https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rjiP9S1j3hs
Gremlins is basically a Christmas monster movie. Something which might seem surprising at first glance, but in looking at the basic elements of the story, we find in it an inner coherence of analogies, which is not only surprising for a movie which appears so campy at first glance, but its web of meaning can maybe even help us understand the meaning of Christmas, and how it connects to personal and cosmic symbolism. And especially the manner in which the time of the winter solstice can be represented as a descent into chaos, darkness, as the breakdown of meaning, and then finally the sunrise, this surprise of a new sun coming to chase away the night. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. The Gremlin story begins as Mr. Pelzer, the father of the main character Billy, is exploring a foreign area. It’s only Chinatown, but it’s made to look like a place of wonder and strangeness. He descends into a cave of treasures to encounter a Chinese man who is the guardian of a mogwai, which is the Mandarin word for monster. The mogwai, just like the foreigner, is this encounter with something that is unknown, a challenge to the normal categories of existence. Just like the foreign or any other novelty, it exercises fascination, but because it is unknown, it also bears the danger of destroying the established order. The name given to the monster Gizmo reflects this notion of a novel yet unknown thing. Here the unknown is also related to the illegitimate, as Mr. Pelzer acquires the mogwai knowing the old Chinese man did not want to sell it to him. When Mr. Pelzer receives the mogwai, he is given three rules, which will be of prime importance. Do not expose it to light or it will die, do not expose it to water, and especially never feed it after midnight. Just as the holiday season is also the time of the solstice, we can understand the entire story as a descent into darkness. The movie shows us a series of places where the vehicles of order are pathological and distorted, where things are not working as they should. We see the authority of police as non-functional and corrupt, the bank supervisor as abusive and condescending, the usurer Ms. Deagle who is a literal scrooge. We also encounter the nationalism and xenophobia of Marie Futterman, who complains about foreign and dreams of a time when people bought American. The ultimate version of this problem, in the normal order of things, is Mr. Pelzer himself, a failed inventor. Although he is constantly inventing new things, his inventions fail and therefore show him incapable of adequately providing for the future. Mr. Pelzer boasts But it is precisely his failure to do so which will bring in a period of chaos. And since Mr. Pelzer cannot support his family, this task has fallen to his son Billy, and it is in this way that the corruption of the normal order is also shown as an inversion. The world is about to be turned upside down. This is shown by Billy placing his name tag upside down on his bank desk. In cosmic terms, the failure of the father is precisely the yearly experience of the sun getting lower and lower in the sky, the days getting shorter as the solstice approaches. Darkness is rising, and we fear that the darkness will prevail that the light might disappear forever. In the movie this is shown by the eruption of the gremlins into the town, of course. But in terms of the imagery of the father, we also see it in two instances. First we find Mr. Pelzer leaving his family for Christmas, which is symbolically equivalent to the solstice. But more explicitly, this descent of the sun’s light is best resumed by the story told by Kate where she speaks of her father dressing up as Santa Claus, as Father Christmas, and wanting to surprise them by coming down the chimney. Santa Claus coming down the dark chimney and exiting in the fire pit where the fire is kindled is precisely the image of the sun going down into darkness and being reborn, relit for the new year. But here the father gets stuck in the descent and the darkness prevails, changing Christmas not into the celebration of birth, but the experience of death. It is precisely this duality that Christmas has always been concerned with. With the divine logos, the origin of all meaning being born in a dark cave, framed by the rise of a foreign empire and the massacre of innocent children, all killed in the hope of snuffing out this new light, this new king. In the movie though, the dark potential of this monster is not bad in itself, at least not at the outset. Gizmo appears rather as benign and charming, attractive by its fascinating strangeness. Just like novelty in general or the experience of the strange and foreign, it is rather when the rules of proper hospitality are broken that all hell breaks loose. Gizmo is malleable, he can be influenced for good or for ill, and in that sense he has the capacity to be integrated into normal order, tamed if you will. This image is especially reinforced in the scene where Gizmo is shown sporting the American flag, showing Gizmo as the integrated foreigner. The other mogwai on the other hand, those that erupt from Gizmo are not so benign. They’re mischievous, destructive, and are looking to propagate and increase their power. Not as integrated exceptions, but akin to a foreign invasion. A good way to understand the other mogwai is to look at the structure on a personal level. Imagine you as a person have these desires on the edge of your being, these thoughts and potential actions within you. A basic desire like the one for food or for sex or for pleasure in general is not bad in itself. If properly regulated, such desires can be good in fact, but if breaking the rules given you plunge them into water, which is this image of chaos and potentiality itself, and let them multiply. If you feed them after midnight in the dark place where light and order are in their lowest moment, then you will produce vices in your life that will take over and destroy you just like the gremlins started to destroy this city. Giving into impulse and desire is shown as the regression from the mammalian to the reptilian brain in the movie. This is why the scene in the bar is one of the best, and where we discover the more pagan influence visible in the gremlins movie. You see, the winter solstice in ancient times was also Saturnalia, the moment in the year where all the structures, all the morality, all the taboos of a society were turned upside down. This is a festival of inversion. In the bar scene we see the result of the rule of darkness, where all the tropes of human vices are caricatured and put into one gigantic, chaotic, and orgiastic event. First of all we have this giving into leisure, games, dancing, drinking, smoking, eating, but ultimately rowdiness, violence, gambling, and perversion, theft, murder, all mashed together until Kate discovers that the darkness can only be chased away by light. That is how we come to the third rule, not to expose the creature to light. The mogwai and especially the gremlins are this dark potential, chaos, the unknown, the undetermined, the imaginary, the nightmare. This is why the first casualty of their appearance is the scientist. They represent exactly that place that is not yet tamed and contained. Giving dark things to light is precisely how they are destroyed, by naming, framing them properly, doing exactly what Mr. Pelter said he was meant to do, making the illogical logical. That’s how these dark things are tamed and their wildness vanishes. This is why Kate not only uses fire in the bar scene, but also uses a camera, both casting light on the gremlins but also documenting them at the same time. Now although the coming of the gremlins is excessively destructive, it’s also a strange kind of cleansing. The gremlins embody all the chaos, but this chaos acts as a flood to cleanse the city. And so all the images of pathology, Mr. Futterman, Mrs. Deagle, the policeman are destroyed in this dark transition. In order to understand the coherence of the final scenes, where the gremlins are finally destroyed, one needs to first ponder the relationship between gremlins and technology. Gremlins are the rarest of things. They are a modern monster. Their legend appeared in World War II as a personification of accidents, of breakdowns in technology, in aircrafts and machinery in general. They were playfully represented as one of the enemies to face in the war efforts. Technology is always a kind of war. Not necessarily a war against other people, but also a war against the dangers of the natural world in general, using the potentiality of nature to defend us against nature, a supplement to protect us, make us more powerful, and make us less vulnerable to the cold, to the darkness, to disease, to our own human limitations in general, and ultimately to our political enemies in the form of weapons. In that manner, the monstrous mogwai can be seen as the potentiality of the natural world itself. A potentiality which can both destroy us, but can also be focused, tamed and channeled towards a greater defense against the dangers of that natural world itself. This is of course what the Chinese man tells us at the end, that the mogwai represent the very force of nature itself, and that the Americans are not ready to gain the keys to that, that they are acting in an irresponsible manner. I’ve explored the duality of technology in other videos, but technology both makes us powerful, while also making us more vulnerable. Our very lives are dependent on the smooth functioning of our vehicles, our electrical systems, our appliances. Technology is therefore a paradox, and this paradox is explored fully in the movie. If the deaths of the bad apples in the movie are attributed to technology turning against its user in the time of chaos, in the death of Mrs. Deagle, the police officers, Mr. Futterman, it is the very fact that gizmo is malleable and can be influenced that makes him not only the source of the gremlins, but also the solution to the gremlins as well. Just as the gremlins killed others by a breakdown in the normal functioning of technology, gizmo operates a last inversion, where by losing control of a toy car, he finds himself at the right place and finally ends the long night, reignites the fire at the lowest moment of the solstice, and lets the sunlight enter the story once again. The return of the sun and the restoration of balance is also the return to the pristine natural world, represented by the garden setting in the final scene. As the gremlin melts away into formless chaos, the father also returns with the sunlight, reinforcing the entire structure and pattern of the movie. Of course, the return of the sun happens in the film on Christmas morning, so all of the imagery ties well with how the birth of the Christ child is seen by Christians as the dawn of a new era. Although as a Christmas movie, Gremlins might seem like an affront to the celebration of Christmas, we find that it also follows in a strange way the very structure of the solstice, and the Christmas story as well. And so I can only say to everybody, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Christ is born. So I hope you enjoyed my interpretation of gremlins. I just want to say this might be my last video of the year. And so it’s been a great year and a lot of things have happened in this year, of course. And I’m also moving very quickly towards the future. I am getting, I’m getting a, I’ve just gotten a new computer. I’m getting a new camera, some new lighting, a new microphone, and I’ve been really busy in the fall, so I haven’t had time to pull it all together. But hopefully by the beginning of next year, at least sometime in January, the experience of the symbolic world will be very different. And so that’s all thanks to your support. I really appreciate all the support that’s been coming my way. And hopefully we can continue to make all these videos better. So once again, have a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I will see you all very soon.