Hallmark Holidays, with Tennis

And Happy Birthday Darwin / Lincoln (Feb. 12, 1809)

Good morning lovely humans! On the first go-round of this missive, I neglected to add a greeting and sign off. So: Let’s try this again at 10:30 am. It’s lovely to see you here — thank you for reading. I hope your week had less flu in it than mine did. (I even canceled class on Tuesday, which was sad in several ways including that I couldn’t bring Valentine’s/birthday chocolates for Darwin/Lincoln to my students, though I suspect the free 75 minutes in their day made up for it).

Last weekend I had marvelous time in Vermont with the Opera Crew — only my second time in Vermont since moving to the east coast in 2001?! — and 6” of fresh powder made Mount Snow a haven with ski instructor friend Katherine and former ski racer Garren. We also had a slammin’ 90s movie night: Jurassic Park and The Bodyguard. The vibrating surface tension on the water (Jurassic Park). The glory of Whitney Houston (Bodyguard)! If, like me, you’re tucked in with snow this weekend, I highly endorse that double feature.

But today I want to talk about other kinds of TV, because it’s time, and not just because we made it through yesterday’s festoons of roses. (There were a LOT of cute couples out in NYC and some goofiness too.)

Let me don my tennis bracelet …

I watch very little TV in general — partly because my parents got cable after I left for college — and even less since YouTubeTV recently raised their monthly prices past my threshold. One uncomfortable outcome of canceling that subscription, besides the ire of my teen co-habitant, is that my seasonal TV-watching has ground to a halt. I find myself in mid-February stress without the balm of …. televised tennis.

For those of you who don’t know, I am a “seasonal” TV watcher, meaning that at the start and end (and sometimes middle) of semesters, when stressed and overloaded by emails, I lean into two types of companionable TV content: Hallmark and tennis.

One guy I dated — note the past tense — laughed hysterically when I told him this, before he realized I was serious. Perhaps you are surprised too. Allow me to explain.

Tennis: Oh, the athleticism! The skill! Sometimes, the outfits! (Not at Wimbledon.) Competitors often honor one another’s performances and speak glowingly/grudgingly about the skills of their opponents.

Yes, there are very real dynamics of classism and racism, media coercion and public shaming, and brand sponsorship. Two ranked women’s US players are daughters of billionaires who own things like football teams and tennis tournaments. Designer watches are everywhere. But there are also folks across generations (notably Naomi Osaka, Billie Jean King) who stand for better ways of doing things on and off court. All of these truths are true at once.

And I know, psychologically, that at core I love the guarantee of a precision-physical game played at top form within mutually-agreed upon rules where the outcome of a given match or tournament is significant but not determinative, representing one moment of excellence (or struggle) in the long arc of a tennis tour/career. I’ve made my peace with tennis, mostly.

Hallmark, though.

Oh, Hallmark, you tricky tableau.

As social media fodder, Hallmark movies are way more popular than tennis. I even have the socks! Part of the draw for me is that (like tennis), Hallmark films have clear parameters: set duration, limited potential plot twists, predictable cadence, known cast of characters, no murders.

The rather asinine predictability paradoxically means that one can get immersed in end-of-semester emails or a work call for 25 minutes and not have truly missed anything. (Ah yes, we must be at the part where the Career Woman protagonist almost flies back to the Big City forever — likely because of a misunderstanding derived from the communicatively chaste couple’s inability to talk to one another after a whirlwind courtship predicated upon wistful gazing and ungrounded affirmations!)

It’s a form of uneventful and reassuring, if unnuanced, accompaniment.

But, Zenner: what is so reassuring about it?

Hallmark portrays an imagined, simpler world that fits within clean, white lines. Here, people live in homes with kitchen islands. They seem to work minimally and are well rested. Even long-term romantic breakups are mutual, non-vindictive, and rapid. (Fraught co-parenting is non-existent, since generally the other parent has died or abandoned the family.)

The politics are local. Generally the mayor, one of the few characters of color, finds a way to empower committed citizens of the town, usually with budget surplus for some kind of festival. There is no evident political tension, perhaps because civic action consists of vapid patriotism, a culture tacitly suffused with Christianity, and other parameters of an overly white, cis-het, city-disdaining, cloyingly craft-based world that is, in fact, filmed on location in … Canada. (Seriously. Hallmark movie HQ is in Winnipeg.)

In this tidy world with its a minimally variable plot line, things always resolve, if only in an absurdly two-dimensional sense. I like the tidiness. I don’t like that I like it, but I do. That’s not the same as wanting to live in it, but it’s a contrast to my own messier life, where my commute takes 1.5 hours each way and there are realities like NYC-area rent, high heating bills, and so forth. I like that things work out for protagonists, even if it’s not how I want my own life to look, and even though I turn off the movies more often than I sit through them.

Over the years that I’ve been suspiciously watching myself cleave to Hallmark holiday films, I’ve realized that I am drawn to the economic mythology that forms a baseline of every story.

Like whiteness, holiday fairs, or heteronormative main characters, the non-issue of economic class and personal finances are a key part of Hallmark’s appeal.

Yes, projects need funding and holiday fairs need saving and the family’s generationally-run bed and breakfast would prefer a non-Big-City-investor to facilitate improvements. But there is never a question that there will be a financial way forward. These folks are not in credit card debit, they are not on food stamps, they are not staying in crappy or abusive relationships in order to have a roof over their heads, and they are definitely always able to fund the field trip or buy hockey equipment.

I find this economic ease both alluring and absurd. As someone with divorce debt (which I have reframed as educational debt), sometimes I can’t look away. Because, frankly, I too would enjoy a world where divorce doesn’t take years and cost tens of thousands of dollars — YES I will be the surprised beneficiary of a recently deceased, distant childless relative’s beautiful Victorian house in a sweet town!

But this is not the world where I, or most of us, live.

I say this with recognition of my own very real privilege: whiteness, health insurance, a tenured faculty position despite the otherwise-exploitative gig economy of higher education. Those of us who are educators know that Hallmark is not the real world because no one actually gets offered a tenure-line Princeton job while falling in love at a Jane Austen cosplay event. Working single moms aren’t generally able to welcome their kids home from school or randomly meet a friend for coffee on a Tuesday morning. Only independently wealthy academic historians get hired by the Plaza Hotel to research and implement an exhibit on glass ornaments before deciding to teach “in the Village” despite living in actual house … somewhere nearby (?). And the only public school teachers who wax poetic that “it doesn’t matter how much I make” are those with generational wealth, since most public school teachers in the US have to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

I used to laugh and roll my eyes at all this. It’s satisfying to think that these stories can ease anxiety while we remain, irl, outside of the frame. But when do we decide that the myth is no longer healthy to engage? When do we remember that myth and story are far more determinative of our moral intuitions than, say, philosophical logic? That we, too, are enframed?

During the pandemic, I had a panic attack when the Hallmark app interrupted a movie to show a GUN ad. (Yes, you read that correctly.) I unsubscribed.

Years later, I got YouTubeTV, and was drawn back in. My draw to Hallmark has always been morally culpable, and I’ve known it. For a while I could handle the cognitive dissonance, but no longer — not in United States where the currently-ascendent Project 2025 ideology elevates guns and whiteness and Christianity over factual history and human well-being.

It has always mattered very much, just as now, whose stories we teach and tell. No accident that the last few months have seen a bevy of critique of Hallmark films, most of them accurately aimed.

We need our escapisms, but not complicity.

Which means, I guess: Anyone for tennis?

~

If you’re a Hallmark (or tennis) fan, how do you feel about this? lmk. And see you in two weeks, friends. Be cozy. ~ CNZ