He also has especially red lips, a feminine-shaped face, and eyelashes any doll in Santa’s workshop would be jealous of. There he runs into Hermey - the only elf with any hair, and it’s a flamboyant blond wave. Rudolph can’t take it anymore and heads off into the wilderness to live alone. It’s almost as if Santa is a church elder trying to force Rudolph into conversion therapy. Santa even goes so far as to tell Donner that he should be ashamed of his son and try to change him. This is the closet of Rudolph’s parents devising, which he goes along with thanks to the internalized homophobia that he inherited from both his father and Santa, the superego of the North Pole, who is equally distressed by Rudolph’s difference. “For a year the Donner family did a good job hiding Rudolph’s - non-conformity,” the narrator tells us, pausing slightly before landing on the right euphemism. His father doesn’t care how uncomfortable it makes him - he is going to play reindeer games with the other boys just like he’s supposed to. Rudolph goes along with his parents’ wishes and wears a black cap on his nose when he goes out to meet the rest of the reindeer for the first time. Rudolph is born to Donner, who immediately hates his son’s red nose and thinks that something so different will keep him from leading a heterosexual life where he pulls Santa’s sleigh and marries a nice doe someday. The elves, identical in shape and apparel, are at work on Santa’s toys, the boys wearing blue and the girls wearing pink. Claus does all the cooking and nags her husband about not eating enough.
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The film starts in the North Pole, where traditional gender roles are quickly reinforced. Anyone who even knows what Queer Theory is can tell you that the subtext of the narrative seems to be a pre-Stonewall contemplation of the power of coming out and embracing sexual minorities into society at large. I mean, just look at it: Rudolph is totally, absolutely, 100 percent, Neil-Patrick-Harris-French-kissing-Ricky-Martin gay. There is the suffocating consumerist melancholy of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the existential dread of a magical friend’s impending death in Frosty the Snowman, and the political allegory of Heat Miser’s rise to power that is A Year Without a Santa Clause.īut nothing, absolutely nothing, is changed with a close, analytical reading of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the 1964 stop-motion special. Thinking back on the children’s Christmas specials of yore with an adult frame of reference can be a little bit dizzying.