The Skeleton’s Skullcap: The Hermeneutical Jew in The Nightmare Before Christmas
by Benny Edelman
I've read these Christmas books so many times,
I know the stories and I know the rhymes
I know the Christmas carols all by heart
My skull so full, it's tearing me apart
As often as I've read them, something's wrong
So hard to put my bony finger on
- “Jack’s Obsession” The Nightmare Before Christmas
I realized at a pretty late age that I have a "parasocial" relationship with Christmas and Halloween. I welcome both like old friends whenever they come around, overtaking the front yards of my suburban hometown, bearing with them all their flashy ornaments and distinct aesthetics. However, neither of them know that I exist; raised as an Orthodox Jew whose community feared both rituals as the dual temptations of Christianity and Paganism, I have never celebrated either. I have only ever experienced them mediated through a screen, spending every Oct 31 and Dec 25 of my childhood glued to my TV watching Treehouse of Horror, Batman Returns, The Santa Clause, Ghostbusters, Home Alone, etc. I’d spend long hours perusing Party City catalogues full of spooky lawn decorations and cauldrons of sublimating dry ice and then a few months later gazing at recipes for gingerbread houses and suggestions for tree decorations. I’m fairly certain I had even tried gingerbread and found it absolutely disgusting, but I still salivated over it whenever it was onscreen. I remember one year, when I was still a single digit old, telling my sister I wanted to have a tree in our living room and her reacting as if I was saying I wanted to burn our house down, yelling across the hallway à la Candace Flynn: "MOM! BENNY WANTS A CHRISTMAS TREE!" Christmas wasn’t merely to be avoided, it was dangerous: a foreign contaminant that could upend our way of life if invited in.
I suppose that’s why I relate so much to Jack Skellington: the lanky, charming, megalomaniacal protagonist of The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Jack is the proclaimed “pumpkin king” of Halloween Town, one of the many hermetically sealed, holiday-themed enclaves which exist in the film’s fantasy world. Here, it is Halloween year-round: the weather is always overcast, the trees are always dead, almost everything is gray, and every inhabitant is some form of Hollywood monster. Despite his prestige, Jack has grown tired of his life in Halloween Town and seeks something more, leading him deep into the forest to the wooden portals to the other holiday worlds, where one in particular captivates his attention: the tinsel-covered tree and brass door knob of Christmas Town. Jack is quickly enraptured by the “sights and sounds” of the winter wonderland around him and becomes madly infatuated. However, he does not introduce himself to the inhabitants or try to truly learn about it by engaging with them, but instead snoops around undetected and tries to infer its meaning by his own deduction. It was hard not to relate to the idea of a complete outsider falling in love with Christmas through a mediated, voyeuristic experience.
Pictured: 7 year old me changing the channel to Cartoon Network to watch the Chowder "Hey, Hey it's Knishmas" special
During my October rewatch of the film this past year, I came upon a recent interview with composer, songwriter, and singing-voice of Jack, Danny Elfman, where he made clear how much his secular, Jewish upbringing played into his connection with the film. “Christmas was the most depressing time of the year for me,” he says while describing his childhood fantasy of imagining his friends gathered together around a tree: caroling and embracing in comforting familial warmth. While Tim Burton conceived the idea for the film, and Henry Selick took on directorial duties, Elfman’s influence went back to the first stages of pre-production, with his songwriting sessions with Burton serving as the script’s backbone. Elfman originally only lended his voice for the recording demos, but found himself increasingly attached to Jack, whose ennui he saw as analogous to the constraint he felt as lead singer for Oingo Boingo. So it’s clear that Elfman: a) is Jewish and connected his Jewish relationship with Christmas to the film, b) is on par with Burton and Selick for the role as author of the film, and c) strongly relates to the character of Jack who he sees as analogous to himself.
And then it hit me… is Jack Skellington Jewish?
My personal "Always Sunny conspiracy board" meme
To satisfy my curiosity, I did some digging on the internet to find out if anyone had any similar takes and was surprised to find even a handful. A December 2020 article from Jewish pop culture website HeyAlma came closest to my realization, even pointing out many aspects I hadn’t noticed. For instance, the soundtrack includes a song called “Making Christmas” where the people of Halloween Town attempt to take over preparations for Christmas while Santa Claus is held in captivity. I had never realized how strange a phrase like that sounds outside of an Ashkenazi Jewish context where holidays are often described in Yiddish as being “made:” making Shabbos, making Yuntif, etc. This seemed a bit too tangential to be totally convincing, but I was more amazed to find out Elfman has drawn a lot of inspiration for his scores from the Eastern European Yiddish folk tradition of Klezmer music, describing it as “the most old soul of orchestral music.” I couldn’t help but imagine the rustic, German expressionist styled town of Halloween as anything other than a shtetl after reading that. The rest of the article made other very interesting conclusions, though ones I found largely unsubstantiated and overreaching, like the idea that Jack’s longing is analogous to the Jewish concept of exile or that Jack’s amazement at the Christmas Town residents’ lack of nightmares reflects a lack of “generational trauma.”
But I still wasn’t completely satisfied. I was wondering how a work blending the two mainstream holidays least associated with Jews would produce a narrative that seems to both attract Jewish audiences and reflect certain Jewish experiences. Probably the most obvious is the role the monsters of Halloween Town take on as the “other.” This is a general trope of a community existing outside the mainstream whose ways of life are deemed atypical and improper compared to normative society. There’s an exaggerated culture clash between the Halloween residents who prefer the dreary, frightening, and macabre against those of Christmas who love warm fires, bright-colored lights, and positive feelings. The inhabitants of Halloween Town can’t understand why sending severed heads and other gruesome grotesqueries as presents to children would lead to military retaliation from the normative society—this is just how they lead their lives. While this could apply to any marginalized group or counter culture, the connection to antisemitism can’t be avoided when much scholarship has been written about the antisemitic origins of classic monsters used to represent “the other,” like witches and vampires, who feature prominently in the film, and how these cultural constructs have been used to perpetuate real world antisemitic thoughts and actions.
If ya nose, ya nose.
Still, there was something missing: Christmas. The film ends with Jack realizing his love for Christmas was disingenuous and that his true home had been Halloween all along. The film presents a Grinch-style narrative where, instead of trying to destroy Christmas, the antagonist to Christmas is trying to take it over, make it his own, but out of a lack of understanding of the function or workings of the holiday. Unlike the Grinch, Jack is neither represented as an irrational hater of Christmas (in fact, virtually no one in Halloween shows any hatred for Christmas aside from the Boogeyman’s nihilistic indifference and Sally’s concern over the abandonment of their way of life) nor is he seen as redeemed by being converted to Christmas. Instead, the lesson of the movie is essentially “stay in your lane!” embracing the segregation of the two opposing forces rather than either of their negation. So then why does a film like Nightmare, which subverts the conventional Christmas narrative, the holiday seen as anathema to Judaism, also happen to present a sympathetic take on mythical creatures associated with Jews? Was there a connection between undermining the narrative traditions of the Christmas story and evoking sympathy for antisemitic stereotypes?
What he said!
I think Elfman’s connection to Jack had to have gone deeper than just his desire to move beyond Oingo Boingo. Elfman’s description of his alienation and estrangement from his peers on Christmas feels eerily Grinch-like, down to the Whoville style tree gathering, and Nightmare is a film that quotes heavily from Dr Seuss, both in style and in direct references to the Grinch such as Jack’s dog Zero. It made me wonder if Elfman’s Jewish identity was also a major factor in his relating to Jack. It made me wonder so much that it reminded me of a piece of cultural criticism I read almost 5 years ago: "The Anti-Jewish Tropes in How the Grinch Stole Christmas" by Ryan Szpiech. It should be stated off the bat that this quoted piece is not some sensationalist rag about how we need to cancel Dr. Seuss for being a Jew hater or how The Grinch is a work of hate speech (neither are the case). Instead, it recognizes how two thousand years of anti-Jewish discourse in Christian society is so thoroughly steeped into Western narrative traditions that even a philosemite like Seuss and an uplifting tale of moral reform like The Grinch cannot escape the antisemitic implications bound up in the traditions they draw from. Consciously or unconsciously, the Western Christian narrative tradition relies on the Jew as a stock figure to construct the narratives which reinforce Christian society.
Pop culture and commercialism seem to have so thoroughly secularized Christianity that we no longer recognize it as a theological ritual, but if the point of the Christmas film as a genre is to mythologize the origins of Christmas, who else would be the amorphous figure in the Christmas story that stands against the holiday other than the Jew for rejecting Christ as their savior? As Szpiech points out: “... Jews do not need to be present for Christian thought to make productive use of them. The so-called ‘hermeneutical Jew’ of medieval Christian theology… developed in a society where few Christians had any dealings with real Jews.” The Grinch, like Ebeneezer Scrooge before him, is not literally Jewish, but takes the rhetorical role of the Jew as the receptacle for what Christian society finds morally undesirable within itself. The social function of a Christmas narrative is to reaffirm the values represented by Christmas by contrasting it with the perceived values of the hermeneutical Jew who rejects it.
Ill-conceived admiration interpreted as malice.
So, if Nightmare Before Christmas is such a Christmas tale, does Jack Skellington take on the role of “hermeneutical Jew?” Although Jack is enamored with Christmas, he spends the first half of the film engaging with it completely voyeuristically—not too dissimilar from your humble narrator—in a way that is clinical, scientific, and motivated by a need for escapism from the world which he’s familiar with, but has grown dreadfully bored of. He doesn’t truly love Christmas, since he knows nothing about it other than the fact that it’s not Halloween, with his humorous misunderstandings and selfish actions making him an unwitting menace who single-handedly ruins the night. Jack is an antagonist to Christmas even if he is presented as an admirer, like a stalker who falsely believes they’re in love with their victim until their delusions of grandeur end in catastrophe for both of them. Does this conform to any particular antisemitic paradigm? Szpiech describes the two major roles of the Jew in a Christmas narrative as either curmudgeonly hater or zealous convert. Jack would certainly initially seem like the latter, but the narrative, through the voice of Sally, chastises Jack for trying to abandon his own way of life to adopt one completely foreign to him.
If Jack can’t fit neatly into this paradigm, Nightmare could represent a radical break with the kind of binary moral system that Szpiech frames in the Christmas narrative, as “our intellectual habits in conceiving of villainy, materialism, greed, or corruption of any kind… [being] partly indebted to a binary either-or, us-or-them logic…bequeathed to us by the long history of Christian anti-Jewish myth-making.” Nightmare, strangely, doesn’t affirm the theological undertone of Christmas, but still reaffirms Christmas as an aesthetic experience. It’s how Jack sees Christmas and how I see Christmas: not the actual theology behind it and the role someone like me plays in it, which is deeply disturbing when you dig deep enough, but as an amorphous collection of cultural motifs bound together by a vague feeling of “jolly.”
When I was 8 years old, I had a camp counselor find out I was Jewish and immediately say, straight to my face, with no irony, “you killed my savior” and then spent the rest of the summer continually trying to intimidate me. I was deeply afraid of him as a child, and years later, I am still bothered by how widely accepted what he said was. Yet, I haven’t stopped loving Christmas. Because the Christmas on my TV and the Christmas of Nightmare are aesthetic abstractions divorced from their theological origins. I think it presents a meaningful solution to dealing with any art created through an unethical or antiquated belief system—the art itself can evolve past the conditions that created it.
So, this Christmas—or Nitl or Kratsmekh as the old Shtetl Jews would call it—I’ll be enjoying some Chinese food, watching one of my favorite films with one of my favorite scores, and enjoying my commercialized aesthetic abstraction liberated from its antisemitic theological origins.
Just watch me!
