In which I meet Carson Hancock at a Christmas party, and he gives me a copy of his DVD, Why Do You Hate Christmas?
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I was at a party deep into the Christmas season, munching on a tasty samosa. Projected on a huge screen were animated elves top rocking and Indian stepping across a chintzy digital winter wonderland. And lolling on the green tunic shoulders were the photographed faces of startled employees who clearly weren’t told their photo would wind up on an elf, towering and unavoidable on the front wall of an office party.
The floor pulsed from the sound system which, like the tiny, chest high bar tables, desert buffet, martini fountain, and sushi station had been set up in a no man’s land between the enclaves of human resources and marketing. If you didn’t work there, like me, you would be swilling free drinks among other people’s abandoned and party-exposed cubicles.
They were irritating and I thought about moving but a hand grabbed and then let go of my shoulder. This was going to be someone I didn’t want to see. I turned around but no one was there. I turned around even more and there was slight, green and yellow scarfed, Keaton-faced Carson Hancock. He nodded sharply. Hello. A blackshirted waiter dodged Carson at the last second, hoisting empty glasses. Carson always chooses the worst place to stand.
He is a friend of a friend, a semi-mysterious traveller on the periphery of a few social and professional groups I’m in. Everytime I encounter him, he is quiet, droll. His impassive stare is unwaveringly dedicated to any gesture you make offhandedly or with a thoughtless shift in posture. But if you take advantage of any of these lulls in conversation and have the presence of mind to take him in with your own dose of steady absorption, you can almost hear the live, snapping filaments under his hair.
It used to be a favorite social tick of Carson’s to quote movies verbatim without being asked. So when he said, “I thought you’d be here” inserting a dramatic pause before adding, “I have something I want you to see,” I searched my brain – I thought you’d be here ... maybe Claude Chabrol? But then he quickly produced a DVD. It read “Why Do You Hate Christmas?”
Oh.
Turning the DVD around in my hands I said, “I’ve heard about this,” but he was already headed with a quick sidestep around a couple leading with their butts in a sloppy Chubby Checker-distressing twist. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night. The quirky, intentionally disjointed Carson Hancock had given way to a man of purpose and ambition.
One of the reasons I was familiar with it was the title. People, mutual friends, in our local film community latched onto the title right away and liked to talk about it in excited, future tense, until the project got bigger and Carson disappeared, apparently working on it with dark-roomed filmmaker devotion. People liked the title, I guess, because it harkens to that viral video of Pootie’s mother yelling “Why do you hate Christmas?” over and over and over. Over and over so much it is now a rolling snowball of spectator derision, heading down the mountain for sleepy Whoville collecting spinoffs, parodies, auto-tune tributes and lame late night jokes for weeks. Just in time for Christmas.
Dare to know more? Why Do You Hate Christmas!?! comes from A Very Pootie Christmas – the very same Pootie of Beach House fame, the reality show set down the Jersey Shore who, yes, was such a hot item that the network gave her her own show, Ventnor, as in Ventnor City, outside Atlantic City, which is now a situation comedy going nowhere, thank god. A Very Pootie Christmas probably sounded like a good idea at the time someone greenlighted Ventnor and presto. TV infamy.
Any way, when Pootie’s mother comes to visit on the day before Christmas, arms full of groceries and presents to make up with her daughter who says she hates Christmas because “everyone is all like – freakin’ happy –” she finds Pootie depressed after a fight Pootie’s had with her boyfriend because, well, the boyfriend says he likes Christmas because of the rockin’ Christmas sex and Pootie is feeling like all betrayed.
The rest of the show, surprise, is a Christmas Carol updated for the badda-bing generation, but in this one epic moment of brutacious line delivery, Mama chastises Pootie for her unChristmas-like behavior, and they launch into a shouting match over the meaning of Christmas (Mama pro, Pootie con), and Mama, riding the Valkyrian crest of Christmas joy, yells, “Why do you hate Christmas!?!” with such unnerving incandescence it takes a while for the floorboards on set to ease back into position. It’s truly unbelievable, but Pootie slams the door in her face and then goes all freakin’ crazy with the triad visitation of ghosts played by the like non-actors of Beach House. Without pirated copies – like mine – no one will ever be touched this way by Pootie’s Christmas.
I can only guess Carson glommed onto the WDYHC!?! culturegag early on, thinking maybe of adding to the tinsel-crusted snowball himself. Maybe he set out with a Very Pootie Christmas gag reflex and at the end felt committed to the title.
But he quickly forgoes the xmas parody and defamation. Instead, it seems, he takes the question incrementally more and more seriously, as if he goes from tap dancing on the roof to making his way down the chimney and into his family’s shag carpeted, liquor drenched, Christmas tree listing living room.
His family always interests me, whenever I hear from those who like to keep the Carson Hancock mystery alive with anecdotes, chance sightings, and family lore. They are living (WASP) embodiments of the Upper West Side, pulled from the Bodoni typeset of a JD Salinger short story, yet somehow prospering dissolutely in modern, incongruous LA.
The father was high in the unseen strata of insurance executives, mother is a self-made caterer to the stars. A hard-drinking family in the land of the lotus eaters whose two eldest, Humphrey and Shannon (who for a while went by the nom de celeb Tillie Harm) flung off whatever legacy their parents meant to bequeath them and hit the road. Flight upon graduation, one after the other. And certainly not together. They are dueling spirits and their rivalry during adolescence would only truce up when they joined forces against Mommy and Daddy. Carson is the youngest by about 11 years and I’d have to bet he grew up behind a closed door.
/continued
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Next: I watch Carson's movie in June.
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