I didn’t watch too many Hallmark Channel or Great American Family Christmas movies this season for two reasons. One, I’m single again after breaking up with my longtime girlfriend (as mentioned in my tragic piece here) so I have a freer hand to read and watch films noir and Westerns on Turner Classic Movies, plus their true holiday-themed classics like The Shop Around the Corner, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and Christmas in Connecticut. And two, you can only take so much formulaic fare about a couple staving off romance for almost the entire picture while feasting on hot chocolate like it was rum. The brilliant satire site, The Babylon Bee, mocked the monotony of the genre in a recent story headlined, “Hallmark Researchers Say They Are Close To Developing A Second Movie Plot.”
You can see how utterly beauty-free the media canvas has become by watching any network or theatrical product.
However, I do have a mother, so I caught a few small screen Yuletide offerings at her place over the holiday. And I suggest a major appeal they all still have is a striking visual beauty found nowhere else in modern TV or theatrical films — no surprise given the movie output of a company best known for its Christmas cards. This phenomenon goes not just for their picturesque village settings in the Rockies or the Alps, but also for the major U.S. cities where the female lead often starts out before ending up in said idyllic hamlet. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: SNAFU in the Woke Military)
The shots of New York and Chicago make each appear clean and crime-free enough that women could conceivably walk the streets at night without being accosted by a homeless loon or assaulted by a violent criminal. Should girls try that in the real-life Democrat-rundown socialist burgs, the result would belie the Christmas gloss and feminist fantasy. New York Mayor Eric Adams Thursday actually blamed rats for the mass exodus of people from his city. Last year, more than 100,000 fled New York State like, er, rats abandoning a sinking ship. Mayor Adams’ ridiculous and discomforting excuse will likely increase that number next year.
Yet there’s another element of media-rare beauty in these cable Christmas movies — the women in them are far prettier and more traditionally glamorous than their mainstream contemporaries. The female sexuality that once powered Hollywood via small and large screen has been in short demand this century. Through most of the 20th Century, screen sirens like Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford (30s), Rita Hayworth and Gene Tierney (40s), Lana Turner and Ava Gardner (40s-50s), Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly (50s), Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren (50s-60s), Raquel Welch and Jane Fonda (60s-70s), Kathleen Turner (80s), and Sharon Stone (90s) attracted both men and women equally yet differently.
Their box-office draw made profitable room for less sexy yet ultra-talented colleagues – Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Judy Garland, Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn, Meryl Streep, and many others. And from the 1950s until the 2000s, television mirrored this dynamic. It was the best of both worlds for both sexes. But in the 2010s, something changed. One of the worlds nearly vanished — that of gorgeous feminine women — due to feminist and beta-male control of the entertainment industry. And the masculine audience dissipated with it.
You can see how utterly beauty-free the media canvas has become by watching any network or theatrical product, or ancillary coverage such as by Elle magazine. One look at the row of ghoulish asexual actresses in its recent article, “Meet ELLE’s 2023 Women in Hollywood,” will repel any normal man or woman. The sub-headline — “Our celebration of the women we loved watching this year” — could be ironic since nobody loved watching any of them, or even watched them in the first place. (READ MORE: Advent Versus Evil)
The Hollywoke virus has gotten so pervasive that once hugely popular 90s sex-symbol Jennifer Love-Hewitt retroactively cancelled her own career start. Love-Hewitt recently blasted the marketing of her early physical appeal on the Inside of You podcast. “I felt watched,” she said. “I was called ‘sexy’ before I even knew what being sexy was. I was 17-years-old on the cover of Maxim, and I had no idea why.” That the starlet’s pulchritude and sex-appeal to boys and girls led to a very successful and non-exploitative TV acting career from the 1990s (Party of Five) through this year (9-1-1) now takes a backseat to her virtue signaling.
The cable channel Christmas movies became a viewer refuge from this pervasive political correctness and greyness. Their bright color, holiday spirit, and, yes, lovely romance-seeking women, like the vast majority of real ones, have long been their main appeal. The men are uniformly hunkish though rather bland and shallow, except for the royals trying to balance love with duty, and generally played by superior British actors.
When the Hallmark Channel briefly succumbed to the wokeness bug last year with less beauteous and definitely less spiritual film selections, openly Christian actress-producer Candace Cameron Bures’s Great American Family channel more than filled the gap. The characters in some of her films, such as this year’s My Christmas Hero, openly celebrate the birth of Christ.
GAF’s enormous success seems to have done the trick. From what I’ve seen with my mom, Hallmark Channel’s 2023 selections seem to be more traditionalist and prettier than they were last year. And the Babylon Bee’s funny joke notwithstanding, several of their new films did follow that second plot. One of them, A Biltmore Christmas, even offers an homage to Hollywood Christmas classics as those shown on TCM. (READ MORE: All in the Homily: On the Death of Norman Lear)
In the movie, the appropriately stunning Bethany Joy Lenz plays a modern screenwriter hired to write a remake of a 1940s classic, only giving it a typical darker ending. Magically transported to the set of the original, she falls for the leading man, and finds the original happy ending not so corny after all. Neither is A Biltmore Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all!
