Doubt in Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

We all know of a precocious eight-year-old(ish) kid whose old soul maturity prevents them from the usual childlike games and fun. They want to skip into adolescence and adulthood, which can be amusing initially, but their tendency to break the Santa news to others on the school bus can infuriate parents and children alike. Susan, the eight-year-old daughter of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade director Doris, doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. A man whose appearance and personality eerily match that of Santa Claus finds himself as the new Macy’s Santa at the parade and department store. We discover his name to be Kris Kringle, and he considers himself the real Santa Claus without a whiff of sarcasm or jest. Susan’s doubt is rooted not only in her precociousness but her mother’s pessimism from life’s disappointment. If Susan believes in fairy tales, then she is vulnerable to the sting of being let down by a cruel and difficult world. For Doris, “getting ahead” socially and economically is what matters, and the imagination does nothing to assist in that. Doris is not unlike Dickens’ Scrooge in this way, as Scrooge fails to find any usefulness in the imaginative joy and celebration of something like Christmas. Scrooge, too, is motivated by getting ahead economically. 

The movie takes an audacious turn into near-satire as the belief in Santa Claus is litigated in a court of law—Santa’s existence is on trial and Kris Kringle faces the threat of being institutionalized. But as character Fred Gailey notes, “Faith is believing things when common sense tells you not to. Don't you see? It's not just Kris that's on trial, it's everything he stands for. It's kindness and joy and love and all the other intangibles.” The movie is able to pull off this bold plot device as we see the political and capitalistic intentions behind the scenes, but it’s also able to work because it’s a much larger trial of faith and doubt in the primal reasons to have a Christmas season in the first place. 

Scrooge himself is confronted with his own doubt when Marley’s Ghost calls out his unbelief, “What evidence would you have of my reality, beyond that of your sense? … Why do you doubt your sense?” Scrooge’s serves a delicious alliterative response, “Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Scrooge, Susan, and Doris’ confrontation with the supernatural provokes a faith that is necessary for living a life whose purpose is beyond the bottom line. As the aptly named Fred Gailey says to Doris, “Someday you're going to find that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn't work. And when you do, don't overlook those lovely intangibles. You'll discover they're the only things that are worthwhile.”