‘Tis the season for Hallmark Christmas movies, if you’re into that sort of thing — and, clearly, a whole lot of people are. We’re not here to judge! The Federalist, however, is very much here to do that and in fact did do that, by publishing a ridiculous op-ed about how people liking Hallmark movies is all the proof needed that everyone secretly wants to live out what they consider “the natural order” of things, complete with traditional gender roles, Christianity and coordinated holiday outfits.
In her essay “Why Watch Cheesy Hallmark Movies? Because They’re Full Of The Natural Order We Crave,” Federalist writer Katie Łastowiecka first explains that “formulaic plots” like the ones featured in Hallmark’s holiday offerings, “go all the way back to Shakespeare.” Technically, they go back a lot further than that — one would assume since the dawn of storytelling as an art form — but we’re not going to dwell on that one. No, we’re gonna move right to where it starts to get weird.
She writes:
Despite all the progress we’ve made since Shakespeare’s time, at the end of the day people still crave a story where the guy gets the girl and we get a glimpse of a “happily ever after.” Hallmark even goes a step further — it isn’t just a romantic union we get in the finale but a familial one. The “boss babe” is often called home to return to family and community for the holidays, and there she realizes that her career cannot love her back the way her family does. There is a reordering of priorities (relationships over work), a return to traditional masculinity and femininity (the characters perform more traditional gender roles), and typically a way for our protagonist to contribute to the community in a meaningful way (saving the Christmas tree farm, the inn, or Christmas in general, etc.). We watch as the woman is freed to find fulfillment in the giving of herself rather than the building of herself.
First of all — I am going to need to point out that pretty much the only people who call themselves “boss babes” are, in fact, suburban ladies who live this exact kind of lifestyle, own many Rae Dunn mugs and pillows that say “Live, Laugh, Love” and end up getting caught up in MLMs. Never in my life have I ever heard of anyone else using this term, for serious, about themselves.
Second, the idea that liberals or the Left in general are opposed to “family” as a concept is a ridiculous strawman argument. The Right took that word and warped it to mean entirely unrelated things like hating gay people and opposing abortion, birth control and sex education in schools. Everyone continued to like the original meaning of it, particularly people who support the kind of social programs that make it easier for people have families, take care of them and spend time with them. You know, the kind of people who don’t sneer at the concept of “work-life balance” or consider subsidized family leave to be the first step towards an evil socialist hellscape.
As you could have guessed, the primary viewer demographic for holiday romance films is female, and even real-world “boss babes” indulge in these Christmas fantasies about leaving the daily grind behind for something simple, warm, and real. So why is acknowledging a desire for ordered priorities acceptable in a Christmas flick but not in a summer blockbuster? What is the Christmas magic that allows us to acknowledge the innate inclination toward traditional family life?
Personally, I prefer Lifetime movies to Hallmark movies. This does not indicate a secret desire to hire a nanny who is secretly plotting to steal my baby, my husband and my entire life, to murder a bunch of teenage cheerleaders in order to ensure my daughter gets on the team, to pretend to be a teenager in order to finally live out my dream of being a cheerleader myself or to be stalked by my doctor.
People like movies about people who are not like them, leading fictional lives and taking paths that they themselves never took — or that they can’t take, as in the case of Hallmark movies that feature idealized versions of perfectly formulaic lives.
America has a culture of innovation that can lead to a disdain for tradition. Antiquity has no place in the race for progress, and our personal lives reflect this. Rather than honor the roads paved by generations before us, we are quick to cast out ideologies as easily as old family recipes that no longer suit our sensibilities. Not to say that all progress is bad, but certainly tradition is cast in a less honorable light when it is consistently outranked by other priorities.
Please. Tell that to the guy who rides around my neighborhood on a penny-farthing bike.
No one is mad not mad at “tradition.” People enjoy traditions and innovations that they enjoy and don’t bother with traditions and innovations that do not work for them, just like with anything else.
The “traditional family unit” containing a man, a woman, and their children is more commonly painted as oppressive and outdated — except at Christmastime.
This isn’t that hard, lady. It’s oppressive if it’s not what you want but something you’re expected to do or have to do or a situation you have to stay in in order to survive, as was the case for women for a very long time. It’s oppressive if you are gay and forced to pretend to be straight. That is when it’s “oppressive.” And nobody gets thrown out of Leftist Club for getting married or having kids, though they may be too tired to attend some nights.
Our natural desire for family life is alive and well, and we are allowed to acknowledge that at Christmas because it is the one time during the year when tradition is deemed by the general public as good. We pull out the family recipes, even if they’re mostly cream cheese.
See, this is why we cannot universalize human life experiences in this way. I have no idea what Christmassy family recipes not involving frosting or bagels could possibly involve cream cheese. Is it mashed potatoes? Is Christmas crab Rangoon a thing? I have no idea! What else is cream cheese in?
Let’s move forward or I’m going to get obsessed.
We embrace old customs and old carols. The element of magic that accompanies the season separates us just enough from reality that approving of more conservative lifestyles is permissible, if only for December.
GOOD GOD, KATIE. NO ONE SAID YOUR LIFESTYLE ISN’T PERMISSIBLE. Why can’t these people just do their conservative lifestyles without needing everyone else to do it along with them?
Across the board, people are proportionally more lonely than in the past, and these fluff movies are an attractive alternative to striving for ordered lives in our daily reality. Rather than making peace with challenging family members over the holidays, it’s convenient to turn on the cinematic equivalent of the fireplace channel, and wait for New Year’s resolutions to remind us that modernity reigns supreme and our fulfillment lies in being a boss babe.
But at least on Christmas, we are not afraid to want something ordered, something traditional, something truly fulfilling.
And there were a whole lot of people in the past who lived what this woman considers “traditional lives” and then watched His Girl Friday as their form of escapism. But it’s a movie, not real life, and that is idealized as well. In real life, being a fast-talking 5’8” female journalist who lives in Chicago and has an especially deep voice does not necessarily mean ending up with Cary Grant. Especially because of how he is dead now.
What conservatives will never understand is that it’s all about choice. It is one thing for a high-powered executive to come home from the big city for Christmas and fall in love with their high school boyfriend who is now a single dad who making wooden rocking horses for a living or to watch a movie about that. It’s another, quite entirely, to exist in a world where other people make your choices for you. Where you aren’t able to become a high powered executive and are instead compelled to have married that guy right out of high school.
I hope that someday, people like Katie Łastowiecka become secure enough to enjoy their life choices without also needing to also impose those choices on other people or imagine that everyone else secretly wants what they want. That, truly, would be a Christmas miracle.
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I watch Marvel movies because I secretly want to fly and smite my enemies with my laser vision.
The darker, probably deeper motivation for why the Federalists would make this argument now are found in Umberto Eco's first two warning signs of fascism, and they are literally present in the quoted texts in Robyn's essay:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”