Glenn Beck’s THE CHRISTMAS SWEATER – a review
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with such holiday classics as It’s a Wonderful Life, Wal-Mart’s annual Black Friday trampling and my weird Uncle Barry’s frottage-enhanced back rubs we find Glenn Beck’s “feel-good-errific” The Christmas Sweater. First a book, then a one-man-show, and now a theatrical simulcast of the aforementioned one-man-show-cum-infomercial care of Fathom Events, Beck’s entry into the Christmas cannon has touched the lives of literally thousands of white, old, morbidly obese Americans in search of something vaguely uplifting yet entirely lacking in substance or meaning. Which is how I, being one such searcher, found myself at Burbank’s AMC Theatre this evening, where an encore showing of The Christmas Sweater (aka The Road to Redemption) was due to grace the silver screen.
At first I was reluctant to plunk down eighteen dollars for the privilege of watching a sweat-drenched Beck running through his gamut of not one but two voice characters. What with the economy in shambles and all, and I having lost my job at the mill, and a lung to the cancer, that eighteen dollars could’ve just as easily been spent on formula for the twins, or a Christmas present for my wife, or on a down payment for a new lung. But in hindsight I am certain that the choice I made was the right one. Fuck the twins, fuck my wife (please) and fuck Beck’s detractors: I was in need of some healin’ and The Christmas Sweater was chemotherapy for my heathen soul.
Based on true events completely fabricated by Glenn Beck, The Christmas Sweater tells of Eddie — a paunchy, balding, sweat-drenched twelve-year-old who lives with his mother. Eddie’s father died – no doubt by his own hand from the shame of having sired such an annoying effeminate twat of a son – forcing Eddie’s mother to raise the boy alone. Eddie’s mother works two jobs “to spend more time with Eddie” (?), leaving them so destitute that Eddie has to wear bread bags over his shoes (per the vernacular of my old Crip set, “ghetto galoshes”). However they’re not so poor that they can’t afford yarn, so Eddie’s mother knits him the titular sweater, putting all her heart and love and grease and a bunch of other maudlin emotions into every stitch.
Eddie, being the sort of greedy prick who might charge eighteen bucks for a simulcast of a fucking infomercial, naturally resents his mother’s sweater as it is not the bicycle he’d prayed to Jesus for. Eddie’s resentment sets in motion a hee-larious chain of events that ends in the death of his mother, leaving the noob orphan to live on a farm with his grandparents who both sound just like Gabby Hayes. Oh, and as it turns out the bicycle he’d traded his mother’s life for had been waiting for him in his grandparents’ barn all along. Guess yours is not only a cruel god but one with a taste for irony, Eddie.
In the farmhouse next door there lives a kindly old pedophile named Russell. Russell also sounds just like Gabby Hayes, but he also bends over when he talks and speaks entirely in metaphor. When Eddie first meets Russell he is seducing a horse by telling the horse that he loves it. Russell eventually fucks the horse, or so we assume, leaving Eddie to stew in existential ennui until he decides to run away. Eddie winds up in a corn field which leads him to a broken road where a menacing, black, socialist storm looms on the horizon. Eddie starts weeping uncontrollably until Russell magically appears to coax him into the storm and rape him repeatedly. As they emerge from the rape-storm Eddie finds his world has transformed into a Technicolor utopia where the colors seem to be alive, and everything is “white.” Eddie wakes up to the smell of pancakes and discovers that “it was all a dream,” turning Glenn Beck’s lattice of fabrications into an accidental-genius work of post modern meta-bullshit.
What was not a dream, however, was the underlying message: Buy Glenn Beck’s book. Glenn subtly reminds us of this over and over as he drags out real (and real overweight) people who’ve suffered actual tragedies – not bullshit ones like those detailed in Glenn Beck’s fucking sweater parable – and who for whatever reason found Beck’s book more helpful in dealing with their hardships than the assortment of more affordably-priced Hallmark cards delivering essentially the same message, minus all the sweat, and for a fraction of the cost. But let us get back to the sweat. Through the entirety of Glenn Beck’s performance there is liquid spewing from every pour of his body; a mélange of perspiration, tears, urine, canola oil and Old Spice cologne that enshrouds him like a watery husk as he curls himself into the fetal position whilst an obese black woman sings faux gospel ditties with a soul normally reserved for karaoke night at the Winnipeg Hilton. The various substances leaking through his epidermis required Beck to change shirts no less than 400 times; you could clothe an entire sub-Saharan nation in the pile of discarded oversized tee-shirts and thermals left to rot in the acid-bath of Glenn’s body-water. In summation, The Christmas Sweater was the best Star Wars movie ever, a heart-warming and ultimately meaningless parable of redemption and love and hope and family and whatever the fuck else it is you semi-literate Republicans want to read about. Oh, and buy Glenn’s book. He needs the money more than you.
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