Disappointed, Jolly, and Longing for More

My own child as well as all the nieces and nephews are young adults, which means that our Christmas Days have been evolving over the past few years into a less child-centric experience. We're here in New York to spend the holiday with our daughter. Yesterday's plan was a lazy, late morning gift exchange followed by a movie and Chinese food. 

It was all a proper NYC Christmas until we arrived at the movie theater only to be told that the showing for which we'd held tickets for months, and had looked forward to, was cancelled due to "burst pipes." That sucked. 

It didn't just suck for us. The flooding impacted most of the theater's showings for the day, which left hundreds, if not thousands of us, with the same disappointment. 

As we tried to figure out if there was another movie at another theater we could see, I watched the poor woman assigned to inform customers of the situation. She was promising refunds and handing out vouchers. Most seemed to understand, but she was also taking some abuse. Talk about sucking. This was not how she imagined things going when she came into work on Christmas morning.

The movie business was struggling before the pandemic, but then took a nosedive from which it's never recovered. Theaters are closing across the country. Turning away customers on the busiest movie day of the year really sucks for this theater's bottom line which will likely impact everyone who works there.

We ended up taking a taxi across town to see a movie we'd never heard of (A Better Man), a biopic about a pop star none of us had ever heard of (Robbie Williams), in which, for reasons never fully explained, the lead was played by a CGI chimpanzee . . . It wasn't bad. In fact, well before the chimp's fame had brought it to the predictable decent into drug abuse and alcoholism, we were once more a jolly bunch. 

I know that we weren't the only ones to go through disappointment on what is meant to be a merry holiday. Indeed, in the scheme of things, ours was an incredibly minor one compared to the disappointments of, for instance, children whose Christmas morning hopes were unfulfilled. Our disappoint was nothing compared to the disappointments of those who hoped that this year they would forge a new relationship with difficult relatives, or that their happy day would not be spoiled by bickering, or who burned the dinner. The truth is that for many of us, these big holidays are often a big disappointment, which accounts, I suppose, for much of the depression associated with this time of year.

Having a bad day is one thing. Having it against the backdrop of a day set aside for being "jolly," "merry," and "happy" is another. Even our most perfect holidays are marred, at least a little, by disappointment, because few things live up to our greatest hopes or go according to our best laid plans. There are those who tell us that we can choose to be happy, even when things go wrong, but try telling that to the kid who didn't get the toy they fully expected. As adults we can dismiss their tears as "nothing to cry about," but that doesn't make the experience of having one's hopes dashed any less painful. 

The reality of disappointment makes cynics of some of us all of the time and all of us some of the time. If we just start by expecting the worst, the theory goes, then we can at least be pleasantly surprised when the worst doesn't happen. It's a protective stance that perhaps dampens the disappointment, but it also leaves us without the anticipation, without the hope.

Anthropologist David Graeber tells us that our medieval ancestors understood this phenomenon in a way that our consumption-based economy makes difficult for modern humans to comprehend. It's natural to desire a wonderful thing, like a perfect holiday, but trying to possess it, fulfill it, or consume it is another matter. "Anyone who got the idea that one could resolve the matter by "embracing" the object of his or her fantasy was missing the point. The very idea was considered a symptom of a profound mental disorder, a species of "melancholia" . . . This leads to the interesting suggestion that from the perspective of this particular form of medieval psychological theory, our entire civilization . . . is really a form of clinical depression." We shop, we plan, we anticipate, but the truth is we always just miss our heart's desire, leaving us with an emptiness that can only be filled by . . . more shopping, planning, and anticipating. The assumption of capitalism is that we will never be sated. The goal of our medieval predecessors was far more reasonable: not to try to possess perfection, but rather to preserve our longing for it.

By the time we sat down to our dinner, we were jovially debating the strange artistic choice to make Robbie Williams a chimp. Was it distracting or inspired? It definitely makes the movie more memorable than the other myriad pop star biopics, but did it make it better? You know, exactly the kind of post cinema conversation one anticipates and even hopes for. We ordered too much food and had an extra round of drinks. We laughed and reminisced and found ourselves by the end of the evening in a holiday mood. It will, going forward, be known as the "monkey man" Christmas, the year, like all the others, that didn't go according to plan, but nevertheless followed tradition, leaving us yet again disappointed, jolly, and longing for more.

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