There’s no way around the question this time of the year, so I will offer my take on The Controversy.
“Die Hard” is not a “Christmas movie.”
However, I will add this word — “unless.” And my “unless” is built into a Christmas movie typology based on feeling tingles of “hathos” (definition here) during decades of having to watch promotional materials for The Holidays — primarily advertisements. I say “having to watch,” because I am a sports fan, which means enduring lots of ads (even with the sound clicked off). I also have to wait to click out of ads while following YouTube channels that I consider worthwhile (like this, this and, yes, this).
I think that there are four kinds of “Christmas movies.” We are talking about moves that:
(1) Are set during Christmas, sort of, and that’s that. See “Die Hard.” See (#ducking) “White Christmas.”
(2) Offer waves of smarmy images and themes linked to generic love, family, snow, food, forgiveness, gift giving, hope, Santa, children and lots and lots of decorations. Did I miss something? Yes, there are many advertisements that offer mini-takes on the same formula (see this instant classic from 2023).
(3) Include actual religious content linked to the Christmas season, running along a spectrum from the original “Home Alone” to “It’s A Wonderful Life.”
(4) Would-be epics that include or focus on the Christmas story.
Now, if you are interested in that third category, as I am, you need to read this new essay — “How Christmas Movies Have Changed Over The Last 20 Years” — by the always-readable Joseph Holmes at Religion Unplugged. It focuses on the current hit, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” which has a 91% critics score and a 97% audience score at the Rotten Tomatoes website. That critics score is shocking.
However, Holmes has bigger fish to fry than that one case study. Here are two key passages, but you will want to read it all.
I’ve written before about the history of Christmas films. They started as a genre when Christmas was primarily celebrated by Christian families, but also by secular ones. And since the country was secularizing in general, Hollywood made the movies primarily secular to get the widest audience possible.
Since Christmas was traditionally a religious holiday centered on the birth of Jesus, that’s why Santa Claus showed up so much as a representative of God and faith, such as in films like “Miracle on 34th Street.” Since it was a holiday for families, that’s why the movies were made for families, like “Home Alone,” “Elf” and “Muppet Christmas Carol.”
But that changed after 2003 — a year considered by many to be the last one where we had largely agreed upon Christmas classics. That’s the year that we had “Elf” and “Love Actually” (both in theaters at the same time). After that, the movie industry changed, and so did the Christmas holiday. People were spending less holidays with their families, and they were watching less movies together, too.
As a result, Christmas movies stopped being made for the whole family and started going after smaller market segments. Hallmark Christmas movies for the Christian moms; action movies like “Violent Night” for the guys and “The Grinch” for the kids.
Now, obviously, I freak out seeing “Love Actually” (an R-rated film in tmatt category 2) in the same context as “The Muppet Christmas Carol” (which easily fits in tmatt category 3). But I totally understand what Holmes is saying about the industry and niche business models.
Which leads us to the current movie scene, in which a saying that I heard a decade or two ago in film circles — “Christian could be the new gay,” referring to niche markets — is growing ever more relevant.
Here is one more important byte of the Holmes essay:
Christmas films fell out of favor exactly when faith-based films started taking off. A big part of that was because Christmas movies were based on getting the widest audience possible. But people stopped watching movies as a family (those that weren’t blockbusters), so they suffered in a world where the market became segmented as digital streaming became the norm.
As New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson put it in an article for Vox: “As pop culture continues to splinter into niches and micro audiences (thanks in part to technological advances), it frequently caters to our individual and identity-group preferences, siloing art rather than creating art that might be watched by a range of audience members.”
But faith-based films thrived in that world because they haven’t tried to cater to everyone (and could be explicit about their Christianity) and have had really low budgets (so they didn’t need to please everyone and make lots of money at the box office to make a profit).
Now, this brings us to another shopping-mall Christmas world that exists in its own television snow (most of the time) globe — the Hallmark “Christmas” movies and the many “movies” that imitate them.
Suffice it to say that I know little or nothing about this world and I don’t think that my classics loving librarian wife has ever watched one of these, either.
However, The New York Times recently offered an in-depth look at what I would call the “doctrines” that define the worldview of these shiny movies. Here is the headline on the main Amanda Hess think piece: “How I Aged Into the Bad Christmas Movie.”
What defines this genre? Here is the power-woman thesis:
What’s happening to me? In recent years, my feelings about work, romantic love, big city living, small town charm and secular holiday cheer have not appreciably changed. It’s my relationship to rote sentimentality that has shifted. Recently I have felt so pummeled by stress and responsibility that I have found it difficult to turn on a compelling new television show at the end of the day. I have no extra energy to expend familiarizing myself with unknown characters, deciphering twists or even absorbing scenes of visual interest.
What I’ve been looking for, instead, is a totally uncompelling new television show — one that expects nothing from me, and that gives me little in return. The bad Christmas movie’s beats are so consistent, its twists so predictable, its actors and props so loyally reused, it’s easy to relax drowsily into its rhythms. The genre is formulaic, which makes for a kind of tradition. Now it plays through the winter like a crackling fireplace in my living room.
Of course, there are now niches inside the main niche, noted Hess. Think: “Newer iterations uphold the same clichés, with a few modifications. There are now bad Hanukkah movies (“Hanukkah on Rye”) and bad interfaith holiday movies (“Double Holiday”).”
Now, what do these movies (tmatt category 2, of course) have to do with actual religion, since faith plays a role in The Holidays for millions of people?
This is where readers need to dig into a Times sidebar that was linked to the Hess feature. That headline: “Just How Formulaic Are Hallmark and Lifetime Holiday Movies? We (Over)analyzed 424 of Them.”
Oh my. Did the newsroom union contract have a clause requiring extra pay for this kind of combat duty?
The Big Idea is that these tinsel-weight products are built on a common backbone of plot elements:
They … have something of a reputation for following a very specific storyline: A recently dumped, high-powered female executive from the city finds new love, purpose and appreciation for Christmas in a small town with the help of a handsome local fellow.
But how much does that formula hold up across the hundreds of holiday movies released since 2017 by Hallmark and Lifetime? Based on data from IMDb, internet recaps and our own viewing, our answer is quite a bit! With some caveats.
Question No. 1 in this news-you-can-use feature (check out the chart) is this:
Are they all about Christmas?
Yes, 99 percent of them. The networks began featuring Hanukkah starting in 2019, but often the holiday appears in conjunction with Christmas. In one Hallmark movie, the characters celebrate Kwanzaa, and Christmas.
Of the 424 movies we analyzed, 73 percent have “Christmas” right in the title.
This might be starting to change. Just 53 percent of Hallmark’s 40 holiday titles for this year include the word Christmas. “I think people should know that they are holiday movies, but you run out of adjectives and adverbs to use with Christmas at some point,” said Lisa Hamilton Daly, the network’s programming executive.
Ms. Daly also said the network was trying to mix up its poster art, which has been mocked for its repetitive depiction of a man and a woman in a green or red sweater.
Ah, but what does it mean when television pros say that a “movie” is “about Christmas”? Here is a hint:
The scripts lean heavily into nostalgia and tradition. In many cases, someone is very into Christmas, and someone is not (until they come around). In others, characters are helped along by some Christmas magic.
But what does “tradition” mean? What is “Christmas magic”? Is any of that magic supernatural or spiritual?
Thus, I will ask: Has anyone seen a Hallmark-esque movie that included any kind of reference to religious faith, maybe even a pause to explain an Advent wreath, a Nativity scene or why the family is lighting Hanukkah lights?
In other words, is religious faith a concept that is safe enough to be included in shopping-mall Christmas movies about “love,” “romance,” “family,” “tradition,” etc.?
Yes, what does it mean to “believe” in Christmas?
Just asking. Pastors may want to ponder a sermon on this topic. Maybe?
