The screen brightens as the camera pans down. The sound of strings, pianissimo, brightly, in a major key. Snowy hills, treetops, a perfect, tiny village nestled in a cozy mountain valley. The strings crescendo into any given Christmas Carol, and the Hallmark Christmas movie is on. The only question is whether the next scene, where we’re introduced to the main character, will open in the aforementioned cozy village or in a big city. Inevitably, the village will be set in New England, probably Vermont, where the 1954 classic White Christmas set the stage for decades of holiday protagonists to come, always returning to the familiarly white-clad hills in search of the lighter and happier trappings of the season. Snow, snow, snow, snow!
Last year, I ended up watching more Hallmark movies than I’d ever seen in one season, mostly thanks to the channel’s hefty advertising campaign and early start. There were 36 Hallmark Christmas originals in 2018, and a boatload of older, archived shows on constant rerun. After the first couple movies, the pattern became obvious: Man or woman has lost his or her Christmas spirit. Circumstances impel character to spend the holidays in aforementioned cozy village, where he or she will rediscover missing sense of humanity by such unlikely seasonal problems as: an employee whose architecture firm requires her to spend the Christmas season repurposing her home town’s beloved historic theater for a multipurpose commercial development; or, a deceased sister whose will requires her city-lawyer sibling to spend a certain number of weeks (spanning Christmas, of course) in the family home her parents built, or else lose the house to a condo developer.
Both of these storylines are drawn from the only two Hallmark movies I saw last year showcasing black protagonists. There were about five such movies in all, and none of them featured a predominantly black cast. Which I suppose is realistic, since then viewers would have to set aside the fact that there are not large African-American communities living, business-owning, and mayoring in small-town Vermont. . . . Though gosh, we sure set lots of inaccuracies aside to swallow the utopian sugar-pill offered up by all these mass-produced imaginings of an improbable yule-tide. These films aren’t realistic, and they don’t strive to be; realism would ruin the whole faux-nostalgic point, which strikes the perfect, escapist note for any given two hours of comfortable, holiday-season watching.
The problem with the lack of diversity in these American Christmas movies, especially the ones produced on a mass scale by the Hallmark film machine, isn’t with the factual inaccuracy; the movies are problematic because they aren’t representative. They do not, in ethnicity or culture, represent every blanket-swathed, peppermint coffee-drinking viewer. But they should, and those of us who do look like almost all of Hallmark’s main characters should care.
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Remember that old religious joke? You know the one: a group of people arrive in heaven, and St. Peter takes them on an introductory tour. Suddenly, approaching one particularly large mansion, he instructs them to pass by quietly. “Shh! That’s where the Baptists live. They think they’re the only ones here.” In the church context of the joke, you can replace Baptists with any worshipping group you happen to derive from. The joke is funny, as all jokes are, because it gets at some truth, whichever denomination you insert to gently jab at. Insert “White Americans, though,” and it’s not funny at all, because now the joke is very true, and the truth is ugly.
You turn on a television show full of characters that look, speak, interact similarly to you, and the way is clear: this story was cooked up especially for you; you can settle in easily and enjoy the narrative. You turn on a show cast with actors of a different race or ethnicity from your own: the differences in skin color and voice modulation create hurdles. Why did that character say that thing, make that choice, perform that action? The characters switch into modes of speech that don’t reflect your own culture’s talking patterns. You can’t understand. Your willing suspension of disbelief, necessary for receiving the full benefit of any story, is in crisis. It takes active brain work to keep engaging. Will you change the channel in search of characters who look more like you? Keep pretending we’re the only ones here?
I’m talking about a racial empathy gap. While it is easy to say with our mouths that everyone who exists on this beautiful, broken planet bears the image of a good and glorious God, it is hard to actually see it, because it is innately difficult for people—all people—to imagine our way into experiences we haven’t had. It takes conscious mental energy to gaze into a culture different from my own and see goodness, beauty, wisdom reflected back, shining like the sun—unless I’ve had practice. This might be the human condition anywhere, among any group of people. In America, the tension rises to a fever pitch between the conflicting experiences of a privileged white majority and a black culture that has, as poet Amiri Baraki says, been developed “in the cauldron of racism, racial violence, and dismissal.”
American minorities live in a world that forces them to bridge the empathy gap day in and day out, from birth. They are surrounded by white culture. The American majority culture, in turn, isn’t forced to do the work. The Hallmark Movie machine grinds on its easy, wide path. Sweet, sentimental holiday choruses perpetuate a cultural blindspot, easing a comatose conscience. Really, why watch anything else? Why choose the mental engagement and moral discomfort required to find beauty and meaning in the story of someone who not only looks different, but who sometimes speaks and acts differently? Back to the mansions in heaven. I’m not really talking about Hallmark movies.
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I’ve donned the oversized sweater I bought last year in Wal-Mart’s ugly Christmas sweater section; it’s like wearing a winter blanket, which is appropriate as I turn on the television for another easy escape. But once I’ve seen the absence of my neighbor, even in what feels like insignificant entertainment, I’m weighed down by the emptiness that pervades when only one cultural narrative is told. I’m weighed down by the hurt others feel when they, too, want to enjoy an easy, happy holiday fairy tale, but time slot after time slot, no one important to the story ever looks or sounds or feels like them. I’m weighed down by the thought of generations who, from their youngest years, must read their books and watch their shows and interpret their own selves through a lens that doesn’t look much like their own family’s culture or history, and doesn’t look like their own skin that they live in. I’m afraid of the generations of children like mine, who will grow up to watch Hallmark movies and never entertain a passing thought that the world doesn’t look just like this white-washed version of peace and happiness.
The good thing is, once I’ve seen those absences, felt that emptiness, nothing looks the same again. I’m probably about to take the metaphor too far, but hear me out. I arrive in glory and follow St. Peter and the other recently-arrived saints around the blocks of jewel-encrusted streets, and see the solemn mansion he quietly points to. I feel angry and ashamed, but Peter looks sad. He is sad because, as it turns out, the mansion is small, and though it is full of people, it exudes an air of emptiness. Its stiff silence highlights the voices that spill jubilant out of the surrounding glorious buildings, full of life, and this new group of arrivals, too, is taking joyful part. Here were are! Where we’ve always been heading. In the Christian faith, the path to getting there is by way of one person—a person of color—the same baby and God-man we celebrate on the more substantial side of Christmas that the Hallmark movies tend to leave out. And he is the image of the invisible God, who shows us, among many other things, how to see and affirm God’s image reflected back in each other, in life here and now.
When we’re watching these movies, are we actually indulging in a desire for some golden age that never (thank God) existed? I’m worried we want a rarified version of heaven where everyone is merely happy, and the deeper, stronger things that actually matter—beauty, truth, justice, being created in God’s image—aren’t present. I hope not. That would make a hell of heaven and, if we’re paying attention, might already be making a hell of our current surroundings. If we’re going to watch these movies, what if we let the very things that we once went to for easy comfort—familiarity, sameness, predictability—now make us uncomfortable? What if we discovered a growing ease and a deep-seated joy in putting familiarity aside and engaging in stories we once thought weren’t for us? And what if that spilled over into actual life? What if the narrative of our relational days shifted, and the thought of being the only ones here or anywhere was so abhorrent we’d shelve it over with the horror flicks?
Let’s start with watching better, and wanting more.