Monday, October 30, 2023

The Grinch

 I am here with yet another very personal post. Since it's almost Halloween, I thought it would be apt to write about a Christmas movie. Well, okay, maybe it's not exactly apt but who said I was a conformist? In my defence, it already snowed where I live and we already saw -19 degrees Celsius, so I already put my Christmas decorations up---there now you know one more thing about me: I like Christmas (mostly because of the decorations).


Not only I like Christmas, but also I like The Grinch. I mean, the character Grinch. I somehow empathized with him a lot in the movie---I am not sure if this is the experience of most audiences. I think that most people who like Grinch like him because most of the time we, humans, like seeing salvation. It reminds us that one day we could be saved too if we were to go down on a wrong path. Well, this is not exactly why I liked Grinch but in general I do like it when a bad character becomes a good one in the next season of a tv series.


Grinch is shown as an "evil" character but you see how and why he became such a person. It is a little bit like how Darth Vader was a villain but the little Anakin Skywalker was good and even cute. Grinch was isolated and lonely. He only decided to reject lovely situations because he wasn't getting any. When approached with love and kindness, the people of the town were able to win him back. This sounds too simple perhaps, and somehow this kind of thing happens only in movies. I think it should happen in real life too, and if you think "no, it does happen in real life too", I will say, at least, it should happen more often. Often, it is hard for us to forgive someone who did a bad thing to us because our arrogance may take over and it is especially difficult because, in our society, this is labelled as weakness. I think it really depends and it is not necessarily weakness. I had mentioned in a previous post something about people who served jail time (and I plan to mention him again in the future because he is actually a very cool person, or he was). There are lots of people who are extremely prejudiced towards those who have been to jail and in practice they think "once bad, always bad", but the same people, when they see a character turn good, they like it. Of course, the plot and the editing should be done well to keep the audience in the loop while this is happening and for it to be convincing. Of course, in quality films, there is always character development at some level, but when it is as drastic as turning from evil to good, more people in the audience are likely to notice this development.


The Grinch's story starts by stating that his heart is two-sizes too small and this is mostly what I will talk about in this post. A heart inside a body, two-sizes too small. Somehow this resonates with me, although it physically doesn't make sense. I don't know you, dear reader, but I do feel like when I feel hate my heart is getting smaller. When I feel love, it doesn't necessarily get larger, but this also depends on what kind of love and the degree of it. There are indeed different kinds of love. I won't list the obvious ones but I will try to make a distinction between some subtle ones. 


A number of years ago, I happened to meet someone at an event I participated. Later, we became friends (although, not close/best friends) and I had started to like him. Of course, since I am a very shy person, I didn't tell him anything. One day, he had an additional ring, it was on a ring finger, and of course, I wasn't exactly happy to see that. Of course (again), I was shy enough not to ask about it at first, but later I asked about it and found out that he got engaged. I had a couple of days with nausea for some reason after learning that and then nothing really changed, except I was a bit sad that he was in love with someone else, all the while he didn't know anything about my feelings. As a friend, of course, I had to hear about his plans about getting married, which wasn't quite nice to listen to but I did it anyways. One day, he went to get married (the wedding wasn't in town), and again, I wasn't exactly happy about that. I still remember the scene when I thought about this situation: I was sitting on the bus, next to the window, the bus didn't leave the stop yet, I was just watching outside. At that moment, I felt my heart getting larger. What does that even mean? Well, I can't explain it physically but that was exactly how it felt.


Being only friends with someone who you secretly like and who doesn't like you back is nothing to worry about, in my opinion, because you don't even have anything to lose. Well, it probably is not desirable but it is really easy to get over the situation and you can just be friends with them. Secretly liking someone who is engaged (to someone else) but staying friends with them is not that much of a big deal either because "liking" is something only at the level of "being attracted to" and strictly different than "having fallen in love". However, seeing that person getting married (to someone else) might be a whole another level. It could be a big thing and you sort of have to decide how much you actually liked the person (or if it was love) to be able to understand your own perspective on this. So at that moment, when I was on the bus, sitting by the window, I was asking myself: am I really in love with this person, and if so, what should that even mean? In any case, I had decided on something else. What was that something else?


One day, years after those events, I asked a group of friends the following. If you are in love with someone but they are in love with someone else (or they just don't love you back), would you still be able to wish the best for them or would you be sad/jealous because they are not "yours"? Well, everyone said it should be the latter. Unfortunately, I disagreed, I think it can be both, if not the first, but it just takes effort and a bit of less selfishness. At the end, perhaps the question is "what is true love anyway?", it is completely subjective. So this is what I was trying to decide on, what kind of "love" I was feeling towards this person---did I feel love that was completely selfish, or did I "truly" love him to be able to wish happiness to him? To do the latter, you do have to let your ego go, I think, and try to be a truly very good person, at least that's how it felt, and so, sitting on the window seat, I felt my heart enlarge as my love extended and became void of any selfish desires. At that point, I had decided to love him as a person before anything else and I wasn't really sad anymore about "losing" him. Now, when I discuss this with friends, they say, "that only means you weren't truly in love with him because if you were you wouldn't be able to do that"---I guess these people define "real love" by craziness, I don't know. 

Well, I think they might probably be right, and that might have been why I was able to let him go, but that's not how it felt to me back then. I guess one might argue that love is an illusion anyways and you just have to come out of the simulation. In any case, the whole point of the story is to illustrate how one can feel their heart getting larger. If you truly value someone, you might prefer having them in your life (even if it may not be with the "title" you want) to not having them in your life at all. It might take a bit of mental effort but it is doable (it requires heart enlargement but after that all is good). I guess, now the question is, did the guy get married and/or did anything ever happened between him and me? Well, I am afraid that is classified information (although if anyone dares to ask me personally I might opt to answer as it is kind of interesting), but the rest of the story is not relevant to the point here, so I'll leave the ending of that story to the imagination of the reader---I can only say that it was a happy ending. A fun fact is his name is actually in this movie but of course I won't tell which character it is. Okay, I will tell you this much: It is not Cindy Lou.


I don't remember any of my other heart enlargements as vividly as this one, unfortunately. But they were mostly in similar situations to what I described above, and definitely not when I "loved" someone and they "loved" me back. Maybe my heart gets larger when I make new friends too (like Grinch) but I bet the enlargement is not that big so it is hard to notice it. How about my heart shrinking? Like I said at the beginning, it does temporarily happen when I feel hate, but I don't actively hate anyone as a philosophy in life (mostly because I don't think they are worth it), so the shrinking doesn't last more than 10 seconds. With this rate, I guess my heart will be huge until I get to old age. It is actually a disease to have an enlarged heart. Oh well.


Back to Grinch. The ways Grinch's heart got larger were much more different, of course. But even when he was evil and mean, he has style. It is hard not to like him with all those gadgets. Being alone made him self-dependent and actually guided him towards invention. You see on his schedule he has booked dinner with himself. This sounds way too familiar in the modern day, doesn't it? All those self-care/meditation guru posts say things like this nowadays. Well, one might say Grinch would pass all those modern era self-care checklists on social media. He also has a dog and so perhaps that's why he didn't lose his heart but only had a small one. I guess the story version says he was born with a small heart, but I think the main reason he became mean is his childhood experiences (and he was an orphan too). I remember that one day I was reading some articles in psychology and then suddenly thought "If Hitler wasn't bullied so much as a child, none of what happened would happen". Well, this is definitely a deep subject that's open to a lot of discussion and I am not saying my sentence necessarily holds true, but it is hard not to think of it. 


I am happy for Grinch at the end of the movie, but I must confess, I liked his mean version a lot too. I guess nobody would like a person like him in real life but I actually know such people. I am specifically thinking of someone I know with similar behaviour. He doesn't really talk to anyone and he is definitely grumpy. He can be pretty mean too. He doesn't exactly have a bad heart. One day, I noticed something he liked and tried to talk to him about that subject, and he was quite happy and nice. But normally, when you see such an old man, you probably want to stay away. Well, this person is a relative of mine and not a stranger, so it was okay to try to talk to him. Sometimes I deeply empathize with grumpy old men and strongly agree with them too, like Ove from A Man Called Ove (which is the film that's good enough to have made me come back to writing on my blog after almost 2 years of break). One might think there might be a grumpy-old-man part of me that's just asleep nowadays. I think I used to be more grumpy and actually straight mean in the past. Well, perhaps I am like a saved Grinch. In the end, I can say openly that I definitely envy the gadgets (for example the one for breakfast) Grinch has, as a person who also loved The Jetsons as a kid.



Speaking of kids, a good discussion point would be if this movie is good for kids or not. I don't really know, but I think it is a good movie for adults. Some parents dwell too much on what they show to their children, like I had briefly mentioned in my Peter Rabbit and Peter Rabbit 2 post. When we consider this movie, there is definitely a cheerful tone, even in the "mean" things, after all it is a Christmas movie so it is supposed to be jolly. I don't know if I would be okay with my kid watching it, but I think I wouldn't care about it too much so I'd show it anyways. When I think back and consider the films/tv shows (or even cartoons) that I watched as a kid, I don't really recall the storyline. For example, The Nanny. I know that I only looked at the clothes of the nanny and just thought how cute they were and I didn't get any of the sexual references in that show (I get them now when I watch as an adult). The point is at that age my brain wasn't developed enough to comprehend everything anyways so I don't think it was "bad" for me to watch it. Now, would a kid start doing mean things just because they watched The Grinch do mean things? I am not really sure, I guess it is definitely possible. But at the same time, there are good things your kid could learn from this movie too, and it is possible that your kid (if exists) will only be occupied with looking at the town and how magical the decorations and the lights are. So, as we are nearing(?) Christmas, perhaps you can (re-)watch this movie. I definitely will watch it (again) soon. 


I am not going to go into comparing the live action and the animated versions of this story. Since the title is not "How Grinch Stole Christmas", we can see that this post is about the animated version. I must add that I definitely liked Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as a voice actor in this movie. I am not a huge fan of him and I don't think he is necessarily handsome, but I do think he is talented. 


Lastly, I will close with one of my favourite videos (it's only 17 seconds). I have come across this video during the pandemic and at the time it described my mental state really well (I was just working too much which caused me feel that way). Here is the video.


I give 7/10.



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