Jack Skellington: Trickster
Probably one of the most talked about figures from mythological archetypes is the Trickster. The Trickster has really captured our imagination, making them figures we really love to hear from, and even replicate them in contemporary storytelling. While some of the ubiquity of Trickters could be because of the broad definition of the term, I think it’s mostly because of the importance of figures like this. We need Tricksters, both the old and the new.
So I want to talk about Nightmare Before Christmas, but specifically I want to study the primary figure in the movie: Jack Skellington. The idea of Nightmare Before Christmas is that there are special towns which are dedicated to each holiday, and the people there help to make that holiday happen.
In Nightmare Before Christmas, we start on Halloween, where we first meet Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King. He’s the guy, the one that everyone loves. He’s the ultimate scary figure who helps to run Halloween town. However, Jack has a problem. He’s feeling creative ennui. Despite being the King of Halloween Town, and being far loved and respected by the community, he feels somewhat out of place and unsure of himself. In Jack’s Lament, he sings that he has tired of his position, and seeks out something new and unique. This dejection leads him to wander through the woods through the night, where in the morning he comes across a set of trees with pictures depicting aspects of various holidays on them. Enraptured by the one with a Christmas tree, he falls into Christmas Town and falls in love with the very different vibe and experience of the holiday. After his visit, he becomes intent on making others understand the experience, ultimately leading him to try and take over Christmas for himself.
There’s something really interesting about the character arc of Jack Skellington in Nightmare Before Christmas. I think a large part of this has to do with the fact that he’s a Trickster figure. His role as Trickster is what puts him in a position to live as both a fool, a cultural hero, and a representation of the liminal.
Let’s start with the idea of the Trickster. Tricksters are rather different from one another in a lot of ways. Not all tricksters are exactly the same, but they share certain characteristics. So while not every characteristic I talk about today is going to be shared ubiquitously, there are going to be overlapping ideas and considerations.
Our first more basic idea of the Trickster in relation to Jack is the idea that the Trickster is a master of disguise. In many stories of Tricksters, they are able to dress up as a different figure and completely fool those around them as to their personality. There are two points where we can point to Jack as disguising himself. The first is in the opening of the movie, as the town gathers to sing Halloween Town and introduce the viewer to the world. As the camera begins to move in, we pass by a creepy scarecrow with a sign for Halloween Town on it. At the end of the musical number, we see this scarecrow again, who suddenly moves on its own, lights itself on fire, and then reveals itself to be none other than Jack. We are immediately introduced to Jack through his ability to change himself and mould himself to different perspectives.
We see him disguise himself one other time, when dressing up as Santa. When Sally remarks that he doesn’t seem like himself, Jack excitedly exclaims that was the point. Jack is actively looking to alter himself, to fool others into thinking he is the real Santa. He is aiming to lose himself into the role, wanting to completely become someone different in his portrayal of Santa.
While we do not actively see it, we do hear him reference other personalities and characters he has drawn on. In his song, Jack’s Lament, Jack makes reference to some of the other ways people have known him, including simply being “Mr Unlucky”, and also being known in our own world.
Jack’s ability to easily disguise himself and shift between personalities is actually something that helps to point out an important element of his personality. He is, at the end of the day, a monster. Monstrosity, as I’ve mentioned before, is often defined by their inability to fit into proper categories. The vampire, for example, live between the categories of life and death. Monsters are often the markers of liminal spaces and positions. Jack moves through his own liminal position fluidly.
In fact, being a liminal figure is also a marker of Trickster figures. But Jack is different than the other monsters in Halloween Town, and therefore a different consideration of monster. So let’s talk about what we mean, real quick, by liminal. The idea of liminality was initially popularised by Arnold Van Gennep, when talking about rites of passage, or rituals which mark important social life steps like coming of age rituals, marriage, and even graduation. Van Gennep understood rites of passage as consisting of three primary stages: seperation, liminality, and incorporation. In separation, the individual withdraws from their current position in society. During the liminal stage, they are no longer of their previous status, but not yet of the other, living in a stage between stages. In the third, the individual is re-incorporated into society taking up their new position.
In Van Gennep’s consideration, the idea of liminality, the stage between stages, is a stage in itself. Its a phase someone can be in, rather than a type of person. The position they hold is liminal, not themselves, as they will be reincorporated at a later point in time.
Anthropologist Victor Turner took these ideas and built on them. In particular, Turner really expanded on this idea of the liminal, bringing it out of rites of passage specifically and into other forms of ritual, including pilgrimage.
Since Turner, the term “liminality” and its definition of ambiguity and between-ness has really taken ahold of the social sciences. In many considerations, it is not just a phase, but also a type of person. Some real world example of liminal people could be stateless people, or those who are between home and host, both a part of society and also seperated from it. Many in the LGBT community also see themselves as liminal, as they do not fit into broader society’s cultural categories.
Which leads us to the Trickster - a character archetype which is often defind by its liminality. Coyote, for example, is an important Trickster figure for many Native American mythological cycles. Coyote is both a cultural hero and a cultural villain, a figure which does much for the people, but also puts them at risk. According to stories from the Chelan people, Coyote belongs to the animal people, but at the same time holds powers like the Creator, but is also subject to the Creator, who can punish Coyote.
As a Trickster, Jack is a complicated liminal figure. He is both of Halloween town while also apart from it. He’s the King, but is not an actual official like the Mayor. Throughout the movie, he’s not often interacting directly with the people as friends, but rather as a figurehead. He is on a stage giving orders, or standing seperate from them while they dote praise on him. The only figure he is seen directly having a normal conversation with is Sally, and only right at the end.
He is also one of the only figures who truly understands Christmas Town. Sally also seems to understand, though she is also a liminal figure in many ways, not being allowed to fully incorporate into the town as a figure due to the oppressive figure of Dr. Finkelstein. But Sally is probably a subject for a different video.
Jack’s liminal nature means that he also embodies one of the other characteristics of a trickster: being a boundary-crosser. Now, by boundary crossing, we do not necessarily mean physically or emotionally. Though, Jack does definitely do this. The nature of being skilled at scaring others means that he is by his nature crossing those kinds of emotional boundaries. But like I said, that’s not technically what we mean.
By boundary-crossing, we mean someone who can move between cultural or social categories. Because he does not belong to a particular category, he can move between these categories freely, and often dabbles in them. The point of a trickster’s movement between and around social categories is meant to break these social norms. Its because of these broken categories that they become cultural heroes, but it is also because of these broken categories that they become cultural villains.
Jack actually fulfills both of these positions: he is both the villain and the hero of the story, a true representation of the roles a trickster can be. Jack’s changes throughout the film are brought on by his desire to find new cultural avenues. He is yearning for something new and something different to experience. What he is really hoping for is a change of position. He is tired of being liminal. He want to find something comfortable, to have a place to belong.
This becomes more obvious when he becomes transfixed by his experiences in Christmas Town. Jack had experienced his something new he was yearning for. He found something different and unique. But it wasn’t enough for him to simply experience it, he wanted to become it. He wanted to move from his liminal position to a place more secure and socially present. He begins to capture the imagination of Christmas, and sees it as the realisation of all his hopes and dreams, and the possible path for his future. He wants to become Christmas, and take it all for himself. He feels he needs to do this in order to feel fulfilled because otherwise he would still be on the margins.
His takeover of Christmas is what sets him up as a cultural villain. Not just because of his absolute destruction of Christmas - but because of his braking of the cultural understandings and categories of Christmas. While there is a tradition of “spooky Christmas” - like, for example, A Christmas Carol - there is a solid separation of feel, obligation, and expectation between Halloween and Christmas. This separation was difficult to explain to the residents of Halloween Town, and to Jack to a certain extent. When Sally tries to tell Jack that she got a vision that his Christmas would be “terrible”, Jack interprets this as a positive due to the social categories and distinctions of Halloween Town, even though this is not what she intended.
Essentially, Jack’s role as a liminal figure affects the categories and individuals within those categories that he interacts with. Christmas is the victim of that. Inevitably, his liminal nature is impacting the Christmas he is creating. He is not just replicating Christmas, he is altering its form to become something in between, like Jack himself. However, the result is a marring of the original category, making it something impure, in a more Mary Douglas version of that word.
It isn’t until he is literally blown out of the sky that Jack comes to realise that his version of Christmas wasn’t right at all. But it is during this reflection that Jack comes to realise that his attempt to join cultural categories he doesn’t actually belong in is the problem. He comes to remember that his role as liminal figure is one to have security in. It’s what gives him the ability to scare, the ability to disguise, and the ability to shift easily to new perspectives and understandings.
It is when he is back to being Jack the Pumpkin King, rather than Jack the Christmas-takeover, that he moves also from being the cultural villain to the cultural hero. It’s his newfound excitement in self that allows him to move quickly, efficiently, and to stand toe-to-toe against Oogie Boogie. On saving Santa, he becomes the cultural hero.
I think Jack’s role as Trickster is what allows him to move through the story the way he does, but more importantly its why we fall in love with Jack, despite him actually not being that great of a guy. We find ourselves rooting for him, because he has a freedom we don’t. His role is to be in between, to exist as something other, and that is appealing. And even when he is a villain, he’s a fun villain that we still want to see succeed.