Thursday, December 4, 2008
Every holiday season, my mom’s side of the family gathers ‘round the hearth for a lively viewing of the movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
The way we get excited about watching this film—the way we recite entire scenes and laugh at every joke even though we’ve heard them dozens of times—would make you think Christmas Vacation is some genius work of cinema. An Oscar-winning masterpiece that rocks viewers souls, if you will.
But as we know, the film is in fact not even close to genius. It’s a raucous romp through the holiday season with the dysfunctional Griswold family.
So why is this film so appealing to us?
Maybe it’s because we live in Kansas, and the movie’s trashiest, crudest character, Cousin Eddie, lives in Kansas.
It could also be because we’re from Topeka—codename: The Dirty Dirty—and for some reason the same domestic catastrophes depicted in the movie tend to pop up in our local newspaper’s headlines.
Or maybe it’s just because we’ve always watched this movie together and always loved it. It’s a tradition, and so watching it makes us feel connected to each other.
So is the appeal of many films we know as “cult films.” They’re not necessarily great because of what’s in the film, but because of their quirkiness, their exaggerations, their clichés and how all these things resonate with us in our lives.
We have the obvious cult classics of our generation such as Donnie Darko and Napoleon Dynamite. But rather than relishing the campiness of recent films, I’ve always found it more entertaining to dig into cult films of the past. Cult classics from the 1980s are my favorite, as I get to see Christian Slater before he outgrew his good looks (Pump Up the Volume), Winona Ryder before she robbed Saks Fifth Avenue (Heathers) and Johnny Depp before he was Disney’s demigod (Cry-Baby).
Check out Derek’s story on page 15, which explores just how certain films get elevated to cult status, as well as what makes us love these films.
No matter how dysfunctional my family is, we know we can never top the Griswolds and their misadventures in Christmas Vacation. Maybe that’s the real reason we watch it.
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