Are you a Christmas movie watcher? I didn’t say fan mind, just watcher, or in my case, addict. There are two or three on every day for weeks before Christmas. If you’re in full-time work they may have passed you by. If you watch them they may still pass you by because they’re not deep. They serve to confirm illusions, in this case illusions about Christmas and about the good old U.S. of A. They’re about as safe a way to waste time as you can think of – a cinematic Mills and Boon; if you want a yardstick, they make ‘Love Actually’ seem like particularly gruesome scandi-noir. Hallmark make the best (is that the right epithet?) ones, with titles such as ‘Rocky Mountain Christmas’, ‘Romance at Reindeer Lodge’ and ‘Christmas Encore’.
There are stock characters and stock situations which are deeply comforting for we viewers as the wheels come off the world.
So I’ve been watching and found their predictability strangely comforting until one day I slipped back into consciousness and realized that it wasn’t just the plots that were the attraction but the whole world the plots plodded through and, to put it bluntly, there’s something not quite right about Christmas Movie World which might make it a close cousin of Trumpworld. Continue reading You won’t find Springsteen’s home town in a Christmas Movie
