SPIRITED Is Actually An Improvement On A CHRISTMAS CAROL

A surprisingly nuanced look at what it means to actually change

This contains spoilers for the movie Spirited.

You don’t change overnight. The impetus to change may hit you all at once - in recovery we call that hitting rock bottom - but that isn’t really the change. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol shows us the impetus moment of change for Scrooge, but it doesn’t show us the follow-up. It’s really easy to wake up one day and decide to change your life, it’s something entirely different to keep that change going weeks, months and years later. Sometimes people don't even make it as far as lunch.

This piece is a little late; I’m writing it the day after Christmas because Spirited was the movie I watched on Christmas night. I wasn’t expecting much from the film - I had heard very mixed things - but what I definitely wasn’t expecting was a rather nuanced look at what it actually means to change, and what it actually means to be redeemed. As a person who has struggled mightily with these very questions for the last few years, I felt, as the kids say, seen. But the message is not just for Christmas, especially as the question the movie centers around is what do you do, as a person visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve, in the days after Christmas.

The rundown is this: A Christmas Carol really happened, and there’s a whole bustling agency devoted to haunting and changing one person every year at Christmas. The Ghost of Christmas Present, who has been on the job for two centuries, is feeling a little burnt out and not so sure that they’re really making a difference in the world; after all, people seem to be getting meaner, folks are getting more divided, and everybody is angrier than ever.

Then he finds Clint Biggs, a handsome, smarmy and amoral PR guy who specializes in creating conflict online. Considered unredeemable by the powers that be, The Ghost of Christmas Present becomes dedicated to actually changing this guy.

Okay, so it’s just A Christmas Carol all over again, right? Not quite. The big twist, given halfway through the film, is that the current Ghost of Christmas Present is actually Ebenezer Scrooge, who died three weeks after his change of heart. But he’s haunted by the question of whether he really changed enough, and whether he can ever move past his terrible actions and deserve love again. And this - this is an interesting idea. A direct sequel to the Dickens, grappling with the problem he never had to deal with: is it possible to truly change your ways.

I have to believe it is. It’s what I’ve dedicated the last six years of my life to, to becoming a better person. Becoming a person who is safe for other people. Becoming a person who adds to the world, rather than takes from it. I have hurt people very badly, and these things haunt me. In recovery we strive to make amends, to let the past be the past (“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it” is a quote that gets thrown around a lot in recovery). But it’s hard - it’s hard when you’ve harmed people, when you have left a wake of destruction behind you.

There’s this day where you realize that you’re not the victim, you’re not Tiny Tim, you’re actually Scrooge, making everybody else’s life miserable, driving poor crippled children to death. That’s the  day you decide to not be Scrooge anymore, but the thing that Dickens doesn’t tell you is that you have to make that choice again the next day. And the day after that as well. Becoming aware of your problems, of your harmful tendencies, doesn’t suddenly cure you of them. In Spirited Clint talks about how while he might feel regret for something he did on this night, when he’s being ghosted around through his past, present and future, that he’ll eventually be able to rationalize and justify it to himself. He’ll feel bad for a couple of days, but within a few weeks he will have constructed a mental narrative that not only made him right, but possibly one where he was the real victim all along. Yeah, he did some rough stuff, but he had to. He had no choice. Besides, whoever he hurt had it coming. It’s pretty easy to just turn back into Scrooge.

Because here’s the thing: you had reasons to become Scrooge. This isn’t even rationalizing; the truth is that people are born generally good, but formative experiences begin to convince them that they need to behave in certain ways to get what they need, or to survive, or to feel seen. People may wake up one day and decide to be better, a la Scrooge, but nobody wakes up and decides to be bad. In my time in recovery I have met a lot of people who have harmed other people quite badly - abusers, con artists and even murderers - and not one of them hurt other people just for the joy of hurting other people. They had developed a belief that they needed to do these things, and that belief was the result of everything that had happened to them in their lives leading to that moment.

That means it’s easy to turn back into Scrooge, because you’ve trained your whole life to be Scrooge. Your worldview is shaped by this - you’re selfish but you have to be, nobody else is looking out for you. You’re angry and get violent, but that’s just because you care, or maybe it’s just because people won’t stop pushing your buttons. You stole but you needed it, for whatever reason… and they don’t really deserve to have it anyway. You have all these muscles built up to be Scrooge, the rationalizations come to you so easily. Much more easily than waking up every day and choosing another way.

Spirited gets this. The change is ongoing work, not a bolt of lightning. It’s more like getting a haircut - you gotta keep getting your hair cut or it’s going to grow out. If you want to keep that good hairstyle, you have to work at it. And the idea that you have to work at it is not something we usually see in our media about people changing. We like to get stories where someone has a change of heart and then we get out of the story as soon as possible - all that mattered was getting the change of heart. That’s the victory. But it’s not! The victory is the next day, and the day after that, and the month after that. That doesn’t make for a good climax in a movie or a book, so we usually just stop at the rock bottom/change of heart.

The other thing that Spirited gets is that the work you do, the changes you make, can only be for you. You have to be the person who believes that you’re different; that cannot come to you from the outside. In the film Scrooge/Christmas Present seems to be a totally sweet and kind guy, but inside he remains tormented by the people he hurt, and he wonders if there will ever be enough Christmas hauntings to redeem himself. No matter what anyone tells him it doesn’t matter - he needs to internalize it before he can move on and begin a new phase of his life. Before he can accept love.

But there’s more to it than that; I would be interested in seeing a version of this movie where Scrooge/Christmas Present incarnates as a human at the end, as he does here, but then he has to deal with the fact that his name has become synonymous with miser, with asshole, with cruel old men. My rock bottom was very public, and no matter what kind of work I do on myself, no matter what distance I travel from the person who I was, there will always be people who see me only as the old me. Every couple of days someone on Twitter attacks me by “reminding” me of the people I hurt (as if I need to be reminded, as if I don’t think about it every single day of my life); the irony is that while people telling you how far you’ve come may not have an impact, people telling you that you’re still a piece of shit does have an impact. They reinforce your own negative self-talk, and I wonder what the experience of watching some random TV show where one character calls another “a real Scrooge” would be like for the incarnated Ghost of Christmas Present. I can tell you how it feels to stumble upon my name being used as an example of a bad person; it creates shame and anger, and it makes me wonder, if even for a split second, if it’s even worth trying to be better. Some people will never see me in any other light.

That’s why it has to be for me. The only person who will ever know my heart is me. If you are changing for other people, or if you’re judging your change by other peoples’ reactions, you’re putting yourself in a dangerous place. You’re putting your recovery - whether from substances or just from being an asshole - in someone else’s hands. That’s not the right place for it to be - it’s your responsibility to make up for the wrongs of your past, and it’s your responsibility to be aware of how that is progressing.

And it has to be for me because there are no guarantees that it will ever work out, externally. The people I harmed may never forgive me (some have said as much), and the life that I had may never come back (spoiler: it won’t. I will never again have the position in my community that I once had). Things may not get better; that’s the consequence of doing harm. But if my goal is to be better for me, that is a goal I can reach. I may not get what we in recovery call “cash and prizes,” but what I can get is peace of mind.

It’s laudable that A Christmas Carol and other change of heart of heart stories are trying to convince us that people, even the worst ones, can change, but I think they also do some damage. They present the change as a binary thing - one day you’re bad, the next day you’re good, and the lines between being bad and good are very clear. In real life it’s nothing like that; not only does the change happen on a daily basis, but the lines between good and bad are way thinner than we think. No one is perfect, and no one can be perfect; even a person who has changed their lives may yet experience anger or resentment or be momentarily snappy with someone.

There’s a scene at the end of Spirited that I love, that really proved to me that the folks who made this movie get it. It’s after Scrooge/Christmas Present has taken retirement from the haunting business and been incarnated on Earth. He is married and has a house and two kids; he’s building a little backyard slide and swing set for them. The kids are young, and they’re rambunctious, and he’s having a hard time with the construction, and he ends up yelling at them. Does this mean he is not changed? Not at all - it means he’s a person. There is no sainthood to achieve, no version of yourself where you are never angry and never raise your voice, where your every thought is only sweetness and light. You have bad days, you have grumpy moments. But what does happen is that he immediately recognizes what he did and he apologizes - that’s recovery in action. Progress, we say, not perfection.

What this scene shows is the only way that we can actually judge the progress of Scrooge. We see him showing up in his family in a small way that he certainly could not have done in his original life. It’s the actions that prove it.

I met my girlfriend after I got sober, and after I had decided to become a better man. I cannot judge my progress by the love in her eyes, partially because I know that I’m manipulative and that maybe I’m pulling a fast one on her. But she is a cancer patient, and she is having a rough go of it right now: intense treatments that make her very sick and a sudden and unexpected hospitalization on Christmas Eve Eve. I cannot judge myself by the love in her eyes, but I can judge myself by the fact that I was there for her, that I showed up (side note: when we talk about ‘showed up’ in recovery we mean it literally but also emotionally; it’s very easy to be physically present but emotionally distant or unavailable). I couldn’t have done this before (I wouldn’t have even gotten involved with a chronically ill person before; I’m the person in the relationship who needs to be cared for!) but I could do this now. I didn’t do it perfectly, but I did it. Watching the end of Spirited, with Scrooge showing up imperfectly for his family, I felt for the first time that a schmaltzy, corny movie like this really got it, was really showing us what true change is all about.

It’s a crazy thing to say about an AppleTV+ original movie starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, but it made me feel seen, made me feel like I could get up another day and once again make the choice to try and be better than I was the day before.