What links Community s Shirley Bennet doting mother of 3 and model student to classic sci-fi
cinema, 50s-era far right movements, and InfoWars? Well, that d be the episode Regional Holiday
Music and this song. This is my One Musical Scene. And if you don
t know what that is certified Cool Guy Nando V Movies has put together another one of his
annual collaborative playlists. And since his last one pretty much launched this channel
I fancied another bite of the apple. This time round, everyone s talking about music,
and how it elevates the scene it scores. I m joining in, and I ve picked Shirley s song
Happy Birthday Jesus but I don t just want to talk about how the music elevates the scene.
The music largely is the scene, after all. No, I also want to argue that this song, this
scene, is essential to understanding the episode as a whole. Using this One Musical Scene as
the key, tgeb, this video s going to try and pull together all the different elements of
Regional Holiday Music its narrative, its satire, its songs, the references its making
to other media and use these elements to establish just what the episode s trying to say about
Christmas. Now, you might be thinking sure, cool song, but this is just a joke. Surely
there s no real substance to dig up here. Why make this video? Well, if that s you welcome
to the channel. Here on Pillar of Garbage, no detail is too small, no gag is too throwaway,
to analyse relentlessly. That being said, I really do think Shirley s song is the key
to unlocking this episode s overarching meaning. If you ve not seen the episode, the general
idea is that Greendale s Glee club, who were a shoe-in for regionals, died in a mysterious
bus crash, so now the show s main characters, the study group, the Greendale 7, are approached
by the Glee coach Mr Rad to fill in, and help him put on the Christmas Pageant. This is
a Dan Harmon-run show in 2012, though, so naturally our characters want nothing to do
with this. But Mr Rad s able to persuade Abed using the power of song, and the rest of the
episodes sees the study group infected by the manic Glee-club enthusiasm, one by one.
If this premise sounds kinda familiar, it s because in true Community fashion the episode
s drawing pretty heavily on an intertext in this case, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
the oft-remade sci-fi film about a quiet invasion on American soil by hostile infiltrators,
who replace citizens with emotionless replicas the so-called pod people . We will come back
to this, but going back to Regional Holiday Music? The highlights of this episode are
its musical numbers aside from Britta and Annie, who are largely converted offscreen,
each character s persuaded to do the pageant over the course of a showstopping musical
number some of which kinda slap. My scene is one of these. It s the moment when Pierce,
and his hired children s choir, converts Shirley a mother and devout Christian.
You see, for Shirley, Christmas isn t just a time for gift-giving, community, and joy.
It s also a time for celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, who some of you may have
heard of. Many people in the real world feel a similar way they ve even built these neat
little houses to gather in. So Pierce and the choir target this, appealing in song - to
her Christian persecution complex. At the start of this scene, before Shirley joins
in, the children s song makes reference to the apparent restrictions to Christian education
found in public schools, and throughout, the idea that Christmas, the real Christmas, is
fading, somehow, from public consciousness, is everywhere. If you ve been near a TV or
radio during December at some point this century, you ll likely recognise the War on Christmas
rhetoric this song s riffing on. And this makes for a funny scene, a funny song, but
I think it s important to the episode in a far greater way. Pierce s use of this rhetoric,
Shirley s response, and where that takes these characters these are perhaps the clearest
windows we re given into what Regional Holiday Music is about, and how it understands Christmas.
And we ll get to what, precisely, this understanding is, but before we do, it s important to note
that this meaning isn t obvious. At a glance, Regional Holiday Music isn t
much more than pastiche. Highly entertaining, highly musical, but pastiche all the same.
The elements comprising this pastiche -the songs, the musical styles, the references,
and so on, don t seem to come together to say anything, in particular. For instance,
the allusions the episode makes to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These are allusions.
It isn t coincidental. It goes beyond the similar premise, there s even a direct visual
reference to the closing shot of the 1978 remake. Why is Community doing this? Or, more
to the point is there an effect of doing this? Is it just for a quick visual gag? Is anything
real signified? What s the point of all these songs, the plot about a tyrannical Glee club
(?), and the presence of these Body Snatchers references? Well, let s go back to my One
Musical Scene. To get Shirley on board with the pageant,
the so-called War on Christmas is all but explicitly invoked. It s immediately successful.
But if we take a step back the pageant, Mr Rad, Glee these forces aren t interested in
Christmas. Not really. Mr. Rad isn t satisfied with Christmas being Christmas, a time for
friendship, family, and connection. It has to be the pageant. It has to be Glee. The
Glee mind-virus in Regional Holiday Music, then, results in a set of hosts only able
to conceptualise Christmas through this lens the pageant, the pomp, the crowd, the lights.
With Glee, Christmas isn t Christmas. It s merely the opportunity to use the trappings
of Christmas to reach more people and command more attention. It's the appropriation of
Christmas for selfish ends. It's Christmas-as-marketing-technique. This invasive force of self-interested appropriation,
of cynical Christmas marketing, is visible on a metatextual level, too. Every time these
characters talk, or sing, about Glee, about Glee club? They re talking about a brand.
An IP. Sure, the term glee club pre-dates the TV show, but to use the term as heavily
and cynically as Community did, back when Glee was still on the air, gobbling up the
ratings, is to implicitly invoke the show, and to gesture, however sarcastically, to
the sort of cross-promotion common in broadcast media like this. And when you begin to understand
Community s Glee in this way, as cynical, seasonal marketing, as the corporate infiltration
of meaning, the rest of the episode takes on new significance. Annie s song pretty obviously
reflects female hypersexualisation, the oldest trick in the marketer s book, but more specifically,
it s maybe riffing on the infantilising sexualisation that s weirdly common in Christmas media.
The way Pierce is attracted to the Glee side is such a transparent marketing ploy that
it s lampshaded by the episode itself and the Troy and Abed rap becomes a look at
the cultural FOMO imposed upon those raised in differing faiths by the cultural omnipresence
of Christmas. These examples also show Community s recognition of just how predatory these
campaigns are, because each persuasion sequence targets a particular area of insecurity in
the mark. The Jehovah s Most Secret Witness rap exploits the tension Troy feels between
his upbringing and its restrictions. Baby Boomer Santa targets Pierce s well-documented
age-based insecurity we ve talked about before on this channel, and that infantilising sexualisation
in Annie s song plays Jeff s age-gap-attraction-shame like a fiddle.
Such a reading of this episode also throws the episode s use of the infiltration-and-replacement
trope s, its Invasion of the Body Snatchers allusions, into sharp relief. I mean, just
look at what this concept accomplished in those Body Snatchers movies. These films and
this central conceit, of the slow, creeping domination of the pod-people were received
extremely well by general audiences and critics alike. Partially because well, this all felt
relevant. The original 56 film has often been read as commentary on the Red Scare either
as sympathetic, expressing this same anxiety that emotionless, mind-wiped communists were
infiltrating the US, or as critical lambasting the enforced conformity of McCarthy and the
House Un-American Committee. The remake, the one Community references most explicitly,
has also been approached as a decidedly post-Watergate film. The reason these films succeeded in
the way they did, then, the reason they spoke to people, was due to the ways they captured
and reflected popular anxieties of the times in this vision of faceless powers replacing
real people, real sentiment, with fa ade, with manufactured fake feeling. With the Red
Scare, it suggests red-blooded American capitalists being replaced by brainwashed, emotionless
pinkos. On the flip-side, those against McCarthyism saw real, free-thinking people subsumed by
the strictly conservative dominant culture of the time. Fast-forward to the post-Nixon
remake and the worry is of trustworthy public figures and politicians being swapped out
for corrupt, self-interested grifters with no integrity. The common thread in responses
to these stories of secret conversion, of pod-people infiltration schemes, seems to
be rooted in anxiety over vast cultural, political, or economic forces replacing genuine, authentic
being with artificial being and unnatural, altered emotions. Flipping back to Community,
that s exactly what we see throughout this episode. Only, here? The faceless power altering
our characters isn t aliens, or communism, or McCarthysim, or even corruption. It s Glee.
Or rather, it s what Glee stands for the corporate hijacking of holiday sentiment via exploitative
marketing. And if this is what Glee stands for here, if these song scenes show Christmas
being hijacked by the media for their own purposes, then Shirley s song my One Musical
Scene shows a very specific example of this dynamic the weaponization of Christian insecurity
we tend to call the War on Christmas . The roots of the modern War on Christmas can
be traced back to a few different places. For one, the far-right John Birch Society
in 1959 came up with the idea of the so-called Assault on Christmas , which was held to be
a sinister UN psyop. I m not joking. I know that sounds like a meme from some dark, twisted
corner of Reddit, something something corn syrup, but this vintage reactionary rhetoric
really did help to popularise the notion that Christmas, American Christian Christmas, was
under attack. Looking even further back, Candida Moss has argued that the notion of constant
persecution is, in some ways, intrinsic to Christianity itself. The War on Christmas
was truly born in 2004, though. A Bill O Reilly segment, Christmas under siege , beamed the
notion directly into the slushy, slushy brains of millions of Fox viewers. The Mayor of New
York City had put up a holiday tree , and some department stores had adjusted their
greeting policies. Naturally, such non-issues were blown up into signs of some impending,
liberal, secular apocalypse, with one conservative commentator labelling such occurrences yep,
hate crimes against Christianity . Ten years ago when this episode of Community
first aired, hell, even today, the War on Christmas was, and is, little more than a
shared sense of outrage, toggled on-and-off seasonally by right-wing media figures and
by their largely Evangelical viewership. A Politico article called the War on Christmas
an All-American staple of the 24-hour news cycle, a gift to busy news producers trying
to fill the airwaves . It s a drum beaten by the Evangelical right to generate propaganda
you gotta fight back against the liberals or they ll lock you up for doing a Christmas
but also? To generate money. The Christmas market is huge. Estimates vary, but U.S. consumers
are now estimated to spend more than $655 billion annually in holiday retail purchases
$1.3 billion on Christmas trees alone. After all, what better way to advertise your products
than to convince a sizable portion of the consumer base that to buy them is to defend
Christmas, and that not buying them makes the consumer complicit in the systematic destruction
of their own way of life? Thus, Christian fragility is monetised. And
this trend of corporate marketing stoking the Christian persecution complex, driving
sales by appealing to that fear of secular armies trying to destroy Christmas? Through
this scene, through this song, we see that s a key aspect of Community s corporate Christmas
body-snatchers along with Boomer exceptionalism and hyper-sexualisation. Because Shirley s
song, its embrace of War on Christmas rhetoric, is the result of Glee-driven astroturfing
on Pierce s part, preying specifically on Shirley s fears and insecurities. The result
isn t genuine feeling, genuine sentiment, on her part and we can see this by looking
to Community s previous Christmas episodes. Season One s Comparative Religion, in fact,
focuses largely on Shirley overcoming the very anxieties Pierce reignites here. Despite
personally holding Christmas to be most important from a religious standpoint, Shirley s also
able to accept the importance of the holiday period and Christmas itself in secular culture
and indeed, to those of different faiths. Seemingly, that disappears here. Shirley backslides.
And that, I think, is the final part of the puzzle. Community isn t just thinking about
marketing, about corporate appropriation of Christmas with this episode. It s thinking
about the unique balance of power and fragility Christmas holds. Invoking Christmas in this
way, in the way Pierce or Fox does only creates outrage at the cost of Christmas itself. The
holiday ceases to be a time for families and communities to gather peacefully, or even
a commemoration of the birth of a peaceful, socially-minded revolutionary some 2,000 years
ago. No, it becomes a symbol of outrage, fear, and consumerism.
This song, then my One Musical Scene reveals Community speaking to the danger of this cycle
of inflammatory War on Christmas rhetoric the propagandistic and profiteering power
of the narratives spread by your Fox news, your Bill O Reilly s, your Alex Joneses. By
banging that drum either for conservative culture-war reasons, or perhaps more commonly,
as an advertising ploy tolerance is drowned out, Christian fragility is monetised, and
any real meaning whatsoever to Christmas, religious or otherwise, fades into the background.
But Regional Holiday Music s vision of Christmas isn t all bleakness, profiteering, and culture
warring. In keeping with Community s Christmas special the previous year, there is a vision
of real meaning here, too. Abed realises what Mr Rad is doing, and sabotages the pageant
by getting Britta to sing her Christmas song. In this moment, we see genuine sentiment come
into conflict with the slick, corporate, marketer s Christmas of the pageant and, more to the
point our characters see this, too. Mr Rad is unmasked the body-snatchers are defeated,
as it were and the insincerity of their vision of Christmas becomes very apparent. But that
s not where this episode ends. Abed s alone in his apartment, seemingly resigned to the
darkness of Christmas, but then we hear carolling. The rest of the Study Group shows up to celebrate
the holiday together, organically. The slick overproduced, Glee Christmas with its agendas
and its regionals is forgotten. We ve returned to genuine being, centred around the sense
of community and connection this show s previous Christmas episodes had embraced. This ending
even calls back, in a sense, to Shirley s song the carol here is the only other one
of the episode s songs with a religious focus, and I think there s an intentional comparison
being drawn here between the glitzy, overproduced pop-gospel of my One Musical Scene, and the
organic, imperfect honesty of friends singing carols. This episode, then, while critical
of the capitalist, conservative weaponization and monetisation of the Christian Christmas,
doesn t reject this religious side. It s ending, in fact, skews a whole lot closer to the biblical
Christmas than the corporate sheen of Happy Birthday Jesus , the Glee infection, and the
pageant ever did. An essential part of this holiday is the religious aspect, and it probably
always will be. It isn t under some existential threat, regardless of what Macy s greeting
staff are instructed to say. The bigger threat comes from Mr Rad, from Bill O Reilly, from
conservative culture warriors and opportunistic marketers trying to convince you that you
can save Christmas from the liberals so long as you buy their shirt.
In summation this episode is a puzzle, but Shirley s song is, in some ways, the picture
on the box. It s all you need to start putting the pieces together. And when you do Glee
reveals itself as symbolising the appropriation of genuine meaning for selfish ends be that
commercial or propagandistic. This episode, this scene, this song, challenges the viewer
to look at Christmas and its role in our culture through a lens critical or, at least aware
of this appropriation. So, that s my One Musical Scene. Now, I know
what you re thinking. Gee, Pillar of Garbage, that s cool and all, but if you were going
to analyse a music scene from Community, why didn t you look at y know, the one which gave
your channel its name? Why didn t you pick that one? It probably would have been simpler,
and this video would have taken way less effort. And let me just respond to that by saying
Yeah. You re right. Shame I didn t even think of that until, like, 3 minutes ago, after
already having written this entire script! Oh well! Thanks for watching, anyway. Drop
a like or I ll transfer you to City College. There s links to some of my sources in the
description, and if you re new here, hey, maybe give the rest of the channel a look?
It s kind of a canvas where I vomit random analyses of disparate facets of pop culture
a few times a week. We ve talked about Community a few times before, and there s more of that
on the way stuff on individual characters and episodes, for instance, and I m even toying
with the idea of a video series breaking down the first episodes of each season in-depth.
I ve also linked the rest of Nando s One Musical Scene playlist below check that out, it s
sure to be chock full of straight bangers and while you re here Patreon. I, I got a
Patreon. It s good! And I want to thank all my current Patrons onscreen now, especially
Kevin Douglas and Ian Fyfield.