As a young adolescent in early 1980s Canada, I often felt as though my country had its collective nose pressed up against a window display of American culture. We watched and sometimes sniggered, in the superior but self-loathing manner of the cool posers who secretly worried that the exuberant people at the party were having much more fun, as our neighbors south of the border celebrated themselves, very loudly. We were bemused by their solipsism (did they really believe they had invented democracy? And weren’t they embarrassed to claim they lived in the best country in the world when they had to pay to see a doctor?) even as we inhaled American culture. An avid consumer of television dramas and sitcoms — which I watched at my grandmother’s apartment because my mother, who called it the boob tube, refused to subscribe to cablevision — I was fascinated by the Thanksgiving specials. I knew the traditional holiday menu by heart and was instinctively familiar with the well-worn tropes of family drama played out at a dinner table laden with turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and gravy. Why, I asked my mother, was this holiday so important to Americans?
My mother applied both her tendency to speak in non sequiturs and her Jewish-Canadian lens in formulating her response to my question: American Jews, she explained, love Thanksgiving because it is both ecumenical and uniquely American. In other words, the holiday gave them the opportunity to express a Jewish and American identity, with the emphasis on American. Thanksgiving makes Americans feel, as Kamala Harris recently put it, that the things they have in common are stronger than those that separate them. It’s about the melting pot. In the 1980s, Canada was in the midst of its experiment with multiculturalism, which aspired to honor diversity and postnationalism but ended up making most of us feel like hyphenated Canadians while the real Canadians, the ones who ran the country, had French and Anglo names. I was a Canadian Jew who attended school with Chinese Canadians, Indian Canadians and also people with surnames like Roberts and McTavish.
I thought of that conversation with my mother while watching “Avalon,” Barry Levinson’s 1990 autobiographical film that describes his childhood in Baltimore during the 1940s and 1950s. The opening scene is a sprawling family celebration of Thanksgiving that takes place in 1947. Sam, 8-year-old Michael’s grandfather, leans back in an easy chair, his grandchildren crowded around, sitting on his lap and holding onto his legs, listening avidly as he narrates, in a heavy Yiddish accent, his story of coming to America in 1914, reminding them that he arrived in Baltimore on the Fourth of July. “We’ve all heard the story before,” admonishes his wife, as she and the other women bustle around, setting the table and preparing the food. “I’m telling them how I came to America,” answers Sam. Then he, his four brothers, their wives, children and grandchildren, crowd around an enormous makeshift table in a narrow row house as Michael takes his place with his cousins at the children’s table, everyone quarreling genially and telling the same bad jokes they tell every year. They reminisce, they teach their children about the importance of family, they eat and they laugh.
But later Thanksgivings show the dark side of prosperity and assimilation.
Michael’s father Jules and his first cousin Kevin become partners in a successful business, earning enough to move their families to the suburbs. At the next Thanksgiving, the extended family gathers at the spacious home of Sam’s newly prosperous son, telling the same jokes and the same stories as always. But there is an undercurrent of change. The grandfather’s older brother Gabriel, whose son hasn’t yet made enough money to move them out of the row houses and into the suburbs, arrives very late and is devastated to discover that the family is already eating. With a look of hurt astonishment, he shouts, in his heavy Yiddish accent: “You started without me? You cut the turkey without me?!” He turns to his wife and announces: “We’re leaving!” Sam and Gabriel stand on the holiday-silent suburban street and fling accusations at one another, saying things that cannot be unsaid. The rift never heals; it marks the gradual fraying of the bonds that once held together the warmly supportive immigrant family.
By the movie’s end, which takes place in the early 1970s, the grandfather is a half-demented elderly widower living in a nursing home, the television in his room tuned to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Michael brings his young son to visit and tells his grandfather that he has named him Sam. “It’s forbidden to name children after the living,” says the grandfather, remembering an old Ashkenazi Jewish custom. Michael smiles sadly and says, “I know.” The tightly knit, family-oriented immigrant world of Sam the grandfather is dead. Michael, the assimilated young American grandson, is well-dressed, self-confident and drives away from the nursing home in a stylish car, but he can barely define his Jewish identity. He is American, he is prosperous and he has a family of his own, but he has lost his connection to the old world and the sprawling, warm immigrant tribe that nurtured him in childhood has dispersed.
The sad nostalgia of Levinson’s 1990 film contrasts sharply with the optimism of the classic 1947 Hollywood movie, “Miracle on 34th Street.” It’s usually billed as a Christmas classic, since the character who drives the plot is a man who may or may not be Santa Claus, but it begins on Thanksgiving Day. The protagonists — a preternaturally wise little girl named Susan Walker and her single mother, Doris, who works for Macy’s and manages the department store’s famous parade — live in a Manhattan apartment. The man who looks like and calls himself Kris Kringle enters their life by chance, when he presents himself to Doris just as she learns that the man she had hired to play Santa Claus is too drunk to participate in the parade.
Kris Kringle becomes a momentous force for good. He convinces Susan, whom Dorothy sends to a progressive school where childish fairy tales are eschewed, that the ideas Santa Claus represents are more important than actually believing in his existence. He becomes a Macy’s department store Santa who earns the appreciation of senior management by showing them that honesty earns customer loyalty. And in a nod to the shadow of the recently ended World War II, he pulls onto his lap a little Dutch girl who was orphaned during the conflict and addresses her in her native language.
America emerged from that war as the most powerful country in the world. It was rich, triumphant and filled with optimism. It had also adopted a certain set of values that were rigorously promoted by — perhaps even partly created by — Hollywood. In “Miracle On 34th Street,” little Susan dreams of leaving the rather nice Manhattan apartment that she shares with her mother, where she has kind neighbors and easy access to a wider community, for a house in the suburbs with a swing in the garden. This was during the period when the United States was paving its vast highway system and building the suburbs that came to symbolize its postwar growth. The film’s happy ending occurs when Kris Kringle “gives” Susan the house she dreams of as a Christmas present.
But these suburbs that Hollywood and local governments convinced Americans were their manifest destiny become, in later films, the backdrop to the loneliness, alienation and pathological solipsism that characterized the “me generation” of the 1970s and the last quarter of the 20th century. Two films released in 1997 have Thanksgiving as the plot point against which suburban family angst plays out — “The Ice Storm” and “Home for the Holidays.”
Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm,” set in 1973 New Canaan, is an immersive portrayal of two families that are completely adrift in a world of financial prosperity and emotional poverty. The day before Thanksgiving, we see 16-year-old Paul Hood traveling home by train from his posh New England boarding school to celebrate the holiday with his family. His father Ben commutes by train to his job as a financial adviser in Manhattan, alongside dozens of men wearing identical beige trench coats. Ben is having an emotionless affair with the neighbor’s wife and drinking significant quantities of alcohol to get through evenings with his estranged wife Elena, who is so desperate for a bit of excitement that she shoplifts lipsticks from a local pharmacy on a whim. Their 14-year-old, intellectually precocious daughter Wendy alternates between scoffing at Richard Nixon’s televised lies and experimenting sexually with Mikey, the neighbor’s awkward, lonely son. At the Thanksgiving dinner table, Wendy responds to her father’s request that she say grace before the festive meal by embarking on a tirade about American inequality and the country’s history of massacring Indigenous people.
On the night of the ice storm, an actual 1973 event, all four parents have left their children alone in their beautiful, silent houses to attend what turns out to be a “key party.” This was a thing in the early 1970s, alongside fondue dinners and consciousness-raising EST (Erhard Seminars Training) gatherings. But rather than learning self-awareness, which was the purported goal of EST, or dipping bread in communal pots of molten cheese, key parties were for what they used to call swingers. At the end of the night, guests blindly fished in a bowl, plucked out a set of keys and went home to spend the night with the person to whom they belonged. That is also the night that Mikey, a science geek, goes out to see the ice storm and is killed by an electric cable, weighted by ice, that falls on the metal roadside barrier he is sitting on. In the film’s first expression of authentic emotion — or any emotion, really — Mikey’s father Jim collapses in keening grief when he holds his dead son’s body. With his primordial sobs he holds up a mirror to the emptiness of suburban life, where spouses are alienated from one another, sex between lovers is a mechanical physical act and parents are seemingly incapable of showing affection to their children.
A lack of affection is not the issue in “Home for the Holidays,” directed by Jodie Foster. The day after she loses her job as an art restorer at a Chicago museum, single mother Claudia Larson flies home to celebrate Thanksgiving at her parents’ home in suburban Baltimore, where she is promptly smothered in the love and affection of her chain-smoking mother, who murmurs during the drive from the airport that her gray roots are showing, and her morbidly obese father, who cannot quite accept that his son is gay. In her frilly, violet-painted childhood bedroom, Claudia wonders what she is doing there and who she is. The ensemble of characters includes the aforementioned half-closeted gay son, a resentful upwardly mobile sister, and an aunt who wears a necklace made of Fruit Loops cereal and brings a homemade key lime pie decorated with M&M candies.
At this point in the evolution of postwar Hollywood films with Thanksgiving plot lines, bringing the family together for the holiday has become a device for teasing out dysfunctional relationships and social alienation. There are no big statements about American values, as in “Miracle on 34th Street,” or about the bittersweet trajectory of immigration and assimilation that is shown in “Avalon.” Instead we see people who are deeply neurotic, raucous, materialistic — and seemingly uninterested in the holiday’s provenance or meaning, except as an obligatory occasion to gather and to eat. The film offers no grand theories about American culture, no thought-provoking resolution or even predictions for the future, beyond more painful family gatherings between people who are not even sure what binds them. As Claudia says to her estranged, resentful sister: “We don’t have to like each other, Jo. We’re family.”
Tucked between postwar optimism, 1970s angst and 1990s end-of-history ennui, two films with key Thanksgiving scenes that were released in 1986 illustrate the contrasts and transitional nature of the Reagan era. Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” takes place in the director’s ineffably attractive version of Manhattan, populated by cultured, middle-class, ostentatiously neurotic white people. In Allen’s version of liberal 1980s New York City, a multigenerational family of writers, artists and actors celebrates Thanksgiving in the sprawling Upper West Side apartment of Hannah and Michael, her financier husband. The only Black person to appear in the movie is the maid, wearing a frilly cap and matching apron, who silently serves the festive meal. The plot is punctuated by three Thanksgiving dinners. In the first, Michael lusts after Hannah’s sister Lee, with whom he soon initiates an affair; in the second, Lee angrily breaks off their affair; and in the third, Lee is happily married to her college professor while Michael has realized that he is, in fact, deeply in love with Hannah.
Upon rewatching the film for the first time in at least 20 years, in the context of the sordid revelations about Woody Allen and in the post-Me Too world, the female characters in “Hannah and Her Sisters” seem jarringly dependent and needy while the male characters say and do strikingly amoral things. All the women are openly desperate for male affection and acquiescent to male dominance. Lee’s much older artist boyfriend positions himself as her teacher, her Pygmalion. Holly, Hannah’s other sister, openly competes with her closest friend for the attention of an architect who shamelessly dates both women, whom he met at the same event. Woody Allen’s character, the producer of a television comedy, argues with the network’s standards and practices representative who wants to cut a certain scene from an upcoming episode because it is about child molestation, which the network representative says “is a touchy subject with the affiliates.” Mickey answers: “Read the papers! Half the country is doing it!”
The neurotic, distorted attitude toward sex and relationships in Woody Allen’s films is remarkably absent from “She’s Gotta Have It,” Spike Lee’s debut feature film. Made on a tiny budget and filmed in black and white, it takes place in Brooklyn’s then all-Black Bed-Stuy neighborhood, with an all-Black cast. Protagonist Lola Darling is an attractive, self-confident graphic artist who lives alone in a spacious loft apartment. Warm and comfortable with her sexuality, she says at the outset of the film, addressing the camera directly, that she is not a one-man woman. She is openly dating three different men — slick, wealthy, vain Greer Childs, loudmouthed Mars Blackmon and polite, loving Jamie Overstreet. The key scene in the movie is a Thanksgiving dinner in her loft, to which she invites all three men because, she says, they were going to meet at some point and she wanted to be open with them. (Notably, only polite Jamie offers to do the dishes.) In celebrating her personal freedom and her sexuality, the character of Nola offers a revolutionary depiction of womanhood in American movies. This is why Lee’s choice of making the key scene a Thanksgiving meal, the ultimate symbol of American identity, is so fascinating.
Americans, I have noticed, take Thanksgiving seriously even when they are living abroad. I have eaten turkey and cranberry sauce prepared by Americans in Tokyo, New Delhi and Bangkok. I moved to Jerusalem for university in the mid-1980s; imported food was difficult to find and very expensive in that time and place. There I met Jewish students from the States who would go to extreme lengths to source the ingredients for the traditional meal. They found the one grocery store in a distant town that stocked Ocean Spray cranberry sauce and the one farmer who raised turkeys, discovering at last that the ovens in their tiny kitchens were too small to contain the bird. In many cases, these were Americans who had come to Israel searching for their Jewish identity, only to realize that they were, as my mother had explained, Jewish Americans.
Watching these films in chronological order is something of an elegiac experience. The evolving symbolism of Thanksgiving in each successive film charts the rapid rise and decline of American culture during the second half of the 20th century, from the optimism and aspirational generosity of the immediate postwar period to the metaphysical void and alienation of the 1990s. Nola Darling, with her warm sexuality and gentle self-assurance, makes “She’s Gotta Have It” an uplifting deviation from the portrayal of late 20th-century America’s downward slide. Perhaps, too, the very act of investing so much thought and creativity in producing films about alienation and narcissism is evidence of a still-vibrant culture.
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