Hallmark Movies: "The Stepford Wives", but scarier...

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Running down this year's schedule of Christmas movie offerings is like a trip into an uncanny valley of shiny-teethed, blow-dried heteronormative whiteness, with only a few token movies with characters of color.  It’s like watching "The Stepford Wives", but scarier, since the evil plot to replace normal people with robots is never actually revealed.

None of this should be a surprise, because Hallmark movies, as cloying and saccharine as they are, constitute the platonic ideal of fascist propaganda.

That is probably a startling statement to some. When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl’s films celebrating the Third Reich -- grand, but cold sweeping shots of soldiers goose-stepping and flags waving, all meant to inspire awe and terror. But the reality is, even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of "normality".

There’s plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview.  It’s storytelling that imitates the gestures of emotion without actually engaging with real feeling.  The Hallmark movie steers clear of the real passion or deeper emotion that tends to be the engine driving more artful fiction.  Characters who have real feelings, after all, can prompt empathetic reactions in the audience, and empathy for others is the greatest single threat to the authoritarian mindset.  And so schmaltz walks through the paces of "love" without touching on any of the messy but compelling realities of it.

Source (link): Hallmark movies are the most insidious authoritarian propaganda - here's how...

Those movies seem to endorse and celebrate 1950’s Americana.

It’s like some sort of ideal that people “should” be striving for.

They generally choose conservative actors like Candace Cameron Bure to uphold the squeaky clean ideal. There’s rigid gender roles, perfectly coiffed female leads, and stereotypical romance portraying nothing but surface emotion.

Oddly (or maybe not), my parents love these movies even though they don’t celebrate Christmas.

It’s quite exclusionary for anyone who doesn’t fit this supposed ideal.

My wife loves these movies. She also loves The Andy Griffith Show, Leave It To Beaver, and similar shows from the 1950s.  I keep trying to tell her that America wasn't like that, and that the "Leuco-Normative" nature of these shows is equally unrealistic.

But no, those shows portray an "idealized" America that exists only in the minds of wealthy, white TV producers, and do not represent any working-class urban environment.

"The very fact that they're presented as harmless fluff makes it all the more insidious, the way they work to enforce very narrow, white, heteronormative, sexist, provincial ideas of what constitutes 'normal'." -- quoted from the article I linked to above

Last edited by Fnord on 26 Dec 2019, 12:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

They get on my nerves, especially all of the ones that show the dumb, flighty wife and smart, inflexible, and rigid husband dynamic.

The clothes also look remarkably uncomfortable.

And then we have dialogue like:

“Now Jimmy do your chores.”

“Awww... shucks Mom. I want to go fishing.”

“You can go after you do your chores.”

“[heavy sigh] okay.”

Mom smiles and shakes her head and says: “That Jimmy is getting to be such a handful” as he climbs the stairs to his room. She then smooths her dress and takes the apple pie out of the oven while her husband remains engrossed in the newspaper.

Have you also noticed that the only time a disabled person is shown (never in a lead role) in a Hallmark presentation is only to have someone play the role of a "Noble Victim"?

Have you ever notice that this "Noble Victim" usually gets lost in a dark forest, a cave, or a deserted building, only to be rescued by someone whom everyone else has given up on because they are one of those immoral city folk who have come back to Whiteville just for the holidays?

Usually, the female is in some sort of victim role which the male lead saves her from.

Sometimes the male lead saves a disabled person which endears him to the female.

Of course, the “spirit of Christmas” “heartwarmingly” changes some degenerate person. You can tell the person is degenerate because he doesn’t say “please” or “thank you” and has messy hair.

"TV Tropes" put it this way:

These stories are meant to be purely sentimental parables, touching hearts and teaching morals.  The problem is, they accomplish this by simplifying their message to the point of complete uselessness to any reader who thinks about it seriously.  All shades of grey between the black and white of good and evil are wholly overlooked, meaning potentially more valuable lessons about actual hard work, understanding, personal growth and sacrifice are completely ignored in the rush to present a universe in which everything happens for a satisfying reason.