If you’ve ever found yourself in New York City on a weekend in December surrounded by thousands of Santas bar-hopping around the neighborhood, you may have been affected by SantaCon.
Now a worldwide phenomenon, SantaCon descends upon New York City once a year. Though New York City’s SantaCon has a philanthropic element to it (tickets sold for SantaCon go to support several charitable causes), the day is often regarded as a drunken day of chaos, with Santas stumbling around the city.
But where did SantaCon even come from? Director Seth Porges (“Class Action Park,” “How To Rob a Bank”) sought to find the answers in his new documentary “SANTACON.”
When asked why he wanted to make a documentary about SantaCon, Porges said that it seemed like too stupid of a subject to base a film on because he, like many people, only knew about the effect SantaCon has on New York City. However, Porges told amNewYork that he had met up with his friend Scott Beale when he learned that Beale had started SantaCon with his friends several years ago in San Francisco, and it piqued his interest.
“[Beale] started telling me that he had personally video recorded many of the early years of SantaCon, and he still had the footage. When I saw these tapes, that’s when I was kind of blown away,” said Porges. “I was taken back in time to 1990s and this feeling of freedom and possibility and wonder that just permeated through the footage, and I just really wanted to transmit that feeling to people, and that’s why I wanted to make this movie.”
“SANTACON” follows the day’s anarchical origins as a prank in San Francisco and follows as it descends into madness as one of the most hated holidays. Founded by a performance art group called the Cacophony Society, the day initially was created to make moments of wonder, awe and absurdity.
event invaded the city.Credit: Pinball Party Productions
“There’s no agenda beyond that. The idea was to show people something they’ve never seen before, and hopefully that’ll spark joy or creativity and remind people that the world is bigger than they think it is,” said Porges.
Porges told amNewYork that as SantaCon began to grow beyond the reach of the original creators — SantaCon was never a brand of copyright that they owned — and when the internet caught wind of it, that’s when it started to go off the rails.
“The modern New York SantaCon has nothing to do with the people who started it,” said Porges. “New York’s is the most famous and certainly the largest, certainly the most overwhelming, but there’s Santacons in literally hundreds of cities all across the world. With the film, you kind of see it spread. It goes viral, it kind of becomes a virus, spreading around the world.”
In the documentary, the original SantaCon creators confront the New York City celebration, seeing how it has all come to exist as we know it. Porges acknowledges that there are elements of the original SantaCon that have carried over the years, but it was that bit of whimsy that made it more appealing back in the 90s.
“Looking at the old footage of the original SantaCons, it’s not so much that the Santas themselves are acting that differently. There’s always a little bit too much alcohol, always a little bit of bad behavior, always a lot of chaos. It’s the people around them and how different their expressions and their reactions are,” said Porges. “That’s what really struck me, because now we have all been exposed to SantaCon. We know what this is, we know that this is kind of gross, and the ability for it to offer any sort of surprise and shock and awe is largely gone as a result. But back in the 90s, nobody had ever seen this before. They didn’t know what to make of it. And so in that confusion and in that absurdity, you see people try to make sense of what they’re seeing, and in doing so, you see these expressions of joy and wonder and confusion that I find just truly amazing.”
time in decades. (What could go wrong?)Credit: Pinball Party Productions
Porges hopes that those who watch “SANTACON” are able to find the bits of joy in the story and see how it can be applied to their own lives.
“How do you continue to go on with feelings of creativity and collaboration and joy and wonder in a world that seems designed to squash all of those feelings? How do you keep on going through it all, despite it all? And that’s what I think,” said Porges. “The creators of SantaCon, the original members of the Cacophony Society, that’s what they gave me is this understanding about what it means to have fun for the sake of having fun, what it means to be creative for the sake of being creative, and how do we hold on to that in a world in which those sentiments become more and more distant.”
“SantaCon” premieres at DOC NYC on Nov. 13, with additional screenings on Nov. 15 and Nov. 20. The film will also screen online from Nov. 13-30. For more information, visit docnyc.net.
