The Racket #37 : HOLIDAY
Selling the season.
When you live in San Francisco, as I do, you aren't exactly immersed in holiday spirit. This is not a town where the streets are filled with holiday lights and the windows stuffed with Christmas trees. This is a city of humans in transition, of the continuously older holding tight to the wispy threads of their youth, of the very rich, the fairly poor and the exceedingly destitute. When it comes to the holidays, San Francisco struggles to show up.
Who needs the City by the Bay to slap me across the face with yuletide glee though, when I have the onus of the internet to roughly shake the oncoming season into my bloodstream? I am writing this a few days before Thanksgiving and though the holiday arrives as late as it can this year, it feels like every online purveyor of anything has been cramming Christmas down my throat since before I slunk into my inflatable pumpkin costume for Halloween. I enjoy the holidays - the communal sense of celebration, the gluttonous drinking and eating, the off-kilter swing of the schedule and how everything, everywhere is suddenly empty. This is a spectacularly different feeling time of year and the sheer contrast is at least something to marvel at.
What kills me about this season has nothing to do with the traditions that accompany it or the red-nosed warmth humanity suddenly remembers is lodged in their windpipes. Instead, I am irked by the fact that Netflix has released an unfathomable amount of shit holiday films in an attempt to challenge the equally unfathomable list of shit holiday films a channel like Hallmark or Oxygen or Flowtasm might be unleashing on unsuspecting audiences. It isn't the sheer fact of Netflix drowning us with superficial yuletide cheer (welcome to America, pick up your plastic wool stocking and Ikea Christmas plant at the register), it's the knowing smirk of giant corporations like Netflix as they do it.
This is Netflix saying, "Oh, we know your holiday traditions at least include a couple hours where you sit back and consume a slew of holiday films that might not be great, but their deeply related to this time of year, so for a single second, a brief moment they are quite literally the greatest thing on fucking Earth" and then taking this insight and crafting a slew of new films equally as bad on purpose. Which again, bad films with snowmen and Santas and broken hearts and Kevin from Chicago, that capture the holiday spirit in a way nothing else can are great. Enormous, soulless companies perched atop their glass-bottomed flying machines, staring down at their soccer field sized digital representations of human emotion and purposefully crafting shitty films to suckle on that emotional teat, well, that doesn't exactly fill my stocking.
Somewhere - and I imagine it is a dimly lit room carved into the foundational bedrock of the space below Netflix HQ - a group of labcoat wearing engineers is mining our nostalgia. They have turned our warmest, most personal of memories into weapons of consumerism. They have taken the abstract ideals our most precious holiday traditions derive from and they have turned them into formulas that most successfully convert our joys into dollars. I still believe that the films I ingested over and over again in the month of December, convincing myself of their merit (when often no merit was or is to be had) weren't genetically engineered to find the soft spot inside of me and burrow in, hard edged claws gouging as it did.
Even as I write this, even as I think about the questionable films that have ascended into my nostalgic canon, I can't help but wonder if before their was algorithms that created weaponized emotion in celluloid form, there were people in business attire fine-tuning garbage for maximum impact. Maybe the films I know are terrible (Notting Hill I am looking at you) but love so much regardless I will argue with my more clearheaded associates their merit. That I will rationalize their inherent worth when all signs point to the exact opposite weren't just a pleasant surprise, but rather, an insidious worm dropped into my ear hole, engineered to make me all teary-eyed.
Perhaps the Netflix of today are just the studios of yesteryears, the sins of consumerism past converted into 1s and 0s, quantified down with the intent of finding the fastest, easiest way to laser-beam it into the brains of the most, willing consumers. The Miracle On 34th Streets just black and white predecessors to White Christmas to Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey to Elf to The Holiday to A Christmas Prince and beyond. Nostalgia in all its warmly glowing manipulations, mined and crafted into the cinematic equivalent of egg nog induced umami, past, present and future.
And really, when it comes down to it, if the films Netflix purposefully makes awful, the movies they film from scripts crafted by jingle bell wearing computers, if these films become the foundational nostalgic beats of a new generation, then, hell, will we even remember how artificial the original intent was?
