Episode 40 - Christmas-Industrial Complex

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Pena-Guzman,

Ellie: 0:08

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Okay. So I wanted to introduce David to one of my favorite Christmas songs, "The Christmas Shoes." We can't play the whole thing for you all, because that would be like a tenth of our podcast episode time, let me just set the scene: it's a little boy who is impoverished, whose mother is in the hospital, and she's probably going to die tonight and he just needs to buy these shoes for her. And in his hand he had a pair of shoes. Oh, it was dirty from head to toe. Nice man behind him gives him the extra money and he runs to the hospital and gives them to his mom. David, what do you think about this?

David: 2:04

So many questions about the narrative arc here. Like, why does the mother need shoes to meet Jesus? You know, like, is heaven like a no shoes, no service kind of place.

Ellie: 2:19

And they have to be beautiful shoes. She has to look beautiful. Um, What I love about this Christmas song- I love Christmas songs. I love Christmas. And I love Christmas in a somewhat ironic, tongue in cheek, perhaps problematic way. What I love about this Christmas song is that it perfectly encapsulates the imbrication of Christian theology and Gospel of Wealth, the commodity fetishism of our capitalist culture, you know, by emphasizing shoes as essential for the project of this dying mother's salvation.

David: 2:51

Yeah. If you just have the money to buy the right kind of thing, then your entry into heaven will be pretty smooth.

Ellie: 2:58

Better than that, if you're just, you're dirty and poor, but you're cute enough. Like this little boy is to have another guy who's richer give you the money to buy the shoes, then you're good.

David: 3:07

Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is definitely about the guy, uh, the philanthropist figure, who says that the first thing that they noticed about this child is that they're dirty from head to toe, just like,

Ellie: 3:17

Well, and I just want to say this dude. I mean, he, sure goes on mission trips to impoverish countries, putting myself on blast there; in a distant Christian past, I also did that. And so, I've actually been there. But yeah, this kind of way of valorizing, presumably white saviorism philanthropy as part of the Christmas spirit, right. I knew what Christmas was all about!

David: 3:37

Love that you parts of it memorized.

Ellie: 3:40

Oh, I have whole thing.

David: 3:41

Yeah.

Ellie: 3:43

What's so amazing about it is it's not even that this Christian Guy realizes the spirit of Christmas outside of the store when he's like in front of a chreche with the baby Jesus's image or something, it's literally still in the store. Maybe the little boy is like a stand in for Jesus, who knows. And he's in the line and it's like, look, you can find the Christmas spirit while you're buying presents.

David: 4:03

Well, it it's like, it's- what puts him in the mood is finding out that his mother is dying. It's like nothing like dying mothers to put me in the spirit of the season.

Ellie: 4:13

And the poor little boy, like voicing his own turmoil and troubles, right. He's like, made Christmas good at our house, even though we didn't have a lot, you know, like it wasn't about the presents. And yet all I care about as my mother is dying is buying her these shoes. Like that's what's so weird about it because part of the boys' narrative is that he didn't have a lot growing up and his mom knew how to like generate the Christmas spirit in the absence of gifts.

David: 4:36

Which is weird that then the kid was looking in his pockets frantically for money. Like he thought he had money, but after a very thorough investigation of its contents realized that he didn't have any money.

Ellie: 4:47

I want the alternative version of this story, where the little kid is just like low key scam artist, who's like, look at this bougie douche in the line for, you know, the shoes. And I'm going to tell sob story, right? Like I want, I want vindication for that little boy in a different way.

David: 5:03

Oh, my goodness.

Ellie: 5:04

Sorry now I'm just being like pure Scrooge. Oh my God, awful.

David: 5:08

You are definitely Scrooge. And I mean, to be honest, I have identified with both Scrooge and the Grinch.

Ellie: 5:14

Well, luckily we're going to be talking about Scrooge later.

David: 5:24

Today we are deconstructing the Christmas industrial complex.

Ellie: 5:28

What is the true function of Christmas celebrations in an evolvingly secular world?

David: 5:33

What do cheesy Hallmark movies reveal to us about the meaning of Christmas?

Ellie: 5:38

And what can the canonical Christmas story, A Christmas Carol, tell us about what our culture values during the holidays?

David: 5:48

Ellie, I'm really happy that you picked the Christmas shoes as the Christmas song for us to listen to, because I have to say I find Christmas music extremely oppressive. Because when I was young, I used to work at a bookstore and come October, we had to start listening to Christmas songs for eight hours a day, non-stop on repeat. And that was the first time that I truly understood the ferocity of Americans obsession with Christmas.

Ellie: 6:21

Wait are- October? We- we're not talking post-Thanksgiving here or at least post Halloween?

David: 6:26

Let me express my feelings in their true or untrue form. Like, it felt like for a long time, but-

Ellie: 6:33

If it felt like-

David: 6:34

It felt like October, maybe it was November, but it definitely was too long.

Ellie: 6:39

Well, I ask in part because there is so much contention in American culture these days about when the Christmas season really begins. Like my mom for instance, is like, it only begins after Thanksgiving, anything before Thanksgiving is wrong. I think our generation has increasingly accepted that it might just be post Halloween, which I'm kind of down for it. I enjoy the Christmas spirit, but I will say, I think a lot of the reason for it getting pushed to post Halloween versus post Thanksgiving is consumerist in nature, right? The companies and stores wanting to push the Christmas season longer, the gift buying season. We'll talk more about that. Yeah. But I want to get a little bit more into your experience here, David. So take it that Christmas songs and carols do not get you in the Christmas spirit. What does, if any?

David: 7:24

Well gifts kind of do, because for me, Christmas really began, as a kid, almost on Christmas Eve and it was all about the gifts. But you know, there- nowadays now that I'm not a child and I don't get gifts really for Christmas, it really is family time, which for me means a return to my homeland of Mexico. So I tend to visit my family once a year. And that's during the holidays. So the meaning of it now has this homecoming character that of course it didn't have when I was a kid. But that's what gets me in the season. It's actually like being back in Mexico, kind of culturally immersed.

Ellie: 8:05

You found the true spirit of Christmas, which is family rather than gifts.

David: 8:10

Well and travel, you know, there's a lot of consumerism with travel too. So I don't want to romanticize that, but yes, for me, it really means seeing family that I haven't seen in a very long time.

Ellie: 8:18

Was Jesus a big part of your experience of Christmas growing up?

David: 8:21

Uh, Mexican Catholic. Hello.

Ellie: 8:24

Don't want to assume.

David: 8:26

No, I mean when I moved to the US I realized that there were a few cultural differences, between the American journey into Christmas and the Mexican journey into Christmas. And one of them is baby Jesus. So in the US, Santa brings you the gifts right. In Mexico that's not the case. People don't talk about Santa bringing the gifts on Christmas Eve. It's El Nino Dios, it's baby Jesus himself, in the flesh, who travels on his own delivering gifts to all the needy children across the world.

Ellie: 8:58

Nino.

David: 8:59

Yes.

Ellie: 9:00

Around giving gifts as he's cooing.

David: 9:03

Yeah. I don't, I don't know if he's cooing and I don't know how he, like, yeah. I don't know how he brings the gifts.

Ellie: 9:08

My God. I love it.

David: 9:10

I love the image of like a flying baby, flying at top speed with tons of gifts. Yeah.

Ellie: 9:18

My God.

David: 9:19

The Kid God, that's the translation. El Nino Dios.

Ellie: 9:21

I can't. Oh my gosh. No, I, I love it. And it's so funny you mentioned Santa here because for me, I grew up Christian and Jesus was the reason for the season, let's put it that way. But you know, we also have Santa, and Santa was the one who brought the gifts. And when I was younger, I was like old enough to realize that Santa probably wasn't a thing because how would Santa know what I wanted? But I wasn't so old that I was really ready to cast off the myth entirely. I went through this weird intermediate phase where I adopted my own belief system that Santa put the gifts in the toy stores, but then the caregivers, mostly the parents in my case, would pick them out for the kids.

David: 10:02

Oh Really?

Ellie: 10:03

My budding philosophical mind, those are really the metaphysical questions that I needed to figure out.

David: 10:09

So I see that you started at an early age in trying to have your cake and eat it too. The essence of philosophy. Uh you're like, I'm not really ready to radically alter my world view so let me see how I can make it compatible with some, uh, auxiliary beliefs. No, my experience of coming to the realization that it was not in fact a baby flying at top speed was responsible for my gifts. In my case, it was an act of revenge from my uncle. I was mean to my uncle at some point. And he was like El Nino Dios is not real. And so I had a crisis, it was very sudden, it was not like, oh, I, I, I had suspicions and then I had time to like reconfigure, the components of my world view. No, it was just like, your worldview is taken down and then you just have to like rummage through the ruins in search of meaning.

Ellie: 11:01

This is telanovela moment. I'm just like picturing your uncle being like, no es verdad..

David: 11:07

Yes. And my mom actually got very mad at him because she had to deal with the fallout.

Ellie: 11:12

Oh, god, was my Spanish right by the way, been a while since I took it.

David: 11:16

No, that was like a weird Latin. Latinized version.

Ellie: 11:23

No way.

David: 11:26

Uh.

Ellie: 11:27

Wow. But that's interesting. Cause I feel like a lot of Christmas for me is about nostalgia for childhood, for frankly like the good old days. And there, there are rituals that really have to do with that for me. So no coincidence that I chose Christmas shoes. Thank you for Indulging me in that.

David: 11:43

Indulging is the right term.

Ellie: 11:45

Well, you know, if you're not going to indulge during the holidays? So thank you. Um, for me, there's a local radio station, KOST Los Angeles that plays Christmas music nonstop post-Thanksgiving. I grew up listening to this, and even though I'm no longer religious, so some of the religious rituals have fallen away from me, listening to KOST103.5 is a big part of the Christmas season, as is actually going to church. I still go to church as part of like an exercise in childhood nostalgia. Yeah. Once, sometimes twice on Christmas Eve. And I go back to the church where I grew up, um, in Hollywood and I see a bunch of people that I knew back in the day. There's this whole special moment where they have all of the alumni from choir come up and sing. And so even though I'm like fully in my thirties, I'm a choir alumni.

David: 12:33

God.

Ellie: 12:34

Who were in choir and we sing carols.

David: 12:37

Oh, that's cute. You know I was in the choir as well for church, but I'm such a bad singer. And I always have been, that I would just mouth the words cause I knew I would ruin it. So I would stand with the choir and just mouth.

Ellie: 12:49

There's, there's no way for me to be like, no, no, no don't sell yourself short there, I think mouthing was probably a good

David: 12:55

You're like actually, you're selling yourself long already.

Ellie: 12:59

Even the mouth. No, no, no. Your, your, your beautiful face and spirit coming through there. Oh-

David: 13:05

No, but I quit very quickly after it was exposed that I was not really singing. And the choir leader was like, David, you really have to sing cause it's not fair. And then I was like, I'm out. Um, and so when you go to church, Ellie, do you actually pray or like, cause you know, that is part of the ritual of going to church, like participating in the life of it. So I'm curious about that. Or are you just mouth the prayers without really saying it like my choir experience?

Ellie: 13:30

I feel like there's a moment of connection, even though I'm not a theist per se, you know, it's still like a moment of connecting with other people. I do think that there's greater forces outside of me than the ones that I can see. You know, and so like, there's, there's that, but I think a lot of it is really just the feeling secure in rituals that are familiar to me from such a young age. And a lot of that is about the singing, frankly.

David: 13:53

So-

Ellie: 13:53

Gifts too.

David: 13:54

Gifts and singing. So would you say that it's the church that puts you in the Christmas spirit?

Ellie: 14:01

No, because I think by that point, I've already been in the Christmas spirit since Thanksgiving. what really puts me in the Christmas spirit is buying gifts on Black Friday. No, no, no, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

David: 14:10

I, that's fine, you can embrace it.

Ellie: 14:14

No, I feel like the Christmas spirit, a part of it is like being in a city and seeing lights, right? Like going to specific neighborhoods that are decked out, or maybe it's like going ice skating or picking out a Christmas tree, that type of thing. Uh, Holiday parties do- oh, and cookie decorating.

David: 14:34

Well, yeah, but I want to go back for a second to the gifts and gift giving, because this really seems to be an absolute requirement for Christmas as we learn from the Christmas Shoes, mother has little time and she needs to be hot for Jesus. And I do really like the practice of gift giving and it was one of the central rituals of Saturnalia, which was an ancient Roman festival celebrating the winter solstice, and on the Julian calendar, Saturnalia typically fell on December 25th, but over time, Christmas took on many of the traditions associated with Saturnalia for itself. And one of them was gift-giving. Um, but there were others that were also borrowed from Saturnalia, like singing. So your choir experience and my choir pseudo experience, candles, which I also associated with Christmas, are leftover from Saturnalia, as are feasting, and just generally, an attitude of being merry.

Ellie: 15:34

Well, and, that points, uh, you know, to something that a lot of people will mention in this context, which is that Jesus was actually not born in December. Jesus was likely born in the summer. And so people have wondered, like why do we celebrate Jesus's birth on December 25th if Jesus was probably born half a year away. And originally this probably represented an attempt to convince pagans to accept Christianity as the official Roman religion; that is the Christmas celebration at the same time as Saturnalia. And in this way, the Saturnalia traditions evolve into the Christmas traditions and eventually Saturnalia itself falls away. And in fact, for the first few hundred years of Christianity, Christians were not celebrating Christmas on December 25th. This Christmas date was not really settled until the fourth century of the common era when Christianity was already ensconced as Rome's official religion.

David: 16:24

Well, and maybe there's a lesson here to be learned from the early Christians, which is that if you want to be accepted into a culture, one easy way to do that is just to appropriate their holidays and upstage them. It's like you throw this party, we're going to throw a better one on the same day and we'll just keep it going. Not that people need to do that to be accepted into other cultures, I say that as an immigrant.

Ellie: 16:48

But you know, I, I think nowadays It's interesting that you mentioned the origin of gift-giving in Saturnalia because I tend to think about Christmas's emphasis on gifts as having less to do with bringing others into Christianity, right, and more to do with the ties to capitalism. So I was surprised to find out that Saturnalia involved these rituals of gift giving, because I had just like assumed that it wasn't until relatively recently with the rise of capitalism that Christmas became associated with gift giving. And it sounds like that's wrong. At the same time, though, I will say, you know, late-stage capitalism, if we want to call it that, has really transformed a lot of the rituals of Christmas such that nowadays- here's a, here's a stat for ya- Americans spend an average of $650 on gifts each holiday season. Then we also have the rise of like the black Friday shopping that I mentioned, and this emphasis on consumption and purchasing as really the heart of the holiday spirit.

David: 17:41

Yeah. And I mean, when thinking about the extension of Christmas backwards, even black Friday, right, now begins on Thursdays, and in some places, even on Wednesdays.

Ellie: 17:49

Oh yeah, you're right.

David: 17:51

Like attempt to stretch the, the festivity as far as it goes in order to get people to drop dollars here and there. Um, but in general, I think this speaks to the fact that Americans have a hard time nowadays thinking about celebration outside of the context of consumption around festivity. So for example, Thanksgiving, I was flabbergasted by the fact that for Americans, Thanksgiving, of course, it's a time to give thanks, to an extent in a superficial way, whatever, but what really shocked me was the emphasis on excess around Thanksgiving, where like the essence of Thanksgiving is having too much of everything, too much food, too much enjoyment and a party in which there aren't leftovers is seen as like, not a good Thanksgiving. Just like this display of abundance and consumption.

Ellie: 18:43

No, absolutely. I love it. I love a black Friday Thanksgiving sandwich. But I do think, you know, our originals are essentially bound up with consumption and also with these class markers, right? The, the Thanksgiving table can't just have a bunch of food on it, it also has to be well decorated, home has to be decorated, and I'll just put myself on blast here. My family has a lot of really special Christmas traditions that I totally and largely unironically enjoy. But we really take setting the tables very seriously. And for much of my life, my family would host these lavish 50 person Christmas celebrations. We were actually featured in the LA Times.

David: 19:24

Thinking here of like a 50 person dinner, where did it even take place, like in your house?

Ellie: 19:28

Yeah. So, so we had like a really long table that was in my parents' living room. And then we had, there's like various kiddy tables, one of which is like outside, that's for the small kiddies and the medium kiddies were in the breakfast room and the big kiddies were in the dining room.

David: 19:42

Oh, my goodness. So growing up in Mexico, I had large dinners on Christmas, but they were always block parties, where the community kind of came together and it was a potluck and it was outside. And it was never really around the family unit. So I feel like this might be a slight difference, culturally, between our upbringings. But I, I mean, I mean, I'm in shock, first of all, that you had these 50 person dinners and second that you were featured in the LA Times, because it means they were really fancy,

Ellie: 20:12

Yeah, they were really fancy. they were also really fun. I mean, I'll say that and it wasn't just family, like it's family friends too, but family friends who are like family, but I think, you know, the difference between the interior home party that I'm describing, which I think is very bound up with a kind of aspirational upper middle class, white, suburban lifestyle in the US is really different, right, from the block party aesthetic that you're describing, where it's like out in public space, right? think a lot of the American rituals around holidays have to do with the space of the home and trying to show off the home in a certain way.

David: 20:47

So ultimately you get into the spirit whenever the home is presented, maybe in a particular way or organized in a particular way.

Ellie: 21:20

The time has come, David, for us to talk about Hallmark movies. This is an essential part of what we have entitled the episode, which is the Christmas Industrial Complex. We've talked a little bit about Christmas rituals and how they're wrapped up in capitalist consumption, but we would be remiss not to highlight the Hallmark movie, which is a hallmark we might say of the Christmas Industrial Complex.

David: 21:46

And I know you're obsessed with them, so I think you need to take the lead here, Ellie, with why you think Hallmark movies play this role.

Ellie: 21:56

I mean, first let's maybe say a little bit about what we mean by a Hallmark Christmas movie.

David: 22:01

A movie made by the hallmark corporation. Is that?

Ellie: 22:05

Well, well, it's actually they're- they're usually on the Hallmark channel, but then I'm sort of using them as a stand in for the entire genre of cheesy Christmas movies, which actually started on Lifetime. And they're also now being produced by Netflix and Hulu. Everyone's jumping in the Hallmark Christmas movie genre. So for instance, for the fourth quarter of 2018, the Hallmark channel was the most watched cable network among women 18 to 49.

David: 22:35

What a bizarre category, just to begin with: women 18 to 49. That's a huge group.

Ellie: 22:40

That's like adult women prior to, uh, old age, right.

David: 22:44

Yeah. So it just encompasses a lot. Like a 19 year old and a 45 year old in the same category.

Ellie: 22:49

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I will say I watch a lot of these with my mom. I am not 18. And my mom is definitely not 49, but we, we watch a lot of these together. They're kind of like intergenerational bonding moment. And there are a few features that usually characterize these Hallmark movies. One is that they're really cozy. Their aesthetic is like everything you would associate with Christmas. You've got the lights, you've got the fires, they're usually in a sort of wintry place. And another thing is that I think they really reproduce ideas of American nostalgia. They're very white, even when they're not white, if that makes sense. Like even when there are characters of color, they still have like an essentially whiteley vibe, you know, to, to the plots and they often have to do with well to do career women who visit small towns. Sometimes they're returning to their hometown. Sometimes they are going to a small town for the first time and they're rediscovering themselves connecting with a part of themselves that doesn't have to do with their ambition, but has to do with the beauty of everyday life. The catalyst for this realization of the humble beauty of everyday life usually local man in the town.

David: 24:03

Yeah, like a local hunk. And you, you know what, this sounds like, this sounds yeah, this sounds like the exact plot of Sweet Home Alabama.

Ellie: 24:11

Yes. I think there's, there's an essential Sweet Home Alabama quality to them.

David: 24:15

Yeah, so I think Hallmark movies are like Sweet Home Alabama in the winter.

Ellie: 24:22

Yes. And also with like an added level of cheese, because they're often really low budget and perhaps self-consciously and ironically cheesy. Like when I say I'm obsessed with them, I mean, I'm obsessed with them in the sense that like, they're so bad they're good. I hate watch them. I enjoy them ironically, right. And, and so does my mom, and this is maybe not true for everybody, but I do think a lot of people who are watching these in the same way that people are watching The Bachelor or The Real Housewives are doing so in a bit of a tongue in cheek way.

David: 24:51

Really, but I wonder how many people are watching them in this tongue and cheek way, as opposed to watching them truly as a way of feeling good about their own interpretation of the meaning of Christmas, which again, is to reconnect with the things that truly matter.

Ellie: 25:09

No, I mean, so I'm thinking for instance, about an Atlantic article that's called "The Cheesy Endurance of the Made for TV Holiday Movie," because that's part of what I mean by Hallmark movie: they're made for TV, although the distinction between made for TV and made for the screen is now sort of like-

David: 25:23

collapsed.

Ellie: 25:24

irrelevant. Yeah. Given the rise of streaming. services.

David: 25:27

Everything made for the middle-sized screen.

Ellie: 25:30

Exactly. 52 inch whatever. But, okay, so, so in this article, the author gives us a synopsis of the 2018 lifetime film, A Very Nutty Christmas.

Here it goes: 25:40

hardworking bakery owner Kate Holiday, played by Melissa Joan Hart, has more cookie orders than she has time to fill this holiday season. And when her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her, any shred of Christmas joy she was hanging on to immediately disappears. After Kate hangs the last ornament on the tree and goes to bed, she awakens the next morning to a little bit of Christmas magic. She gets a surprise of her life when Chip, played by Barry Watson, a handsome soldier who may or may not be the Nutcracker prince from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, appears in her living room. And so one of the things that, that the author of this article, Megan Garber points out, is just like self-consciously cheesy and ironic, right? She writes, there's often a heavy dose of irony woven into their formulas, the comfort of the weighted blanket mixed with the winking absurdity of the ugly Christmas sweater.

David: 26:34

Well, and I love that it's a handsome soldier who may or may not be the Nutcracker prince from, The Nutcracker.

Ellie: 26:42

Well, this is also a huge trope. These guys, the local hunk, is often from a different time period. Like like there's one where the guy is a medieval knight who comes to the contemporary world. And then there's another one, one of my favorite ones, about a Christmas ghost, woman stays in a haunted hotel and there is a legitimate ghost that she falls in love with from like the 19th century.

David: 27:07

Okay. So now-

Ellie: 27:08

Not the Demi Moore movie.

David: 27:09

What I am getting now is that Hallmark movies and for the record, I really haven't seen them, I do think this is a largely white American phenomenon, which, you know, fine.

Ellie: 27:19

Would say new.

David: 27:20

About

Ellie: 27:20

New, I think it's new too. It's, it's gotten really popular in recent years.

David: 27:24

Um, so it seems like that there's a combination of Sweet Home Alabama fetishization of the simple life of the small town combined with sometimes the time traveling of The Notebook in various iterations and then the metaphysics of Ghost.

Ellie: 27:40

Yeah, well, even if it's not an actual ghost, it's like the ghost of like, if the ghost of a certain kind of America, you know, in a small town America that is as humble as apple pie type of thing. And that's one of the things I find really troubling about these films actually, is that in the trope of the ambitious city woman who finds herself by finding a man in small town America, there is a valorization of the relinquishing of ambition in order to find happiness that looks very traditional in a lot of ways. And it actually has nothing to do with the woman's career. It also doesn't really have that much to do with communal values of family and friends, because always like or two token friends. This is often where they cast the people of color in these films, right. It's like the token friend.

David: 28:28

I'll be your friend in your Hallmark movie, Ellie.

Ellie: 28:31

Well, there is a least one, if not two Hallmark Christmas movies that have a protagonist named Ellie, which is its own thing, blonde in both cases.

David: 28:38

Well, I was going to say some of the images that I'm seeing associated with Hallmark movies all feature really, really white ladies with blonde straight hair, usually in a ponytail.

Ellie: 28:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a remarked upon phenomenon, which is that often these women who play the protagonists are less attractive than the local hunk character. And it is supposedly so that a sort of everyday average woman can see herself in the character and think that she too could have this like local hunk, even though she's like, you know, on the scale of what our society considers hot a little bit less hot than he is.

David: 29:16

Oh, wow. And all it takes in order for her to do that is to go to a small town and basically give up her career. That's a good trade. No. Yeah but they all do look like Reese Witherspoon in one way or another, like shorter white women with blonde hair. I'm not sure that they're all natural blondes though.

Ellie: 29:40

Oh, absolutely not. But you know, as we're talking about this, this trope of the small town, I'm also thinking about how there are a substantial number of these films that feature actual princes and vaguely European countries. So there's kind of like a Princess Diaries element, where a lot of times it's like the journalist slash tutor or the local cook who suddenly gets mistaken for an aristocrat, and then becomes the object of the Prince's desire. There's also a kind classic Cinderella narrative.

David: 30:11

Well, and I mean, this speaks to Americans' infatuation with a dying European aristocracy. So for example, when you think about the way in which Americans were drawn to something like the Royal wedding and the drama of the Royal family, it seems like this gets replicated in Hallmark movies on a micro scale, where somebody looks like they come from the aristocracy, or somebody actually is from the aristocracy ,and then falls in love with this woman that is relatable to the everyday Jane.

Ellie: 30:44

Yes. No exactly. I'm actually having a hard time even finding the movie I'm looking for right now because I Googled Christmas Switch and there are so many variations of this. There's Christmas Switch, Switched for Christmas, The Princess Switch, that Princess Switch is actually the one that I was thinking of. And in this case, two women, sometimes sisters, but also it's sometimes just totally random up getting mistaken for each other. And they're usually of like very different class backgrounds and the wealthy aristocratic one who is mistaken for a commoner ends up falling in love with a commoner. And then the average Jane one ends up falling in love with the prince and vice versa. That also speaks to the duality of, like, let's say, like middle-class usually white women, this 18 to 49 group, are simultaneously encouraged to go after some sort of girl boss city ambition, but then also go after the traditional script of heterosexual romantic love, even as there's a recognition that those two are potentially incompatible, maybe neither of them is ideal either to be honest. Um, but there there's a, there's a kind of splitting off of the desires where one character gets to embody one of them and the other character gets to embody the other.

David: 31:54

So it seems that to my framework of other movies that help us make sense of Hallmark movies, we have to add Dead Ringers by, uh, Cronenberg, which is like about these twins and a case of mistaken identity and it's, it's a psychological horror, really dark, but here it's presented as this feel-good moment of self discovery. In Dead Ringers it's about twins who sleep with women and then mess with their heads and then mess with each other's heads. And then they basically die together in a really upsetting way, um-

Ellie: 32:26

Is just like other level, not, not really a level of darkness, but a level of complexity, which Hallmark would not even, you know, claim to, to be capturing. I mean, they're, they're like painfully self-consciously shallow. Like try, try watching this by yourself without another screen in front of you. It's virtually impossible. You need to either be with somebody else kind of like jokingly hate watching it, you know, with the, with some popcorn or eggnog or, you know, ice cream- cookies! Cookies! Or you have to be scrolling your phone. Yeah. Like they're, they're really boring.

David: 32:55

Yeah, so there's, there's a lot of Christmas. There's a lot of industrial, not a lot of complex.

Ellie: 32:59

Yeah. But, I should say too, as I'm thinking about the kind of splitting off of these two different goals that women are taught to, to strive for, they both ultimately boil down to the dream of heterosexual, romantic love, because even the one who ends up being a princess and who's able to like actualize projects in the world, is still taught the way to do that is by attaching herself to a prince.

David: 33:21

Wait, so I'm surprised that gays haven't gotten their own Hallmark movie. I, it seems like by now they would have broken through this last glass ceiling of cultural representation.

Ellie: 33:34

Okay. So yes. And I will say they have, although I will say there that in the same way that even when these films are casting characters of color, oftentimes their plots are still fundamentally white. I would say the same about, the, you know, representation of gay characters in these films. Like there's something- there. Yeah. There's just like something so profoundly heterosexual about the very plot of them. But you know, as we're on the topic of gay Hallmark characters, I would be remiss not to mention the terrifyingly bad 2020 gem, A New York Christmas, which on the face of it, seems like kind of cool at first. It features a protagonist who's a woman of color and also a lesbian. And, it's this story of like, what would she have done differently if she could have gone back and lived her life in a somewhat different way? But the best gay character in this whole genre of film is the gay angel who literally says things like, girl, get it queen. And whom you find out towards the end is actually the fetus of one of the main characters who was still born and somehow aged into this hot angel who's gay like after dying as a fetus, right.

David: 34:51

This sounds like a movie for the ages. Although I have to say, I would have preferred if the angel was a baby angel who said things like, get it girl. Yes, you better work. And it was just an actual fetus.

Ellie: 35:07

A gay Nino Dios, if you will.

David: 35:10

Oh my God.

Ellie: 35:11

And just, just to give you a sample of how people responded to this movie, I use this app called Letterboxd where you can basically do like a public diary of the films you've watched and see how other people have reviewed them. And here's just a sampling of them. Okay but is this pro-life propaganda wrapped in a gay blanket to distract us? Please tell me because I don't know. And another one says, who is at the center of the lesbian pro-life Venn diagram, like Dick Cheney's daughter?

David: 35:37

That's really good. Uh, but I think we see here some of those tropes that we were just discussing, right? The focus on family, on simplicity, on choosing love above all else. And you know, of course you can't really have much of a Christmas movie without some kind of supernatural event, whether that's a miracle or an angel, or just like a massive coincidence where two people who are meant to be together, magically run into each other. Because you know, they cross the street at the same time and looked into each other's eyes.

Ellie: 36:13

Yet, I think what you're describing David gets at the fact that for a lot of people, the Christmas spirit essentially has to do with like warm, fuzzy feelings in some way. And I also think that that connects up with this bigger idea that, that I've been working with, which is, Christmas, for many people, doesn't have a religious meaning. We live in an increasingly secular world. And of course there are lots of people in the US who are religious, but not Christian. And so in a society that really takes like a couple months out of every year to celebrate Christmas, how do people resonate with Christmas when they're not Christian? And I think here, what I see in the popularity of Hallmark movies is that one way for this message to resonate with people to bring it into line with other dominant and frankly, relatively conservative, social scripts that are palatable to people, even if they're not overtly religious. Although a lot of people who are watching these are also probably Christian. But the social script I have in mind here is the social script of heterosexual, romantic love, which the queer theorist Mari Ruti calls a happiness script, and she draws the term happiness script from Sarah Ahmed, another queer theorist. For Ruti, you know, romantic love is really one of the primary social scripts that we're taught to seek. And especially when it has to do with this idea that you'll have a happily ever after if you find yourself in a heterosexual, often white, often bourgeois, marriage. And I think there's a way that the script of Jesus's birth, when it's unpalatable for people, becomes really easy to replace with the script of heterosexual romantic love, because our culture has so many other elements that center around romantic love, right? It's like this really entrenched script. And so, you know, at a time of social upheaval and uncertainty around the role of religion in secular life, what can we all agree on? The idea that romantic love is beautiful, wonderful, the meaning of life.

David: 38:12

Yeah cause it's weird, although comprehensible, when seen in light of these happiness scripts, that I would bet there aren't a lot of Hallmark movies that hinge on somebody finding their best friend or somebody healing their relationship with their grandfather, or, you know, like all these other kinds of relationships that exist. They all seem to pivot on finding a romantic partner specifically and yeah finding somebody of the same class as well, typically, middle-class, right. Like I don't, I don't see a lot of romance of the 1% or of the working working class.

Ellie: 38:49

Oh, well, but I actually think that that's not quite right in the case of these films, because oftentimes, as we mentioned before, they do play on the trope of somebody from the very, very tippy top of the 1% finding themselves with this humble local hunk or the local average Jane finding herself at the top of the 1%. But I will say that the kernel of what you're suggesting, David, I think still stands, which is that these are meant to appeal to the middle class because they essentially reproduce a middle-class notion of romantic love even if the characters are coming from different classes.

David: 39:20

Well, and if you think about it through a spatial metaphor, when you, whenever you have like, you know, somebody from the upper class and the lower class combining, that's how the middle class originates, right? Through the mixing of high and low. and so it seems like the thing that is missing, and this is sort of what I was getting at, is that you'll never find two poor people falling in love in their material reality, right. Without ascending to the middle-class or to the aristocracy, or a narrative of two aristocrats falling in love, because that's out of reach for the middle-class. And so that's not the sort of thing that we want to see.

Ellie: 39:55

Yeah, those are so 19th century. And you know, one just last thing to put in here too, as we're thinking about the kind of upheaval of meaning that causes a lot of people not to be sure about the actual meaning of Christmas in their everyday lives. I would be tempted to call Christmas in our day and age what Daniel J. Boorstin calls a pseudo-event, which is an event that is not spontaneous, but planned or incited in advance for the purpose of being reported or reproduced. So think about the way that for a lot of people, a lot of Christmas has to do with what we're seeing on social media, what we're posting on social media, stories that we're sharing about our Christmas experience, the, you know, images of like, what is it like to go to Disneyland at Christmas, LA reference here, or to get a tree? These rituals are encoded a desire for them to be reported or reproduced. And he also notes that a pseudo-event's relation to the underlying reality is ambiguous. So for a lot of people, their celebrations of Christmas don't have much to do with the birth of Jesus Christ, which is the ostensible reason for Christmas. And in addition to that, pseudo-events are usually intended to be self fulfilling prophecies. And I think you could really say that about Christmas today in terms of the celebrations. I don't know.

David: 41:07

And is the self-fulfilling point that Christmas takes on this value simply because we invest in the ritual without really having any connection to the substance? Like we commit ourselves to the form of going through the motions and that's where its social power comes from.

Ellie: 41:25

Yeah. Exactly. And also this idea that like, why is Christmas important? Because we endow it with importance, because we think it's important.

David: 41:34

It's what I call the Paris Hilton effect. It's like, why is Paris Hilton famous? Because she's famous? You know, why is Christmas important? Because it's important.

Ellie: 41:43

Okay, David, it is so funny you say that because, in fact, the book where Boorstin develops the idea of a pseudo event, a book called The Image, which came out in 1961, is the very same book that first develops the idea of being famous for being famous.

David: 41:56

Really? Okay. And I think Christmas is the disembodied embodiment of Paris Hilton.

Ellie: 42:05

Christmas is famous for being famous.

David: 42:07

Exactly. Uh, uh, umm, and Paris Hilton is the reason for the season. Enjoying Overthink? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 42:36

So David, you just indulged me in talking about one of the foremost forms of 21st century Christmas media, the genre of the Hallmark Christmas movie. And I hear you want to take us back to the 19th century and talk about Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

David: 42:49

I do. Not only because this is the Anglo American Christmas story that everybody grows up with, people read it in high school. And there are various movie adaptations of it, but also because it was my first entry point into American Christmas. So when I moved to the United States, I watched that movie with my step siblings who are American. And they told me that in this movie, you see what Christmas means to an American audience. And of course it's book, which I subsequently read, but I was really fascinated by the fact that for a lot of Americans, Christmas meant, at least this is how I interpreted at the time, being haunted by various spirits that effectively terrify you into doing the right thing. So it, it didn't seem very Christmasy to me at the time. And it still doesn't to be honest, but it is, you know, I, I would say a canonical work of Christmas literature.

Ellie: 43:52

Absolutely. And so I imagine that many of our listeners are familiar with this story, but let's maybe say a few of the central features of it. So the main character is Ebeneezer Scrooge, the mean-spirited, selfish, and avaricious old man, has a ton of money, hoards it, hates Christmas.

David: 44:08

Yeah.

Ellie: 44:09

Personification what we now call a Scrooge. Yeah. Literally. And what happens next? Remind us.

David: 44:15

So Scrooge is living in his mansion alone. It's dark, it's cold, it's old. So you get a sense that this guy is really a meiser who treats other people in instrumental ways and hasn't had a human connection in a long time. And so you get introduced to some of the characters that play a role in his life, like Bob Cratchit, who is his clerk who helps with the house and works for him.

Ellie: 44:40

Kind of the embodiment of the good sweet, humble guy.

David: 44:44

Yeah, the poor, English worker, essentially who Bob Cratchit is. Also there is Jacob Marley, who was Ebeneezer Scrooge's partner, business partner, for a long time and who died seven years ago. So, we learned that he's been dead for seven years.

Ellie: 44:59

As a doornail, in fact.

David: 45:00

Yes, dead doornail, which is the deadest of all physical objects, according to Charles Dickens. Um, so the story gets going when Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his ex business partner, Jacob Marley, who tells him, I lived my whole life just like you, trust me, it's not good on the other side, you don't want to be where I'm at. I'm roaming in limbo without any sense of happiness, always carrying these chains. So they just paint you a very visceral

Ellie: 45:29

picture. Yeah, no, he's, he's like, all of his chains, they're the embodiment of the wealth that he hoarded in life and didn't share with others. And so the sense is that the wealth that he had in his afterlife is actually a burden rather than a gift.

David: 45:41

Yes, And I will want to get back to the metaphor of the chains in a minute, but he is visited by three ghosts, the ghost of Christmas past, present, and future. And he has these visions of both the Christmases that he has had in the past that have led to the present moment. So for example, he starts remembering the time that his love, his young love, broke up with him because he was too greedy. Um, subsequently he's visited by the ghost of Christmas present and he sees the way in which other people, like Bob Cratchit, who are poor, nonetheless have Christmas dinners full of joy, which he's never so there's a contrast there between him and the worker. And then when he's visited by the ghost of Christmas future, he has visions of a world in which people are talking about the death of a miserable old man who was awful to those around him and, famously, it's him. And so he comes to the realization that what's in store is a pretty terrible death in which nobody's going to remember him or mourn his passing.

Ellie: 46:49

So let's think about the themes of a Christmas Carol. Obviously there's a rejection of a consumerist capitalist mentality going on here, right? Scrooge is a problem because he is hoarding; he's not caring for other people. So we've got this emphasis on communitarian values as opposed to greed. What else?

David: 47:10

Well, there is also the Christian component here, uh, the notion that there are these spirits that roam the earth that will come and visit you, delivering a moral message, something akin to angels that will save you from yourself, and give you the chance to redeem yourself. So there is a theme of redemption and moral salvation that goes from beginning to end.

Ellie: 47:31

Yeah. And I would say that the redemption and salvation themes I do see as Christian, but the, the ghost stuff is, is actually pretty different. Like it's a, a wild world where, you know, in a sense, Marley, I think he's in purgatory rather than hell, so certainly there is like a Christian afterlife notion. But it's not an overtly Christian story. Maybe let's put it that way.

David: 47:49

Yeah, definitely not overtly.

Ellie: 47:51

Jesus is not the reason for the season here. Community is the reason for the season.

David: 47:56

And I mean that is definitely the Christian interpretation: it's the season. during which people come to realize what really matters in life. And that's not, uh, material possessions, but rather human contact, love, appreciation of one's neighbor. And there is a very clear connection between that and the kind of morality that we tend to associate collectively with Christmas, right? As this moment of reckoning with your priorities.

Ellie: 48:23

Yeah. And I also think that transformation here is in part brought about by the sympathy or even pity that he has for the character of Tiny Tim, the young boy. And I mean, I wonder about that because on the one hand, you know, there's something really appealing about the child and especially the child who's different from other people. Tiny Tim has a limp. He has a hard time walking and Scrooge really comes to have this transformation through seeing actually in the future, Tiny Tim will die. And, as you find out later, once Scrooge sees the error of his ways and ends up helping the Cratchit family, Tiny Tim is saved from death. Um, I also think at the same time, there's another reading of Tiny Tim's character where there's something fundamentally instrumentalizing about the little boy with a disability who is providing the savior narrative for the Scrooge character and who also is the object of pity, which I think a lot philosophers see-

David: 49:17

Yes.

Ellie: 49:17

as not really a good emotion to have for people with disabilities, right. It's like sympathy, empathy, compassion. Sure. But pity, really?

David: 49:24

Yeah. I mean, one of the mottoes of the disability rights movement is piss on pity because of the ways in which-

Ellie: 49:30

Mm.

David: 49:31

pity has been weaponized against people with disability, turning pretty much anyone with any kind of disability into a medium for the moral transformation of an able-bodied individual, right? The person looks with pity at the disabled and says, I am not thought I must change my ways. Just as we can think about the character of little Tim through a critical disability lens, we can also think about the story as a whole through a Marxist lens, which gives us a very different picture of what is at stake in this narrative, very different than the Christian moral transformation, moral salvation at end of life line of thinking. A Christmas Carol is steeped in capitalist ideology that I think is ultimately bad from a political standpoint. And I mean, not that I think Charles Dickens should be our go-to person for political views since he himself was ultimately, you know, uh, petite bourgeois character, um.

Ellie: 50:30

That's interesting. Cause I think we're going to go in a different direction there and say that because the story ends up espousing these values of community and rejecting wealth hoarding, it could be read as a Marxist story.

David: 50:42

Oh, so that is one reading, but I see it as the exact opposite. I see it as a defense of capitalism through and through well, in part, because I think it pedals certain mythologies that are essential for sustaining capitalist modes of production. So think about the moralization of poverty that happens through the character of somebody like Bob Cratchit, right? That poor people who, even though they have been dealt a really bad hand, they will get into the kingdom of heaven afterwards, right? So this is what you see in those visions, where even though Scrooge treats them like crap, the Bob Cratchit family still prays for him and wishes him a happy Christmas. And so there is a way in which poverty is moralized in a way that I think is very damaging, politically speaking, and not to mention just the, the myth of the powerful philanthropists, right? The, the capitalist with a conscience, because one thing that's really important note here is that at the end of the story, we do want to read it as a moral transformation and it is presented as such. But what's left somewhat ambiguous and vague at the end of the story is how this inner transformation translates into action. And what we're told by Dickens in the concluding chapter is that Scrooge gives Bob Cratchit a raise and buys turkey. That's his way coming to terms with the fact that he's exploited this guy for decades.

Ellie: 52:19

Doesn't he go into the street and pass out money though too?

David: 52:22

Well, he goes out into the street and gets a kid to go buy a turkey for Bob's but they, they do specify that it's a very big turkey in his defense. And the second thing that happens is he changes his ways moving forward, but only during Christmas. So he learns how to keep Christmas in the right way. But there is never any real transformation of his behavior. It's not like he gives up his wealth. It's not like he redistributes it. It's not like he changes his business practices. And part of the ideology of A Christmas Carol is that it is an anticapitalist narrative when it, in fact, is the opposite on my reading.

Ellie: 53:06

Wow, I, you know what, David, you've convinced me. This is I think, I think that's great. Christmas Carol, insidious capitalist ideology. I also just want to say that the guy who sings The Christmas Shoes could be considered a kind of avatar for Scrooge and the little boy buying the shoes for his mom as an avatar of Tiny Tim.

David: 53:26

Yes, no, and in the case of both characters, is the notion of the redeem ability of the rich. I ultimately don't believe that the rich and powerful really are redeemable, uh, or that they will come to this sudden realization of the badness of their ways and reorient themselves in a radical way. Certainly not through some form of visitation, however we interpret that. And so I, I really disagree with Dickens.

Ellie: 53:53

I think I

David: 53:54

that

Ellie: 53:54

more positive view of, of people's capacity for transformation than do.

David: 53:59

Of the 1%?

Ellie: 54:00

Oh yeah, no, I think there are very few people I would say are not capable of transformation.

David: 54:05

Yeah. And for me, that's the 1%, that's a small number. Um.

Ellie: 54:11

God. Well, and with that, God bless us, everyone as Tiny Tim would say.

David: 54:19

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 54:27

You can find us overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.

David: 54:34

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Anna Solomon. Thanks to our audio editor, Karen Fabec, Samuel PK Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

And to our listeners: 54:48

thanks so much for overthinking with us!