Deconstructing the Grinch

This is another one that I feel like I watched and read it so many times as a child, and then you know, and then it's just all over pop culture. And then they made that movie. The less that's said about the better, But still people are not that movie is old enough now that people are nostalgic about it. That's noting like that films like over a decade old now the gym Carey, But for me it was all

ways the old animated version. The head boars karlof yeah in it and in the book itself by the good uh Dr Seuss, Yeah, The Grinch She Stole Christmas is a great literary classic. In the song You're Mean when Mr Grinch performed by Thorle ravens Croft. Yeah, not Boris Karlaf some people mistake did the voice of the and yeah, and in fact Thorle ravens Croft also did the voice for Tony the Tiger. But we bring it all up because this is just great fodder. Great, yes, great fodder

to deconstruct the Grinch. That's our aim today, to find out what makes him tick mentally and physically, and also find out why he's so obsessed with stopping Christmas from coming to Ville. Indeed, you know, the basic scenario is, uh, it's it's very much like Scrooge in a sense, you know, the commugon ly old critter who who learns the true meaning of Christmas and has a big change of heart. You know, it's a reduntion story and all that, um.

But in the meantime, can't be bothered with all those do goods and merrymakers right, and just can't stand can't stand the sound of them, can't stand the idea that they are down there, and decides, well, I'm just gonna steal their Christmas. I'll take it away. I'll go down there, I'll dress the Santa Claus, I'll take everything out of their houses. Their presence, their food, there, the decorations on

the walls, Like he just completely ravages their culture. That's his, his thing, and then he's going to destroy it all. But then something happens. He has an epiphany, and we'll get to that. There is another character that we're like, how did he get to that epiphany? Um? First though, let's take a look at what the Grinch looks like, I mean with his actual physical characteristics. As we're talking about a green fur clad primate. Yeah, yeah, some sort

of bipedal critter. Now, I I do have questions about his primate status because the the world that we encounter in the Grinch, uh, the who despec is, is filled with creatures that are just run straight out of our world. There's a dog, you know, there are mice, but then you have the primary resident seemed to be the Who's who haven't who are bipeds as well, but they have antenna.

The Grinch doesn't have antenna, but I will know that he has very animated eyebrows and these two kind of horns of hair, which leads me to believe that they might be antenna. They're simply covered in hair that's just a loose theory. That's true, it's hard to tell. I saw that little mop. I kept staring at that little mom trying to figure out because what could it be. In the animated version, there's that great scene where he gets the idea, uh, and he smiles and it's the

most devious smile ever brought to the moving picture. Now, from the Whoville Wikipedia, it states that the grinch is known to be of a different species than the who's being stated as a what. And moreover, in the story, the grinch is described as being as strong as ten grinches plus two, implying that perhaps a grinch is its own species. To who's call him of what? How very how? How very alienating of them to do that to to who it's who? It's tied up with your identity, right

and what? That's very dehumanizing. Well, keep a handle on that, because I feel like this will become important discussion fodder, uh, for when we talk about epiphanies. Now, the grinch is constitution, as we all know, super grumpy, antisocial, neurotic, aggressive, depressive, you could even say, vindictive, and possibly even fulfilling a neurotic need for power by exploiting his companion Max the dog. Yeah, the relationship between the Grinch and max Is is perhaps

a little borderline abuse of at times. But but but he's a you know, it's a service animal. That's that's that's that's animal. Yeah. I don't see anything on there that says do not pet. Well, it's implied, you know, the horn on the head, positioning in the front of the sway like clearly. Uh, you know, the Grinch sees this as an animal that aids him in his endeavors.

He makes a great foil, does now The image of the Grinch in that cave on a mantaintop really brings to mind a jetty or better yet another creature and I'm talking about from the epic tale bail Wolf. Yes, uh, this is this is something I just keep thinking about this Christmas season. I never thought of it before, but

it it's it comes up every now and then. We're not the first people to to talk about Grindel and Grinch as very similar entities, because you have one that's a cave dwelling monster that haunts the Danish moors, and the other lives within the microcosm of the hood despec one taliens in bloodshed, the other in Christmas Cheer. But both stories concern a loan outside or a to quote the words of authored John Gardner, who who wrote the book Grindel, which is the story of Baowulf and Grendel.

From Grendel's perspective, uh, the creature is quote a shadow shooter and earth room roamer, a walker of the world's weird wall, a perpetual outsider that is uh, that's barely even a part of the the world of man, or in this case, the world of the Who's Yeah, there's

a sense of suffering there. And according to Courtney che writing for Humanities three sixty, she says the first and most apparent similarity between Grendel and the Grench other names both begin with a sound Grin the Online Etymology Dictionary states that the Old English word grenian means to show the teeth in pain or anger, and an old Norse the word crena means to howl indeed, uh And and you know, in both cases the creature is is just

really irritated by the noise and the grinch and the noise, the noise, the noise, and in bow will fuh it is written, then the mighty war spirit endured for a season, bore it bitterly, he who bided in darkness. That lighthearted laughter aloud in the building greeted him daily. There was dulcet heart music, clear song of the singer. And uh. And so Grendel sets out to attack uh the mead hall of Herod and uh and it's important to know that the mead hall here is the center of Danish culture. Like,

he's striking at the heart of the Dames. He's striking at their merriam. And he's starting at the He's striking at the glue that holds them together through the dark winter. Right and uh and and the Grinch is doing much the same thing. He is striking at their Christmas. He's striking at their their central belief and their central um, the very heart of their culture. Yes, there's a merriment, right,

there's the feasting. And when he attacks them, Grendel, they are asleep from their feasting nuts, unlike the Who's who lay a snooze exactly. Um. But it had had Cindy, had Cindy lou Dane woken up and wandered into the meat hall, she would have met with a very different fate. She would just be gulped down. There will be no discussion. Oh yes, torn apart. Now, the biggest difference, of course, is that Grenville's vengeance and hatred makes them incapable of

connecting with anyone else. Right, He's got different motivations too, Yeah, and some other issues I think too, don't we all Yeah, And also I'm you know, theo Wolf is a bit of a jerk. Well, yeah, so it's not like the Danes are not doing a great job of reaching out to Grenville, right, and so he's not going to have that epiphany like the Grinch. R. Yeah. But nonetheless, there are so many similarities between the two you can't help

but mention them. Indeed, Yes, and I would love to see, uh, some sort of adaptation that combines these two in a in a more festive manner. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break on that note, and when we come back, we're going to discuss the physiology of the because we know at least one crucial thing about it. All right, we're back. We're back. And one of the distinguishing physiological features of the Grinch is of course that his heart is two sizes too small. Yes, and this seems to

be both a physical and figurative situation. For the most part, from what we can tell, we have a little X ray that comes into frame and shows you that the heart is is literally too small, and also his love for his uh, his fellow creature seems to be somewhat lacking as well. Indeed, so we look to the human world to try to explain some of the reasons why this may be so, at least on the physical level. Yeah, now, I do want to say one quick thing about why

it is definitely a problem. Because the grinch is living at a very high altitude, right and uh, and so he's living in a glow oxygen environment. So if he if his species, if you will truly evolve to throw I have at high altitudes, then that species would boast slower development, delayed maturity, greater lung volume, and a larger heart. Has pointed out in the book Essentials of Physical Anthropology, we find all four of these attributes in lifelong high

altitude human residents. So his heart is too small for his environment. Well, especially if you consider that the grinch and the Who's evolved convergently with one another, as possible that the grinch has a heart that is really better adapted to um higher levels of oxygen, which would find on the ground right right, So it's it's hard to

tell where this is coming from. It could be maybe the Grinch is actually at lower levels of altitude, but now as an outsider has decided to live on this mountaintop and therefore doubt by the Who's, Yes, he's been excommunicated by the Who's and now here he is with his heart. She size is too small to deal with a lack of oxygen the high altitudes. It's okay, I like this theory, and it plays into some other arguments they're gonna make later in the podcast concerning the origins

of the Grinch. But another idea, maybe that's not a Grench heart in his chest. Maybe it is a whole heart. Because in in, indeed, when it comes to you a human heart transplant, transplantation UM underside replatement, replacements are are certainly an issue of concern because you you know, when it when it comes to heart availability, you're not always able to match up everything perfectly. You know, you're you're matching across genders, um, you know, ultimately across different people.

So sometimes the heart is a is a bit smaller than it would ideally be for that chest cavity. Yeah, and what you're describing is actually called the Grinch syndrome. In some cases it is a postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. And it sounds like one of the things that Who gets on Christmas Morning one of the instruments. It is actually um and most patients have a heart that is indeed two sizes too small. And this effects about five

hundred thousand Americans, primarily young women. So again, this is something that is really taken into consideration when you are looking at donors. So if this were the case, Uh, you could imagine that in all that junk up there in the mountain, on the top of Mount Crumpet. Uh, perhaps the Grinch has some sort of automated surgical theater that performed this procedure once upon a time. And why not, I mean, he has a sewing machine. It's true. It's true.

Perhaps Max has has a skill set that we were just not privy to in the book or in the film, or or perhaps the Who's did it themselves before they shunned him and pushed him up to the top of a mountain. In any case, you put someone up there with a heart that's much too small for that altitude. You're gonna get some dizziness, You're gonna get some very unclear thinking, You're gonna get a lot of crappiness. Yeah, it's going to definitely, I think contribute to his his

ill demeanor. Indeed, now not laud is known about his actual ears. Um. Perhaps they're situated underneath all of that that for the cladding his body. But it could be that he's just highly sensitive to noise. And we know that the human ear canal actually amplifies noises in the

range of two thousand to five thousand hurts um. So that's why I like things like knives, scraping plates, or nails on a chalkboard are so terrible sounding, because they inhabit that range and they kind of ricochet around in the ear canal. So could it be that all that merriment, all all of that singing is occupying that same space. It could be it's hitting the sweet spot for him, or the spot as it were. Well, the noise, noise, noise,

that's the one thing he hated. Yeah, yeah, and that's ultimately, I mean, that's that's what makes him decide, Hey, I'm gonna go down there and I'm going to cut this noise out, all those fancy bells and whistles they get Christmas morning, I'm going to take rid of to take care of that. And that's ing may do. There's gonna be no cause for that either, because I'm stealing everything

that's right. Because when I am perched atop my mountain, particularly on the edge, and I'm really like leaning down to here, I know that sound is reflecting off of really hard surfaces like rock, water, or ice. And I'm that grinch and I'm mad about this. And that's to say nothing about what's going on inside that cave. Indeed, if you think of the ear canal as as amplifying sound, essentially the cave that the that the Grinch is in

is another ear canal. It is, I mean, because if you you look at it, there's hard surfaces that are surrounding the Grinch, perfect for amplifying sounds, since any noise that would appear to enter the cave or that was made inside of it would bounce off the cave walls and it would be picked up by the ears. And in this sense, there's a twin to each noise a kind of shadow noise, and this gets into a really

interesting area of research called arco acoustics. UM. One of the main guys behind all of this is a US researchers, Steven Waller, Uh, and he's looked extensively at at Lascaux caves in France, these ancient caves, cave art on the sides, you know, animals, that that kind of thing, and he believes that the echoes of ritual clapping outside of those caves would have sounded like hundreds of hoofs drumming on

the ground. So he thinks that the the the design of the caves, the positioning of the art, all of that, um is orchestrated with the sound amplification in mind. Yeah, these kind of sound illusions that come from it. And we were talking earlier, You think that perhaps the hooves might be behind this. Yes, yeah, it does make me think that. Um. You know, Weller pointed out quote ancient mythology explains echoes from the mouths of caves as replies

from spirits. Our ancestors may have made cave paintings in response to these echoes and their belief that echo spirits inhabited rocky places such as caves or canyons. Uh. So, taking this thinking about the Grinch, thinking about the Grinch is a creature that has been shunned and even placed there by the Who's Perhaps they also created this cave so that whoever's occupying that create that cave, whoever is the Grinch, will steadily be driven mad by the amplified

sounds of merriment far below. Um and and i'll and i'll, I'll talk more about this as we we progress, but it's all part of my theory that the grinch um has an important, crucial even role to play, uh annual role to play in the culture of the Who's Well. And in this sense, he's kind of like the cramp Us that the anti clause, right, So we'll talk about this a little bit more in the epiphanes Um discussion. But what I think is interesting is here he is

sequestered away, completely isolated. Perhaps um he is experiencing these sound illusions and going a little bit mad from it. Now, the isolation aspect of this, I think is a really big deal. Um, we should take a quick break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about Grinch on his only mountain top. All right, we're back. So there's the Grinch up in his cave up the mount Crumpet,

far far, far from the who civilization down below. Um, it would seem that he isn't you know, he would be in a very splendid uh area of isolation, that he would be far from from any of the sounds

that might bother him. No, not at all. We we tend to think that we talked about this in our episode Splendid Isolation, this idea that if you could just get some quiet and isolation, and maybe you could even live like one year completely isolated, that you could finally sort of unwind and let you the flowers of your brain bloom. But no, what happens is that those flowers get all sort of choked together and die off because you're not having those sort of connections with people and

associations that you need that your brain craves. Yeah, I mean, you end up talking to a dog, dressing like Santa Claus and and breaking into houses. Indeed, according to researcher John Caciopo at the University of Chicago, of all people are unhappy because of social isolation at any given moment.

So he wanted to know, Hey, what's going on in the minds of these folks who are isolated and they're unhappy, And he recruited volunteers to look at some photos while undergoing f m R I. Now this is this has such an interesting twist to it. Um Some of the participants have been identified as having an acute sense of social isolation and some were just you know, healthy volunteers

that they had screened. Now, both groups viewed a series of images, some with positive connotations like happy couple doing funhappy things, and others with negative associations, such as scenes of human conflict. Now, when the two groups watched pleasant imagery, the area of the brain that recognizes rewards showed a

significantly greater response non lonely people than in lonely people. Similarly, the visual cortex of lonely subjects responded much more strongly to unpleasant images of people than to unpleasant images of objects.

This suggests that the intention of lonely people maybe especially drawn to human conflict, and that what's interesting about this is that the nominally subject showed no difference here, So it was the lonely subjects who were particularly taken with these scenes of conflict, and this this instantly brings to mind an image of someone who's isolated themselves inside of their apartment and they're just watching nothing but but cable news over and over again and yelling at it yea,

and yelling at it, just glutting themselves on conflict and engaging with the conflict and really feeling a lot of stress. Um. There's a two thousand seven study from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, and they reported that the anxiety and aggression that results from social isol a trace to altered levels of an enzyme that controls the

production of a brain hormone. The in the two enzymes in this case are needed for the production of allo pregnantoline, a brain hormone that acts to reduce stress through regulation of gabba uh, an important neuro transmitter. So the suggestion here is that increased levels of isolation, it's going to impact your ability to roll with stress and regulate your own stress on a on a on a on a neurological scale. Right, and um, one of the ways that

you might deal with stress is to communicate with others. Right, to unburden yourself. And again he does not have that luxury. Yes Max, Yes, Max, But Max seems and and and rightly so a bit reserved. Yes, Max does not speak despite being a cartoon storybook dog. He merely just rolls with the punches. Yeah. And you know, we talked about the dysfunctional families. Just would be the lost child, right, and one that receives to the shadows because he's like,

forget it. I don't want to raise the hackles of the Grinch, but you know, I think the stage is pretty well set here that you have this, this creature who is tormented UM, auditorially fermented UM and psychologically tormented and as a result, perhaps having a mental breakdown. Now, in the BBC documentary alone The Brain Century, Deprivation and Isolation,

six people were deprived of sensory input. They were essentially put in solitary confinement for about forty eight hours, and one of the findings is that at around our thirty people began to pace back and forth, and a lot of people who were looking at the footage said, this is a lot like animals in captivity. And perhaps one of the reasons why they're doing this is that they're trying to create some sort of sensory input for their brains.

Because we've talked about this before. This is one of the reasons why you can't be isolated for a long time. Your brain needs something to a non it needs a bone, and a lot of time other people are those bones. And again, if you if you have someone who has sequestered themselves in your brain, isn't getting this sort of input that it would normally get. The unconscious has very little information to play with and to mold into a story.

And that story of I. You know, we've talked about this, the me, the who I am, And that's when you begin to see some some aspects of mental breakdown sometimes because there isn't that cohesive, uh, sense of self that's bolstered by others or even mirrored by other people around you.

All Right, So the Grinch, this uh, this miserable creature, driven half mad by the merriment of the who's, finally breaks, finally snaps stresses up like Santa Claus descends down on Christmas night while the Who's are asleep in their beds, steals just about everything, even raid the refrigerator packs it all up on the sleigh, he takes it up and he's about to dump it, right, He's about to just throw it into the abyss and u and wish him a merry Christ. But he's waiting, Remember, he's waiting on

that ledge. He's waiting for them to wake up and realize that all of their little goodies have been stolen from them. Right, that's the ultimate reward, more so than just the material theft involved here. He wants to break them, to break who culture itself, and just send them into despair. The problem is, of course, is that when he's he's got his hand up to his ear and he's listening

really hard, he doesn't hear sobbing. He doesn't hear this is terrible wretching noises of broken Who's he hears his unified chorus, this beautiful lilting song that that comes up to him and makes him realize that all of his expectations have been violated. And this is what allows him, at this very moment to go in one of two ways.

Either he can have this sort of cognitive dissonance right in which his violations or his expectations are violated, and he doesn't know what to do with that, and so he doubles down on a sort of cognitive bias and tries to explain it away and say, oh no, they're

still materialists, they're still terrible. Or he can accept that there's cognitive dissonance and he can accept that there's an alternate take to the Who's and to Christmas that is not just about materialism but perhaps something more m and that makes all the difference. He has this change of heart. He brings everything back to them, He celebrates with him, He's, He's, He's brought into who culture. He's no longer an outsider, or at least for this one night, he's not an outsider,

and he joins in the feast. He cuts the roast beast for crying out loud. He does. And again, this, this, this sort of see change is all predicated on his epiphany moment that it's connections with people that matter, and that's what the Who's, uh we're celebrating when it came to Christmas. Not necessarily their stuff, but these guys Who's

do not get out of this unscathed. Right, It's easy to look at the story and say, oh, well, the Who's are such a noble people that even though all their presence and their food was gone, they still went out there, and we're happy because they're ultimately happy and good at heart. But we would argue that they felt this, they made this. This is a realization for the Who's because the Grinch told all their stuff, because the Grinch took away all the material possessions, of which they had

way too many to begin with. Yeah. According to Chad or Zell in his article on Science Blogs, how strong was the Grinch each of the thirty three who's in Whoville? We're getting about three thousand or about six thousand pounds of stuff on Christmas and Orizel basis calculations on pixels and what they might represent in terms of real world

dimensions and mass, including that that slayh um. So that would lead us to believe that maybe those who's we're just empty husks trying to stuff themselves with things before the Grinch came along and delivered uh an epiphany to them. Yeah, I think so. I mean it, you know, clearly their way over doing it. They're indulging in just rampant materialism, and then the Grinch comes takes it away and gives

them the space to realize what's important. Most So in this I would I would argue that the Grinch plays a crucial role in the Who's if not for that that Christmas, but perhaps every Christmas. Perhaps the Grinch comes every Christmas to the Who's and it's part of their their winter festival, you know, the great green god on the mountain that it comes down and takes away your your your material possessions so that you may see what's most important. So this is like the passion play for

the Who's. Yeah, like maybe, yeah, And I think so if the if the Grinch doesn't come, then you end up just drowning in your own materialism and you're you know,

freezing through the winter. And the Grinch himself might say, yes, I will participate in these festivities and pretend to be terrible and awful and and and I can recreate that epiphany that or or you take a creature and you replace its heart and you stick it into a specially designed cave on the top of the mountain so that it will play a role in your your necessary festival

year after year after year. Wow, maybe the Grinch isn't even real, Like maybe that's a Grinch costume that one of the Who's has to wear as sort of like the sacrificial Grinch for the year. Yeah, it's just kind of the supernatural entity that everyone believes in and you sort of you partake in the passion play of the thing that is somehow more believable than um. Then positing that the whose heart grew two sizes that day when you have the epiphany simply be has some sort of

genetic switch went off between the who's and the what. Yeah. I have no explanation for why his heart would literally grow two sizes and allow you know, better sourcing of oxygen, but that just reminded me too. Uh. Now, he's more of a who and than a what, which is sort of a whole underlying basis of what we were talking about earlier, like how how terrible to be a what instead of a who? And he made his way back to his unness by connecting with his fellow species. Now

that's that's some rich stuff there. That's sus you really knows who knew what he was doing? An intuitive psychologist? I think so. Yeah. Alrighty guys, we hope that you enjoyed our presentation of the Grinch as well as Scrooge. And if you want to check out more of what we're doing, you can do so stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's right. You'll find all the podcast episodes,

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