5 Ways The Nightmare Before Christmas Makes No Sense
Tim Burton’s Holiday classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas, is certainly a labor of love, and since it’s release 21 years ago, suffice it to say that the film happily stands up to the test of time. While watching the film as an adult still produces the same warm-fuzzies that it did during childhood, it’s also difficult to avoid watching with a critical eye. It can be fun to re-watch old favourites from your youth to try catching details you might have missed, but sometimes it yields down-right confusing results.
1. Jack is a Terrible Boyfriend
I know, I’m going to catch flack for this from a legion of wide-eyed emo teenagers whom turned to this film as their #RelationshipGoal after rejecting the fuzzy idealism of Disney’s typical couples. A decade ago, I was among such a horde myself. You can’t get much more romantic than Jack and Sally’s hilltop embrace behind the enormous, glowing moon while warbling about how they’re ‘simply meant to be’. But watching the whole film and considering the context of his relationship with Sally, he’s a far cry from boyfriends like Rory Williams. The residents of Halloweentown, including her ‘dearest friend’ Jack, appear generally oblivious to Sally’s struggles to escape her master and creator, Dr. Finkelstein. From what the film shows us, she imprisoned and being held by her creator into some sort of servitude. Is Halloweentown just allowing slavery? Jack spends the film distracted by his own plans to really do much about Sally’s situation. And to boot, when she shares her prophecy that Christmas is going to go badly, he barely listens to her.
2. Is Jack a Villain?
This is an argument that gets thrown around every so often by people whom are fond of alternative film interpretations. With the town’s macabre culture, it easily follows that their morality system might be a bit more grey than what we’re used to in the mundane, non-magical world. Through out the film it’s unclear as to whether the residents simply enjoy scaring people for the fun of it, or whether bodily harm is fair game. The beginning of the movie does have the Mayor awarding a vampire for ‘The Most Blood Drained in a Single Evening”, and some of the Christmas gifts that Jack distributes look down-right lethal. But Jack acts with the best of intentions, and it’s hard to dislike a character with such genuine, childlike glee. His obsession with Christmas and his plot to ‘borrow’ it comes from his desire to overcome his depression, and even do what he thinks is a favor to his neighbor. But that ‘favor’ also involves abducting Santa and carelessly handing him over to Oogie Boogie, a sadistic killer. Oogie’s murder plot could have been avoided had Jack simply thought to say, “Hey kids, deliver Sandy Claws to my house, and make him a mojito while you’re at it”. For the residents of Christmastown, this incident would feel less like a fun prank and more like the set-up for a Taken movie. There’s also some rather disturbing lyrics from Kidnap the Sandy Claws, where the children believe that “Jack will beat [them] black and green”. Then there’s the question of Jack’s level of authority in town: he has the vaguely-defined title of ‘The Pumpkin King’, meaning he likely resides over Halloween as it’s figurehead much like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. But our glance at Christmastown makes it look like a Marxist Utopia: the worker elves are happy and safe, their leader Mr. Claus responsible for the most difficult and dangerous tasks while remaining illusive in the eyes of Earth’s children. The residents of Christmasland don’t visibly have any poverty or class division. Jack, meanwhile is effectively a cult leader. Even Halloweentown’s Mayor desperately relies on Jack for making decisions and keeping things organized. All things considered, Halloweentown starts to feel a lot more like Jonestown.
3. What did Oogie Boogie Want, Anyway?
The first thing that comes to mind when considering Tim Burton’s take on The Boogeyman is that he has one of the most awesome villain songs in the Disney canon. While it doesn’t sound like much from the track title, Oogie Boogie’s Song has got the best traits of it’s peers. It has the theatricality of Hellfire, the bombastic attitude of Friends on the Other Side, the fun of Gaston and the pure fear factor of Be Prepared. But for all the show-stopping punch Oogie’s number has, he doesn’t really take the time to define what his plan actually is. It’s clear that he wants to kill Santa Claus, but… why? A single line from Kidnap the Sandy Claws suggests that Oogie wants “take the whole thing over”. Does he want to rule Halloweentown? Did he just happen to have the same plan as Jack to appropriate Christmas? Jack was clear about keeping “that no-account Oogie Boogie out of it” so these two guys clearly dislike each other. Maybe Oogie just wanted attention? His treatment of Santa Claus and Sally suggests he might be serial killer, which is the closest we get to uncovering his pathos. And which also makes his employment of 3 children rather terrifying.
4. Sally’s Confusing Skill Set
The moment where the film takes a turn for the serious is Sally’s vision. Her vision of the burning Christmas tree is our first indication that Jack and the Halloween people may be in grave danger. Her seer-like abilities are also never mentioned prior to this scene nor employed again for the remainder of the film. She also has a talent for chemistry, poisoning Finkelstein as her preferred tactic for escaping his lab. Being a sentient ragdoll, she is able to dismember herself and uses her detached limbs as decoys while eluding would-be predators like Oogie. She also appears not to experience pain while dismembering or repairing herself, which makes her fear of being tormented by Oogie in the film’s last act rather puzzling. She’s also apparently a talented seamstress, likely developed from re-stitching herself on various occasions, which is why she is chosen to create Jack’s Santa suit. How did she have the time to learn half of these things? Why doesn’t she use her prophetic abilities to convince Finkelstein to free her? With her sewing knowledge wouldn’t she have noticed that Oogie had a loose thread and used it to her advantage rather than waiting around for Jack to solve the problem? All her cool, eclectic abilities pretty much never get used outside of plot devices. That’s cold, Tim Burton.
5. Where is Halloweentown and How Do You Get to/from It?
This question seems obvious at first – well duh, Halloweentown is that holiday portal forest thing from the start of the movie. Based on the other Holiday doors present – Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, etc. it can be assumed that the forest is somewhere in the American Midwest since there’s a tendency towards holidays common with more W.A.S.P.-like populations. Maybe there’s doors for Cinco de Mayo and Dias de los Muertos in California or Texas? Jack stumbles across Christmastown during his wandering through the woods and has never seen nor heard of it before. There’s never any indication given of the geography of the holiday towns in relation to each other or the human world. Santa effortlessly flies into our world for his gift-giving and Jack boasts about being “known through out England and France”. He returns home towards the film’s finale via a portal in a graveyard’s tombstone. Was the portal always there, and how did Jack know it was? Or did he simply create the portal? Are the towns even on the same plane of existence as our world? The physics and geography become even more confusing with the addition of the Kingdom Hearts games into the Disney universe, in which every canonical world is apparently it’s own little isolated planet connected through highways in space. This suddenly makes the happy-go-lucky charm of Disney take on a heavy, almost Arthur C. Clarke-like undercurrent.
Looking at the facts, maybe good ol’ Nightmare Before Christmas really is as scary as Burton intended, perhaps even moreso.
