Jingle All the Way (1996)

directed by Brian Levant

Brad Efford 

This year at the cinema was the year of Men in Therapy, whether or not any actual therapy was involved. Matthew Rhys went to therapy that looked like a perfect recreation of the set of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Brad Pitt went to therapy that looked like the moon, then Mars, then Neptune. Joaquin Phoenix went to therapy that sounded like a ham sandwich and looked like Diet Scorsese. Shia LaBeouf went to therapy that looked like therapy, then wrote therapy that looked like a screenplay that felt just like therapy. It was a lot of fun, and we all had a blast.

And what did all of these men talk about in therapy? Well, they talked about the only thing that men are ever truly thinking about, of course: they talked about their dads. How much they loved Dad, how much they hated Dad, how hard they were trying to forgive and avoid becoming Dad, and how all three of those feelings were so knotted together that they were essentially just one big terrible feeling that all the men wanted real bad not to feel. Again: lots of fun, we all had a blast.

I love my dad—there isn’t a but. But I will say that I love my dad, and I live with a lot of internal conflict about the way he raised us, the soft anger he has within him and passed down rudely to me, the way he sees the world and talks about it, his obsession with Thomas Jefferson and the legacy of the South, etc. Pretty standard Dad Things, it turns out. Not everyone has one who is kind, though, who cares about the lives their children have made for themselves, and who drinks exclusively in moderation, and was there, didn’t leave, didn’t let the darkness win, didn’t become a cliche the minute the first opportunity arose. For this, for my dad, I am grateful.

“The idea of a good father was only invented, like, thirty years ago,” Laura Dern says in Marriage Story, and the nineties really back that up. At the time, it seemed like every live-action movie targeted at children revolved around a brazen new concept: What if Dad had good intentions? I remember this well because most of them were my favorite movies. Jungle 2 Jungle with Well-Intentioned Dad Tim Allen. Man of the House with Well-Intentioned Dad Chevy Chase. Hook with Well-Intentioned Dad Robin Williams. The Santa Clause with Well-Intentioned Dad...Tim Allen again. Even A Goofy Movie—honestly the least live-action film the decade produced—got in the game. Dads were on the rise on the silver screen and in our VCRs, so much so that it almost seemed like a government-sponsored initiative. DADS: Not So Bad After All.

In the midst of all this emerged Brian Levant’s Jingle All the Way, a movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sinbad spending the day before Christmas dashing madly around Minneapolis looking for Turbo Man, the year’s hottest toy, in order to prove to their sons just how much love they’re hiding beneath their fatherly armor. Arnie is a workaholic mattress salesman who we know sucks at being Dad because in the opening scene of the movie he misses his son’s karate ceremony (in Hook, five years earlier, it was an important little league game). Sinbad is a mailman who we know is blue collar because he never removes any piece of his mailman uniform throughout the movie, including his mail bag (though he does dump out most of the letters and use it as a weapon against the movie’s lead, which I think is maybe a federal offense?). These two men both have sons who are disappointed in their deadbeatness, and Christmas 1996 may very well be their last chance to prove they can be good dads. Jingle All the Way is a movie targeted directly at eight-year-old boys who love to see Arnold Schwarzenegger punch people (in this one he punches a reindeer(!!)) and Sinbad monologue humorously, and who are curious about why dads have such a hard time with things. What I’m saying is that, yes, I was this movie’s target audience.

My own dad was a Congressional aide for twenty years, which meant that for my entire childhood he worked in the bowels of the Capitol, sometimes spending strings of days and nights at the office writing or co-writing bills for Congressmen (always men) to bring to the House floor. Most days, though, he was home at a predictable time, and our family of eight had dinner together at the table before washing up in time for American Idol or Everybody Loves Raymond or some other agreeable fare. My dad is from central eastern Virginia, the Northern Neck, and most likely as a product of regional circumstance more than anything else, has always leaned conservative. When I was in fifth grade, he would make sure every day that my brother and I tucked in our T-shirts before heading to the bus stop. His favorite music seemed to me always to have been groups like Alabama and the Oak Ridge Boys (as I got older, I realized the truth was closer to John Prine, Neil Young, Jackson Browne—aging hippie roots rock suitable for comically large noise-canceling headphones). Some of our most common, most memorable family outings were weekend trips to nearby Civil War battlefields or the preserved homes of revered Virginian presidents. When Blackberrys were a thing, he was the first in line for a belt holster; when the phone rang, he suddenly became a twenty-first century Man with No Name.

The issue is that my dad is a good person, which I suppose is in fact not an issue at all except that it took me too long to see it. His father never hugged other men, son (and grandson) included, which I know now must have meant a concentrated effort on my dad’s part to break the pattern. My dad always drilled into us that C being the “average” grade in school was complete nonsense when an A was right there, so when in seventh grade I brought home two Bs on my report card, I started bawling as I handed it over; Dad froze at first, grappling with his own discomfort, then pulled me into an embrace. I tell these stories to tell you that I am lucky, and aware of it, but still I was afraid of him, still I wrote angrily in my teenage diary about hating him, hating him, hating him. These are feelings that are difficult for me to access now, to understand completely, but they were there, and they were noisy.

What’s been super fun as the years pass has been grappling with my privilege in this way, from the Good Dad underside. He was not perfect—stern, of course, but also impatient and stubborn and often out of touch—but he was there, always, and doing his best, which was good and often enough. Perhaps it is the duty of the son to fear and resent the father, to not only butt heads but hoist a battering ram of insecurities and charge forward hollering. Lord knows there’s been enough art put out into the world that tells us we must. In Jingle All the Way, the plot (“plot”) grinds to a halt so that Sinbad and Schwarzenegger can sit in a diner and talk about the different ways they’ve disappointed their sons and have been disappointed by their own fathers. “For my old man, Christmas was just another opportunity to let me down,” Sinbad says, pulling from his mailman flask with gusto. And there I was, eight years old, then ten, then twelve, rewatching the movie every year and nodding like it was church. What did I have to nod about? Dad was probably right there, watching this stupid movie with me. Did he know he was good? Did he know I didn’t see it? Does he know I see it now?

Brad Efford is the founding editor of Wig-Wag and The RS 500. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and two cats.