Season’s greetings uncultured swine!
What better way to celebrate a Christian holiday than banging in the name of Jesus? I don’t know why we’ve conflated romance with the 25th of December but the ache in my chest around this time tells me it’s a market worth exploiting (or I’m dyspeptic). You might think Christmas romcoms are below my artistic station, however, as with my love life, I will lower my standards for >90mins of entertainment.
Shall we analyse? (The Art of Christmas Romcoms - not my flailing love life)
Every year. Emma fucking Thompson straightening her bedspread while Joni Mitchell crones yonder, has me sobbing as if I’m the one losing Snape. Every year. A good Christmas romcom has the ability to disarm you, regardless of pre-menstruation or blood alcohol levels, and embed itself in your festive rituals. Since it’s clear narrative quality isn’t the determinant, what is it that makes these movies so sacred?
Let’s start with something that rhymes with Smichard Rurtis. Richard Curtis really screwed the pooch for aspiring romcom writers - even flirting with being cancelled for out-dated storylines he wrote over 20 years ago - Curtis still sets the romcom standard. Love Actually… is… every-fucking-where in the lead up to Christmas and, try as they might, imitators never quite got their hooks in the nature of its success.
In each of Love Actually’s storylines, Curtis seems to capitalise on one of three elements: heightened emotion, quotidian joys and the capriciousness of Christmas. Capricious being the active word here: you’re uplifted by little Sam running through the airport, laughing at the “shitting fuck arsing hole” of Bill Nighy and gently crushed when Emma Thompson (character name be damned) opens a gift confirming her husbands infidelity.
Love Actually is the cinematic equivalent to crying in the bathroom at a party while “Shots” by LMFAO thrums through the door frame. Curtis showed us, but didn’t tell us, that life’s sweetness is understood through its counterpart. A similar bittersweet strategy was employed successfully in newer Christmas romcom, Love at First Sight, a Netflix film closest to the Curtis warmth (that isn’t Curtis) I’ve seen in years.
If it’s the happy-sad cocktail that books a permanent slot in Christmas viewing, then how do I explain surface level classics like The Holiday? That’s simple: Jude Law (above). By removing the heightened emotions, a romcom can provide escapism from the train-wreck that is your personal life, though it’s difficult to do well. When you alleviate emotional risk you stand to lose tension, and many romcoms (don’t see: Holidate) die on this hill.
Bridget Jones’s Diary is a prime example of captivating levity in a Christmas romcom. A self-absorbed but self-effacing protagonist, characters that are quirky but believable and a simple objective - get sprogged up. Paradoxically, it’s the crassness and lack of glam in Bridget Jones’s Diary that spares it being trash. And in the absence of hefty familial trauma, we’re gifted understated humour, snow in London, and a young Hugh Grant.
I arrive at an impasse here. Because there’s a direct conflict in what makes these favourites so compelling. A theme they either lean into, or go to great lengths to avoid. It’s not love, sadness or merriment, but grief. Grief, to me, is a suite of feelings we have no good place to store. Irrational, organic, humorous and devastating. Maybe it’s enforced celebration, merging of family or the reflective nature of Christmas, but it seems grief never strays far from the leg of ham.
As in true life, it’s difficult to ignore the theme of grief throughout Love Actually and Love at First Sight - even in How To Be Single - but incredibly easy to in Bridget Jones’s Diary or The Holiday. As romcoms are the thin veil through which I analyse my own life, a good one should either take us to the source of hurt, or take us on a minibreak with a wanton sex god in the manner of Grace Kelly.
It’s the very last Dis Content for 2023 and I’m so, completely besotted by it and this and you. Even if you’ve only read it once, or half of once, or every week - I feel so grateful that you allowed this absolute shite into your brain. More art next year <3
Love this, love you.
C U Next(ish) Tuesday xxxxx Maggie Jean xxxx
Thanks Grace for editing! Feel FREE to email me back at ANY TIME I never sleep.