The best film version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is the version made in ARSH 1951 starring Alastair Sim as everyone’s favorite Diabolical Narcissist usurious Jew, Ebeneezer Scrooge.
The Scrooge character is a classic DN. He is a cerebral narcissist – highly successful in his profession, a miser, caring for nothing but “his work”, sitting alone in his room every night, lovelessly single, devoid of human empathy, haughty, critical and disdainful of everyone and everything, looking down on and actively resentful of normal, loving people – embodied by his clark, whom he psychologically abuses, Bob Cratchit, and his family. Love, joy, gratitude and generosity disgust and enrage Scrooge. He hates occasions of happiness, and actively seeks to disrupt and destroy them, especially holidays. The people around him walk on eggshells to his face – but either pity or dislike him behind his back. In the “Ghost of Christmas Future” act, Scrooge is genuinely surprised to discover that almost everyone is glad that he is dead – the exception being Bob Cratchit himself, the most direct recipient of Scrooge’s abuse. Bob Cratchit is thus a metaphor for Christ.
The reason why “A Christmas Carol” is so compelling is because the healing of Scrooge from Diabolical Narcissism is, basically, a miracle. We love to watch the story unfold because it is such a beautiful and hopeful story. And so rare. And, you do realize that the implication at the end is that because of the Christian Cratchet family, Scrooge converts to Christianity, right? “And it was always said that he knew how to keep Christmas well….”
But, what I want to show you is the scene in which Scrooge becomes a Diabolical Narcissist. It is very clearly depicted in the “Ghost of Christmas Past” act. Up until that point, Scrooge has revisited his pre-DN youth, although it is revealed that Ebeneezer’s father was cruel towards him because he blamed him for the death of Ebeneezer’s mother. Ebeneezer had a beautiful girlfriend, Alice, to whom he even gave a ring, declaring, “Oh dearest Alice! If ever I have a change of heart towards you, it will be because my heart has ceased to beat!” Well – sort of, as it turned out.
Ebeneezer makes the conscious decision to purge all love from his heart upon the death, in childbirth, of his sister Fan. At her death bed, after she loses consciousness, Scrooge rises and as he is walking away, Fan’s newborn son cries out from his crib. Scrooge stops, looks at the child with rage in his heart, and in that moment – and you can see it clearly – makes the conscious decision to NEVER LOVE ANYONE OR ANYTHING EVER AGAIN.
And that’s it.
The interesting thing about Scrooge is that he chose Diabolical Narcissism when he was in his 20’s. The older a person is when they descend, the “easier” it is to come out of Diabolical Narcissism. But it is still a miracle. For those poor souls who descended into DN as children, the odds against them are heavily stacked. But even then, children who descended into DN due to abuse (usually sexual abuse), at least have the ability to recognize the damage that was done to them, and that they were a pure victim of. The DNs that are the most deeply ingrained, and most profoundly loveless, and for whom miraculous, supernatural intervention is required, are the DNs that were not abused in the conventional sense, but rather deified as children, and thus chose to purge themselves of love in order to “live up” to the hype of their own superiority and “otherness” fed to them by their parents and/or teachers.
Sit in stillness with that. Do you realize that our entire education system and youth culture revolves around the deification of the child, and has for decades now? And THAT is the toughest genesis of Diabolical Narcissism to break.
Anyway, here is “Scrooge”, perfect viewing on Christmas Eve night, before heading out to Midnight Mass. The deathbed scene begins at 32:22. The exact moment when Scrooge becomes a DN is at 33:40. In that moment he says internally, “That’s it. I will not love.” And the ensuing decades are needless tragedy and waste….