together/If the fates allow/Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow," Garland sang. And the Americans who heard her uncertainty shared that sense of dread.
But what Americans feared most by December 1944 wasn't the Axis; it was the irrevocable alteration of their way of life. If commentators might later refer to the War as the nation's loss of innocence, their more precise meaning was that post-Pearl Harbor Americans understood that the myths by which they had defined themselves were no longer sustainable. Their response was denial -- the reaffirmation of patriotic platitudes and the cloaking of discredited values in what would ultimately become the most repressive period of flag-waving, defense-building and dissent-silencing in the nation's history.
On its face, Meet Me in St. Louis offers an American idyll. Focusing on a large and comfortable St. Louis family during the last months of 1903, the film makes its primary image the American home. The elder Smith children worry about romance: Garland's Esther falls memorably in love with the boy next door. The family's younger members wreak havoc on the neighborhood. What unites old and young is their anticipation of the event that promises to be the community's most joyous event, the 1904 World's Fair.
But suddenly, the outside world intervenes, threatening life as the Smiths know it. Mr. Smith announces that his law firm is transferring him to its New York office. Three days after Christmas, the family will move away from St. Louis.
Today, it's easy to dismiss Meet Me in St. Louis as a carefree trip down memory lane, a cinematic respite for the war-weary. "It isn't often a pretty girl has a really legitimate reason to cry," the Smiths' grandfather says when Esther's beau misses the Christmas dance -- a truly stunning gibe for the year that produced D-Day. But director Vincent Minnelli's masterpiece is more ambitious than that.
Meet Me in St. Louis doesn't offer an ideal America, after all, but an inquiry into the idea of America. The film gives concrete form to the notions we continue to have of ourselves as a people, generous middle class folks sharing the values -- no matter how populous our urban centers -- of small-town America. ("I know St. Louis is a city, but it doesn't seem like one here where we are," Mrs. Smith offers.) Then Minnelli ruthlessly exposes those images as sham. The procedure reveals something remarkable about why we resist challenges to our self-perception with such flag-laden fury: Patriotic display inevitably defers our acknowledgment that the presumptions underlying our national identity are now -- and have always been -- false.
Thus, Meet Me in St. Louis, famous for both its beautiful surface and its upbeat reaffirmation of traditional ideals, offers one of Hollywood's most subversive subtexts. Moreover, in a sly play on MGM's well-known use of angelic child stars (Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Garland herself) to market the studio's conservative political agenda, Minnelli makes social critics of the film's genuinely outre children. ("I hope it's a hunting knife," 9-year-old Agnes responds when she's asked what her Christmas present will be.)
No sooner does the film's primary narrative extol the American mainstream's shared rituals and traditional values than the youngest Smiths reconstruct their own versions of the grown-up conventions. Even Minnelli's introduction of the Smith's unconventional 5-year-old, Tootie (Margaret O'Brien), foregrounds the horrific jingoism -- the complete conviction of one's own exceptionalism -- that studied indifference to the rest of the world ensures. "Wasn't I lucky to be born in my favorite city!" Tootie gloats in an exchange that today suggests nothing so much as the campaign platitudes of our own singularly ill-traveled Chief Executive.
Minnelli's show-stopping Halloween sequence may be cinema's most vicious exposure of the hellish inconsistencies that our heartland myths conceal. Dressed in costumes that parody the adults' fixed professional and gender roles, the neighborhood kids launch a vicious attack on the families who have offended them during the preceding year: "Tear down their fences! Kill them all!" the leader of the pre-teen mob rails, stoking a bonfire that must have reminded Forties moviegoers of the Klan rallies and Kulturkampf they'd seen so recently and so often in newsreels. When Tootie singlehandedly storms the home of the community's most identifiable outsiders, the Braukoffs -- Minnelli substituted this overtly Jewish name for the WASPy one appearing in the original script -- she is elated by her Stormtrooper status: "I'm the most horrible!" she shrieks delightedly.
In the end, it is Tootie's overwhelming sense of entitlement -- a violent score-settling that's never convincingly masked as heartache -- that forces the film's make-believe ending. Stirred by the sense of loss that Garland's song conveys, Tootie flies into the yard and viciously beats her snow people into unrecognizable mush. "If I can't have them, no one can," Tootie screams. The scene won't be America's last exposure to a policy popularly described -- at least during the Vietnam War years -- as "Give us your hearts and minds or we'll burn your village."
Remarkably -- or perhaps not remarkably at all -- Mr. Smith finds the fantasy violence both justified and cathartic, offering a reborn sense of optimism and a new opportunity for endeavor. The family need not meet the rest of the world halfway, Mr. Smith announces. Rather, the world will come to St. Louis.
And for 50 years after V-E Day -- the glorious, eagerly awaited, but not quite concrete celebration that Minnelli's Fair symbolizes -- the world did come to America, accepting the country's unexamined assumptions of moral superiority, its jeans-and-Big Mac cultural hegemony, its claims of political virtue amid imperialist intrigue and, of course, its dollars. Then, on Sept. 11, Americans were forced once again to consider a cosmos beyond St. Louis.
We're inundated this season with unlikely combinations of nationalism and nativity scenes, of uniforms and Santa suits, of war news and tidings of good will. If the juxtapositions seem jarring, DOJ soundbytes and Defense Department blurbs and special broadcasts tell us that the inconsistencies are all for the best: "Come next year, our troubles will be out of sight." But America's loveliest, most ambiguous Christmas song also implies an obligation to resist false comfort, to investigate inconsistency, to examine values to determine if they are worth keeping. This holiday season bids us to look beyond the promised outcomes. To release what is false in our past. To recommit to what is most generous in our future. To make for ourselves a merry little Christmas now.
Contributing writer Terry Diggs teaches law and film courses at Hastings College of the Law and Golden Gate University School of Law.
