Unfortunately, I’ve been away from a computer, and fear this is a dead thread, so I’ll just gesture towards the kinds of elements that made me enjoy the film, even though I have no interest in guns or Norman Rockwell.

“violent boys-will-be-boyshood”

OK, yes, the movie has a scene where Ralphie fights back against a bully, and his mother protects him from being punished for it. It seems to me that fighting back against physical assaults is the sort of thing that you and I might consider reasonable. Bullying is treated with a bizarre tolerance that comes directly from patriarchal notions of hierarchy and the value of intimidation.

Furthermore, the scene where the bully and the toady are punching each other leads to the toady rubbing his shoulder in genuine pain. So much for the “playfulness” of violence.

“consumerism”

One of the funniest scenes in the film involves Ralphie using his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring to uncover the message, “REMEMBER TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE.” He says, in response, “A crummy commercial?”

Certainly the father is valorized for buying his son the air rifle. At the same time, the point of the decoder ring scene (as well as the final scene with the broken glasses) is that a child learns about the world partly by having a certain amount of freedom to make mistakes, including the mistake of consumerism. Ralphie is continually satirized for repeating the exact language of the air rifle advertisement. (That’s why he gets a C on his writing assignment, even though one doesn’t sympathize with the moralizing teacher.) His dream of protecting his family from some imagined pack of villains is just that — a dream. The alternative, forbidding everything, puts the child in an impossible situation.

A lot of the things you describe as brutal realities of the holiday — decorations going awry, isolation, and so forth — are right there in the movie. Think of Flick getting stuck to the pole and being left behind to suffer. Think of the family forced to have Christmas dinner at a restaurant.

The fact that the film maintains a tone of compassionate amusement does not make its critique any less memorable. I could imagine having a wonderful conversation with a child about the dismembered female body in the lamp scene, or a discussion about male privilege beginning with the line “my mother had not had a hot meal in over fifteen years.”

The portrayal of a set of characters does not equal a total identification of the film’s “message” with the ideas of those characters. And no good work of art thrives on an icy absence of understanding of desire (e.g. Ralphie’s consumer desire), even if it ultimately calls those desires into question.

Oh, sorry — I got distracted by the food. I’ve always hated “A Christmas Story,” too. Especially the men-act-like-buffoons-and-the-savvy-ladies-quietly-rule-behind-the-scenes schtick.

Worse than the schtick is having a dude come in here and tell us that the schtick = some kind of triumph of feminism.

“it pretends to be dark and transgressive”

In what universe?