After the hors d’ouevres were put in the fridge and the crumpled wrapping paper bagged and dragged to the garbage can in the alley, and after my daughter, who had celebrated Christmas while also doing a batch of laundry, had departed, my son with her, and after my wife had gone to bed, I turned on the TV to watch a holiday special on Netflix, A Very Murray Christmas. The show is probably now about five years old and I watch it every Christmas Eve after everyone has gone and house is mostly empty and silent. Outside, the curb is uncustomarily lined with the cars of adult children returned to this neighborhood to spend the night with their aging parents and, sometimes, someone walks by the sidewalk triggering a chorus of barks from dogs chained outside to keep them from interfering with the gifts and the plates of sugar cookies and sliced Summer sausage. It’s warm for this time of year and Venus shines brightly in the southwestern sky, a chill wavering light like the lone headlight of a celestial motorcycle approaching over a dark lane in the sky. My old dog drowses on the couch, wheezing a little, stuffed up with table scraps and, so, scarcely reacting to the hounds baying in backyards and behind fences in the alleyways. There’s no jingle of bells, no patter of reindeer feet on the roof-top shingles, and the lawns are bare and shadowy – all the snow that fell a week ago has melted and an unnatural humid warmth blankets the streets and intersections. In the morning, there will be fog.
To be honest, A Very Murray Christmas isn’t very good. But that doesn’t matter to me. I’m not watching the show because it’s good, but because it is familiar and has a meaning to me beyond its content, although it would be hard for me to say what that meaning is. No one that I know, let alone anyone in my family, thinks that the show is worth watching and, so, I am always alone when I search for the program on the Netflix backlist, using the TV-remote to punch in the letters of the title. One day, I suppose the show won’t be broadcast at all and I won’t be able to find it in the Cable catalogue, but, most probably, I won’t be searching since the dead don’t watch TV. The show will be forgotten as will I.
A Very Murray Christmas is captioned as “A Netflix Holiday Special.” It begins with a shot of Bill Murray, viewed from behind, gazing out of the window of his suite at the Carlyle Hotel. He’s wearing reindeer antlers and seems more than a little ridiculous. We can see some distant skyscrapers and Central Park, a ruffled carpet of brown trees in the falling snow. Murray turns to the camera and we see that he is very sad, his face sagging into a frown. The ever-ebullient Paul Schafer is with him in the hotel room and tickling the ivories of a grand piano that happens to be present and, outside, fluffy hirsute-looking flakes of snow are falling. Murray sings an old Dean Martin song, “The Christmas Blues” – the special is, after all, mostly a musical revue. Two TV producers, both of them aggressive women, appear and they establish the show’s narrative premise. Murray is supposed to present a live Christmas show featuring George Clooney and Miley Cyrus, but the blizzard has made it impossible for the stars to reach Manhattan where the program will be shot in the Carlyle’s Bemelman’s Bar. Murray protests that the show can’t go on with just one performer (or two counting Paul Schafer at the piano). But the women, who represent the network insist, and, since the elevators aren’t working, everyone troops down the stairwell to street level, singing a holiday song, “Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow!” At Bemelman’s Bar, the camera crew is assembled but there’s no talent except for Murray and no audience. He begins to weep as the show goes live. Fleeing the stage in despair, Murray encounters Chris Rock on the sidewalk outside the Carlyle. He drags Rock on-stage and they sing a strange, stilted duet version of “Do you hear what I hear?” The power goes out, Rock escapes into the blizzard, and the show is canceled without liability to Murray on the basis of Force Majeure. (Much of the show’s first fifteen minutes involves references to matters of contract law compelling Murray to perform notwithstanding his obvious despair.) The producers vanish and Murray is left with the staff at the Carlyle in kitchen and bar stranded by the storm.
The refrigerators have failed and so all the gourmet food on offer at the hotel restaurant is doomed. This causes Murray to recruit the cooks and other hotel workers for a feast in the bar. This crisis engenders the show’s best line: taking charge Murray orders: “Men, you take the meats. Women, carry the lobsters and vegetables.” A couple, their wedding wrecked by the blizzard quarrels and the bride sits weeping in the hallway. Murray encourages the young couple (Rashida Jones and Jason Schwartzman) to reconcile. The characters perform a number of impromptu Christmas songs, including “Baby, it’s cold outside,” and a rock tune “Alone for Christmas”. Maya Rudolph, playing a lonely and alcoholic woman, (she’s drinking a martini called a “Soiled Kimono”) belts out some more Christmas blues. Then, the whole ensemble led by the bartender, played by David Johansen in a resplendent red jacket sing the Pogues “Fairytale of New York.” Murray is pouring shots of tequila and Slovenian brandy and, passes out, falling heavily to the floor. He revives on a musical soundstage decorated with flocked white trees and acres of white floor and cream-colored flats. A sleigh appears on-stage with Miley Cyrus and George Clooney on board. Several more holiday songs are performed as glitzy production numbers, complete with dancers with long bare legs and band-members wailing on their horns while wearing Santa hats. Miley Cyrus sings “Silent Night” and, not once, but twice, she lunges into the air as Bill Murray catches her so that she stretches out laterally across his mid-section. (The second lift is botched somehow, Clooney is supposed to hold half her weight, but the stunt goes wrong and Murray again holds her, staggering a little with her weight while George Clooney grips her ankles.) The next shot shows Murray awaking on the couch of his hotel suite. Paul Schafer plays a Christmas medley on the piano, Murray’s factotum, Dmitri, serves breakfast, and, then, we see Bill Murray in close-up gazing pensively down at the snow in Central Park as he wishes everyone a Merry Christmas.
The whole thing is supposed to be upscale, urbane and suave and so, I suppose, it is. The show turns on the contrast between the cold, snowy blizzard outside – even the subways are shut-down – and the warm, dimly lit interiors of the hotel’s hallways and bar. These places are cozy and full of good company and everyone drinks to excess and breaks into song spontaneously. A version of “Baby, it’s cold outside” performed by Jenny Lewis, a very appealing singer, and Murray is wonderful, seeming just to occur out of random bits of dialogue and the scenes of the cast performing “The Fairytale of New York” are moving and effective. Most of the songs are well-staged and the show is beautifully directed by Sofia Coppola – she uses soft focus with images that drift and blur into one another, strings of light against the snowy darkness. There’s a lot of content in the hour-long program, not all of it successful – for instance, Michael Cera appears early in the film as an aggressive and obnoxious LA agent (what’s he doing here?) and the subplot involving the unhappy couple who fall in love again and renew their vows verges on the maudlin, although sentiment of this kind, I think, is expected in this sort of show. The actors and singers seem to be enjoying themselves. George Clooney, of course, is charming, particularly in a production number in the dream sequence, ducking behind a Christmas Tree with his enormous eyes showing white under his pupils as he intones in a deep baritone “Santa Claus needs some lovin’.” People are constantly making martinis – David Johansen shakes his martini mixer as a rattle during the rock song in the Bar. Clooney mixes martinis with Bill Murray in the glaring white Christmas set, remarking that it’s “very nice for a soundstage in Queens.” No one seems to take the production too seriously and everyone has a good time – there’s an improvised feel about the show, although, no doubt, this is very carefully contrived. A Very Murray Christmas is split between cynical and saccharine – this is exemplified in the last shot after the closing credits: Maya Rudolph in her white mink stole is sipping her martini when someone off-screen salutes her: “Merry Christmas, young lady!” to which she replies “Young lady, my ass!” But the program has real emotional power and lingers in the imagination primarily because of its opening and closing shots: Bill Murray disconsolately wearing felt reindeer antlers as he gloomily watches the snow fill up Central Park and, finally, the close-up of his drooping face and eyes focused on either the remote past or the distant future in the film’s final image. Murray’s face looks lived-in and he knows something about life and the past and, even, perhaps the final few years that he has remaining to him – like the holiday, he is suffused with regret and prophecy. Somehow, he seems to embody the world-weariness that we feel on Christmas, the battle between light and dark in which the two qualities melt into one another so that neither is overcome and each seem to prevail, the sense of the past as a gallery of aching absences and, at last, a faint promise that can only be whispered.
I rose on Christmas morning and went downstairs, nowhere to go because everything was closed. Again, I turned on the TV and found a performance of Bach’s “Wachet auf” cantata on You-Tube. In the film, the Cantata is performed in a Baroque church somewhere in the Netherlands, part of an ambitious effort to record and document on video all of Bach’s works. The singers perform with passion and the musicians play period instruments, a strange spear-shaped oboe and a trombone with a crooked slide that you pull back up toward your ear to change the pitch of its notes. Many years ago, I studied Cantata 140 in a class on Baroque and Mannerist art. I audited the class, or, more accurately, didn’t even audit, but simply attended all the lectures – it was a well-subscribed class, maybe 60 students, and no one paid any attention to me. I wrote papers for the class and turned them in under a pseudonym, C. Blossom (“Chokecherry Blossom”) although the teacher thought that the first name must have been “Charles” because on occasion, in an attempt to tease me out into the open, he would direct a question to the lecture hall – “What do you think about that, Mr. Blossom?” or “How does that strike you, Charley?” I wrote a lengthy term paper for the class, but, of course, I wasn’t signed-up for anything and so I don’t know what the purpose for that exercise was. Much of my past remains a mystery to me. I have always been more than half-crazy.
But, in any event, I learned about Bach’s Cantata 140 in that class and have always been grateful for the teacher’s lectures on that musical composition. And, of course, I’ve always known that the cantata is suffused with mystical-erotic imagery, climaxing, if that is the word, with the duet between Jesus (sung by a baritone voice) and the soprano singing the part of the Soul. Both of the participants in the duet rapturously sing about “coming” and Jesus calls himself the Soul’s Teil – that is, “portion”, but more colloquially, “member” or penis. (There’s a song by Rammstein that makes this idiomatic use of Teil thematic – the tune recounts the true story of a homosexual cannibal who with the full consent of his partner cut off his lover’s penis and, frying it with onions, ate the thing as his Teil, that is, meal portion but, also, “member” or “part”.) Jesus’ Teil is opposed to the Brennendes Oel – that is, the “burning oil” -- in the lamps borne by the Daughters of Jerusalem. The tropes here are pretty obvious, but I had never heard them so clearly declaimed as on this Christmas morning. (Subtitles translated the German and, with obvious anxiety as to the heavily sexualized imagery, additional words were supplied in the titles to assure the viewer that the text isn’t as obscene as it is; as is the case with most efforts of this sort, the titles merely emphasized the indecency of the words, the repeated outcries: “I’m coming” and “you’re coming” and the slithery, syrupy warmth of the “burning oil.”
Wachet Auf, the popular title to Cantata 140, is usually translated as “Sleepers Awake” – the admonition of the watchman on the city walls to the drowsy “daughters of Jerusalem,” that is, the bridesmaids attending upon the wedding of the bridegroom, Jesus, who is coming (“Er kommt” is declaimed) and the Soul who awaits her lover, tingling with all-consuming desire. The passion here consummated is too much for conventional language – the singers ecstatically cry out “Hallelujah” and “Hosanna” and, even, the more intense ejaculation “Io!” I haven’t heard the whole cantata for many years and found the music overwhelming. For some reason, the occasion and the music and images released a flood of emotions in which I floundered with tears in my eyes, half drowned.
Outside, the fog was pale, shrouding the evergreens and the big old trees looming over the houses. The streets were empty. No traffic was abroad and it was very still. Even the dogs were silent.
In Cantata 140, the watchman repeatedly sings “Mach euch bereit” – that is, “make yourself ready”. Sometimes, the phrase is completed with the couplet “Fuer die Hochzeit”, that is, “for the wedding.” The daughters of Jerusalem are enjoined to prepare themselves for the wedding. But the purpose for the preparations somehow seems unimportant. More pressing is the need to “make yourself ready,” to be “prepared” for that which is coming whatever it might be. It is this abstract injunction that seems most to concern me and that is most wounding. As I listened to “Sleepers Awake”, it was the German expression Mach euch bereit that powerfully affected me, vexing me to sorrow that filled my eyes with tears. All my life, I’ve been studying, preparing, making myself ready. I read constantly and make notes in the margins of what I read and I study German scrupulously four or five times a week and I try to watch all of the important movies, not for pleasure, but to write little essays on them. I make myself available to the world as a scholastic exercise. Everything, it seems, becomes a kind of duty, an occasion for self-betterment. I am always preparing but for what? To what end? I’m old now and death is approaching and all of these labors, it seems, have been in vain. I have never achieved the ends that I desired. It’s our souls that are condemned in the afterlife. Most religions insist that, after death, the soul must be judged, sometimes, even weighed against a feather. The reason the soul is tried and convicted is that it is the soul that is the part of us that desires; it is the desiring Teil or portion of us. The soul can desire what is good or what is bad. And bad desires are blameworthy. Hence, we must make ourselves ready; we must prepare ceaselessly, even though that for which we are preparing will never happen. Bad desire must be purged. But the sky is empty and the earth hollow. I feel like an actor who has spent a lifetime learning a part that I will never play because there is no stage, no audience and, in the end, nothing to perform. And, soon enough, I will forget my part.
It is a commonplace that Christmas is the most demanding Holiday, the festival that requires more from us than we have to give. Inevitably, Christmas calls forth memories, a parade of recollections that falls away from the wan present into the more intensely colored and vivid past. The holiday requires reverie – instead of the fantasies embodied in the flicker of fire in a dark room, the images fluttering like lost geese across the sky of a TV screen. The darkness in this climate shudders with ill intent, but we know that the sun has revived, albeit only weakly, and, in a few months, will be triumphant once more. But, for the present, it is dark and cold and these aspects of sky and landscape make us fearful. The light that we imagine, here in the gloomy north, is entirely enclosed, a radiance that must be within us or not at all and that contends against the evidence of the world’s rigor mortis outside. The holiday is a mixture of sadness and hope. We feel the absence of those who are no longer present. Every shadow is an index to a loss that we have suffered. And, yet, we must be hopeful. The Bridegroom is approaching. The wedding is at hand.
December 26,2021
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