See the real deep cut Taylor Swift lyrics to get tetchy about would’ve been Begin Again, the “you’re helping me get over a breakup by being everything to me he couldn’t” song off Red, the album about breaking up with Jake Gyllenhaal, where her examples include “talking about your family’s Christmas traditions”
You know if we’re lazily smearing things as anti-Semitic based on long-forgotten historical resonances can we do people who complain about the commercialization of Christmas?
This really started at the 19th Century dawn of the German Empire, contemporary with the growth of a thick commercial retail culture – “Christmas” as we know it is essentially an epiphenomenon of the department store – and much early criticism focused not on how it detracted from a religious cast the holiday had once had, but on how it was becoming a yearly ritual of riches flowing from Christian pockets into the tillers of Jewish retailers, manufacturers, and traders.
As time progressed and the Second Reich fell, this was the theme of infamous interwar antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer’s editorial cartoons at Christmastime every year.
(This was also, coincidentally, when and where the traditionally minor Jewish holiday of Hannukah was glowed up into a rival gift-giving celebration, so as to undercut Christmas as a draw for [then much more common, often with secular motives of cultural belonging] conversion.)
Michelle Pfeiffer in ’Batman Returns’ - Tim Burton - 1992 - USA
just like Burton’s first Batman was about NYC’s 80s “urban crisis”, violence on the streets, Batman Returns was about the turn to the ‘90s and the return of the city, as the never-left faction of unmarried women traded image as mousy to leather-clad dominatrix sexy, and meanwhile the Penguin, disgustingly waddlingly fat… with freakishly large nose… cut off from his heritage… laughably styling himself as heir to the old urban ruling class…
huh.
Like, I get it, penguins really do have beaks, waddle, and look like they’re wearing tuxedos, and have since before Moses came down from the mountain, but still this take on a character from pulp fiction set in German Expressionist ersatz-NYC is in fact all those things, plus he starts the movie being set in a basket to float down a river, uses a businessman named for the German actor who played lead in Nosferatu as a front, and after his attempt to win a PR war against the rightful old-money heir to the city fails when his vulgarity is revealed and the people reject him (and the sexy single woman figure rejects him as hideously unappealing) he strikes out at high society by stealing their children and killing their firstborn sons.
Like, holy shit you guys.
Oh also, this child-stealing, where he realizes his real beef is with the German industrialist who doesn’t respect him enough to invite him to social functions, comes in the context of ruining Christmas.
Michelle Pfeiffer in ’Batman Returns’ - Tim Burton - 1992 - USA
just like Burton’s first Batman was about NYC’s 80s “urban crisis”, violence on the streets, Batman Returns was about the turn to the ‘90s and the return of the city, as the never-left faction of unmarried women traded image as mousy to leather-clad dominatrix sexy, and meanwhile the Penguin, disgustingly waddlingly fat… with freakishly large nose… cut off from his heritage… laughably styling himself as heir to the old urban ruling class…
huh.
Like, I get it, penguins really do have beaks, waddle, and look like they’re wearing tuxedos, and have since before Moses came down from the mountain, but still this take on a character from pulp fiction set in German Expressionist ersatz-NYC is in fact all those things, plus he starts the movie being set in a basket to float down a river, uses a businessman named for the German actor who played lead in Nosferatu as a front, and after his attempt to win a PR war against the rightful old-money heir to the city fails when his vulgarity is revealed and the people reject him (and the sexy single woman figure rejects him as hideously unappealing) he strikes out at high society by stealing their children and killing their firstborn sons.
