Clark Griswold Was ‘Likely’ Suffering From a Traumatic Brain Injury

Clark Griswold kind of sucks. The buffoonish patriarch who first appeared in National Lampoon’s Vacation is prone to random acts of unbridled rage and unnecessary rudeness. Not to mention how he tends to spend every spare moment he has fantasizing about cheating on his amazing wife, whose only flaw is not leaving him in the early 1980s. 

But is there another explanation for Clark’s constant lack of self-control?

As sensorimotor neuroscientist Dr. E. Paul Zehr pointed out in Psychology Today, Clark clearly suffers “nine traumatic head injuries” in Christmas Vacation alone, which is “likely” the cause of his “odd behavior.” Just minutes into the movie he crashes his car into a snowbank. Not much later, a ladder smacks him in the face. And moments after that, he gets hit multiple times by wooden planks.

These blows are clearly severe because Clark appears “dazed and woozy” after each hit. 

And then there’s the time he rode a flaming saucer sled of death straight into a Walmart parking lot.

As the movie progresses, Clark’s apparent mild traumatic brain injury could explain his “difficulty with anger management, loss of behavioral regulation and erratic actions,” such as how he cuts down a neighbor’s tree with a chainsaw and sets it up in his living room. 

Dr. Zehr also notes that these injuries could explain some future examples of Clark’s “extremely poor judgment,” like when he gambles away all of his money on “risky” games like Rock, Paper, Scissors in Vegas Vacation.

And Dr. Zehr isn’t the only medical expert to point to Clark’s apparent condition. In 2022, a representative of the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center used Clark’s Christmas Vacation mishaps to teach people how to stay safe during the holidays. They specifically noted that “Clark suffered multiple instances of head trauma” and was showing “symptoms of a traumatic brain injury.” Therefore, he should have sought help from a medical provider.

That being said, Clark does exhibit milder versions of these same symptoms in the preceding movies, in which he doesn’t regularly smack his head. But, for one thing, it’s possible that Clark’s concussions are limited to the holiday season, and happen every Christmas. And it’s also more than likely that he sustained some sort of head injury after crashing his station wagon while en route to the Grand Canyon.

Plus, and this might sound like a big stretch, but some people with a brain injury can “develop a condition known as prosopagnosia” or “face blindness.” Clark and Ellen Griswold’s children, Audrey and Rusty, conspicuously look completely different in every single Vacation movie. Perhaps the glaring casting changes were intentional, in order to visually represent Clark’s “mental confusion”?

Then again, it’s possible that the actors’ parents just didn’t want their kids hanging around with Chevy Chase on a semi-regular basis.

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