Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, as the holiday season begins, Tim DeRoche makes his case for why ‘Gremlins’ isn’t just a classic Christmas movie; it’s a prophetic critique of the modern West.
Last year, I sat down to watch the movie Gremlins (1984) with my 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son. It isn’t a kids’ movie. But I was excited to show it to them anyway. A favorite from my childhood, the film seems to drip with a kind of gleeful mischief that contrasts quite nicely with the saccharine commercialism of the typical Christmas movie.
The early returns were quite positive. They absolutely loved the cuddly, cooing mogwai—a small, magical creature—that Rand Peltzer, a struggling inventor, gives to his son, Billy, as an early Christmas present. But things got a bit hairy, so to speak, when the mogwai started multiplying and transforming into many little green gremlins that wreak havoc on the small, fictional town of Kingston Falls, Pennsylvania.
