The Christmas Chronicles is this year’s tentpole festive family movie from Netflix. Directed by Clay Kaytis, the script is written by another two men, David Guggenheim and Matt Lieberman.
The nice thing about The Christmas Chronicles is that a few of the old gender tropes have been inverted. Instead of an adventurous younger brother juxtaposed against a surly teenaged older sister, we have an adventurous younger sister juxtaposed against a surly teenaged brother. Instead of killing off the mother, they’ve killed off the father to allow the kids to go out on their own Christmas Eve jaunt completely unsupervised.
But as I have said before, inversion doesn’t equal subversion.
Writers cannot simply flip a few gender tropes and hope for pats on the back. Writers need to read the damn room. They need to actually listen to women when women say — as women have been saying this entire year, and last year, and all the years before that — that women know our own minds. We don’t need men to know our minds for us.
In The Christmas Chronicles, our adventurous heroine causes Santa to crash his sleigh. On the ground, nobody but the kids believe he’s ‘the real santa’, but Santa manages to pull adults up short by knowing everyone’s names, and also the content of their deepest desires, stretching back to when they were kids. (In storytelling terms, he knows their conscious desires — a certain toy of the year — as well as their underlying desires — their wish to make their families happy etc.) Basically, Santa is a red and white version of an omniscient god. (I’m going to leave the inherent creepiness of that aside.)
In this particular version of a ‘true believers will be richly rewarded’ story, Santa ends up in prison, which allows for a good fish-out-of water comic set-up. Jail is the last place for Santa, right? Santa breaks into people’s homes to GIVE stuff, not to take it away. The writers have made the most of the comic irony here.
The jail sequence begins with a scene completely lacking in 2018 informed sensibility.
The following conversation takes place between the newly imprisoned Santa and a police officer who thinks he’s being pranked. The only way Santa can prove he’s the ‘real’ Santa is by playing the role of a TV psychic. Santa tells the officer things deeply personal things about himself.
Transcript
POLICE OFFICER: You know what I want for Christmas?
SANTA: It’s my job, Dave.
POLICE OFFICER: Okay, then, smart guy. What do I want?
SANTA: Lisa.
POLICE OFFICER: Lisa?
SANTA: Your ex-wife.
POLICE OFFICER: I know who Lisa is. How did you…
SANTA: She left you a couple years ago, and all you want for Christmas is for her to come back.
POLICE OFFICER: Yeah, well, that ain’t ever gonna happen.
SANTA: Yeah, I think maybe. [facial expression suggests the officer is wrong]
POLICE OFFICER: Okay, look, pal. You don’t walk in here and talk about my ex-wife.
SANTA: Dave, just… just give her a call.
POLICE OFFICER: She doesn’t wanna talk to me.
SANTA: Yes! Yes, she does! Now, she’s… she’s having second thoughts and… she’s lonely, too. And she really misses you!
POLICE OFFICER: Now I know you’re out of your tree. Will you please stop this?
SANTA: You know who I am! I mean, you’ve always been a suspicious, doubtful type. That’s probably why you’re a good cop. But deep down, you know that I know what everybody wants for Christmas. So, just give her a call, Dave!
POLICE OFFICER: I don’t know how you know all this stuff.
Within the world of this story, Santa knows what the unseen ex-wife really wants because he knows what everyone really wants. The ex-wife wants the man she previously left to just call her.
If stories existed in a completely separate bubble from the real world, this might work fine.
But within the world of the actual real world, when women leave their partners, it’s generally for a damn good reason, and if they give their ex-partners the impression they want no further contact, they damn well mean that. Women don’t need men sitting together in rooms, trying to persuade each other that women don’t really mean exactly what women say.
The notion that women don’t mean ‘no’ when we say ‘no’ is dangerously pervasive, for women. For women, this sometimes means murder. It very frequently means physical or emotional abuse.
When script writers create scenes like this in a movie for children, they are perpetuating the idea that women don’t know our own minds — that men know better. Worse, men *magically* know better. Or they should magically know better. Silly old emotionally deaf police officer, failing to pick up the real situation. Santa is persuading the police officer that he’s got the situation completely arse about. (Because men are emotional dolts when it comes to women — another tired, self-perpetuating trope.)
If a man wants the love of a particular woman, all he needs to do is ‘persevere’, said every stalker ever. Where on earth do they learn this?
Since this character is a police officer, the scene feels even worse, if that’s possible. In family films, police officers are portrayed as the good guys, except when they blatantly are not. The police officer in The Christmas Chronicles is an unambiguous good guy. Like the child viewer, he craved certain toys. (It is implied he didn’t get them — poor him.) Now he’s an adult, all he wants is love. Poor him. It can’t be just any love, though. It must be the love of the woman who left him for reasons known only to herself. Another concerning trope: The myth of the one true love.
Domestic abuse among police officers is even higher than in the general population. This has been known for some time.
Research suggests that family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population. So where’s the public outrage?
Once again, an audience is encouraged to take a man’s sexual desire seriously without considering the woman’s side. What a man wants — the love (and possibly the control) of a woman — is prioritised above what a woman wants — to not have that with this particular man.
Since it obviously needs saying, people cannot read minds. Women can’t read minds, either — though women are acculturated into listening to cues, prioritising male desire over our own and picking up on body language, then acting accordingly. Too often, men fail to do the same for women.
Have we not had enough of that this year? Have we not?
Also relevant, family violence spikes at Christmas. The violence is heavily gendered. It’s mostly men trying to control women, thinking they know better than women, thinking their own right to exist in the world takes preference over a woman’s autonomy.
That’s why a scene in which two men discuss the desire of an unseen woman is so hugely problematic.
In case you think, “It’s only a story”, consider this: precisely because it’s only a story, the writers could have given the police officer in The Christmas Chronicles LITERALLY any other desire. It did not have to involve the love of a woman who left the officer for unexplored reasons.
If the writers were really reading the room, the police officer would have been a woman.
My wish for 2019: Keep men away from movies for kids. Hand over the reins.
For audiences: Don’t mistake a sparky, adventurous female lead for genuine feminism in film. The Christmas Chronicles is not it.
#NotAllMen
