Over the last few weeks, I’ve gotten really obsessed with the new Bruce Springsteen album, Only the Strong Survive. It’s honestly as if they ran a boomer dad’s Sunday soundtrack for cleaning the house and then going for a ride in a convertible after through some AI program and came up with it. Just Bruce doing soul covers. The guy doesn’t exactly have the voice for it. I don’t think he could make it on the Stax roster in 1968 or anything, but it has heart because, well, it’s The Boss. The king of white dads born in the years after the Second World War is trying to be Levi Stubbs. It’s sort of hard to hate on that.
Boomers catch a lot of flack. They supposedly ruined everything. There’s a book I still do want to read called A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, even though I find the title a little offputting. The whole generational thing is silly. It’s a real A few bad apples spoil the bunch sort of situation to me. I talk a lot about how I have a weird vantage point being in that grey area of having been born the year Carter was still president but Reagan beat him in the election. The youngest Gen. Xer or the eldest Millennial depending on how you want to look at it. Either way, I get to observe how both generations age and how the younger generations act toward them. And sure, maybe you’ll meet some guy who was born in 1952 who will tell you “My generation stopped racism” or they’ll talk up the age of innocence or the Summer of Love or whatever, but I’m realizing now that everybody does that once they start reaching a certain age. I sometimes long for 1997 before…everything circa 2022 and friends, 1997 wasn’t so great. It was just chiller in hindsight.
This is the time of the year when some of us will revisit the films we tend to always watch in the days leading up to Christmas. Some will do White Christmas, others will boot up The Holiday and more than a few will put on National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and laugh at jokes we’ve been laughing at since 1989. If you do that, please pay special attention to Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold, because time has done a lot to make a truly absurd character seem quaint.
All the 1980s films focused on the misadventures of the Griswold clan are hilarious. Clark is a sub-middle-management nobody at the office, but he tries not to let anything get him down. Instead, he pushes all his anger deep inside of his brain until something triggers him, he explodes and goes nuts. Therapy? Of course not! But that’s part of the charm. It’s hilarious when he does it.
The Griswold stories were actual stories once. He published “Vacation ‘58” in National Lampoon in 1979 and “Christmas ‘59” came out a year later. There has been a lot of discussion since his death in 2009 about just how much written stuff Hughes left behind, most of it possibly telling the continued stories of his characters from films like Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and the Griswolds. For me, his fictional Shermer, Illinois is basically the Game of Thrones extended universe or whatever classic science-fiction world is just waiting to be pillaged by a movie studio and turned into a big-bucks CGI franchise. It’s sort of an obsession of mine. So much so that I wrote my first book about it.
I don’t play favorites, especially with films. I won’t say whether I like one character from a Hughes movie more than another. But I will say that Clark Griswold has really grown on me over the years for what he represents. You see it in the first two Vacation movies, his optimism in a cruel, cynical world, his obsessive planning, his little fantasy life of sitting beside Christie Brinkley in a red Ferrari instead of being stuck in the Wagon Queen Family Truckster with his ungrateful clan. He’s Peak Dad, but he’s also something else to me that I appreciate more and more each year. Clark Griswold is one of the truly great cinematic Boomer dads. And nowhere is this on display more than in Christmas Vacation.
The thing about the first two Vacation movies is you get to see Clark in the wild. Clark on the road, his plans falling apart across America and then in European Vacation he’s Clark, the ugly American. But in Christmas Vacation, we get to see Clark at home. His kingdom. And not only that, but we get to see Clark as an outlier. You’ve got his parents and in-laws visiting, then next door you’ve got the iconic Margo and Todd, the yuppie couple you know just had to give up their apartment in the city so he could be closer to the office and they feel so superior to their neighbors because they eat sushi and go jogging and other circa 1989 yuppie stuff. Clark, on the other hand, is just a guy. He definitely has a mug that says “#1 dad” that he tells the kids nobody else gets to drink from. That, and he takes things way too far. The Christmas lights, for example.
I’m not a dad…unless you count my pets. I know a lot of people my age that are dads, and in some ways, they all have a little Clark in them. But Clark really represents a certain kind of dad and in Christmas Vacation, he’s one of the last true representations of them in movies. The Boomer dad. The guy who came of age when the culture shifted and things really did change with everything from Civil Rights to the anti-war movement, but who will feel out of place with the changing times in the decades to come as soon as the credits roll on Christmas Vacation.
The thing about great Christmas movies is that they’re often so much about nostalgia. It’s a Wonderful Life or White Christmas or you think that the idea that Die Hard is a Christmas movie originated with you because you caught it on cable in 1995 on Christmas morning and thought, by God, this is a Christmas film! So now you watch it every year around this time. There’s a lot of nostalgia in Christmas Vacation. Just see Clark watching old films of his family during the holidays when he was a kid. But watching it now vs. watching it 20 or 30 years ago, there’s a different sort of nostalgia there. It’s the sort of nostalgia I feel listening to that new Bruce Springsteen album. It’s simple and sweet and a little delusional. Bruce isn’t a soul singer the way Clark can’t ever get close to having his perfect plans work out. But I appreciate the way they tried. The results might be a little silly (Sorry Bruce), but you walk away feeling thankful they had the best intentions.
This is great. I definitely have some Clark Griswold in me as a dad who plans things for the family and loses it for a moment when they go awry. I also have a good friend who's watched Christmas Vacation enough times that we could recite every line in the movie. When I watched it last week, Clark saying that Christmas means something different to everyone, and now he knows what it means to him hit me harder. But when his coworker says "You're the last true family man", it feels like that is the real thesis statement of the movie.
and pets counts