Thinking About Black Friday On The Saturday After

When Black Friday's horror was limited to the screen.

My wife and I went to visit friends on Thanksgiving Day. We got home sometime after midnight. Our drive back to casa nostra took us past a large shopping mall parking lot. We were startled to see the lot filled with cars. At first, we thought we were mistaken about the time, and we thought it was really six in the morning. Then we realized it was the dreaded Black Friday. It was the first time we had witnessed the infamous shopping event's Midnight Madness.

Now, I can understand why someone would wait hours for a World Series seat, or a tough ticket to a musical act. I just don't grasp why anyone has to camp out to purchase a popular gadget. The hysteria underpinning American holiday shopping has become genuinely troubling. Has one ever witnessed a time when people have gone so far off the deep end to maintain a "normal" environment?

The poster is from the 1940 film Black Friday, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The movie's screenwriter, Curt Siodmak, was a Polish Jew who fled Germany during the Nazi era. Before the rise of National Socialism, Siodmak invested money in the 1930 silent movie Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a pivotal documentary about four ordinary Berliners that Criterion Collection recently re-released. The movie's co-directors were brother Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer; the scriptwriter was Billy Wilder and the photographer was Fred Zinnemann, who later directed High Noon.