THE SELF IS, OF COURSE, OBSERVED:

Miracle on 34th Street (1947) is the finest cinematic exploration of the commercialization of Christmas. The central story is that Kris Kringle, a man who looks like and believes he is Santa Claus, is hired to play Santa Claus at Macy's department store. When it is revealed that he believes he is the real Santa Claus, Kris must defend his sanity in court.

Rather than condemn commercialization, Miracle on 34th Street recognizes that Christmas and commercialism are like milk and cookies--you can't have one without the other. It pragmatically accepts commercialism as a part of the celebration of Christmas in America. Gift giving requires a marketplace. Kris is not opposed to working for a department store in which the prime purpose of having children visit Santa is so that moms and dads will buy things while they are there. He is highly knowledgeable of the toy market. He knows where and for how much toys are sold. As if to drive home the point, Kris sings the nursery rhyme "To Market, To Market" to Susan (played by a young Natalie Wood). Insofar as markets are where toys are bought and sold, Kris accepts them as useful and a legitimate part of Christmas festivities.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville explains that the American morality is the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood. Enlightened selfishness motivates Americans to be honest and self-restrained, for they know that these virtues are the surest way to get what one wants from others. Americans, Tocqueville observes, love to praise how their self-interest produces the common good.

Nevertheless, Tocqueville sees evidence of Americans giving themselves over to "unreflective" impulses of goodwill towards others. Americans are, as he says, better than they say. They demonstrate through their actions not their words sincere self-forgetting behavior.

Miracle on 34th Street explores how calculated self-interest can ameliorate some of the worst tendencies of commercialism. Self-interest rightly understood does what Tocqueville says. Yet, self-interest also provides "cover" for characters to act on more noble grounds. Characters makes decisions that require loyalty and resolve that go beyond mere self-interest.

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