Yesterday I was on the phone with a new contact in the Bay Area literary world about a sponsorship the MFA Program I direct is involved with, and after she opened the conversation asking how I was I gave what’s become my standard answer: “Oh, the same. Same as yesterday and the day before that and the day…” She laughed and said, “You know I read your blog today just to find out who you were, so I suppose I should expect a funny answer.” I was happy, I think, to be so on-brand, but I was also reminded, suddenly, of how front-facing (as they say around these parts) this blog is. Anyway kids, if you’re worried whether anyone will take you seriously if you publish for the world your first-draft thoughts on Hallmark Movies and sexual ignorance in the U.S., I am here to tell you no. No, of course they won’t, but that won’t necessarily preclude you from getting a professional job that treats you like a professional.
Okay so not only is this an Angela Lansbury reference (missing a comma tho; just as Jeopardy! fans know about that exclamation point, we Murder, She Wrote fans know from commas), but it stars Danica McKellar, who is probably the only Hallmark Woman who has co-authored a mathematics paper, on statistical mechanics, with a title I can’t even type because it’s got a script Z (for the set of all integers) I don’t know how to do. Plus also she’s written a handful of books that encourage young girls to get excited by math. I love Danica McKellar. I’m more excited about this HCM than any other, save for the inevitable Candace Cameron Bure one I haven’t seen yet.
Danica’s Woman is a columnist, at a print (!) newspaper, who used to be a therapist, and she lives in New York City, and I’m waiting for a story conflict to kick her to a small Vermont town but nothing so far. So far it’s just this office party in what might be a hotel bar, and the Woman keeps bumping into a Man who might be a ghost, because he disappears quickly after she looks away and nobody else at the party can see him. If it’s a ghost…well, I don’t want to have to think about what I’ll do.
*
Okay he’s not a ghost, the Man, he’s the new editor in chief. He has the face of a sphinx, if Skeletor was a sphinx, and his name is Tripp Window? He’s too old for the Woman, and because he needs to make cuts at the paper he’s ending her column. The news is so sad she’s bailing on Aspen with her gay friend at the paper, and now she’s at home typing a column in voiceover a la Carrie Bradshaw in an inexplicably large all-brick apartment that would make Monica and Rachel gawk. Yes.
Yes! Please let me keep indulging in this fantasy. After a year of sitting in our apartment I would pay money to watch Danica McKellar decorate a dubiously large NYC apartment for Christmas while through the windows snow falls. Please don’t disappear her to a small town, where basically nobody in America actually lives.
Oh wait never mind. She just called her sister and said she’s coming home for Christmas. Home is of course another tiny town. Goodbye New York Christmas. Hello Pineberry, California.
*
You can start up your therapy practice again, the sister is suggesting. “I love writing too much,” says the Woman. Good for her. They’ve given the sister Bakery-Owner and Widow functions and attached the Teen Daughter plug-in. I haven’t seen a single man in the movie other than the gay friend and Tripp Window, who is still in New York and now tasked with rehiring the Woman after her final column created angry readers missing her, so yes Mr. Sphinx is really going to be the Man.
The Boss-Boyfriend, that’s what we’re heading for. He’s personally flying to California because the Woman won’t answer his calls. He won’t leave town until she agrees to come back to the paper. They are competitive these two. Is this fun? It is yes, I’ve decided. There’s an extreme pleasure in watching two people who loathe each other move through that loathing toward romance and sexual desire—well sexual desire is compatible with loathing of course. I hope they hate each other well into Act III. Or Act 6? I read somewhere that HCMs have 9 acts, one of which is Almost Kiss. So another feather in the cap of Hallmark is how, without being big braggarts about it, they’ve found a dramatic structure that doesn’t worry about making Aristotle happy.
Another part of the pleasure of keeping the Man and Woman hating each other is that it gives us as long a fantasy as possible of the Woman possibly, maybe, if only, going her own way. ‘Cause see, now the Woman is working on a column for the Pineberry newspaper, and she’s got family here, and so maybe she doesn’t need anybody but her own strength and courage to make a great change.
Wait shut up it’s snowing.
If you watch Home Alone after a bunch of HCMs, as we did last night, the fake snow on the ground of Kevin’s street is gaudy, it’s an embarrassment: glassy and pebbled. The fakey-est of fake. Before Hallmark became really what it is now, the fake snow they used was another embarrassment, like cotton batting laid on top of grass. The snow they’ve got now is just like, oh it’s gorgeous snow. It’s the greatest snow, this snow, chunky like cotton balls but floating down past the actors’ faces in a way that almost defies physics. It flutters like the snow in those high-end snowglobes you’d like to have just one of on your mantle but can’t talk yourself into dropping that much on during a vacation—and how are you going to fly it home without it breaking? That snow. You hear it crunch under their boots while they walk around the tree lot set up on a corner of the town’s decked-out main street.
The not-so secret of HCMs: they don’t have to say or be anything. They just have to stand where it looks nicer to be than where I am right now.
*
The Man is originally from San Francisco. (The U.S. West is showing up in the HCU this year.) He’s “not good at that whole work-life balance thing,” which makes sense given that he’s the editor-in-chief of a New York City daily and has decided it’s no big deal for him to stay in this small town, sipping coffee at the Widow Sister’s café, staying up all night reading the Woman’s past columns to better understand her. No, there’s no pressing work needing him back at New York, why would there be?
The Woman has confessed that she’s working on an autobiographical romance novel that she hasn’t found the ending to yet. This, I think, is the Christmas she’s written, titularly.
*
The retirement home in this town of Pineberry, California, is called “The Pineberry”, which wouldn’t have the same effect in another town, like Boise, say. “We’re staying at the Boise.” The Internet tells me that pineberries are white strawberries with red seeds. See?
They were discovered, pineberries, in 2002, so this must be a very new town. Now the Woman has run into what has to be an ex, given how awkward this is between them. He’s a beefy doctor who wears a tie and has the best ass I’ve seen on the Hallmark Channel. He has sad eyes and his hair is just starting—just a touch, just like an angel’s whisper’s worth—to go grey, and it’s infuriating that he’s not going to get to be the Man.
Let’s talk about the chemistry between the Woman and chosen Man: they make the kinds of jokes I hate watching people pretend to enjoy, lines like “Thanks for the ride … but I’m only going to give you 4 stars because there was no phone charger!” or “My cooking comes with a warning label: Eat At Your Own Risk!” Etc. Then in a heartbeat one of them Gets Real, and soon they’re re-establishing boundaries and remembering that they’re boss-employee. I don’t buy it, and I don’t want it to happen. I don’t want the Woman to fall for her new boss who has too little going on in his life.
God, Danica McKellar is pretty. Her face is a campfire or some other object I just want to stare into and watch the shifting facets of.
*
Jesus, everyone’s here. The gay friend has just shown up in Pineberry, right at the exact moment that we’ve learned that the Man cut his job, too. So this is the All Is Lost moment, even though the Man and Woman aren’t yet close to kissing, nor is the Woman ready to say yes to getting her job back. Now the Woman has decided with the gay friend to host a cocktail Christmas event they have one day to plan—why are they doing this?—and the only venue they could find is owned by the boyfriend of the impossibly sexy Ex, who is moving back to Pineberry to practice medicine there.
The bar owner is hitting on the gay friend, so here’s another marginal gay romance. Why don’t I hate it? Well, I’m fully invested in this Danica McKellar Is A Writer story. But also because this is evolving, this new romance, in ways that feel as real as things get in the HCU—this is the first time the gay friend and Ben, the bar owner, have seen each other since high school, and Ben was clearly not out in high school, and it’s too weird to come out and say “Hi, I’m gay now too and want to engage with you romantically,” so their banter, the gays’, is, sure, goofy, but it feels honest and, and it feels like a development to the gay friend character’s arc, and it’s not being played for attention or headlines. Good for Hallmark.
And now the Woman’s got two men vying for her attention at this cocktail thing: the Man and the Ex. Good for Danica.
*
But is this movie coming together? The Man, in reading through the Woman’s old columns, has reminded her of her early spirit and passion when she first started that job, and this has given her the inspiration to finish her romance novel, and from this, she has let her gratitude lead her to fondness and possibly even lovingness. She’s falling for the boss, who is leaving town tomorrow. “Apparently, the mountain air has gotten to me,” he just said. “And, um, so have you.”
Pretty good line. Still don’t want them to end up together though, and ultimately this is what’s making Christmas She Wrote the standout HCM it is: it’s got me emotionally wanting some specific future for the Woman—one I’m sure I’m not going to get—but normally I just sit back and grumpily watch while the Woman achieves the dull trajectory they’ve fully forecasted in the third scene.
Oh shit. Oh shit! The Woman gave a printout of her novel (which she finished the first draft of yesterday) to the Man, who read it in full in one night and sent it to his contacts in the publishing biz, and even though they want to publish it (it’s that easy, kids! every published writer publishes their first drafts because that’s how talented they are), she feels so betrayed that we’re at one hell of an All Is Lost moment. (Another one!) Because what this movie’s cleverly done in setting up the Terrible Idea of Boss-Boyfriend is duplicate the “All” of All Is Lost—they cannot be lovers, and the Woman cannot return to the job she left.
The way out of All Is Lost, though, is quick and easy: the Woman has learned that the Man quit his job the next morning. And he left a message with the innkeeper that the Woman is “pretty special,” I think the phrase was. So in less than 12 hours he’s shown himself to be (a) a man of integrity not scheming and untrustworthiness, and (b) a total sweetheart sweetie to love forever.
*
Fine. Fine. The Ex, the Woman has clarified to him, is the kind of guy who needs adventure and won’t be happy with a 9–5 in Pineberry. And sure enough he was awarded a grant to go be a doctor abroad. “You’re an incredible woman, Kayleigh,” he said, and left the room and her life forever. Damn it. But also, good for the Woman. I wish she’d have a similar insight about the Man, but no, here he is in a navy suit that’s looking purple in this lighting or maybe it’s our new 4K TV did I mention? What event is this where they’re all coming to a fore with their plotlines? It’s not quite the town’s big Xmas party, but everyone is in suits and dresses.
Okay wait. There’s still a chance these two won’t get together, but will part ways with mutual respect for each other. He’s taking a new job in San Francisco, so…. Please please please. Don’t kiss…?
Another day, same pandemic, another Hallmark Christmas Movie, same HCM shit. This one is bad, I’m warning you, so bad this slapdash image Hallmark somehow put on the internet best captures the movie and N’s & my thoughts on it.
“Is this the Darlington house?”
That’s the opening line, from a delivery man coming up to a boring enormous house that brags about how much stone it can afford (not enough to look classic, just enough to look expensive). This house was built in 2012 probably, and once again we’re to understand it’s an Old Manse full of history.
*
There would be no HCMs without pizzicato strings, have I mentioned? When we’re not in an All Is Lost or an Almost Kiss, whatever mood is happening in an HCM requires pizzicato strings. They do what ukulele does in a Flash video on a website for an app or new gadget: signal good times. It calms the unsure spirit—How do I know I’m not going to feel intimidated / disgusted by these people? You know because there’s music playing of people plucking strings at almost-random intervals. It’s percussive, so it feels like we’re moving somewhere at a nice clip, but melodically percussive, so we’re not being hit too hard.
*
All right, here’s a Black man, a South Asian man, and a White man at a ski resort giving each other the business. We know nothing about them, but I’ve been given everything the HCU needs me to know about them. At least, I know who is going to be the Man and which two won’t have personalities (or appear after this scene). This Man is a less dynamic Dax Shepard. His henley has like 7 buttons. No 8! Jesus, get a grip. His brother is the Woman’s crazy wealthy chairman-of-the-board boss to whom she’s “E.A.” (which I’m not bothering to spell out if she can’t be bothered to spell out), and the premise here is that some Nieces and Nephews are arriving from somewhere (abroad?) for the holidays and the Man has to help the Woman take care of them for a weekend before the Woman (my god I’m tired) escorts them to a boarding school somewhere called Paden Academy.
Paden. Genuinely shocked I haven’t seen a post-millennial child named Paden.
Yes okay so both brothers are the guardians of this Niece and Nephew (still unsure how many kids we’re getting), but whoever died to make them guardians hasn’t been spelled out. And wait also so the Woman hasn’t been assigned to do any of this. She’s volunteered to watch “all three of them” over their holiday break while she takes two weeks off work. And then the Man is going to help her out, for unclear reasons. So we’re about 15 minutes in and we have the most convoluted way I’ve seen for a HCM to get its Woman and Man together. These two already know each other. They “work for the same company.”
If your biggest romantic fantasy is to let volunteering your vacation time to the care of three rich siblings lead you to husband/fellow-parent material with your boss’s brother, have I got a movie for you.
*
The Woman is an orphan, folks keep hinting at, so she’s familiar with having Xmases alone. Her friend, a surgeon, is a lesbian, who is in love with the gal who runs the café in town, but too shy to say anything to her. Immediately I want to spend all our screen time watching shy surgeon try to figure out how to woo the cute coffee shop gal, but instead here’s Uncle Max and the Woman playing nuclear family with Emma, Abby, and um … J. Henry. That’s the nephew. Jay Henry? They’re rich, so it’s likely J. God, this has me pining for Owen-Noah.
Already bored as hell by this one. Everyone is uselessly wealthy and the pizzicato won’t stop. What Christmas with the Darlings is hoping from us is that we’ll be heartstruck by the plight of these three kids who “don’t have a stable home,” but they’re named the fucking Darlings, and they get to go to boarding school (I would have choked two cats to death as a kid to get to go to boarding school, I’m not kidding), and their two guardians run the kind of company that flies its CEO to Lisbon for business. Kill your darlings, they say in MFALand, and it’s advice I’m only now wanting to heed.
*
A dream would be for this movie to fix itself around the Woman and her gay friend. Because the Man and Woman just took the kids on a sleigh ride, which is Necessary for any good HCM, and the Woman explained her parents divorced when she was young and her mom died when she was in high school. “So you’re like us,” the kids said. “And you too, Uncle Max,” leaving us with a set of unrelated people who are very clearly going to make a family together.
What if instead they got parented by two women uninterested in each other romantically? If people (or cable networks) want to put Family First I’d get behind them if they were genuinely interested in the many formulations by which U.S. humans make their families, but they never are, no matter how fascinating or heartwarming these new-family stories are. Chosen families and blended families are to Family Firsters always these tarnishes on the ever-beloved boring nuclear family.
Wait. The family’s name is Darlington. So the titular “Darlings” must refer to the kids’ whole mien, not their actual names. Gross. These fucking people.
*
Hey wow! First product placement I’ve noticed all year. The Man just made soup on the stovetop, and right there with the label facing the camera perfectly was the can. I’m not saying which soup company it was. I’m not a sellout. I mean, how else will you trust the integrity of these, my weakest takes?
Last year, or maybe two years ago?, it was Folgers coffee. Not a single family in the HCU made coffee at home without standing very close to a perfectly aimed plastic canister of Folgers. Also, did you know that last year every Lifetime Christmas Movie had some mention of Winter Storm Meghan? (Thus actually firmly creating a cinematic universe.) Meghan. I feel like some gal must have won a contest.
Also, also, my friend David asked me today if I’d seen the other gay Xmas movie, with Andie MacDowell, and it turns out he was talking about Dashing in December, on the new Paramount Network. (Is anyone subscribing to this?)
Wyatt heads home for the holidays to convince his mom to sell the family’s ranch, but with help from Heath the ranch hand, Wyatt gains a fresh perspective about life and love.
The first gay story I ever wrote named the sexy boyfriend Heath, so I’m eager to see what his fresh perspective looks like. We’ll be watching it soon, thanks to my parents’ YouTube TV subscription. But what’s going on with the Darlingtontons? No idea. The Man is lying in a large bed inside an enormous room and one of the Nieces has brought him The Wizard of Oz to read, so now I’m imagining all the scary and difficult shit that befalls Dorothy and wishing any of the HCU writers might have tried watching it for ideas.
*
The news tells me that New York might get a foot and a half of snow tomorrow, and my heart breaks in utter jealousy. Those lucky bitches. And now the Darlingtons are romping in the snow, building what look like pretty great snowmen (expensive scarves, actual coal, enormous black buttons), and I’m reminded of another reason I love HCMs—the snow. California is wonderful, the best place I’ve lived in lots of ways, but it never snows here (well, not in these parts) and that makes it a shithole for 3 months of the year when all I want is snow.
Again, we should be in South Dakota right now, where it snows. I was lucky enough to be in Maine back in November 2019, but I don’t really know when I’ll see snow again. Except I do know: it’ll be the next outdoor scene of this HCM. This movie is awful, everyone in it is unwatchable, but they keep doing Christmasy stuff in the snow, so I won’t turn away.
Snow is magic. We’re so lucky the world dumps that stuff on us for just a tiny portion of the year. I know it’s cold and wet, and it’s such a pain to shovel out a car or scrape a windshield or shovel a whole driveway, but nothing worthwhile is won easily.
*
There’s a passed-hors-d’oeuvres party happening at Darlington House right now, and a man who’s important for business reasons has shown up and said, “I didn’t know the Darlington Corporation was a family-run company,” while standing between two brothers named Darlington.
The girl who plays one of the Nieces acts and delivers her lines exactly like Laura Parsons, and now I’m wishing someone would do a genuinely funny HCM and cast Vanessa Bayer in the role of the needy Daughter-Niece. Now I’m reading online interviews with Vanessa Bayer. God, I miss her being on SNL. Did you see her on that episode of What We Do in the Shadows? She’s so good. This movie has fully lost me. Was there an Almost Kiss? The lesbian friend has been given a successful love match, but it’s not enough. I’ll watch to the end, but I’m probably done here.
Final Grade: F
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
Sure, I understand that videos of child sexual abuse make it online (but I know they’re not half as easy to find as anti-porn activists like to pretend), but wiping out half the videos of sex workers on PornHub isn’t the way to stop kids from being abused. Instead, it’s like wanting to pave California to stop all these wildfires. If you’d been raised in a culture that continually shamed you for loving trees and wilderness, you’d pretty easily join the call the tear them all down, rather than consider what’s really causing this epidemic.↵
As N and I watch just about every Hallmark Christmas movie each year, and as I have mixed feelings about this, about the entertainment quality of this, and about the point of it, I figured one way to make this mindless watching feel less mindless would be to live blog about each one. I’ve started this series late, about 6 movies in, but I’ve started it.
Godwinks. It’s a Hallmark thing, based on some book. Possibly Kathie-Lee Gifford is involved? Did she coin it? I don’t know, Google the thing, but from what I recall it’s a moment of serendipity or big feelings where it seems like God is winking at you, so’s to indicate something of His Plan coming to fruition. “Godwinks are always signs of hope,” they say via intertitle before the opening credits.
Insipid? Maybe. But what’s even more insipid is that I live for these. Like: it’s been important to learn these last five or six years when to stop and take a moment to thank God for some small gift, like on Election Day, when I was assigned by random to work a polling place that had a sudden vacancy, and it turned out to be a church with a high, sunfilled rotunda whose walls were covered in painted icons representing religious and secular saints. On what was for me one of the most anxiety-filled days in an anxious year, God gave me a little gift of serenity and I thanked him for it like 5 times that day.
So what’s insipid about “Godwinks” exactly? Well, there’s the obvious cashing in on the way some people use prayer as wish-fulfillment, the Godwink Industry I mean, which behold this opening line from the “Godwinks History” page, written by the man who coined this term:
It was truly a “Godwink” that my first book of hope and encouragement was released just before 9/11, almost as if it was predestined to help a hurting nation.
If I had more time, I’d get into how “almost as if” is the trap Godwinkers unwittingly use to keep themselves from happiness and serenity—it is classic Berlantian cruel optimism—but we’re like four scenes in already and I don’t know what’s going on.
*
BOISE! We’re in Boise in this one, where Sam Page lives. Sam Page will be playing the Man in this one, and he’s the only Hallmark Man I follow on Instagram (you might remember him as Joan’s military husband on Mad Men), even though his posts are rife with shirt-on-fullness and pics of his kids. The Man has not 1 but 2 sons. They’re visiting his mother for the holidays. The Woman works in an office, probably in a city, is it Boise proper? Too soon to know how/why she’ll meet the Man. Her boss is a Black woman, which is true for most Women in the HCU this year—I think I’ve pointed out before how Hallmark has risen to the call of better representation not by exactly letting more people of color star in romantic roles in its movies, but instead by promoting its Black women characters from (White) Woman’s Friendly Coworker to Woman’s Demanding Boss.
It’s something. It’s not representing people with desires and faults to overcome, but it’s not nothing. Oh, Sam Page and Sons live in Hawaii?
*
Okay we got our first Godwink. I forgot that they’re signaled by a little non-diegetic chime for those of us slow on the uptake. Here, the Man has borrowed the classic car his mom keeps in her garage (was it Dad’s? I missed any explanation), and the Godwink is that he found a 4-photo photobooth strip somewhere inside it.
Once, in high school, driving around with nerd friends a few years older than I was, we pulled up to a red light on Herndon Parkway, and there was someone standing in the median selling roses. “If this were a King’s Quest game we’d have to buy one of those roses,” my friend Rob said, and we all laughed, because it was true. Video games’ solipsistic lesson is that everything around you will lead to something later. That’s basically how Godwinks work: if you find something on the floor of a car—now it’s a Christmas tree charm—it should be seen as a step on your personal plot trajectory, not anyone else’s. Ignore the Godwink Chime at your (love life’s future’s) peril.
The Woman is his old girlfriend. That was her Christmas tree charm she lost after prom years and years ago. Moments after he found it on the floor of the car (this car’s floor hasn’t been vacuumed in 20 years, we’re to imagine, despite the car’s flawless detailing), the Man has run into her on the main street of this Idaho town. (Boise was just the airport they flew into.) So it’s like you find something, and then it gives you what you’re looking for. In A Godwink Theoretical Model, coincidences don’t exist on their own, they are always broadcast moments before they’re to happen, like precogs to any crime in Minority Report.
I don’t think this warrants any more discussion, despite how much I want to get into what it means to cloak your lazy plot devices in a matter of down-home faith.
*
Idaho in December seems to be full of snow. It’s everywhere, every spot of ground is covered in it. I’ve only spent one night in Idaho, in a hotel room in Bliss (pop: 318) back in May 2001, so I don’t know what kind of winters they get there, but this snow cover seems accurate for so northernly a state. But anyway here, in this Idaho town, every tree outside is fully decorated: big ball ornaments, lights, ribbon, small trinkety ornaments. Did I mention ribbon? They’ve got ribbon. Those of you readers who live in snowy climates, imagine going outside in December and decorating one of your yard trees with ornaments and ribbon. Then imagine it snowing. If the HCU is to be believed, those trees are going to look fucking incredible in the snow, not at all like the rubble from some apocalyptic disaster.
*
The Woman has a co-worker boyfriend/ex-boyfriend who I’ve seen in other HCMs and who has the perfected eyebrows of a man who does drag. The Mom of the Man has ombré’d grey hair that makes Susan Sontag’s look underwhelming. She’s my favorite mom so far this year: her house is overdecorated but tastefully so, with less overloaded garlands and more white surfaces than you normally see. (On second thought, she does cover every door, including her front door, with wrapping paper, and it’s a corny, cloying look.) She went with her son and grandkids to pick up a tree, and the Man, carrying the wrapped tree on his shoulder, just lightly smacked the Woman in the face with it. Normally, this would be a meet cute, but instead it’s another Godwink. There’s that damn charm again.
The thing about this HCM so far is that nothing is different or interesting. In facing the puzzle of how will this movie put the required elements in order, this one went, “Let’s just follow the instructions very carefully and then be done when it says we’re done.” I don’t know what the Woman does for a living. The Man is looking for a job now that he’s moving to Boise (his ex-wife lives in San Francisco, so they’ve just moved from Hawaii to be closer). The Woman’s coworker boyfriend isn’t weird or threatening or overly protective or rude. So far the only plot obstacle is that the Man and his sons haven’t received their Christmas stuff from the shipping company in time to decorate in full, but now I guess the Woman has made a call and solved it for them.
So why not just kiss now, Man and Woman? Maybe God needs to wink before they can do it. Oh wait, okay so now the Woman is pushing the Man away, because she doesn’t want to get caught up in their past relationship again, and wants to pursue this deeply unattractive coworker. Now the Man is asking his mom what might have happened if he didn’t run off to Hawaii. This is a fatalist movie, which might be true of all Godwinkers: the essence of their conflicts involve people worrying over whether they made the right decisions long ago or are making the right decisions now.
I can get on board with this because I feel it it all the time. But on a good day, I also know that what I’m feeling is a little lie I’m telling myself, and sometimes that wisdom hits me in prayer, which is to say God tells me what’s wrong about that thinking. The choice you made years ago to move to Hawaii and not pursue this relationship wasn’t the “right” or “wrong” choice, it was just a choice that had consequences you’ve been living with. If you want to do something else you can start to do it, without needing a sign from above that it’s okay.
But then again, few things are more difficult for me than knowing what my desires are, or, when I do know them, trusting that they’re my desires, not the desires I think others want me to have.
*
“That’s a Godwink,” the Man just said, to his mom in the kitchen. She was talking about “those little coincidences that give you hope when they happen.” So now it’s diegetic—though I hope they’re not also hearing the chime. Then she asked if the Man remembers what she said when he moved to Hawaii, and Man said, “Go where your heart leads you.”
So it’s like total mixed messages in this movie: are you supposed to listen to your heart or look for Godwinks? They’re not always leading you to the same place. Maybe the heart is the refuge of those poor people deaf to the Godwinkian chime.
Oh shit, the ex-wife has just shown up.
Never mind, she’s only here to deliver the presents she got the boys and tell the Man she’s found someone she might be falling in love with, thus making it very clear she’s not here to become a plot obstacle. God damn it.
*
Almost Kiss just got broken up by the Woman herself. The only thing keeping these two together is some fealty to their shared sense of timing, that there’s again something fated that indicates they’re not “supposed to be” together. So this, ultimately, is the function of the Godwink, to indicate through coincidence that old adage about how to make God laugh. Godwinks kick a person out of their doomy fatalism and say: look, see, here, this is what’s right in front of you.
What does it mean for something to be Meant To Be? I think it means nothing. I think there’s zero signifying in the phrase, “It wasn’t meant to be,” and instead of signification we have only the evidence of people wanting language to fill the uneasy void of their fear. “It is what it is,” we say in similar situations. The only way Meant To Be makes sense to me if I believe two things: (1) someone (God, probably) has a plan that will decide for me what I am and am not supposed to do with every choice that comes my way, and (2) I could ever know what that plan is.
“Margie, look at me: how much more proof do you need that there’s a bigger plan for the two of you?” This is the Woman’s friend speaking (the Woman’s name is Margie), after the Godwink of driving to some big Christmas event everyone is going to and—chime!—seeing the Man there.
It’s led to our All Is Lost moment: the Man is moving to Seattle for a job. The Woman is now positing that this job in Seattle is the Godwink. These people have been given a very cruel and useless thing to guide their thinking and I hope they find peace by like, slipping over onto the set of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and getting this entire concept erased from their memories.
*
But then again: isn’t God a compass? Don’t I also pray for…if not signs then guidance? I could go around this question for hours, but the fact remains that this movie, simply obsessed with sudden coincidences, fails at each moment to create drama and surprise. I’m grumpy at all this Godwinking taking away from my HCM workhorses like cocoa and tree lighting ceremonies and big holiday parties and, well, we have watched a tiny bit of cookie decorating.
He has this odd thing with his underlip, but Sam Page is maybe the handsomest of the Hallmark dudes. I hate that they did this to him.
Oh wait, oh gross—this movie, we learn at the very end, is based on a real couple, the Godfreys, who look like wretched people who always put Family First in whether they decide to trust others and “are grateful for so many Godwinks that have filled their lives over the years.”
This again. While I do live blog these, by the time I’m done I’m usually too ready-for-bed to go through and edit out all the typos, so they pop up on the blog a day or two later, and usually in that time N & I have watched one or two other Xmas movies I don’t have the energy to also live-blog. Some of them aren’t worth it; last night’s was called USS Christmas and it amounted to little more than military propaganda asking us to feel sorry for these people volunteering to kill civilians around the world, but it was set in Norfolk, which is just down the road from where my parents now live, and just down the road from Virginia Beach, which is where I holed myself up in a beachfront hotel room for 3 nights earlier this fall to finish a draft of my book, and so when I saw in the opening credit sequence a pair of fighter jets superimposed behind city buildings, with their 130db screamings across the sky, I nodded as knowingly as any local must have, though not with any of their pride. Anyway, here’s an only slightly better one.
Treat Williams and a woman I keep thinking is the mom from My So Called Life have two sons. One is an actor who stars as a handsome lawyer on a courtroom drama called Handsome Justice. The other is a Buttigieg-style gay who is trying, with his partner, to adopt a baby. If Hallmark lets them kiss even once I will donate money somewhere they’d hate. So far they have held hands, and Act One isn’t even halfway over, so maybe I’ll end up eating my hat. Anyway: Treat Williams and the mom used to do what they called Christmas House, which is where they over-the-top decorate for Xmas and open the house to the town: Hudson Valley? Something Valley, but I know we’re Upstate. Both sons have come home to help them.
The not-gay’s problem—he’s the Man, clearly,[1] and they’ve just showed a photo of the childhood friend who will no doubt soon become the Woman—is that the network isn’t sure whether they’re going to renew Handsome Justice for another season. So now we get to watch and learn how the Man will decide he doesn’t really need 1.2 million followers and to be on TV anymore.
Neal tells me that the gay just got engaged IRL, that actor (who has before been the Man, admirably, in other Hallmark movies), and that his social media posts are about things like how grateful he and his fiancé are for the new pickup truck they were given by Toyota to post about. Also, Neal reports that Treat Williams’s nickname back in the day was Big Meat Treat (SFW).
As I like with my HCMs, Treat Williams is hotter than either of the sons.
*
The Woman is wearing a beret and has delivered coffees (not cocoas!) to the family. Her name is Andi or Andy or Andee. She used to be in a magic act with the Man they’d perform at Christmas House. And now she slipped the news that the parents are selling Christmas House, and the Woman has been hired as the agent. Oh, and the Man asked earlier why Treat Williams’ watch was in his old bedroom, and the mom said Treat Williams is always forgetting it everywhere, but it’s clear mom and Treat Williams are divorcing. They’re doing a very good job of pretending like they’re not, so I get to wait and see how long they can draw out this mystery.
Dave, Jesus, why bother watching if you know everything that’s going to happen and treat all of those as this tedious chore? Nobody’s making you do this.
Do I have to respond to this question only I have asked? Am I avoiding introspection or do I find the question irrelevant? Why watch anything? Did you read previous posts about puzzles?
Also: sometimes punching down feels like punching up, and that comes from never really knowing where you stand.
*
Okay so the mom just suggested that she visit the Gay in Denver (i.e., the Paris of the HCU) and he said they were welcome any time. “Maybe just me?” she said, a little choked up, and it’s unclear whether the Gay picked up on the meaning of this. “You are welcome any time,” he said, so maybe he knows more than we’re letting on? There’s so much this Christmas has to accomplish for this family: the Man needs both his next career stage decided on (will he teach acting in the town?) and the Woman to be his love forever, the Gay needs to know he and his partner can adopt, and the parents need to realize they don’t need to divorce. I think of these stories I’m most invested in the parents’. It feels like it’s time for them to stop living together and end things on a wonderful, compassionate note, and I would love this 2020 Xmas to watch Hallmark show people how relationships really are sometimes.
I’m bitter (bitter-er perhaps), I should point out, because we’ve decided not to travel for Xmas this year. California has made travel … well they can’t enforce this, but the state has prohibited nonessential travel, and our plans were to go to South Dakota, where from my research 99 out of 98 people have the virus and continue to ignore mask advisories out of a misguided and uneducated understanding of what personal freedom entails. So it’s like two strikes against us being with family this year, so here we are, still, in our 500sqft apartment, trying not to give up on what we’ve known to be life.
I realized that if we tried to have the Xmas we always have with our families—same cookies we bake, same movies to watch and other traditions—it would feel self-defeating and perhaps keep reminding us of what we’re missing, and so I suggested we try to do new things, or things that might make this lonely Xmas feel special. “Well, I think we should buy a new TV,” N said. “That’s a no-brainer.” We bought our 780p plasma back in 2008, right after we first moved in together, and it’s never had a problem and we keep moving to smaller and smaller homes, so it’s kept feeling larger and larger, but the moment he said it, my terrible mood brightened, and I was like Of course. Anyway we got a 55” Samsung for $150 under retail that Consumer Reports ranks 3rd in its size-class. It arrives tomorrow. So I’ll have a much larger screen to watch fake scripted families have their most ideal Xmases ever while not one of them even mentions the idea of illness, much less the fact of a global pandemic.
I’ve complained about this before, but I feel the hurt of it still. Would it have been so wrong or revenue-risking to line up just like two Xmas movies this year that faced the reality of the pandemic? Doesn’t Hallmark know how fiction works, and what it feels like for most human people with emotions to watch the stories of others struggling with like obstacles? I’m getting to the point where HCMs feel like public health disasters, continually airing into U.S. homes new movies that inspire people to have closely gathered warm-indoor home holiday celebrations together.
Anyway, let me try to get into this movie. If there’s one thing I believe about Xmas decorating it’s that more is more, and here’s a movie whose central premise is this same thing. Another reason to hate Melania Trump and celebrate her removal from the White House: that bitch had no idea how to overdecorate.
*
Oh my god okay I was wrong. 30 minutes in and the homos kissed on the front doorstep after talking about how they’re going to be a family soon. (Again: they’re those gays.)
The Woman is a cipher. I think this is the first HCM this season where the Man is the protagonist, so we know very little of her heart. She has longer and darker hair than most Womans are allowed to have, and her voice is darker. She’s like a Mediterranean Cameron Diaz, or a more approachable Gina Gershon. Oh, she’s Latinx, that’s why I find her unrecognizable in this landscape. She is 100% unimpeachable, and I think she might even be a talented actress. Anyway, she’s got a nerd of a Son who is going to learn magic from the Man, thus forming the basis of Man-Woman wooing. Now they’re in the small town’s magic shop (still open in 2020) run by a Dom Deluise type with a good-enough British accent. It seems to double as a costume shop. One thing I admire about Hallmark is its optimism about the endurance of small-town retail. Will this encourage its devoted fanbase to shop anywhere other than online this year?
Oops. The network canceled Handsome Justice, making me multiply wrong about this movie’s shape. Next thing you know the parents are going to get back together, but then again they still haven’t announced the divorce plans.
Also, that the ass on the Man is better than the asses on either of the Gays is homophobic.
*
It’s not an All Is Lost moment, but just seconds after the mom confessed that she and Treat Williams are moving into separate homes in the new year, Xmas lights outside exploded in a bursts of sparks and some of the lawn ornaments caught on fire. And the mom is telling Treat Williams that they’re “out of synch.” “A perfect Christmas is not going to solve our problems,” she says, shaking her head in an apron and walking out of the room. Treat Williams seems dubious, or confused, and it’s unclear if he’s another unintuitive man or if the mom is the kind of person who assumes that changes in people’s interrelating practices constitute Serious Problems That Can’t Be Fixed. It seems these two are the kinds of movie characters who have a big conflict caused simply by not yet having that conversation they need to have, and so let’s look forward to that “Oh wait maybe things aren’t over forever” conversation to come.
*
Now I’m invested in the question of whether the Man is going to buy the house from the parents or whether the parents are going to decide in the end to stay. This house looks like it was built in 2010, maybe 2008, though of course all the talking about the house makes it seem like it’s been around forever. Now I’m wishing we got to see more kinds of homes for Xmas other than suburban new construction and new-construction wood cabins in the woods. Nobody in the HCU lives in a split-level, like we Maddens did. (I understand the demands of film shoots.) Some HCUers live in apartments, but none of them ever goes home to an apartment at the end of the movie. Inclusivity comes in many forms, as this movie is making headlines about, but the non-rural working-class really have no place in the HCU.
At this point I’m realizing how boring this live blog is. I’m bored with it, and my guess is that I’m actually becoming more interested in and patient with this movie than any other this year. Too little about it is worth making fun of, and while I don’t care that much whether the Man and Woman get together, I am curious about how everything is going to come together. I mean, Treat Williams just agreed to put the house on the market after the mom told him that he’s made changes in his life (he does yoga and goes hiking now) that she wants for herself—and she sees the only way that she can get these kinds of changes is by selling the house and splitting up. It’s a stupid, wrong, completely misguided and self-absorbed belief, and I know exactly what she’s feeling. I’ve been in the same stupid and wrong place she is right now, assuming that others are standing in my way of something, whereas what’s really happening is that others aren’t actively and vocally giving me permission to do and be what I want because they’re busy working on their own shit, and that reads to me too often like disapproval and abandonment.
Anyway, I hope the mom finds her way out of this trap. Also, the Man has to go into NYC on Xmas Eve to meet some producers about his next gig, so maybe he won’t be ending up in Christmas House forever? Now his advice to the son—who feels like a real pre-teen that I also have been and understand, though I was more into yo-yos and string tricks than magic at that age—about nerves is solid and useful and it’s advice I give others: nerves and excitement are both forms of energy, so accept that your nerves are a good sign that you’re ready for the job.
That Hallmark is making me like everyone in this movie but the Gays is also homophobic.
*
Okay let me get into it. Why do I hate these Gays? Well, they have one job in this movie, and that’s to show off how the filmmakers, and Hallmark by extension, have “revised their thinking” on gays since they took that two-brides ad off the air last year. That’s how the Gays function. All they do is talk about adoption, hold hands, wear turtlenecks, and live in the center of the country.
“Now who’s your favorite son, huh? The one who’s leaving you on Christmas or the one who’s giving you a grandchild?!” This is what the Gay says right after the parents announce they’re moving into the same house together after all (thus making room for the Man to surprise-buy the Christmas House). That’s who this Gay is: scurrying after validation still in adulthood and deciding the only way to get it is to reenact the very hetero norms that made him.
Perhaps I should be reasonable. What kind of Hallmark gays could I expect to like? Bitchy. Single. Pervy. Horny. Irresponsible. “Oh yeah because wanting to love and raise a child is hetero,” N says, rolling his eyes at me. And he has a point: sometimes having kids isn’t a societal pressure you cow to, it’s a real desire. People want kids the way I want to be left alone. I get it.
Also, Bitch Media tells me it’s important to have a successful gay couple adopting in an HCM given how hard some states are working to deny them this right. Which is probably at the heart of my complaint. These gays never had a chance. We just watched a movie about a Woman whose late mother was a stage actress who never told the Woman who her father was, and as a result she feels very ill-at-ease inside theaters and feels tepid about Christmases, which they always spent in hotel rooms. This is a character: someone with a past that affects their present and gives them choices to make on how to act. Hallmark either doesn’t know how or can’t afford to make characters out of these Gays, and so because they are tokens, they make being gay less a reality than an idea.
They are as humorless and dull as a box of rocks. If you present me an unfunny gay character I am going to understand you’ve never met a gay man before.
*
Uh oh! The NYC producer just revealed that they’re not canceled after all, but even amid this news the Man can’t stop thinking of the Woman, smiling in a turtleneck. Now they’ve put Treat Williams in a knee-length knit granny vest to hand cookies or maybe candy canes out to the kids running around Christmas House. The Man left in the middle of a business meeting to go be with his family, and the NYC people were shocked by this. The idea being that it’s so unprofessional to not be willing to sit in a meeting past 5pm on Christmas Eve. This is a perennial grousing that N and I do: the amount of business work that apparently gets done on Christmas Eve in the HCU is just a stupid lie to make viewers distrust cities and people who don’t as a rule put family first.
The son’s name isn’t Owen, but it’s Noah, so basically it’s Owen again. Nimble Noah. That’s his magician stage name. I’ll just end there, with everything working out for everyone in the end but me.
Final Grade: B-
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
My best guess is we’ll see two gays be the Men in 2022. Lifetime’s reportedly got a gay couple this year, so that might kick Hallmark’s ass to put this into production for 2021, but I’m not optimistic. Also, I probably don’t want to see it.↵
As N and I watch just about every Hallmark Christmas movie each year, and as I have mixed feelings about this, about the entertainment quality of this, and about the point of it, I figured one way to make this mindless watching feel less mindless would be to live blog about each one. I’ve started this series late, about 6 movies in, but I’ve started it.
It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I don’t know whether it’s worth doing. Since the last post we’ve watched a number of Xmas movies. In one, the Woman was a dog therapist, and the movie had a puppy in nearly every shot. In another, the Woman was a museum director who fell in love with the subject of her PhD dissertation who traveled inadvertently through time to be with her at Christmas. In another, a Woman who loved Christmas movies found herself inside of a Christmas movie and had to fulfill a Christmas movie plot to get out of the Christmas movie and back to her life (which magically had the Man in it, transported from the Christmas movie, and I was like: how is he getting a social security card?).
None of this content needs blasting. I’m spending hours absorbing content I wouldn’t recommend to a single person. I have more important things to write. But also, a thing you hear a lot about Hallmark Christmas Movies is that they’re formulaic. Yeah, duh. So is a sonnet. Probably I love HCMs not just because I love Christmas (children love Christmas), but because I love the feeling of watching puzzle pieces fall into place.
The fantasy of the world even possibly working like that.
*
Anyway, premise: in this tiny town named Pine River, every Xmas, a tree appears in the town square overnight and it’s called The Angel Tree, and we’re to believe that nobody knows how this happens, that small towns aren’t filled with nosy people on whom nothing is lost. So then, once The Angel Tree appears, you can write a little note and hang it on the bough and your wish on the note will come true. It’s like a goyishe Western Wall.
The Woman grew up in Pine River, and if she can go back and get the scoop on who does all the wish-granting, then her boss will put the story on the “main page of the app” and give her her own column. The app or magazine or whatever is called Aspire. So that’s how the Woman, in the big city, gets shipped to the small town that Hallmark pushes on every big city Woman in its universe.
She arrives before the AT is up. My guess is the Man will be Matthew, her friend from when she was a teen and lived in town. That’s a thing I’ve seen a couple times already this year—it happened in the violinist movie: a friend from childhood who was never a love interest becomes in adulthood the Man the Woman wants to kiss and love. Does this happen to real humans? Women readers: have you jerked off to the thought of male friends you were never hot for in high school?
*
Okay the AT is now up. “Look, Mom, they’re already hanging wishes!” says the Niece. She’s a True Believer. The Man is a True Believer. The Woman lives in the city, which makes her something else.
Strip Peter Dinklage of half his hair and all his charisma and you’ve got the Man. The chin of his beard is white, which is generous of Hallmark to allow. No news on his ass yet, but I’ve already given up hope. His job is diner-runner. The Woman is a new-to-me face. I like her. Is it the husk in her voice of the thickness of her hair that makes me trust she’s good at her reporter job? Or is it simply that her job is Reporter and not Event Planner? She reminds me of a former student I admire. I think the Niece is actually the Daughter, and now the adults are trimming a tree with the Niecedaughter and a boy her age, so maybe these two are both single parents wearing ribbed sweaters? Oh, no, okay the boy is the Nephew of the Man. Oof, this is busy casting.
*
At this point the Woman is interviewing townspeople about their past experiences with Angel, the carefully ungendered person the town believes is behind all the decades-long wish-granting. At 28 mins in, my guess is that Angel is everyone; it’s the town working together without quite realizing it. The Man believes that the town is going to work hard to protect the identity of Angel, which you know. I’m probably right, and I’m never right about this stuff.
How do I feel about this? Much of me loves it. The fantasy of Hallmark smalltown movies is that we might find ourselves living in communities where everyone knows everybody in a way that somehow creates zero conflicts (and as a white man I’m able to enter into this fantasy more readily than others). Our middle sister is usually the family member most eager to forego gift-giving around Christmas, because which of us Maddens really needs more stuff? But this always bums me out, because one of the ways I’ve marked adulthood is how I’ve found greater joy in giving people the right gifts over getting what I myself hope for. It feels so good to give somebody a thing they didn’t know they’ve wanted and that they suddenly enjoy. It’s hard work to find this thing, but it’s worth that hard work, and Yuletide is the time of year that we’re all just trying to give and give and give. So I’m right now 100% on board with this movie, and also 1.5 martinis into the night.
You, reading this right now? I love you for reading and being yourself. Happy Holidays.
*
Oh no. Oh no. The Woman’s article. Usually about 50 wishes get granted each year, but now, with the article, there are 50 wishes hung on the tree in just the first day. I want to watch the Woman reckon with her guilt about this. (Of course it’s begun over a mug of cocoa.)
Aha. The plan is that the Woman and the Man are organizing two dozen townspeople to pitch in and help in the work of granting all the excess wishes. So again: this proves my theory. I mean, I know I just performed enthusiasm for this movie’s premise, but it’s very thin, right? Unless we’re to believe what the Daughter believes, that Angel is Santa (confusing the hell out of the nativity story), I can’t see how this town isn’t by now fully bored with the aggressive samaritanism of one of its older citizens.
Oh, the Man just made a drag pun! “I think we sleigh’d it.” The Woman has been wearing high-waisted acid-washed jeans that bloom wide around the ankles. Hallmark has discovered 2016.
*
So Owen is the Nephew. That’s the Nephew’s name. Owen. It’s Owen. Owen is probably the Hallmarkest name. Owen’s mom is overseas fighting one of our two useless forever wars it’s wrong to still feel patriotic feelings toward, as much as Hallmark is trying, and she’s so sad she won’t make it back for Xmas—though not sad enough to defect. I was wrong about this with a previous post, but in this movie about wishes coming true by Angel, if this Army lady doesn’t show up in the movie’s last 5 minutes I’m going to start to believe (and publish) that Hallmark hates the troops.
*
Almost Kiss just happened, in the Man’s diner, but it wasn’t interrupted by the needy Daughter. All we heard were footsteps running off, and there in the diner’s doorway was a red envelope that we’re to understand is “from Angel.” Here’s the thing with Almost Kiss: they’re continuing now, 2 minutes later, not to kiss. They’re in a gentle argument about Owen that’s not worth getting into here, but it’s enough to not get them back in the mood to kiss. Which feels…? So you’re inches away from the lips of a person you want to kiss, and someone/something distracts you. Don’t you go back to the kiss approach ASAP?
Wow shit, this Almost Kiss has led right in the same scene to the All Is Lost Moment: the Woman just said to the Man that he doesn’t understand anything about who she is. When someone says, “I’m gonna go,” you know that there’s no hope for love to happen for the next, oh, couple days of story time. We’ve got 29 minutes left, so I’m taking this AIL even less seriously than most.
Are you asking me why? The answer is easy: I don’t care if these two get together.
*
Wait. Owen’s mom is in South Korea? We’ve got enlisted people in South Korea that the U.S. decides can’t be sent home for Xmas for, like, a week? Like North Korea is going to attack the moment we let people be with their families. Ugh. Hallmark might be inadvertently producing some of the best anti-military propaganda we’ve got.
Well that’s not true. Is it worth pointing out here that I’ve never seen a person of color serving in the military in the Hallmark Cinematic Universe?
*
The only thing interesting about this movie’s premise is the mystery of Angel in a town of people who seem communally disinterested in easily solving that mystery, but because it’s a Hallmark movie we need to focus instead on this budding romance between people I don’t want to see get together.
Oh shit, the Army mom is back! There’s so much movie time left! That’s nice of them. Nice to let this actress enjoy more of the set than just a trimmed tree by a fire, or even worse: a foyer near a front door. Somehow the Woman “pulled some major strings” to get the Army mom home. (Her name is Zoe, the Army mom. Classic Army mom name!) Turns out the Woman once wrote a story about the very base Zoe is stationed at, and just made a call. That’s our military for you, giving reporters whatever they need.
*
So: who cares about a Hallmark Christmas Movie? We’ve got 13 minutes left, and we all know what’s going to happen. If a HCM is a sonnet, what do we do with this one? The magic of a sonnet is the way the content fits, or exudes from, the rigid form, and me I’m charmed by this one’s throwing Almost Kiss right up against All Is Lost. I’m charmed by saying Yes to both Niece and Nephew, when I assume any movie can only bear the weight of one needy preteen.
But these are formalist pleasures. They soothe a brain that indulges itself in its brainy analyticness. Whatever a HCM has to teach me I never want to learn—they are rife with saccharine banalities that seem hell bent on denying like 90 percent of the realities of being a person in the world in 2020. Formulaicness is a pleasure, but lies are something else. I’ve been lied to all year, is that what’s souring me on this cute blog project?
