The other night, a friend and I were heading to a happy hour hangout at one of the most expensive restaurants in San Francisco—a detail I open with because this post is trying to understand some things about gluttony, restraint, money, pleasure, and virtue. We were equally wary and excited. ‘For the record, I’m dressed like I’m about to go mow the lawn,’ I texted her beforehand, and she said, ‘For what they charge they should give us clothes to eat in.’
They did not give us such clothes, but nor did they seem to sneer at my raglan T advertising a vintage jockstrap company. We ordered cocktails and talked of hedonism, my friend telling a story of someone at a writers conference who announced, amid a group discussion about bars and favorite drinks, that she felt ‘Othered’ as a person in sobriety. My friend wondered about the rise, lately, in sobriety / restraint / asceticism pleasures in the U.S. A related question: how much of the war against smoking cigarettes in the last few decades has been about public health, and how much about another victory for puritanism—defined loosely as the belief that the purpose of having a body is to keep it ‘clean’ and ‘holy’?
I imagine all of us have our own answers to that question. I’ve got a number of friends and former students who are sober, and I have every reason to believe they’re happier. I’m not any kind of authority on the reasons behind that form of doing without, but I am curious about some things that I’m here to try to work out. Namely:
What was the exact nature of the conflict between those people at the writers conference?
At what point do your habits, behaviors, and commitments become an identity you hold up alongside or against others?
In making heroes out of hedonists, in siding every time to the pursuit of pleasure and excess over restraint, am I indicating something of my overall values, or is it just because pleasure is easy and I can’t handle difficult feelings?
More nights than not, I drink more than the doctor-recommended 3oz of spirits. Am I drinking too much, or am I allowing myself a pleasure for its own sake? That seems to be the basis of hedonism, an ethos that seeks to maximize pleasure in its isolated form, meaning that the pleasures we get from donating our time or money to a cause we believe in, or the mild euphoria I feel after swimming a mile first thing in the morning—these are not the pleasures of the hedonist. These are ancillary pleasures.
Sometimes I feel this is the point of life: to ever increase one’s ongoing pleasure without causing increased pain in others. But pleasure has a cost. Booze at a certain amount does things to my digestive system I pay for later. All drugs and consumable vices carve themselves on the body in some fashion, and so we have the motto of temperancers everywhere: All Things In Moderation.
Temperance and moderation have its own pleasures, I imagine. But don’t feel. That is, when I provide myself temperate pleasures—when I say no to a(nother) vicious thing I enjoy—that pleasure is tinged with Good Boy status. I feel like I’m in school hoping for the gold star on my ditto. What I still, in my 40s, have not yet found a way to do is undertake and enjoy temperate pleasures for myself, and not for the approval of some (ghostly, but pressing) judge.
Hedonistic pleasures likewise carry a naughtiness to them. Oh this is really gonna piss my parents off.
*
Let me change gears here.
Sex Addicts Anonymous has this phrase they use: Keep working your circles. It refers to the central understanding of sobriety in SAA. Sex is part of being alive, and so abstinence can’t look the way it does in AA, say. Much of the early work a new SAA initiate goes through with their sponsor involves sorting their sex practices and behaviors into two circles: the Inner Circle, which holds all the things they did that brought them to SAA, all the stuff they feel bad about after; and the Outer Circle, which holds all the sex stuff that makes them feel good.
This is a psychosis, and here’s why: Everyone’s circles in SAA are different. Hiring sex workers can be in one person’s inner circle, because it’s what brought them to SAA, while it’s in another person’s outer circle, because they feel ‘addicted’ to masturbating alone to porn, and hiring sex workers is a great way to engage their sexuality with another person. Sex with sex workers, then, is neither good nor bad, it’s something in SAA that causes some of its members shame.
AA has the chemical process of addiction to base its work around. SAA has the emotional process of shame. If shame marks the boundary between the sex you feel good about and bad about, your troubled relationship to sex will not be improved by stuffing that shame into a closet. Sorting your circles accepts that shame is an augur, a useful tool. Let me accept and trust my shame to better have the sex I want, says the temperate SAAer.
But why not accept the sex you want to have to better understand shame and its effects?
When I asked that question and saw in its answer a far deeper understanding and acceptance of myself, I left SAA.
*
Another way of relating the above to the topic at hand: What does it take for someone to put every sex practice under the sun in their outer circle? (That’s the good one, confusingly; let’s just move on from the fact that SAA makes one’s ‘Inner Circle’ a thing to be avoided, bucking all idiom trends.) What happens to your identity after you dissolve the boundary, vis-a-vis your vice, between yes and no, have and have-not?
I said earlier that the point of life seemed to be increasing pleasure without increasing pain, and yes I see in that balancing act sneaky temperance waving at me, but I’m noting here the pain and harm side of all this. What makes hedonists chiefly gross figures in our myths? I’m thinking here of Des Esseintes, or Midas, or even Hedonismbot:
It’s likely a failure of my imagination this morning, forgetting some hedonists of humble means, but the key factor seems to be money. As I said before, hedonism costs—and more than the health and well-being of the hedonist’s hungover body. Vices aren’t free, and so the lesson we teach over and over again is that hedonism will lead to corruption as absolutely as absolute power. Decadence. Human trafficking. Hunting ‘the most dangerous game’.
A more everyday example is the city I live in. San Francisco—at least in terms of climate and landscapes, but also in terms of employment levels and social services—is a pleasureful place to live. For some. Creating and maintaining that pleasure requires a workforce too underpaid to afford to live among it, especially since San Francisco opted in on becoming a bedroom community for tech workers employed elsewhere. So when you go out to eat, there’s always the question of what has it cost the person who made your food for you to eat it at this price you’re willing to pay?
Which is why I was happy to pay the high prices at Che Fico, which recently added a 10% service charge to every dine-in check—paid in addition to, not in lieu of, the standard tip. Tips get distributed among the whole kitchen staff. Line cooks there reportedly make $72,000 a year.
Maybe there’s a thing called Compassionate Hedonism that continues to seek as its core ethos the increase of pleasure, but does so in a way that understands the sources of that pleasure and simultaneously minimizes any ancillary pain or harm. In this formulation, we can bring hedonism in among the other virtues, which—if you believe Montaigne—are found only through some form of pain:
[V]irtue presupposes difficulty and opposition, and cannot be exercised without a struggle. That is doubtless why we can call God good, mighty, bountiful, and just, but we cannot call him virtuous: his works are his properties and cost him no struggle.
from ‘On Cruelty’
So maybe hedonism is just another way we chase after holiness.
I’m late to this book. I was early to it, having picked it up in 2018 (in the original printing!), but I couldn’t finish. The novel, as I wrote in a blog post on abandoning books, was ‘about 80 percent “hanging out at bars” and I couldn’t get engaged in the book as anything other than a remarkable tour de force.’
I don’t know what I was thinking.
Andrea Lawlor’s novel—about a boy named Paul who can transform his body’s size, shape, and even sex organs—is the queer narrative I’ve been looking for for ages. I want to try to figure out what changed, within me as a queer and/or a reader, that made me so grateful to be reading a book I had very little patience with 4 years ago. I always knew I would return to it (the reviews alone, from friends and the literati, suggested it was better than I was seeing), but I figured I’d do so as a bit of homework, housekeeping. Okay, I read it and I get why everyone loves it.
Instead, I’ve now read it and I need everyone to understand why it’s great.
*
‘Paul was never very good at having friends. If he liked someone enough to get to know them, he’d want to suck their cocks or even just make out after weeks of prolonged staring. That might be his favorite.’
Paul Polydoris is full of doubts about who he is and who he should be, who he should be with, what he should be doing with his life, etc.. He’s a very classic post-teen except when it comes to sex, about which he has few if any doubts. Paul is ‘good at sex’ in ways that have nothing to do with prowess or maneuvers in bed, and everything to do with knowing himself and what he likes or wants to try and not feeling ashamed about it. Here’s a passage from when Paul takes the titular form of Polly at Michfest:
Paul was naturally curious about girls; he didn’t know how to find a boyfriend; and sex was sex, he thought. Later, other gay men would find this remarkable; they would make their endless fish jokes, or confess proudly their inability to get hard with some cheerleader. Paul didn’t understand that. What was sex but newness? And sensation and conquest and intrigue and desire and romance and fantasy, and specific people sometimes, sure, but not always. Having sex with Heather Federson had been hotter than sucking off the fourth guy he’d ever gone down on. Not as hot as the first three, the newness there trumping their less-appealing qualities. Fucking Heather Federson had been scary and dangerous and even humiliating, and he’d felt brave to do it and protective of her and scared of her and all of that was fun, right? […] She didn’t love him either, and wouldn’t. She was proving something on him too. Boys were harder, easier, more dangerous, and mostly Paul just wanted them more, but something was better than nothing, when it came to sex, and always, always he was curious.
Note the line ‘other gay men’—one of Paul’s many gifts is his ability to stay himself (a gay man) even when he’s fucking his girlfriend with his girl genitals. In Paul, the bounty of queerness multiplies and shifts as his body does, or his whimful desires do. He’s a total hero to me in this way—not in that I wish I could also have female genitals to explore lesbian sex with, but because Paul doesn’t let any categorical identity dictate his choices and desires.[1]
I can’t tell you how good it feels to read a novel about a queer character who just likes sex, and in liking sex acknowledges the reality of HIV (this story is set in 1993, by the way), but for whom sex doesn’t become a question of identity, destiny, or self-worth. It feels revolutionary, but maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong novels lately….
*
Another of Paul’s gifts is having grown up in thickly queer circles, which has given him sharply hewn opinions on art and aesthetics. Before I get to some examples, and why I love that the novel makes room for them, I want to first point out how remarkable this is. There are plenty of novels about gay men—going all the way back to Giovanni’s Room at least—that stick their protagonists in relative isolation. These novels tend to be tragedies, and even humorless ones,[2] which I’ve always found strange given how funny gay people are. When you yourself are a queer kid in isolation—no queer friends, no clubs at your school, etc.—these novels seem to affirm the lies you can’t help tell yourself (well, you’ve picked them up from the air around you): your difference is going to be painful, and likely leave you loveless, if you don’t commit suicide by the end of your short narrative.
Here are some representative passages I marked:
[Paul] crossed the street and used all the change in his pockets to buy two Boston cremes. He leaned on the counter, eating his donuts out of the bag. Paul liked any food that exploded into his mouth: grapes, Freshen-Up gum, soup dumplings. There was something pleasing, something orderly, about swallowing a mess.
[Paul’s friend] Jane was alternately drawn to and horrified by Darwinism, and often found herself attributing phenomena to the unseeable (hormones, pheromones) despite her strict identification as a social constructionist. This was one of her sore places. Was biology destiny, in fact? That might really fuck up not only her identity but her dissertation.
He ostentatiously returned [Patti Smith’s] Radio Ethiopia to the rack…. He made it to the shop on time, took the key from Madge, the owner, who was off to scout rural Salvation Armies. Paul settled into the big leather chair to think, because no one bought expensive snap shirts before noon. Patti Smith—why was she such a genius? The cover of Horses was tacked to the shop wall. He tried to imagine the day Mapplethorpe took that picture, what Patti Smith had been thinking. He wished he had a cigarette. He thought about the smell of piss baking on the August streets of the East Village. he imagined drinking Patti Smith’s piss, then Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Then Jean Genet’s. Then River Phoenix’s.
This was the stuff that I think originally made me put the book away. Nothing was happening. Paul didn’t want anything specific, and there was then no clear obstacle to get in the way of that pursuit. Etc. Etc. But lately I’ve been looking for queer narratives that are queer in form and not just in the characters involved—which, when they perpetuate ancient narratives about queer sex as tragic or disease-bringing, or even worse, when they mirror Austen-style love & marriage plots but with gays!, makes me think of the inevitable season of The Bachelor that’s the exact same show but just with men.[3]
I think I’m done with queer representation inside hetero forms. Lawlor’s consistent trust in association, digression, and tangents (best illustrated in the Patti Smith passage above), delivers a narrative as fluid and shifting as Paul’s body. The engine that drives whatever plot is here involves moods and ideas, and in this way it reminded me of maybe the queerest novel I’ve ever read: Huysmans’s À Rebours.
If you’re looking for a good story in the classic sense of plot and pacing and resolution, PTTFOAMG will disappoint you—as it did the me I was in 2018. But if what you want in a novel is to transport you into a body and a mind you can live inside for a while, and read their world through that perspective, this novel is for you. It’s for everyone. I’m so glad I returned to it.
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
I know I’m not getting very deeply into the explorations and arguments about gender this novel pursues, mostly because it’s not exactly my beat and others have already written more smartly about this than I could. But here I do want to point you toward a really smart essay Lawlor has in Mutha on becoming a parent and seeking a new term for themselves.↵
I’m thinking here of Lie with Me, A Little Life, most of Garth Greenwell, likely other renowned novels I as a gay man do not need any more of (but which I’m also not sure I’m the intended audience for, which is a post for another time.)↵
I publish a fortnightly newsletter called Shenny, if you haven’t heard. In the last couple of months, subscribers have asked me why I don’t use Substack or Medium or any of the other sites out there that essentially do everything for you. The short answer: control issues. I like having everything I do—email, blog, newsletters, etc.—integrated into the same domain. (I could much more easily use Gmail to run email on my domain, but I don’t, to give you an extent of the neurosis.)
At any rate, I use WordPress to run the back-end of this site (or, more specifically, my site designer and friend Beth Sullivan used WordPress when she built it), and through minimal research found the Newsletter Plugin to build Shenny with. It took a few weeks of working through all the settings to get them just right—integrating the mail functions with my domain’s SMTP servers, modifying the DNS record, and tweaking the CSS to match the look (Beth helped a ton)—but I think it was worth it, because I get to maintain control.
If I were to score The Newsletter Plugin on its documentation I’d give them a B, or a B- on my frustrated days. The information seems to all be there, just not easy to navigate to. The other day, I saw a little lightbulb icon next to the window where you’re supposed to enter the newsletter email’s subject. Get Ideas it read. My subjects are set by default: ‘Shenny: [Random Thing I Recall About One Of My Sisters]’, but I was curious and clicked on it.
Here’s what I got:
What I love about these suggestions is how they assume you’ve got the content but have failed to figure out how to pitch it, that you’ve just written a killer newsletter about the secrets of certain famous people—like the Arquettes, say, or the Branch Davidians—and need help making sure your subscribers click. I doubly love just accepting these lines as actual word-for-word newsletter subjects. ’10 Ways to Simplify Your Something’ has a nice frank honesty to it, because does it really matter what? We all have a something we could simplify, just give us the ways.
However, who am I to second-guess the people who do newsletter marketing for a living? So I thought I’d try out some of these templates. Maybe I’ll generate some quality content for a future Shenny.
10 Lies [a Minnesotan] Likes to Tell
How safe is your [hermit crab] from [being assaulted]?
The thing about Rocky Horror Picture Show is that all the sexy, heroic men die and only the unsexy men—I mean this in terms of bodies but mostly in terms of minds—get to survive. Meat Loaf, who died today, played Eddie, a delivery boy, who for much of my life was the RHPS character I pined the most for. Because I mean look at this man:
Anyway, in the height of the pandemic I wrote a likely unpublishable essay about the ways RHPS intersected with, amplified, and informed my younger body’s developing eroticisms. Who cares, right? But Meat Loaf died today, and though I was never a fan of his music, I loved him, desperately, for enough years that today, in honor of his life and what he gave me, I want to share this excerpt:
—
In a dream, you walk through your home, which may be the home you live your waking life inside or may be a home your dream has fashioned for you. You turn a dusty corner, open a suspect door, and there it is: a spare room you never knew about. Or sometimes it’s a whole wing of rooms, expansive, promising, ready to be filled. For a long time, that’s what sex became: an extra wing. An affirmation that somewhere within me lay an allure I didn’t know I had. Or a strength. There’s a wish we quiet young men have to shout the loudest inside a loud room.
I grew up to have a quiet voice, and quiet voices wait. There’s going to be a lull. Really, any minute now. Eddie bursts literally onto the scene without so much as a pause, his arrival announced by a siren, an urgent blinking light, Columbia screaming his name. He is a wild, undead thing, an icy, sideburn’d blast from the past, wearing denim and leather, with a motorbike and a saxophone—all the paraphernalia of the dangerous boy your parents are quick to hate.
Eddie wears HATE on his left hand. His danger is that he needs nobody, he doesn’t even need to be looked at. Eddie is all eyes; the gash across his forehead forms a bleeding unibrow to frame them, and at one moment, singing to Columbia, his eyebrows pop with a subtle shrug, suggesting both how passionately he can fall for a girl just from the taste of her, and how little it really matters, how this sort of thing happens to him every time he crosses the street.
The flash of that look floods Columbia with a sea of promises. It’s as dense with feeling as a deathbed’s I’m sorry. For years I watched and waited for it.
Eddie’s body is nothing to look at. The body is something to fuck with. Shoot up junk with. It’s a barrel, a boulder, a bulk that blocks everybody’s path, and it serves as a means of bringing other bodies closer. All he has to do is pull one finger himward and Columbia comes running. He expects her to. Just the sight of him makes everyone in the room scream and run, but soon he has them all dancing, singing a song about fucking teen girls.
Do they know they’ll soon be singing songs about Eddie? “I very nearly loved him,” Columbia will say, and for years I wondered what it was that held her back. When you see sexy bodies everywhere but a mirror, you don’t feel that sex is yours to try. Sex becomes for other people, like jiujitsu or Finnish. I never had a Rocky body. All I wanted was to be looked at by a big man telling me how fun sex was. What more, I wondered, could love be?
LOVE is on Eddie’s right hand. His jerking-off hand? Eddie the ex-delivery boy embodies dark secrets and regrets and failures. The promise of Rocky is that manufactured sexiness can be made real. The promise of Eddie is that your first attempts, your shortcomings, your monstrousnesses will return and haunt you. They’ll show up the moment you think you’re free of them, requiring you to dig out the pickaxe. Add it to Eddie’s allure: he’s alive for 3 minutes and 20 seconds, but they can’t stop talking about him. What a guy. He’s the loudest man in the room, even long after they eat him.
I. If the thrill of Christmas is getting to be with your family and loved ones, last year was the worst Christmas season ever. Neal and I made the most of our pandemic isolation. We baked a lot of cookies. We got ourselves a new 55″ Samsung LED TV. It broke in 3 months, and Samsung in its poor customer service wouldn’t replace it even though it was under warranty, but at least we had the TV to watch Hallmark Christmas movies on.
I live-blogged 9 of those movies (out of 40+, not a thorough coverage). It was fun the way the 90s were. It was not a marathon, but when I think about doing it again this year, I imagine what a marathoner thinks after they finish that marathon they’d been telling themselves for years they’d train for. I see a Been There Done That T-shirt, also from the 90s.
Why run a second marathon if you’re not a marathoner? I’m trying to imagine being such a person, and the only things I can think of are (a) you want to beat your time out of a sense of disappointment or striving, or (b) the experience gave you a pleasure you’ve never felt before and can’t manufacture elsewhere, so it’s time to chase it again.
There’s no better way to live-blog bad television, unless you talk about striving to be funnier with it, the thought of which sends me down a bleak road. It’s the road I’ve seen any time I’ve thought this season about live-blogging a Hallmark Movie, which Neal and I have already watched 5 of and it’s only November 10. So then there’s the question of what pleasure it gave me, and whether I can’t get that pleasure elsewhere, and if I can’t get that pleasure anywhere other than live-blogging bad television, I have much larger problems than what kind of content to post here for the next two months.
II. When I was 20 years old, I was given the job—paid, even—to review visual art shows around Pittsburgh for a print newspaper. I was an art history minor at college, or more exactly I was in the process of switching my minor from art history to writing, but it was enough to let me feel qualified, and I guess the job was of such little importance that my editors felt it was fine giving it to a 20-year-old who knew essentially nothing of art’s processes or market.
At the time, I also worked as the Opinions Editor for the school’s daily newspaper. I was a pundit on a tiny level, with a readership of maybe tens of people. I use the word not to place myself among anybody, but to capture the job at hand: opinion-haver. Take-maker. The best part of these jobs was getting to decide what I thought, write it down in words that conveyed those thoughts entertainingly, and see it published within days. I got the first and last word. Sure, sometimes we’d get letters to the editor,[1] but nobody read those.
Now I’m a man in his 40s who’s been writing his 2nd nonfiction book for 10 years. I’m acutely aware of the struggles it takes to make art, to see it through the long and complicated process, and while I still value reviews for the conversations they help us have about what art is doing and what it could or should be doing, when I sit down and work, again, on this book, I hear a lot of critics in my head. I hate every one of them. I don’t know why they have to keep telling me I suck, or that this argument I’m making about consent paradigms is branding me as a sociopath, or that telling people about this part of my life proves I’m a pervert nobody should respect.
“God, you’re dumb,” say the critics in my head. It’s such an easy job, being a critic. You get to sit back, wait, and have an opinion.[2] As a writer who hasn’t published anything in over a year, more and more this job feels very sad and self-destructive. And worse: it feels just riddled with jealousy. Many people get to have the (formulaic, fakey, heteronormative, bullshit-heavy) movies they wrote appear on screen for an audience of millions, and I get to sit in my home office wondering why I have so little to show of the 10 years I’ve been working.
I don’t like the form of their success, and last year I got to pretend it was the form I didn’t like. This year, I know it’s just the success.
III. They already showed the Danica McKellar one. Faithful readers of this blog will recall that I love Danica McKellar. They paired her with a man I have a very hard time looking at, and the charisma was off, but they gave her the job of “Christmas Tree Whisperer,” and she got to have a number of scenes where she dropped pine needles in test tubes and shit so’s to deduce the cause of the rot problem at the Man’s family Christmas tree business (he refused to diversify what they planted and somehow they still could afford that house they put his character in).
After it was over (they kissed and there was still 15 minutes left, confusingly), Neal said, “We might have to think about alternatives to Hallmark movies this year,” and he didn’t have to say another word. I felt the same thing. Is it like we woke from a nap and the dreams we were having, fun at the time, feel pointless amid the day’s pressing needs?
Or rather, the day’s open doors. Live-blogging bad TV is a merry-go-round. Fast, fun, and it feels like you’re getting somewhere, but you’re not.
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
Once, a letter to the city alt-weekly took me to task for a poor review I gave a group show of local artists (Boring art = the sum of my take), and in it, the letter writer called me a “wannabe art critic.” My editor printed the letter the following week, along with a note she signed underneath it, which read, “Dave Madden doesn’t want to be an art critic, he gets paid to be one.” I wish I had it framed.↵
Sure, there’s a lot of work it takes to form informed opinions. You have to see a lot of things, and you have to read a lot. It’s a lot of tracking, a lot of extended attention-paying. You have to remember what one artwork did at a certain point that created this feeling in you of “No” or “Yes” and then make a case for how this is a flaw/victory in terms of the work’s stated aims, and not in terms of you and your quirks or quibbles. (I mean, if you want to be good at the job you have to do this.)↵
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…?
