Christmas Carol Criticised for Cratchit's Interracial Marriage

Today's profanities are tomorrow's banalities. See Clark Gable's 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn,' or Petula Clark holding hands with Harry Belafonte on US TV.

And yesterday's banalities are today's profanities, as with Agatha Christie's Ten Little Persons of Colour, or the naked boys in Disney's Pollyanna.

Kantastic

That's very interesting, isn't it? What I take from this is that if we want good effective swear words, we shouldn't over-use them, and should be careful to indoctrinate children against using them.

One of the things they said was that swearing was really tame, and it would look funny to us in a film, these tough earthy men using words we don't think of as really swear words at all.

This is off-topic, but I just got fascinated by the fact that there is an Expletive Treadmill that moves in the opposite direction to the Euphemism Treadmill, so that words intended to shock become toothless, and words intended to be kind become insulting.

I have no intelligent conclusions to draw from this observation but am dropping it here in case someone else does!

Yes, read the novella many times. Seen lots of different adaptations. Loved this one, though I agree with earlier comments about the uneven pacing.

Disagree with you, but not to the point of a riled up argument over it, as you've said it's making you angry and I've got no appetite for that sort of discussion today.

There seem to be trends around adaptations of novels. There was a period in my parents generation when many novels were adapted really badly, made to serve the desires of the television producers to (they thought, anyway) appeal to the masses.

Then there was a switch to adaptations that remained closer to the text, with most changes being related to demands of the medium.

More recently there was an interesting sweet spot for just a moment, where the adaptations were a little freer but still seemed focused on exploring the author's text, and there were a few really good things that came out of that, very creative but not a totally different story.

In the last two years or so my sense is we are back to lifting characters and settings and just creating a new story. I think two things are behind this. The first is that there is so much content being produced now that producers can barely keep up, and it's very expensive content as well. If you make up your own story about a young girl in rural Canada at the beginning of the 20th century, you may or may not have an interested public. If you call it Anne of Green Gables, all of a sudden you have a title people already have a relationship with. And you cut down the work for the writers.
It also allows them to shoehorn in whatever contemporary viewpoints they want which seems to be required these days.

Have you read the novel?

I agree with your comments. There is a difference between treating the original text as 100% sacrosanct and re-writing the text to the point of unrecognition. The motivation for Scrooge is in the original text.

@FloralFestiveBunting

Have you read the novel? Almost all the adaptions use the perfectly clear motivations from the source material- he was never loved my his father and abandoned at boarding school at a young age and never allowed home in the holidays. His beloved sister then dies in child birth and his fiancé leaves him because he is so obsessed with money.

This makes me so angry. Scrooge is a fully realised character with quite deep motivations. Explore those! Don’t make up totally irrelevant shit.

Again, Scrooge is representative of many men of his age and class in Victorian London who were brought up in cold, unloving homes.

This adaptation was utter shite. At least Tom Hardy wrote his own story to portray the aspects of Regency London he wanted to focus on

Oh absolutely. If you want a spot of genuine Victorian low-life, corruption in high places with a nice bit of supernatural thrown in then Taboo beats this hand down.

I absolutely take your point about portraying him as some sort of anti- hypocrisy objectionist makes him more noble than he actually is

I didn't make myself clear. I warmed to Scrooge far more than the rather unpleasant Cratchit and the canting hypocrites cajoling him to have a merry Christmas. Which isn't really the intention.

Completely disagree. Very faithful adaptations to screen already exist. But as far as I can remember, every single one has some attempt to rationalise why Scrooge became the flint hearted miser we meet at the start of the story.

Because actually, everyone has a motivation, and stories which simply show black hearted, one dimensional villains are usually shit.

@EveryKingdomOfRain

But that’s kind of my point. The whole role of Scrooge in the novel is to represent that aspect of Victorian society that viewed the rest of humanity as a means to an end (profit). Scrooge is heartless, cold and antisocial and utterly obsessed with his own wealth. He passes up the chance for love because his investments are more important to him.

It’s not the hypocrisy that Scrooge objects to, it’s the expense and contact with other people.

Portraying him as some sort of anti- hypocrisy objectionist makes him more noble than he actually is. He is supposed to be an irredeemable character who is redeemed.

This adaptation was utter shite. At least Tom Hardy wrote his own story to portray the aspects of Regency London he wanted to focus on.

In every production of Oliver on Broadway, Fagin is conspicuously not Jewish.

BelleSausage

My biggest issue with it wasn’t the inter racial marriage. It was the swearing, Tiny Tim’s letter from America, Scrooge’s moralising (he is supposed to be amoral) and Crachitt’s weirdly aggressive attitude*

I quite enjoyed Scrooge's moralising. I don't like Christmas. I don't like the enforced jollity and the over spending on useless tat. He had a point about why is this day so special when for the other 364 days people are beasts?

Cratchit's attitude to and behaviour towards Scrooge was odd- unless Cratchit knew that as an employee he was valued (good and cheap) so was unlikely to be sacked for rudeness. In which case that makes Cratchit a bit unpleasant himself- he's trading the right to be insubordinate for poor wages - why not get another job? Cratchit didn't know the backstory with Mrs Cratchit.

It wasn’t Dickens. It was something else much more similar to Peaky Blinders. The language cadences were all wrong and odd, odd, odd

I enjoyed it more when I decided it wasn't Dickens. Although the pacing was rubbish- the first 2 episodes werefar too slow and the last rushed.

AutumnRose1

Everymaybe he was brilliant and the best when they were casting

From the trailers he is recycling his usual gormless, aren't I loveable persona.

Maybe he has a thing like like Vivien Leigh virtually becoming Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche DuBois. Guess we’ll find out

Those are not valid comparisons. David Copperfield is virtually an autobiography. Charles Dickens was not Asian.

people treating Dickens' work like it's religious canon

Yes, all well and good unless it changes the whole point of the story. The characterisation of Scrooge was entirely and completely wrong. I don’t mind a bit of adaption- I bloody love a Muppet Christmas Carol. But the entire point of the story is that he is a miser who values money above human life and dignity. Giving him OCD as an excuse for his sins completely wiped out the point Dickens is making about Victorian social ills.

Tbh, I loved the whole production, swears and all, and I've got no time at all for people treating Dickens' work like it's religious canon and the only worthy thing is to slavishly stick to the words on the page, or at least make sure it has a patina of sentimental 50's nostalgia for Victoriana.

Same here. I don't think they were making any comment on the racial make up of Victorian London, accurate or otherwise. I just thought they did soi disant colour blind casting. Fine by me. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, including excellent performances by the cast, the swears, the cheeky fourth wall breaking at the end, and, well, just about everything about it (except the odd pacing - slow at the start, rushed at the end).

My biggest issue with it wasn’t the inter racial marriage. It was the swearing, Tiny Tim’s letter from America, Scrooge’s moralising (he is supposed to be amoral) and Crachitt’s weirdly aggressive attitude.

It wasn’t Dickens. It was something else much more similar to Peaky Blinders. The language cadences were all wrong and odd, odd, odd.

@IlsSortLaPlupartAuNuitMostly It sort of is when people are practically rewriting history to suit modern political equality goals. Whilst I'm interested in undertold stories, you can't simply put BAME actors everywhere & anywhere in historical stories and expect people to be blind to the historical context.

I don't have a problem with "Buggar" being used by Mrs Cratchit. My Grandmother didn't really swear - but would call people Buggars - I think it was seen as rude but not really swearing. And it was years and years before I learnt what the word "meant", it was used more in the meaning "a nasty/annoying person".

Oh I should add

I think Elementary is one of the best TV shows we’ve had for years, and Watson being a woman was a big part of that.

Every maybe he was brilliant and the best when they were casting.

Maybe he has a thing like like Vivien Leigh virtually becoming Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche DuBois. Guess we’ll find out.

I think it’s complicated with classics. I’m glad that Maxine Peake and Cush Jumbo get to be Hamlet. Or indeed that Ben Kingsley got to play Gandhi.

It's when these things are presented as huffy outrage at 'being politically correct' and dismissing it as tick box equality quotas or whatever and getting angry about it. Once you've learned that such relationships existed, moving on is the only response that seems sensible and not rather uncomfortably racist.

Though... something like this could be plausible, and people might also question the thinking that went into the casting, because they have been sensitised to racialised casting. It can seem rather odd sometimes, weirdly deliberate, in some productions. There was that production of Troy recently that struck me that way. It seemed intended to be a sort of colour-blind casting which I could see for something so mythological, (though I did wonder what the Greeks thought of it.) And yet I wondered, given the demographics of the UK, if it wasn't actually quite improbable that a colour-blind casting would have looked like that. I don't actually know that, I didn't crunch the numbers or anything, and maybe the acting profession has a different ethnic demographic profile than the population as a whole, but it struck me more than once.

Is that a bad thing, I don't know, I'd have to know what they were trying to do. But I think many people see it in a similar way to things like affirmative action, they distrust it implicitly. And when people notice things like this, or have cause to think that it is going on sometimes, it tends to affect how they look at instances that aren't problematic as well.

EveryI don’t see Dev Patel as a one trick pony

Each to their own. I've found him irritating and gormless in everything he's in Out of all the actors who could have been cast as Copperfield (Dickens) why pick him?

Colour blind casting is fine for Mrs Cratchit- no problem there but it's ridiculous virtue signalling in this case.

So from a quick google,slavery was abolished in most of the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. This would leave numbers of people who were former slaves, and their descendants, presumably. There might also be some further immigration in ports like London. It is plausible that there might be some interracial marriages, surely.

I hate this assumption that all black people were slaves and only got to Europe via slave boats. There has been a vibrant and born free black community in London since Elizabethan times, or 15th C.

Every I don’t see Dev Patel as a one trick pony

A colleague said that to me about Benedict Cumberbatch and I didn’t agree with that either. Oh well.

So from a quick google,slavery was abolished in most of the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. This would leave numbers of people who were former slaves, and their descendants, presumably. There might also be some further immigration in ports like London. It is plausible that there might be some interracial marriages, surely.