THE SECRETS OF BELLA VISTA
Woke Hallmark Movies DESTROYING Christmas
As soon as I found out this issue was going to be about Hallmark Christmas movies, I hurriedly pulled out my phone and googled “hallmark movie transgender”. I don’t know what I was expecting. Of course there isn’t a trans-led Hallmark movie, not in an America where people buy cans of Bud Light to shoot with a machine gun because of the brand’s vague and lateral connection with a random trans woman, not in a company so committed to a Fordist production line style of filmmaking, where each film is perfectly functional and uniform, that even the most rigorous of critics have struggled to find a directorial voice peaking through. We’re just not there yet.
The closest thing I could find, I suppose the next best thing, was the casting of non-binary actor Donia Kash in the 2022 non-Christmas production (though Christmas gets a little nod, something for the fans) The Secrets of Bella Vista. The first of many films in this piece with a title that manages to sound both generic and bizarre.
Unfortunately Kash’s role is marginal in the story of a hypercompetent but vaguely unfulfilled business woman—one of the Hallmark form’s defining archetypes—who must learn the value of family and tradition, or whatever. Which she does by inheriting her estranged father’s massive orchard and living amongst its large cast of mostly Hispanic workers (and a handsome, very white, man she will inevitably, perfunctorily fall in love with). The film, a little desperate to insist that this is unproblematic, tells us that these workers are all refugees that her father, after himself escaping from the Holocaust, found and gave a place to work and live. Though none of them seem to be inheriting any of the land. Weird.
Kash’s character, Suzette, is never verbally gendered, so the audience is left to read them as a woman, if a somewhat masc one with short hair and a waistcoat collection. As is so often the case in the world of Hallmark, they exist primarily as a part of a couple, as an extension of their wife (Amber Lewis), who is much more conventional and femme and is, unsurprisingly, the one carrying their soon-to-be-born child. Though I doubt the target audience would know the distinction between masc and femme, it serves to make a queer couple look comfortably familiar; basically the same as a man and a woman. The pregnancy subplot does much the same: it shows us that they’re actually super normal and not weird.
In 2019, just three years earlier, Hallmark pulled an ad that featured a Lesbian couple—because, would you believe it, some mom’s group complained—but in 2022 there was only scattered reaction to Kash’s casting, mostly in publications like Diva Magazine, Advocate and The List (two years later), which generally praised Kash for allowing other queer people to see themselves succeeding (moreso than seeing themselves represented on screen). I suppose that’s the advantage of a non-binary actor for a ruthlessly calculating company, if you keep their characters ambiguously gendered they can be seen and celebrated by the gay press, but remain functionally invisible to those who might get angry, who couldn’t pick the clockiest non-binary person out of a line-up.
Transness might be a little much to expect, but queerness as such hasn’t been entirely scrubbed from the Hallmark universe. Though even by Hallmark’s small-c (and for that matter big-c) conservative standards, this is a pretty recent development. The first gay couple appear, in a similarly side-lined role to Kash’s, in 2020’s The Christmas House, so named for a family’s house which they put a lot of Christmas decorations on and so call the Christmas House. And the first movie with a gay couple at its centre is 2022’s The Holiday Sitter, which is about a hypercompetent but vaguely unfulfilled business (gay) man who must learn the value of family and tradition by going to the, uh, suburbs, to look after his sister’s kids and spend time with their handsome salt-of-the-earth sitter who knows how to cook and do DIY.
To even these most minimal of steps forward, admittedly from one of America’s most stationary cultural institutions, will inevitably come backlash from culture war grifters. Though less than you might expect. If you search “hallmark gone woke”, or some variation thereof, on Youtube, one of the few videos you’ll find is from some sub-Tim Pool Blaze TV freak who goes by Pat Gray Unleashed with a measly 8.8k views. Most of this four minute opus is dedicated to Pat fantasising about a transgender Hallmark movie that does not exist while the bottom of the screen is adorned with the Twitter logo and misaligned text reading: “#PutThatInYourPipe”.
Hallmark is a topic too low for all but the most desperate of these bottom feeders; hardly worthy of The Quartering types who have to grind out multiple videos a day. Among the other videos you can find—most of which revolve around the stepping down of an allegedly woke CEO (such a non-story I’m not even going to bother summarising it) rather than the actual movies—are ones that are entirely AI generated or a series from a channel called Adam Post with more respectable but rapidly declining view counts that are only ambiguously AI generated.
No one really seems to care about these movies in any meaningful way. There’s a hardly detectable reaction or much difference in their IMDb or Letterboxd ratings because, ultimately, they aren’t any different. No one who’s seen The Holiday Sitter would accuse it of being a celebration of queerness. The word ‘gay’ is only used once and is only the subject of a single scene, in which the lead (Jonathan Bennett) tells his sister (Chelsea Hobbs) that the reason he’s been so reticent about marriage and kids is because those weren’t always an option for him. The problem exists within himself, not in the world outside and its vague prejudices that the movie goes out of its way to say he never really had to face, not at home at least.
No, he just has to open his heart to the heterodox institutions that are ready to welcome him in. And that’s the exact function of the movie itself: to allow gay people into the most normative corners of society as long as they act functionally identical to the straights; to crush everyone into the same homogenous mush.
That’s the real reason it’s so hard to find much of a reaction to these movies either way: they are designed to be basically ignored. They might seem like an exaggeration of a “normal movie”, but that familiarity is just another tool to keep them at an un-notable remove, they are functioning in a meaningfully different way. The drama is kept at a shockingly low-level, just enough to give a pleasant humming drive, something you could technically call momentum, but never so much that it draws any kind of attention.
They are ambience machines, meant to be played (more-so than watched) in the background to set a generic Christmassy tone; no different to a video of a fireplace playing on the flatscreen. And so the vast majority of their audience has no reason to look for a reaction. Anything these movies might give them—associations, feelings, even just observations—will glide perfect and soundlessly inside, never to be interrogated, left obscured and unarticulated, and forever to be lost once that person leaves this world, or forgets about the movie entirely. Whichever comes first.
Maybe one day we’ll reach a point where transness can become a part of this ambience, where it’s something that people can half-notice and forget, where any inherent power it once had to challenge society’s ideas about gender and patriarchy has been ground down into nothing. Then we’ll get our very own Hallmark Christmas movie. But that day doesn’t exactly seem close by. I guess we’ll just have to hope for a Christmas miracle.
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