A Very Thelma Christmas Special, with Joan Collins
Details
Our Thelma Lavine series ended last week with her final episode “… And In Review.”
I wanted to start our next exciting series on Otherness straight away, but our next event falls on Dec 25. Normally, we would cancel a Meetup falling on Christmas. Who wants to spend hours editing videos and writing on-screen annotations for a micro audience? But my mom intervened and said, “Why not do something that light and casual. Can’t you people ever relax?”
Normally we do light and profound—courtesy of some member of the BBC2 Four (Bronowski, Magee, Clark, Burke) or of Thelma, their newly inducted American sister. But light and casual? What does that even mean?
Then it hit me—we could do something that appears light and casual but which is actually serious and profound, and feels dark and disturbing. The alternative to a philosophy lecture doesn’t have to be unstructured chit-chat time. Surely there’s a third way …
Phase I: The Sexy Joan Collins Fleur du Mal Christmas Special (10 mins)
I originally called the event “A Very Thelma Christmas Special, with Joan Collins” because I know what boys like. They do like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—true. But they would like a Joan Collins fleur du mal Christmas story even more.
Oh no—I’ve said too much. 66% of you already know what I’m referring to; I’ve ruined the surprise. I’m sorry, I had to say something in this description. But there are others who don’t know and will be highly entertained by what they see. Please don’t ruin the surprise for them in the comment section.
Everyone in every country of the world, even in benighted lands such as Saudi Arabia and North Korea, loves and appreciates Dicken’s A Christmas Carol of 1843. It’s surely one of the planet’s greatest hits.
However, the story is so thoroughly well-known and so often performed that, for humans over 14, it has lost its morally transformative and therapeutic power. We post-teen “adults” are story-weary and can only be stimulated by the odd-ball and perverse. We’re so calloused and numb that we need a sexy-dark anti-version of A Christmas Carol in order to provoke us into moral reflection and reform.
We weary ones like it hot. For more than fifty years now, it’s been clear that numbed cynics respond best when morality tales arrive either sexy, scary, or—ideally—both. But a sexy-scary A Christmas Carol? Does such a thing even exist? And if it did, could it be good enough to Make Dickens Dangerous Again?
Mom says “Yes!” and “But wait, there’s more”—because sexy Joan is just the tip o’ the holiday iceberg. Besides the Joan Collins Fleur du Mal Christmas Special we also have …
Phase II: The Saddest Christ-Mass Story Ever (17 mins)
This is serious. We will identify with the saddest character, in the saddest story, played by England’s saddest actor. This is really serious, actually, and kind of painful. But pain is no stranger to Christ on the Cross, the reason for the season. So maybe opening our heart chakra on Christmas is a good idea.
This mini-story answers this question: What do you do when an arrogant, narcissistic sociopath provokes the kindest and most loving person in the world to suicide?
Which story am I talking about? I’ll give you a hint: The protagonist in this story is so wonderful that he was immortalized in sculpture 10 years ago by America’s greatest living sculptor.
Actually, this story is so sad and so well-acted that it might be better to skip it. But if we happen to be super miserable when the time comes, watching it might actually help us by pushing us out the other side. We can take a vote when the time comes. Yes, it’s that sad.
Phase III: A Christmas Philosophy of Mind (11 mins)
What ontological commitments does the Christmas story have with respect to consciousness and the mind–body problem?
Our next clip is one of the strangest—and cleanest—cinematic thought experiments ever smuggled into a horror anthology. A neurologist, impatient with the limits of organic life, devises a way to transfer consciousness into an artificial body: stronger, more durable, immune to pain and decay. The promise is Cartesian liberation. The result is … well, imagine if Christmas and Crucifixion occurred on the same day.
This segment—and the Asylum frame story along with it—was written by Robert Bloch, disciple and actual student of the immortal H. P. Lovecraft, and the author of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Bloch learned early that the most disturbing stories are not about monsters entering the world, but about the world ceasing to cooperate with our self-conceptions. In Lovecraft’s terms, humanity is a temporary local arrangement—a lucky island—inside something vastly indifferent and only intermittently intelligible. Our clip stages that lesson at the level of personal identity.
Fun fact: John Carpenter lifted the name “Sam Loomis” directly from Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1960). In Halloween (1978), Loomis is played by Donald Pleasence, and is the hero guarding Jamie Lee Curtis—the real-life daughter of Psycho’s Marion Crane actress, Janet Leigh. And, as it happens, Pleasence will appear again later this evening in our final—and considerably more refreshing—episode …
Phase IV: Erotic Christian Love (24 mins)
Remember the brief cultural stir when Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw both publicly affirmed KISS frontman Paul Stanley as a formative erotic ideal? Well, the next episode delivers a unisexual avatar of devotion even more sensational than the Star Child!
This will be a clip that you’ll never forget, and it will haunt you (in a good way) for the rest of your life. It stars the great Donald Pleasence and his stunning daughter Angela Pleasence in her most famous and erotically iconic film role. The story begins with gratitude, obligation, and generosity—Christian virtues in their most ordinary register—and then slowly reveals what those virtues may cost when taken seriously.
Angela Pleasence’s performance is the axis on which the episode turns. It is seductive without being theatrical, intimate without being reassuring. The attraction she exerts is beyond beyond. She offers herself as something to be believed in, followed, and ultimately submitted to. Marlon Brando famously described the effect of her performance as inducing (in him) “erotic ecstasy of the religious kind.”
When Chuck Klosterman wrote about “every man's inherent obsession with attractive, psychologically damaged women,” he focused mainly on Kim Novak’s character in Vertigo (1958). That was before the CSO of Samsung showed him this Amicus chapter! Angela Pleasence blows Kim Novak away. The attractor inside Angela seems like pathology at first, but then you realize it’s really her absolute availability—a form of love that asks, finally, for everything. As a Christmas story, it is perfect: generosity, incarnation, and sacrifice, stripped of comfort and returned to their disturbing core.
Special Presentation: Ode to the Heideggerian Dickens (20 mins)
Finally, our own co-host David Sternman will close the evening with a short meditation on A Christmas Carol read through Heidegger. Expect reflections on thrownness, temporality, and the sudden disclosure of a life as already over. Scrooge’s redemption will be treated less as moral improvement than as a …
Good grief! I’m not going to ruin any more surprises.
So join us on Christmas. The Babadook will be with us. Bring him wine, good cheer, and your shadow. And gang way by for a Christmas miracle of deep comfort and joy, via the Underdark.
METHOD
Please don't watch anything before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion.
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.