John Williams Will Save Your Christmas
Anytime my wife and I are watching NBC Nightly News or the Olympics, or Monday Night Football and hear the theme music to any of those programs, I can’t wait to remind her that, “Hey, you know that’s the guy who wrote the Star Wars music!”
Of course, movie people will know that I’m talking about John Williams. And over the course of many years of watching blockbuster movies and Steven Spielberg movies in particular, I can easily pick a John Williams score out of a lineup. John Williams music always goes down easy — he’s like The Beatles of film composers, and for my money, sometimes at the danger of being too prevalent. You know you can have too much of a good thing, sort of like my cousin who couldn’t stay out of granny’s Fig Newtons when we were kids and now he’s a type two diabetic with no sense of culture.
At any rate, when it comes to big Hollywood composers, I’m more in the Jerry Goldsmith camp. Jerry made you work a little bit harder for it with an edge over Williams that manipulates your emotions across a broader spectrum.
If you want to tie the girl to the train tracks and swoop in to the rescue while the bad guy is in the corner twirling his mustache concocting his next plan for galactic domination, then John Williams is your guy. But if the plan is fascist apes, the disturbing prospect of giving birth to the Antichrist, or believing an eleven foot model spaceship is the biggest most elegant thing you’ve ever seen, brimming with the unharnessed power to cross the stars, then Jerry Goldsmith is where it’s at.
Anyway, we all love John Williams whether we know it or not. He’s at his best when he nails that sense of wonder and adventure we’re all familiar with in Star Wars and Indiana Jones. But every once in a while, in films like Lincoln, he gives us that Sword of Damocles kind of thoughtfulness of great things hanging in the balance. In Saving Private Ryan, he subverts the weight of sacrifice with lighter tones of heroism than we’re used to from him.
I could go on all day about Goldsmith versus Williams, and why the theme from Patton should replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the National Anthem, or how the latest Star Wars scores, much like the films themselves, left me wanting.
But it’s Christmas, and what I really want to talk about is believing with a capital B, which is what a great film score will do for you. I don’t mean to complain, but does anyone do actual themes anymore? I have a picture in my head of movie composers sitting at their laptops, rubbing their foreheads like my dad doing his taxes only to come up with some reverberating tones and “soundscapes” — what the hell is a “soundscape”? You can’t hum a soundscape!
You say, “What do you mean, ‘Believe’?” I mean Believe like “You’ll Believe a man can fly” like in Superman: The Movie. I hate to break it to you, but it wasn’t the special effects that sold that idea. That was Mr. John Williams with his sweeping score that almost literally lifts you off your chair, and burns into your heart the Belief in not only Superman and all the flying around he does, but the Belief in strength, heroism, and humanity that is so essential to the character and so capable of each and every one of us.
And now, here it is two days before Christmas, we’re living in a Michael Crichton novel, two Greek letters deep into a mind-numbing pandemic, towns across four states lie in devastation from a historic tornado, family illnesses a-go-go, 13 hour work days to make up for shortages, and no XBOXes to be found anywhere and you’ve got about as much Christmas Cheer as Donald Trump playing Santa at the flea market in the old Toys R Us on Boxing Day. You’re so spent, you’re actually considering just buying bottles of Stetson for all the men in your family and calling it a day. Don’t do that.
If you want to save Christmas, here’s what you gotta do: first, you’re gonna get in your car, or pop in your ear buds. If you’re using ear buds, you’re gonna want that volume cranked all the way up. If you’re in your car, and happen to be driving any 2017 or newer model Toyota or the like, you’ll want to set the volume knob to 43. Any vehicle older than that, then it’s at your discretion. The point is, it needs to be loud enough for the Christmas Spirit to permeate the sound of traffic and drown out any Mannheim Steamroller that is inevitably playing somewhere in your vicinity.
Next, you need to locate the neighborhood nearest you for the best outdoor Christmas displays, and I don’t mean displays with those spinning LEDs projected on the house, or 18 blow-up Santas bouncing around the front yard, or those kind of lights with the three color LEDs that make the outside of the house look like the inside of a 1984 cathode-ray tube Zenith color TV set. That’s lazy decorating. I’m talking good old fashioned, honest-to-God, big carbon footprint incandescent Christmas lights.
Then, you’re gonna want to get anyone who’s with you to shut up! This will not be a problem since you’ve already pegged out the Grinch meter this year. Please, everyone, just shut the hell up for four minutes!
Finally, and this is the most important part, you’re gonna want to pull up the music streaming app of your choice on your smartphone and search “‘Somewhere In My Memory’ by John Williams,” or just look for the Home Alone soundtrack. And when you’re just about to roll into your nearest Christmas village, and everyone is good and quiet, press Play and by the time the childrens choir is singing about “feeling that gingerbread feeling” and “Christmas joys all around me, living in my memory,” your Grinchy little heart will have grown three sizes, and what you feel that very moment will be that Belief in the Spirit of Christmas, and it’s the nearest thing you’ll experience to real magic.
