{"id":105982,"date":"2016-12-20T14:24:48","date_gmt":"2016-12-20T19:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105982"},"modified":"2016-12-21T19:14:31","modified_gmt":"2016-12-22T00:14:31","slug":"the-captured-santa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/20\/the-captured-santa\/","title":{"rendered":"The Captured Santa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why pop culture fixates on the incarcerated Claus.<\/em><\/p>\n

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From Get Santa<\/i>, 2014.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Let me tell you something you already know: our culture longs to incapacitate Santa. At Christmastime, as the tired \u201cGod Rest\u00a0Ye Merry Gentlemen\u201d apparatus lurches to serve up the same perverse images of twinkling, Old World pageantry, we dream of the captured Santa, the deposed king, thwarted by his own bumbling jollity into reckoning with his parochialism.<\/p>\n

Santa represents a tradition at its breaking point. He\u2019s the relic of a broken Eurocentric past, held over by the glad-handing rearguard in smoky backroom deals. Everywhere you look, you marvel at how brittle his grip is on power. You can feel it in the decorations, the imperious gimlet-eyed nutcrackers and gaudy wreaths, the prickly holly bushes with their poisonous berries, the wantonly felled firs, the long wasteful chains of eco-unfriendly incandescent lights<\/a>. You can smell it on nog-breathed mall Santas, their faces glistening with sweat, their hours punishingly long<\/a>, the ink still wet on their International University of Santa Claus<\/a> diplomas. Santa is ripe for abduction\u2014Santa wants to be abducted. This is why pop culture is teeming with images in which he\u2019s out of commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The culture has indulged fantasies of the neutralized Saint Nick since the early twentieth century, if not earlier. In 1904, L. Frank Baum, of Wizard of Oz <\/em>fame, published \u201cA Kidnapped Santa Claus<\/a>,\u201d a short story whose depiction of Santa\u2019s apprehension\u2014by generic \u201cDaemons,\u201d in this case\u2014remains the captured Claus urtext:<\/p>\n

Suddenly a strange thing happened: a rope shot through the moonlight and a big noose that was in the end of it settled over the arms and body of Santa Claus and drew tight. Before he could resist or even cry out he was jerked from the seat of the sleigh and tumbled head foremost into a snowbank, while the reindeer rushed onward with the load of toys and carried it quickly out of sight and sound.<\/p>\n

Such a surprising experience confused old Santa for a moment, and when he had collected his senses he found that the wicked Daemons had pulled him from the snowdrift and bound him tightly with many coils of the stout rope. And then they carried the kidnapped Santa Claus away to their mountain, where they thrust the prisoner into a secret cave and chained him to the rocky wall so that he could not escape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s a not unsexy whiff of BDSM to Santa\u2019s capture here. One wonders what those chains and tight coils of stout rope did to the old man\u2019s libido\u2014or if, suddenly divested of the power he\u2019d known for centuries, he wasn\u2019t at least slightly aroused by the prospect of submission there against that rocky wall.<\/p>\n

Almost a century later, in 1993, Tim Burton would tease out the\u00a0bondage in Baum\u2019s story. Burton\u2019s\u00a0The Nightmare Before Christmas <\/em>sees\u00a0three pale-faced hellions capture Santa and stuff him into some kind of HVAC pipe. As his eyes roll back in his head, they unleash a fusillade of blows to his behind: one of them prods him with a pitchfork, another smacks him with a broom, and a third takes a plunger to his anus. All of this is mere prelude to Santa\u2019s mistreatment at the hands of Oogie Boogie, a burlap-sack bogeyman with a gambling problem who tosses dice at Claus\u2019s head, straps him down before a firing squad, and hangs him from a meat hook.<\/p>\n