Melancholy in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Meet Me in St. Louis can veer close to the edges of the category of movies whose Christmas genre bona fides are debated. Who can forget the few years in the last decade when our culture was gripped by whether Die Hard was a Christmas movie? (It is.) Does a movie that takes place at Christmas make it a Christmas movie by default, or must it explicitly be about the holiday and season of Christmas? Does being a Christmas movie mean it feels odd to watch it from January to October? How much Christmas makes one eligible for the title of Christmas classic? All these questions and I have few to no answers, with my best guess being a combination of the setting and themes depicting what we consider characterizing the Christmas season.
All this to say, Meet Me in St. Louis only includes a Christmas setting for about 30 minutes of its 113-minute runtime, yet is ranked the #1 Christmas movie by Rotten Tomatoes. It’s most powerful scenes and moments are explicitly about Christmas, not too unlike it’s contemporary It’s a Wonderful Life. For the first two acts of the film, we are simply spending time with the Smith family of St. Louis in 1903. The plot is shaggy as we bounce from summer to autumn, with musical numbers buoying the film’s entertainment value. What’s most important here for viewers in 1944 is nostalgia for the time period of 40 years prior. The equivalent for today would be a setting in 1984 akin to the worlds of Stranger Things, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. We’re quite alike our 1944 ancestors if the last decade of Hollywood’s 80s nostalgic cash-grabs have been any indication. Forty years is the perfect time period to wistfully visit again—it’s not too long ago to forget its pleasures, but far enough away to forget its downsides.
The moment of emotional power comes near the end of the film when Judy Garland’s Esther comforts her younger sister, Trudy, by singing the now-beloved “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” through melancholic tears. The Smith patriarch just announced they are leaving St. Louis for New York. The tears are earned after we the audience have fallen in love not only with the time period but the city. The lyrics speak for themselves: “Here we are as in olden days / Happy golden days of yore / Faithful friends who are dear to us / Gather near to us once more.” The added weight of America’s fourth year in World War II would have highlighted the theater’s absence of thousands of fathers, husbands, and brothers who can’t be home for Christmas. Who wouldn’t pine for a 1903 Christmas with no knowledge of two cataclysmic world wars?
To tie this back to Dickens, Scrooge himself is moved emotionally for the first time in the story when he visits his own childhood with the Ghost of Christmas Past. His face lights up and Dickens writes, “He was conscious of a thousand odours floating through the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long forgotten.” Christmas is probably the most nostalgic time in all our modern world. Nostalgia brings with it the melancholy tied to something that can’t be recovered and people we’ve said goodbye to. Judy Garland spoke for all Americans (and Scrooge!) when she sang, “Through the years / We all will be together / If the fates allow.” The longing for the past is a longing for reunion.