I’m going to be a little sneaky here and double-post because I have so much to say about Galbraith’s article. This post is about her reading of The Polar Express; later on I’ll post some thoughts about her broader discussion of emancipatory child studies (which blew my mind).

I think Galbraith’s one misstep in this fabulous article is her reading of The Polar Express. I agree that the image of masses of identically-clothed elves gathered to greet Santa does resemble a Nazi rally, but it also resembles a rock concert, a royal wedding, and an Obama campaign rally. Galbraith might object that the fact that the elves are all dressed in one color resonates with uniformed Nazis and distinguishes them from these other kinds of democratic assemblies, but consider the popularity of matching event t-shirts distributed at fundraisers, or the wearing of pink at the Avon breast cancer walk. Or Santacon, for that matter. These communities aren’t perfect and suffer plenty of valid critique, but it seems like a stretch to accuse them—and the elves—of being Nazi-esque for assembling en monochromatic masse.

My second quibble with Galbraith is that Chris Van Allsburg was born in Michigan in 1949, so he certainly wasn’t attending any Nazi jubilees during his childhood or adolescence. But what about his family? Even if we humor Galbraith and hypothesize that Van Allsburg’s parents were German immigrants who raised him on a steady diet of their fond childhood memories of Nazi Youth rallies, what are the odds that these vicarious memories inspired Van Allsburg when he had direct access to the many powerful mass assemblies of 1960s America? Why can’t we point out Santa’s resonance with rock stars and civil rights leaders instead of Hitler? Moreover, would we say that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the performers at Woodstock were fŭher-like because huge crowds gathered to listen to and venerate them?

Galbraith claims that Polar Express resonates with “the imagery of a Nazi Youth rally” in part because “a lonely and yearning child travels by magical night train through a Northern European folktale/operatic landscape.” Doesn’t that also describe Harry Potter aboard the Hogwarts Express, complete with uniforms and the intention to see a Great Man, Dumbledore (and the hope to curry favor with him)? Yet Vauldemort, not Dumbledore, is the charismatic leader with genocidal interests. The Nazis simply cannot have the monopoly on magic train imagery. Magic trains are conducive to a liminal, otherworldly atmosphere; my personal favorite magic train might be the one Chihiro rides in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which also offers a very clear counterpoint to the argument that trains inherently serve as emblems of industrialization and its decay. There is something emancipatory about the notion of train travel, especially for a child; it has something to do with the fixedness of the stations and schedules, and comforting anonymity of getting on and off without one’s presence affecting the train’s movements or agendas. It also feels, subjectively, very safe and free of traffic and the possibility of collisions; there is none of the free-floating anxiety or unpredictability of air or motor travel. But perhaps above all there is something thrilling about an endless network of train tracks that can go far beyond the horizon of the unknown via a very familiar, safe-feeling, and comforting mode of transit. It would be a shame to write off magic trains as Nazi images.

I also do not accept that travelling through the “Northern European folktale/operatic landscape” must resonate with Nazi imagery. The train climbs “a mountain so high it seemed it would scrape the moon” and crosses a “polar desert of ice.” While that does indeed sound like the sort of fairy tale landscape that the Nazis coopted for their own propaganda, I’m reminded of Percy Shelley’s anxiety about the vulnerability of poetic images to perversion, and his injunction to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of retiring these images permanently for such contaminating associations, we should reclaim and rehabilitate them, perhaps as images of the Romantic sublime, for example. Whenever a particular aesthetic becomes firmly associated with a movement, the aesthetic and the movement risk damage to the other, and sometimes for no good reason. For example, until recent efforts to rehabilitate the aesthetics of the environmental movement, “going green” was so firmly associated with hippie aesthetics, people could hardly recycle without worrying their neighbors would see them as tie-dye wearing, unwashed stoners. On the flip side, the negative associations of so many kinds of aesthetics have left us with the whitewashed minimalism of modern design for the last sixty or seventy years, as though retaining the more ornamental aesthetics of the past would somehow perpetuate the social problems of earlier eras as well.

Next, there is the matter of Polar Express’s reference to the factories at the North Pole, which could be construed as glorification of industry, another Nazi red flag. But the factories also serve a greater, less political purpose as bridges between the impossible logistics of the highly figurative Santa Claus fantasy and the more literal fantasy of Santa’s functioning in accordance with the laws of physics. Obviously, even if Santa had the vastest army of elves and unlimited access to the most advanced technology, he still couldn’t distribute toys to all the boys and girls (leaving aside, for the moment, the also-obvious fact that the majority of children are not Santa-believers) in accordance with their personal wishes and surveillance intel as to naughtiness or niceness; on this, I believe, we can all agree. The industrialized version of the fantasy is still a fantasy; it’s just a different kind of fantasy—one that can perhaps temporarily stave off an older child’s skepticism about the logistics of a pre-industrial North Pole, but which also begins to introduce some of the problematic social realities that lie beneath the fantasy without ramming them down the child’s throat. The book doesn’t develop this much, but the inordinately creepy film adaptation of Polar Express portrays the North Pole’s toy factories as sinister and dangerous places where one clumsy slip could cost a child his life. Isn’t this a gentle but firm introduction to the reality that most toys are produced in sinister, dangerous third-world factories by oppressed workers? The elves aren’t Nazis so much as quasi-enslaved factory workers. Moreover, the children arriving on the Polar Express aren’t new recruits bound to join the ranks of the elves; the children are mere tourists on a temporary visit to the North Pole. The elves, on the other hand, are Santa’s permanent laborers; nothing suggests their ability to board the train back to civilization or the availability of any means of crossing the “polar desert” in which they are stranded in their labors. In the film adaptation, elves speak to the children in a particularly ominous way that suggests significant resentment against these privileged beneficiaries of their labor. It’s a far cry from a heavy-handed Marxist message, but still, the film and even the book plant the seeds of the ideas that toys are not made by happy elves in cozy pre-industrial workshops.

One last point about Galbraith and Polar Express: Galbraith presumably objects as anti-emancipatory to the narrative of a lonely child “chosen out of a crowd for a special gift from a powerful and charismatic adult,” and I agree with this to an extent. But the gift and its presentation are merely rewards for the story’s precipitating action: the boy’s choice to get on the train. The story is telling us that sometimes opportunities and adventures come along in life and yield their rewards only to those who actively choose to grab them. For the young, such opportunities often appear via those who are older and more financially, socially, or professionally established in the world of adults. The book (and the film) take care to emphasize the boy’s agency; the conductor tells him he doesn’t have to board the train. (Of course, if the train conductor turned out to be a molester luring the boy into his vehicle with promises of Santa Claus, we would have a very different story.) Perhaps that’s the other reason why the mode of transit must be a train, which always remains an open, public space and thus precludes the privacy required by contemporary predators (and yet another reason why the Nazis cannot have train imagery). But the point is that even if the reward is bestowed by a “great man,” the principle choice is still the boy’s. There is also some emancipatory potential in the fact that the opportunity does not arrive through any mainstream or normative channels; again, it’s a magic train, and the conductor is not an authority figure from the child’s life. The boy ventures outside of the familiar, normative, highly regulated environment in which he dwells, which strikes me as a grab at freedom.