This article is part of The Twelve Days of Doofmas, a daily series of articles on our favorite Christmas films that was released as Bonus Content leading up to Christmas Eve 2019.
Author’s Note: The following is not a critical review, it is a thought experiment. It should not be used as a guideline or example of good criticism.
Editor’s Note: I disagree. This is exactly what good criticism looks like.
This review/essay/whatever is about the sheer terror I felt watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000).
I get caught in my own head sometimes. A thought or observation will catch me, and like a plane stalling in the air I’ll lose speed, and fall, spiraling into that thought. I’ve learned to pull out of those, but damn did I have trouble not crashing in the first two minutes of the 2000 live-action movie How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
For those who don’t know, How the Grinch Stole Christmas is Christmas movie, based on a children’s book by Dr. Seuss, wherein a gross green creature, the Grinch, seeks revenge on an innocent consumerist, Christmas loving town. Along the way, the Grinch, and the town, learn the true meaning of Christmas and yadda yadda… The movie is fine, it has Jim Carrey and a cute dog and it’s about Christmas.
None of that is important. No. I want to focus all my attention on the first and last two minutes of the movie. You see, the Grinch and the entire history of Whoville take place in real life, on a snowflake.
And that’s terrifying to me.
In the first two minutes, we find and zoom into this snowflake, freshly formed in the sky. We zoom in on its surface, into the crystalline cracks, to find this spider’s web of bridges and structures, and zoom further as it expands like a fractal. Until finally, the texture of the pillars becomes snow-covered mountains and we find the one tiny section of a tiny section of a tiny section of a snowflake that contains the town of Whoville.
I’m going to ignore some of the more unnecessary “that’s not real physics” questions that come up in the story because they’re not important. Things like, “where does the day-night cycle come from?” and “how come there is only one small town on this planet-sized fractal web of forest?”
If this concept sounds familiar to you, it may be because you read or watched one of Dr. Seuss’s other stories, Horton Hears a Who. The plot of this one focuses on Horton, an elephant, who has discovered a planet of tiny sentient beings living on a tiny speck. The plot of that entire movie is Horton trying his damndest to avoid the destruction of this defenseless speck. It’s a triumph when the speck is finally placed in a secure location where those Whos can live in peace.
Except this town of Whoville is inside of a snowflake, falling from the sky. There is no Horton here. This snowflake could make it all the way from the sky to the ground intact and land somewhere safe, theoretically. However, it’s only a matter of time before the sun rises in the spring and the snowflake housing and protecting the Whos of Whoville melts.
If there is a consolation to the Whos, its that they clearly live in a bubble of accelerated time.
The main event of How the Grinch Stole Christmas takes place at the 1000th Whoville Whobilation, another word for the Christmas Celebration. This implies that the Whos have at least existed for one thousand years, although I can imagine two other interpretations of that number on their time-scale. On the lower end, it’s possible that the Whos have Whobilations more often than once a year. It might even go so far as to be once a day, as we are told that “… this Christmas marks the 1000th Whobilation,” which does nothing to dissuade the idea that every celebration isn’t a Whobilation, and that the Whos don’t celebrate every day.
On the other hand, the Grinch is at least 53 years old (that’s how long he’s been on Mt. Crumpit), and 1000 days is only about 18 years. However, we also don’t know how long Who years are, especially given we don’t know how their day/night cycle works.
All this should be considered with the fact that we don’t know how long Whoville, and by extension, the Whos, existed before they started counting their Whobilations. Were there thousands of years of evolution before the rise of the Whos? Or did they arise from the dust, fully ingrained with an understanding of American Christmas traditions?
You may be thinking “this is all well good Alexandra, we’re establishing that the Whos have existed for a long time, but you haven’t explained at all how they’re living in an accelerated timeline.” I’m getting to that.
See, the snowflake we’re shown is not resting on the ground, it’s still falling from the sky, which means we can estimate the amount of time between the creation of the snowflake and it hitting the ground that the 1000 years of who must have happened. And with that, we can determine how much faster their existence is.
According to the Chicago Tribune, a snowflake takes an average of 45 minutes to hit the ground. This is the average however, to stay conservative we’ll take a number on the lower end (and a rounder more convenient number). Snowflakes generate at about 10,000 feet in the air and fall between 1-6 feet per second. At 1 foot per second over 10,000 feet, that’s 10,000 seconds or 166 minutes, or almost 3 hours.
This is another bit of evidence affirming that the Whos are in accelerated time as the snowflake would most definitely have hit the ground by the end of the movie, which is only 105 minutes long.
Let’s assume, again to keep the numbers conservative, that the snowflake has actually almost hit the ground already. That the conclusion of the story of the Grinch takes place in the 165th earth minute of the snowflake’s fall. If the Whos have experienced 1000 who years in that time, then, after doing a bit of napkin math, we find that in every Earth minute, 6 Who years pass. We are experiencing time more than 3 million times slower than they are.
165 Earth minutes= 1000 Who years
165 Earth minutes = 525,600,000 Who minutes
1 Earth time units= 3,185,454 Who time units
Why is this relevant? To go back a bit, the snowfall doesn’t mean that the Whos are immediately doomed. They’re probably too small to be destroyed by the impact, and again, their small size may protect them from being crushed or damaged by objects moving through the snow. The snowflake’s integrity itself may be damaged, but the Whos inside may be fine. But when the snow melts… Their only hope might be to find a Horton, someone who would protect them and place them in a fridge or something.
However, because of the accelerated time, communication would likely be utterly impossible. The Whos in Horton Hears a Who are not in accelerated time as they communicate in real-time with Horton.
What hope do the Whos have? There is a chance that the Who snowflake is not falling over a rural American town as we might guess, but perhaps the Whos are falling onto a land of permafrost, where the snow lasts all through the summer. In this case, the Whos might survive, buried under a deep snowfall and eventually made into just another part of the landscape. At least until climate change ruins that too.
But what makes this all so, so much worse, is that we haven’t examined the scale of this problem. We actually have no idea how many Whos live on the Who snowflake, as we are only shown the one tiny town and no other settlements or Whos are mentioned. However, given that the rest of the snowflake is implied to be planet-size compared to the Whos, it stands to reason that it may well be populated by many more. The more pressing question, however, is just how many snowflakes have Whos on them?
I have no idea how to answer this question. There is no math to start me on this as the Who snowflake wasn’t a randomly examined snowflake but one revealed to us through the power of story. But I fear the worst-case answer. That on every snowflake, there live Whos, and that all theses Whos are damned from the moment they’re generated.
How many snowflakes does it take to decorate a mountaintop? How many dust the evergreens of Siberia? And in all those places, how many countless trillion trillions of Whos wander and live and die, ignorant of the doom of them and their planet? Do they know they aren’t alone?
When you throw a snowball, are you pulverizing billions of homes? When you salt your driveway, are you consigning generations to death? And if the Whos are newly generated onto new snowflakes, are you hoping for more doomed lives to be generated when you pray for a white Christmas?
How the Grinch Stole Christmas was, in actuality, about none of this. But I can’t stop thinking about it. How many souls live on a snowflake?
I can’t stop thinking about what I did the last time it snowed. The soft, cool taste of a snowflake, melting on my tongue. It won’t let me go.
When the cold wind whispers, does it scream?
-Alexandra
