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 each one. I’ve started this series late, about 6 movies in, but I’ve started it.
Look, I just did one of these last night (we’ve got at least 7 more to watch), so I’m going to keep this one short. And probably boring. Already after just 10 minutes The Christmas Bow is impressing the hate out of me. It stars a Korean-American woman I like a lot because she has a total lack of cloyingness when she talks to the Nephew of the Man and also because IRL the actor debuted as a violin soloist with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra at age 5, and no instrument is better in every setting than the violin.
The Woman, then, is a violinist in this movie, too, but get this, she also runs a music shop, with her father, in Boulder. If you, too, are remembering a movie about a father-daughter music shop in Denver, join me in wondering how much the Colorado Tourism Board paid Hallmark to get its official Xmas state changed from Vermont. The Woman auditioned earlier for the Rocky Mountain Philharmonic. Plus one of the Women from an earlier movie was a professional pianist. And I think there’s another I Want To Go Be Famous In Nashville movies coming up to watch, a movie my sister couldn’t finish and I imagine we’ll have a hard time of it as well. So, Hallmark’s cure for 2020 = music performance.
Now she’s singing with a duo in the Boulder Christmas Market, and she’s not a soprano? I’m liking her more and more.
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 each one. I’ve started this series late, about 6 movies in, but I’ve started it.
This one’s got Alicia Witt in it. There’s one every year. Alicia Witt was a little girl with eyes that burned in David Lynch’s Dune. That’s something about her that’s interesting.
“You don’t see a lot of people drinking black coffee these days,” says the guy I think will be the Man on the coffee cart meet cute. (He orders a hot chocolate, naturally.) I feel like ordering different things at a coffee cart shouldn’t count as a meet cute—if anything she should spill something on him, or, Freudianly, vice versa—but what do I know I’m not a writer.
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.
Five minutes into this one and we’ve learned twice from a friend and a coworker that the Woman’s chronic conflict is that she doesn’t show up for herself at work, and so here she is carrying to her boss’s office a tin of what look like very dry sugar cookies made with a recipe she got from her grandmother. Story obstacle: the boss who can put the good word in for her to get the Head Game Creator position she wants has quit! (She makes scavenger hunts for a living, so bonus points to OTTDoC for originality.)
Now here’s the Man in a meeting suggesting “Winter Wonderland” as the theme for the big party that’ll be at the end of the movie, marking himself as a basic bitch. “They’d expect that one,” says the client, cinching the idea in everyone’s mind. Still not sure who the Man is yet, but I think he works with the Woman somehow, and the Woman just said, “I got it: the 12 Dates of Christmas!” which will be the theme of her scavenger hunt that’s going to lead players in the end to some big hotel who’s paying for all this wonky publicity for some reason.
Yes, okay: the Man has to work with the Woman and he doesn’t seem to respect her or want to do this, and so even though this Hallmark movie seemed to skip right over any meet cute, we’ve got our relationship established. That the Man and the Woman hate each other in the first act is as common in the Hallmark Cinematic Universe as too much garland in a kitchen.
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.
Cranberry Christmas is about a couple with a well known lifestyle company called Cranberry Lane, who just happen, at this Xmas season, to be probably on the outs with each other. The Woman isn’t living in their home on the farm anymore, she’s living with her sister (and requisite niece character). The Man is focusing on the farm work—it’s a cranberry farm in Maine—while the Woman does things like make an appearance on an Oprah-type show to promote the brand.
Already this one has some disasters and delights. The disaster is the actor who plays the Man, who appears in one Hallmark Xmas movie each year, and who looks like a sickly Zach Quinto with an ass like an empty bag. What we’ve found this year is that Hallmark seems totally disinterested in casting real handsomes, or perhaps the subhandsomes are all saved for the movies they air in October and early November, before anyone but us real Xmas sickos are tuning in. The Men in the movies thus far have had greasy hair hanging down the napes of their necks, or nothingy shoulders. One was so unpleasant just to look at that N & I kept making audible groans whenever they cut to him.
I see how this sounds. I recognize I’m just as much an uggo as anyone. My point only is that if Hallmark doesn’t need to find actors who can surprise through their acting talents, they might as well spend time and money seeking out actors with faces and asses I’d like to imagine my own face and ass in combinations with. But I get I’m not the target audience. I get the target audience has a taste in men that’s perfectly valid but which I find suspect.
The delight is this movie’s singular premise: every Hallmark Xmas movie involves a too-busy-for-dates woman needing to run off to a small town for job reasons and finding there a simple man who seems at first like A Real Pain but ultimately becomes not just dateworthy, but Drop Everything In Your Old Busy Life And Move In With The Guy–worthy. Here the Woman is already with the Man. Cranberry Christmas is about the power of the holidays to heal old wounds.
“I’m leaving the company,” the Man just said to the Woman before the first commercial break. Now he’s talking to his dad about it while they play, in dun-colored barn jackets, at fixing an ancient tractor. There’s a farce-y quality to this movie, in that the Oprah-type has invited herself to the farm during their town’s big holiday festival, and the Woman and Man need to keep up appearances that they’re still together. For PR purposes.
The night before the election, N & I watched another episode of that Lord of the Rings series. I was in a rotten mood, having been earlier at happy hour drinks with a friend, where the bar gave my card to another customer who’d left long before I did. The episode was about humans and elves gearing up for another big battle with orcs. Solemn faces. Oaths of solidarity. Heaps of longbows getting handed out. I hate this, I kept repeating in my head. Then: why do I hate this?
A bad habit of mine when I ask that question is to assume something heterosexual’s afoot, to ascribe badness or myopic thinking or rehashed triteness to the heterosexual. To be clear going forward: queerness has all kinds of this stuff too. One useful example might be Bros, which we’ll return to, delicately, as I haven’t even seen it.
Talk about myopic thinking.
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As I’ve written before, what makes a story heterosexual might be its being a story. ‘Story chauvinism’ is what I call the belief that storytelling isn’t just another aesthetic pleasure, another way of thinking about the world, but rather something essential to humanity. Its cri de coeur is Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms,’ but you can findthemythrepeatedeverywhere.[*]
In that post linked above, I had trouble making the argument story = heteronormativity. This post might be another attempt. To what end? Why am I trying to make this argument? I’m by profession someone who writes stories at times, and I’m feeling a hunger for stories that feel truer to me than those I, a queer person, am often told.
That’s the smartypants version. The rotten-mood version from the other night? ‘This Lord of the Rings show isn’t half as good as any episode of Golden Girls,’ I told myself. I still believe this with all of my heart. How is it true? And what does it mean?
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Let’s get some definitions down. One thing I might mean by ‘heterosexual story’ is ‘important story’, as when I wrote, in the Commemorative Angela Lansbury issue of Shenny, ‘Gays aren’t the center of our culture’s Important Stories, and may never be.’
So what’s an ‘important story’? Here’s just as good a definition as any, coming as it does in the middle of one:
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back. Only they didn’t, because they were holding on to something. That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
This little speech has choked me up more than once at the end of The Two Towers, and half of that emotion is coming from Sean Astin’s big, thick, kissable face as he speaks it.
But we can extract a few key elements of ‘great stories’:
They present something about the fixity of good and evil, shadow and light.
Perseverance (i.e., ‘lots of chances of turning back’) takes the form of a fight/battle against evil.
They point to or are set in times of yore, and see ‘us’ as a continuation of the people therein.
This last one is the thing I feel most frustrated by. (Though the others present problems I’ll get to in a bit.) When you grow up queer in a straight family, you learn early on that stories/histories/the past can’t tell you who you are, because the story of every consanguineous family is the story of heterosexual generation. When you’re in the closet, or in denial about yourself, this truth hits you very painfully—I don’t fit in the story everyone’s telling—but later you begin to see how the story is wrong, or at least incomplete.
A queer person’s queerness begins at the moment of intractable separation from the birth family, which is a separation from history. What makes a story queer is how it thus begins with the actuality of loss or isolation.
Loss isn’t a threat, as it often is in Important Stories. The loss (of self, family, tradition, safety, values, etc.) that’s feared by the coming of evil can’t be fought against. For the queer person, it’s always already happened.
The important story then becomes: how to move on?
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Which brings us back to The Golden Girls, as great an epic as any on how to move on after tremendous loss: of husbands, of careers, of self-sufficiency, of one’s purportedly ‘fuckable years’. And what’s evil look like in the Golden Girls Universe? Who are the villains? It’s been a while since I’ve rewatched the series, but we can find an easy analogue in the Designing Women universe, where evil takes the form of people (straight men) who don’t even listen to, much less respect, the underrepresented:
If ‘evil’ in every story is shorthand for the forces that seek to destroy the lives and values of the protagonist(s), then ‘evil’ in a queer story involves a return to the pre-splintered family. Evil means retying the thread to the past. What characters embody that, or enforce it? What do they look like? How are they not-us or not-like-us?
Probably the biggest lie heterosexual stories tell is that evil will always stand out as different, making itself so clearly known that all the people who are not-different will band together to fight it.
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Lone heroes have little place in queer stories, because it turns out that How To Move On From Great Loss involves coalition-building, chosen families. I’m inspired a lot here by Kevin Brazil’s thinking in Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?, which posits a kind of Bechdel Test for queer stories: ‘Is there a scene where two queer friends appear without, and without discussing, their family trauma or their fucked-up lovers?’
Likely Bros passes this test, given the run time. And likely the elements of greatness in a romcom (so heterosexual genre) differ enough from those of the fantasy epic to warrant a separate post. But I count myself among the millions who didn’t go see Bros during its failed opening weekend. Representation matters, but from the $30 million advertising budget, it was clear that Bros had a very old story to tell. Letting gays avatar themselves inside hetero archetypes does not a queer movie make.
If, again, that’s what Bros does. Like I said, I haven’t seen it.
