Can anyone be redeemed?
At dinner with friends last night, we were talking about, well, talking, and crossing the divides in our society. And how we criticize people when they change their minds. We call them “flip-floppers.” I suggested that we rarely enter a conversation to change someone’s mind. We want to eliminate them, take away their credibility.
As I think about the movie Spirited (On Apple TV+ starring Ryan Reynolds (Canadian!) and Will Ferrell), I wonder. Maybe we just don’t believe people can change. If that is true, then we have more in common with Clint Briggs than any of us would be comfortable with.
Spirited is yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which Victorian capitalist Ebenezer Scrooge, famous for his cheapskatedness and exploitation of workers (think Jeff Bezos) is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. The ghosts—of Christmas Past, Present, and Future—try to change him into a better person. In this musical version, the ghosts are still at work and have a whole campaign apparatus behind them with surveillance, analysis, and, of course, special effects.
This year, they take on Clint Briggs (Reynolds), a specialist in spreading disinformation and scandal. He is “the perfect combination of Mussolini and Seacrest” according to (the Ghost of Christmas) Present, played by Will Ferrell. Clint has earned the title, “Unredeemable”. Despite the policy to leave unredeemables alone, Present has a personal reason for seeing Briggs change. The preparation begins on Christmas Day and takes a year until the grand reveal on Christmas Eve.
The question of whether or not people can change is central to the story. Can someone who causes great harm be changed into one who does great good? Or, even, just stops doing great harm? Can they ever make up for the harm they have done? In the past few years in our political climate in the West, we have dealt with leaders who refuse to acknowledge the harm they cause, let alone try to change it.
Spirited offers hope by declaring that, yes, people can change, but it takes more than a weird Christmas Eve dream brought on by an “undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.”*
Along with the lessons of the OG Dickens about reflecting on your past, reconciling with family, facing your vulnerability, blah, blah, blah, Spirited adds one more element of redemption: sacrifice.
We can face our past, spend years in therapy, make donations, and so on, but the real fruit of change is not just generosity—it’s consequences. Some forms of Christianity scapegoat the sacrifice we need to make onto Jesus on the cross. This narrative works if you have no need to see things change in the present, but that’s a very privileged position. If we want to know change in our present, then we must be ready to change. “Your sacrifice,” says one wise character, “Would have no meaning if it had no consequences.”
It is cruel to expect people to face those consequences alone. Briggs has companions, people who point the way through the process and hold his hand while he does the work. When we consider the people we hope will change, are we willing to hold their hand, too? It is a challenge and an invitation. None of us needs to face our consequences alone.
*Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
