I adore The Nightmare before Christmas. Unlike almost every other animated kids' movie since 1991's Aladdin, there are no contrieved attempts at annoying comic relief characters, the story is maddeningly original, the visual aesthetic never gets old, and the songs are beautiful. As that holiday, definately one of the my favorites, as I endorsed in a poem recently, rolls near us, I started watching the film again. I realized something a little peculiar that I hadden't before, what is the cosmology of this fictional universe? Does Halloweentown, Christmastown, (and the other holiday towns) all reside in the same world? Where is the normal world, where Jack attempts to unsucessfully deliver toys? After some thought, I realized that The Nightmare before Christmas is a profoundly religious film, with a worldview rooted in the melding of Aristrotelian and Neoplatonic ideas such as the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Halloweentown is not a spacio-temporal place in the way the normal world is, rather it exists in the mind of God as the perfect representation of the spirit of Halloween, much like Plato's World of the Forms. The residents of Halloweentown, as spiritual creatures, are capible of transcending into the reality of the normal world, specifically to scare people on halloween and other occasions. St. Thomas Aquinas noted that all beings originate from God with a teleology (a purpose) which they are meant to fufil as they then return back to God. Because these spiritual creatures are like the angels, they are almost perfect in fufilling their task of scaring people. Scaring people is not a sinful task, but rather a noble one, as it is established in the opening song that "Life's no fun without a good scare." On a more national level, one might argue that the prophet Amos' condemnations of invasion from Assyria (which proved to be correct) were meant to "scare" Israel back to following the laws of God after a long period of unjustice. The residents of Halloweentown are spiritual creatures fufiling a spiritual task that includes gaining tangible form.
Jack, the doubting angel, is strugging with fufiling his teleology. When Jack enters the door into Christmastown, he is entering a portal to another location in this "World of the Forms," into another place in the immaterial mind of God where the perfect spirit of Christmas exists.
Returning to Halloweentown, Jack is excited, and the rest of Halloweentown attempts to mimic Christmas, but instead they create a warped version of the holiday. This is most likely because they are forms, they are incapible of becoming what they are not. Still, Jack enters the normal world unsucessfully, and gets shot down by the military after delievering horrifying presents to children.
It needs to be pointed out that Jack dressed as Santa Claus perfectly reflects another important idea in the Thomist system. St. Thomas Aquinas adapted Aristrotelian concept of essence versus existence. Existence is for an object to be there in space and time. Essence is that which makes the object the object. There is that element of "dog" that makes all dogs be recognized as a dog, despite many different colors, breeds, etc. Essense is within an object. As Jack wears Santa's red coat and a fake beard, be does not become Santa, because Jack's essense as a spiritual creature of Halloween does not change.
After being shot out of the sky, Jack comes to in the arms of an angel statue, a piece of symbolism demonstrating both his redemption and the place as a spiritual creature himself, he comes to terms with the teleology of his existance: to BE the essence of Halloween. Afterward, he rescues Santa Claus, who then enters the normal world from his place in the mind of God in order to correct the wrongdoing. Jack's question ultimently was not in vain, as he found the girl, and regained a sense of direction in his existance. Meanwhile, St. Thomas would be happy to know that it was a skeleton, not an angel, that could danced on the head of pin.
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