The Internet has been abuzz with discourse ever since Happiest Season dropped on Hulu, a lot of it heated and most of it critical. As the hours go by, the takes get wilder. I don’t usually chime in on #discourse because I’m often late to the game or just haven’t seen or read The Thing That Everyone Is Talking About™.
But this time, I watched The Thing™ right when it came out, before the discourse, and ever since I’ve been reading both sides. I really enjoyed this movie and at the same time, it made me deeply sad because it stirred emotions I’ve been dealing with for years. This isn’t unique to this movie, which for me functioned as both wish fulfillment and worst anxieties come true, so I don’t blame the film for this. Like the random girl in the gym scene in Mean Girls, I just have a lot of feelings.
Plenty of others have said their piece about whether this film helps or harms. For me, Kristen Stewart and Aubrey Plaza in those suits help. A lot. Harper’s behavior toward Abby harms and homophobia harms more. Yes, Harper crosses the line of “cute rom-com hijinks” with the way she treats Abby. But my main thought through most of the film was “look how much homophobia and being forced to be closeted is harming both of them. What an ugly thing to deal with. Also, I want a girlfriend to have cute Christmas parties with.”
I feel on a spectrum.
My point is, I agree with all the criticisms of Harper. She has never dealt with the toxic environment she grew up in that forced her to be closeted. Abby gets hurt because of it. Multiple times. It’s painful to watch and at one point I prepared myself to see yet another wlw relationship onscreen fall apart. It still seems that children’s cartoons are the best place to find healthy wlw rep.
Which is why I liked the ending of the movie. For me, I got just enough acknowledgement of the issues to believe that Abby and Harper could work it out. I like this message much better than the alternative: that the relationship falls apart and you suck if you’re closeted and hide from your family. At the same time, the message of leaving someone who is mistreating you is powerful and valid. Abby does exactly this. She’s done when she walks out that door. She made her stand for herself. It’s then up to Harper to own up to the way she behaved, which she does, and I buy it.
Why do I buy it? Partly because of my own biases as a reader/audience. Most of the time, I’m happy when the characters are happy. At the end, Abby is happy being with Harper, so I’m happy. Right before Abby left the Christmas party, she wasn’t happy, so I was ready to be happy for her for breaking up with Harper.
But the other reason I buy the ending is because Happiest Season works as a story. In this sense, it’s a good story.
“Good” is subjective, but what I mean here is that this movie gives us certain promises in the beginning and then fulfills those promises. Stories work when they do this. There may be exceptions, but most successful stories follow this pattern and Happiest Season is not in a genre that lends itself to pulling the rug from under the audience.
Now, we may not like the outcome, details, or messages of those promises, but the story still works.
I think this movie suffered from a marketing campaign that made it look more light-hearted than it is. Sometimes, the marketing of a book or film can make false promises to us, so I think we have to separate the work from its marketing (yet another great reason to avoid ads and not watch trailers). The story’s promises aren’t in what the marketing tells us–which is a cute, funny movie that pulls your heartstrings just a little bit because it’s a coming out narrative. The story’s promises are what’s shown to us in the beginning.
What Promises Are Made in the Beginning?
The opening credits and the first scene before the title screen really give us everything we’re gonna get in the movie. It’s just difficult to notice the first time around.
Those opening credits are an adorable sequence that gives us vital information about Abby and Harper. It’s the story of how they met and the milestones of their relationship over the past year. For me, two images stand out as demonstrating the seriousness of their relationship: the necklace gift and the one where they’re moving in together. This is shorthand for a commitment that isn’t easily broken.
So the promise I get from the credits is that these two women are in love with each other and them being together is a major component of the story.
The opening credits transition into the first scene, where Harper and Abby are on a Christmas light tour. I think this scene is more important for establishing promises than you initially realize the first time you watch. We hear this tour guide describe a wholesome fact about a long-time Santa Claus, but it ends with a twist that this Santa got arrested for child endangerment. This juxtaposition is humorous, but it also sets the tone for the film. Yes, we’re going to get cute, wholesome Christmas vibes, but we will also get some things that hurt.
This promise is further emphasized when Harper suddenly tells Abby to follow her and doesn’t explain what’s going on. Abby follows her as she climbs onto the roof of a random person’s house and while this scene is very cute and magical, it also establishes this pattern that we’ll see throughout the story: Harper doesn’t tell Abby what’s happening and things are okay for a bit, and then Abby falls off the roof and gets hurt–literally and metaphorically.
While there’s a lot of silliness to that scene, it’s just a bit too dramatic to signal a purely light-hearted Christmas rom-com, isn’t it? So the promise I get from this is that there will be drama and it will hurt, but the first promise of Abby and Harper being together will still be true.
These promises are why Abby and Riley don’t get together and why Abby and Harper make up at the end. It’s why the movie gets too real with its coming out narrative. This film does fulfill its promises and on those grounds, it does what a story is supposed to do. The effects of those promises help us decide whether a story benefits or harms those it’s representing.