The story opens with the community of Halloweentown celebrating the victorious triumph of the latest Halloween, exhorting their king (the Übermensch in this example), Jack Skellington. He embodies everything the town admires, namely, the ability to frighten various beings in the most severe manner possible. He appears to be the master of himself, the master of all he, and his community, value. However, it is revealed shortly thereafter that Jack is disheartened and anxious. He is bored with the routine of Halloween and wishes for something different. He has no passion (something that Friedrich Nietzsche and the other existentialists saw as essential in making life worth living) for his existence. Thus, he is a slave to his own weaknesses rather than a master of said passions, and a true Übermensch cannot be a slave to anything, even himself.
No one knows my inner pain.
After wandering away from his home, he discovers something beyond his previous knowledge: another world, and he becomes obsessed with realizing its manifestation in Halloweentown. In the film, his obsession is Christmas, but it can be substituted for any Other World that one can looks to for comfort, be it an afterlife or a socialist Utopia. All of these were equally abhorrent to Nietzsche and Albert Camus. It is also curious as to why Skellington is even enamored with Christmas in the first place. He comes from a community that values death, decay, and the inspiration of horror in all people unfortunate enough to encounter them, yet Jack sees the illogical joy of Christmas and wants it for his own. Even though he is the sovereign of the darkest holiday around, he wants to become the bringer of Christmas joy and other values totally at odds with his own world. Nietzsche’s oft-misquoted decree that “God is dead” is a proclamation that the modern world (i.e. the 19th Century) has no use for God or traditional Christian morality. That time is over and those values are no longer relevant. In a similar way, Jack holds on to his Other World even though it, to Halloweentown, never existed or is “dead.” This will only bring misery.
Oh, pretty colors and candy canes and little children full of cheer!
Jack attempts to explain, examine, and understand Christmas through various rational means. First, he wants to convince the Citizens of Halloweentown to accept his vision of the Other World while rationally explaining its virtues. Rationality fails him, as the existentialists knew it would (I guess), and he resorts to using the aesthetics of Halloween (the world they know) to convince the townsfolk of the merits of Christmas (the Other World).
For Nietzsche, the only thing that matters is “The Aesthetic” since there is no “Other World,” there is only the here and now. For Jack, he must transform Christmas so that it conforms to his community's aesthetic for it to even interest them (for example, he describes Santa as a giant red lobster king named "Sandy Claws"). Jack then attempts to grasp Christmas for himself through science, which is an equally useless task. Proving something that is, as Jack sings, "invisible but everywhere" is not something done with beakers and Bunsen burners, or with any empirical method. For Søren Kierkegaard, the self-hating Christian Dane existentialist, science was undeniably admirable but useless for proving ethereal matters like faith, God, or the Other World. He'd have a thing or two to say to scientific creationists, by the way. Anyhow, Jack's scientific ventures into his own Other World ultimately fail. He cannot rationally prove Christmas in the same way he cannot explain it to Halloweentown.
Skellington enlists the help of "the professor" (the wheelchair-bound Dr. Finkelstein) to assist him. In a sense, this only deepens the irrationality of the situation, as the good doctor is not a scientist dedicated to the improvement of society, but is a self-serving, immoral curmudgeon who spends his time making humanoid creations to serve his personal fancies. Most prominent of these is Sally, by far the most rational and morally-centered inhabitant of Halloweentown. She constantly exhorts, practically begs, Jack to abandon his quest to take over Christmas, but he rejects these rationalities with close-minded enthusiasm.
Totally NOT evil:
The results of Halloweentown's Christmas are predictably disastrous. The aesthetics of the Halloweentown, Christmas Town, and the human world they encroach on cannot coexist and they threaten to destroy each other. Santa is kidnapped, Jack is blown out of the sky, and, for the citizens of Earth, Christmas has become a carnival of the delightfully macabre, complete with shrunken heads and carnivorous Jack-in-the-Boxes. To restore all worlds to their proper aesthetics, Jack must retake the mantle of the Pumpkin King and master himself as well as his subjects (particularly the ghastly Oogie-Boogie, Santa Claus' captor).
After his victorious conquering of his foe, Jack resumes his role as King of Halloweentown, only this time with renewed enthusiasm and vigor. He claims to already have great ideas for next Halloween and his subjects are just as willing to follow him as before. His attempts to create a new identity for himself, to break from conformity and his Sisyphean existence as Ruler of the Morbid, have been failures. He is back to being what he was born to be: himself (in this case, the Pumpkin King). His self-conquest, the suppression of his desires for something beyond his life, has made him an Übermensch.
Nietzsche, along with Kierkegaard, detested any sort of herd mentality, and it would seem that Jack’s return to his previously-detested life of macabre monotony is merely a re-submergence into such thinking. However, Jack, as the ruler of Halloweentown, is outside of the heard, rather, he is the leader of it. If anything, he was more under the influence of a herd mentality when he was enamored with Christmas Town. He saw something bright and sparkly and new and wanted to be a part of it, was willing to change everything about himself to do so. He made himself as much a part of the herd of Santa Claus as the people of Halloweentown were members of his own. It was only through his re-taking of the Pumpkin King crown (and being blowed up real good) that this way of thinking was shook from him like so much fake snow on a department store Christmas tree.
Jack's downfall originates from his constant self-examination, his obsession with who he is and why, and is acquiescence to the herd mentality of both his fellow citizens and Christmas Town. The other residents of Halloweentown are content with their endless task of frightening whomever they come across in their own charming Addams Family-like way. They live in the moment; they live for the terror they inspire. When Jack becomes interested in the how, the why, and his own personal motivations, he ventures from his home in hopes of finding "something new." Kierkegaard called this sort of self-destruction the "curse of consciousness," and it is also reflected in Camus' last novel, The Fall. In this book, the main character is a seemingly exemplary (like Jack) individual who falls from grace, though not quite as literally as Jack does in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Camus strangely had little interest in the effects of artillery shells on Santa's sleigh.
Destroying childhood, one believer at a time:
At one point, Sally says to Jack, "you don't look like yourself" when he dresses as Santa Claus. The aesthetic of his new role is a foreshadowing of the disaster to come. Skellington is donning the clothes of something other than himself and the result is destructive to his own identity and to Christmas. The idiom "Hell is doing the same thing over and over again" is anathema to the philosophy of Nietzsche as well as Albert Camus. For Camus, one could live for an eternity on the memory of a single moment. For Nietzsche, one becomes an Übermensch when he (and Nietzsche certainly envisioned the Übermensch as a male) has mastered himself to such a degree that he would gladly choose to live his life over again for all eternity. Tedium is not an issue; it is life that is worth living, no matter what form. Jack Skellington has overcome the view that his existence is tedium and is enthralled with the prospect of living it forever.
Here we see a walrus in a cravat ponder how much better he is than everyone else:
So, why has The Nightmare Before Christmas become such a touchstone film for throngs of angsty adolescents? Why do they wear merchandise for a movie that exhorts one to accept one's station in life and to not strive for anything beyond it? Again, the answer can be understood with aesthetics. For fans of the movie, the aesthetic of ghouls, ghosts, and creatures of the night supersede any "message" that may be "behind" the film. There is nothing behind the film for those enjoying it, there is just the film itself, it is just something to be experienced. While I don't buy into much of existentialist philosophy or enjoy the literature I've read, I do think this movie is pretty good, despite its association with Hot Topic and Disney. Better I just watch it and be satisfied with my existence.
Yes, I am aware that this very essay is an example of the very over-examination that brings about Jack Skellington's fall. Oh well.
