1957’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas is up there with A Christmas Carol and A Visit from St. Nicholas as one of the all-time great Christmas books. (Oh, and the Bible. I always forget that one.) The tale of a malevolent misanthrope who sets out to ruin Christmas but experiences a change of heart has delighted readers young and old for decades now. There’s something so simple about the Grinch— a villainous figure who is moved by the love in Whoville and ultimately joins in the celebration. Yet more recent adaptations have tried to build on his story a little.
I’ll admit that 2000’s live-action The Grinch isn’t really for me. I’ve always found its aesthetic distractingly creepy, and this adaptation’s suggestion that the Grinch was bullied as a child makes him almost too relatable. The Grinch isn’t even really the main villain of this adaptation, with that role being filled by the town’s mayor. Though certainly not heroic in his actions, this Grinch at least seems justified in his distaste for the cruel and bigoted Whos, and the next major adaptation would take a similar approach.
While 2018’s The Grinch steers a little closer to the book by maintaining the Grinch as its main antagonist —I guess technically an antihero?—, the title character again gets a more sympathetic backstory. In this telling, we see the Grinch’s lonely gray upbringing and see his hatred of Christmas stemming from a very early envy. Though this adaptation doesn’t have an outright villainous Who like the 2000 version, some of these Whos (Mr. Bricklebaum in particular) seem especially inconsiderate— never appearing to consider that their enormous blinding decorations might annoy the neighboring Grinch. While this Grinch is more traditionally villainous than Carrey’s, his history and motivations are still pretty relatable by comparison to the Seuss original.
And all this leads me to a question: Why are we trying to make The Grinch more sympathetic?
Perhaps some of this comes down to the medium. Seuss’s original book can be read cover-to-cover in a matter of minutes, and the first television adaptation (consisting solely of Boris Karloff’s narration and a handful of songs) was only 26 minutes long. Because the 2000 and 2018 versions are full-length feature films rather than shorts, it’s likely they had to add to the Grinch’s story just to fill the runtime. While I find this answer the most probable, I also find it the least interesting. Maybe there’s a deeper explanation…
As we’ve also seen with the evolution of Disney villains, there’s something about our modern era where we’re more interested in complexity, and this manifests across our media— even in cartoons geared toward children. While Dr. Seuss could present a flatly malevolent Grinch in the 1950s, the changing political landscapes of the past several decades (see either version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire“) have created an audience who yearn for depth. While villainous characters like Seuss’s original Grinch will always have their fans —look at our fascination with the Joker or the old school Disney villains—, our culture has become much less accepting of “evil for evil’s sake.” We want to understand what led a villainous character to become this way, and I wonder how much of this may stem from our own fears of being perceived as villainous or on the wrong side of history. If someone as cold as the Grinch can be justified, maybe we can too.
Now, please don’t hear all of this as a criticism of the newer Grinch media or the culture which has spawned it. My dislike of the Jim Carrey version is purely because I find literally every character creepy-looking; by contrast, my family actually enjoyed the 2018 version enough that we’ve already watched it twice since Thanksgiving. I just find our desire to redeem the Grinch intriguing, and I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts on this increasingly sympathetic yuletide scoundrel.