It's time for some Hallmark movies!

'Tis the season.

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I’ve recently become a Letterboxd guy, and despite my extensive cataloguing of films, there are many reasons why I refuse to disclose how many Hallmark movies I’ve indulged in. Actually, I do my best to avoid knowing that precise number. Whatever the grand total, that number is surely more than I could bear to confront, and the Christmas season is full of lies and delusions anyway. Even when I account for every Hallmark movie having a precisely 90-minute runtime, that final tally would add up to literal weeks of my life—the only one I have or will have—that I could’ve otherwise spent doing anything else, like learning how to make pizza dough. Instead, those accrued hours have been irretrievably spent watching Candace Cameron making concerned faces in a gazebo, or two soap-opera actors with blowouts almost but not actually kiss after a spontaneous low-intensity snowball fight. Honestly, I just respect how these movies consistently have normie attractive women as the leads—Lacey Chabert never sold her soul, and it shows.

I have mentally constructed an awful Bill Simmons-style patheon of the various iterations of films that exist inside the Hallmark Cinematic Universe. It should be noted that absolutely no healthy or well-adjusted person should have this kind of extensive psychic catalog. There’s one with a harvest theme in which two characters go on a date to see this band called McBanjo—ChatGPT could never come up with something that poignantly boilerplate. There’s one about, from what I can glean, avalanche safety protocols with some frictionless rom-com gestures grafted onto it. There’s one in which Wallace Shawn, for some inexplicable reason, plays an angel. There’s a Hanukkah-themed one in which a Jewish character didn’t know what a hammer was. Apparently, Mariah Carey directed a Hallmark film. Most of my exposure to Hallmark movies is the result of my mom passively throwing these on in the background before Thanksgiving is even over. I used to think that any household that plays anything other than football on Thanksgiving is statistically inclined to be the worst people in America (with the exception of switching on The Godfather after the Giants inevitably go down by two scores). But I have come to realize that mom culture is underrated—Hallmark cinema, Real Housewives, Bachelor in Paradise, working your way through Memoirs of a Geisha for three years. It’s Carmelacore.

These movies are pleasant enough, but they are not meant to be watched very closely or with any amount of discernment. Before a bleak plurality of films became designed to play in the background while we doomscroll, Hallmark movies served that explicit purpose. If there is such a thing as wallpaper movies, these are wrapping paper movies. You’ll look up from whatever you were doing and notice two conventionally attractive people in Nordic-style sweaters sipping hot cocoa on what is noticably a hot and soggy day. You’ll look up again, and one of them is eating a stale gingerbread cookie and reacting as if they saw the real face of god. The ideal way to ingest Hallmark stuff involves spending a significant portion of the time not watching these movies. Staring at the screen the whole time is like looking at an AI-generated image for too long and noticing the person in the photo has six fingers or their knee is bent the wrong way. Hallmark cinema is movie-esque, but they are deeply uncanny, and they do not always follow or even seem to acknowledge the rules that other movies follow. Plotlines bloat and blurt. The action comes to an abrupt halt to make room for some high-handed exposition, and this usually arrives as characters trauma-dump to each other about their relationships with their parents, with Christmas, or with the city of Burlington, Vermont.

When movie conventions are upended in something like Twin Peaks: The Return, it’s a deliberate choice by the filmmaker to put viewers in a more vulnerable position or to keep them on unfamiliar footing. Many Hallmark movies will also toy with viewer expectations, but this happens more organically—one of those snowball fights kicking up in the middle of an afternoon stroll, a date scene in a restaurant that features waiters presenting plates of white flimflam as “the lobster tellegio,” or another useful but surprisingly meticulous disquisition on avalanche preparedness. If you watch enough of these movies and damage yourself with the Stockholm syndrome variant that I have given myself, you will come to treasure these moments of uncaniness as part of the strange syntax of the Hallmark genre. What you know about movies will not help you navigate this marshmallow world, but you might be delighted when someone is served a pastel-hued drink in a martini glass with a candy cane sticking out of it.

Any sort of familiarity with this particular type of uncaniness has zero real-world practicality, especially in explaining what is truly strange about these movies to normal people. I feel like the Charlie Day Pepe Silvia meme whenever I expound on the dinner roll thing at ugly sweater parties—their uncommon size and their periodic weird shininess and their ubitquity—and I have watched people’s faces change to express deep concern for my mental state. But if Disney is desperate enough to crowdsource all their creativity and IP to Silicon Valley’s biggest scam artist, then maybe there will come a time when Hallmark will do the same. So let’s give it a try.

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Working Title: “The Love Learning Model”

We open with a half-white/half-Asian woman named Ashlynn, and she lives in San Francisco. She is at her boyfriend’s apartment enjoying a nice bottle of Cab and a candlelit homemade steak/roast veggie dinner before he lets her know that he will be moving to Singapore to take a job as VP of Content & Brand Partnerships for TikTok. He doesn’t have the heart to say it, but it is unsubtly implied that he doesn’t want her to move there with him. She sulks back her her place, reminiscing on their picture-perfect six months together. The she’s slouched on her couch, watching cheesy rom-coms and whimpering her way through a pint of Hagen Dazs.

The next morning, her job notifies her that they’re sending her across the country to a quaint town in New Hampshire, just a half-hour drive off the coast. It’s an emergency push to finish her Q4 crunch for a consulting project for their client, Handcrafted with Love, a bespoke card-making company. After all, she is their rockstar technical project manager, and the only woman employed at the company. She relishes the opportunity to take her mind off of the breakup.

After she lands at Logan Airport in Boston, she hops in her Enterprise-rental Range Rover and she winds up the coniferous-lined country roads, having a sweet moment getting back in touch with herself as she sings along to some Michael Bublé holiday tunes—her ex HATED Christmas music.

The next morning, she is in a boardroom meeting with the executive team, who has notified her that they just underwent a year-end mass layoff of the creative team, and will be turbocharging their AI implementation program to mass-produce holiday cards to expand their customer base. She’s now in charge of the transition project over the next week, but she’s clearly dejected.

After the meeting, Ashlynn is driving back to her Air BnB, but she gets lost due to the winding roads and poor cell service. She spots a colonial-style house on a massive plot of land, which appears to be a pet sanctuary. She stops to ask for directions, and she walks to the side of the house and sees a jacked 6’4” man in lumbersexual attire with thick dark hair and a perfect smile. His name is Tanner, and he’s tending to his horses and a pack of beagles are following his every step. She tells him she’s lost and he invites her inside for some pumpkin pie and hot cocoa (it’s not creepy when he’s 6’4” and handsome).

We’re in his living room/studio and they’re sitting by the fireplace and the movie pivots to 20 minutes of dialogue about how Ashlynn has spent the last few Christmases alone because her last nine boyfriends break up with her around the holidays, then she inquires as to whether he has a signifigant other. But it’s just him and his animals, who are all perfectly groomed despite living on a farm. Ashlynn gushes over how cute his homestead is, and Tanner says he loves it too, but then his mood changes. He used to be the creative director at Handcrafted with Love, but his job was one of the casulties in that mass layoff. With a sagging job market, he’s worried that he won’t be able to afford the mortgage payment, and Handcrafted with Love has been lobbying the municipal government to scoop up land in the area and turn it into a data center.

Ashlynn is too nervous to tell him that she’s a tech consultant for the company that advised Handcrafted with Love to gut their creative department, but she’s torn between this newfound infatuation and her career. But she gazes into his eyes and smirks, “I have an idea.”

While she was driving into town, she noticed that Hallmark was sponsoring a Christmas card contest, and the person who made the best card wins a prize of $100,000—which would be enough money for Tanner to pay off the remainder of his mortgage. They go on the website to enter, but they notice Handcrafted with Love is also entered into the contest to pilot their new creative AI suite. Tanner, dejected, says they shouldn’t bother because Handcrafted with Love will use their machine-tooled algoritim to make the perfectly sentimental holiday card, but since Ashlynn works at the tech company, she knows how to defeat the machines: Love.

Ashlynn asks Tanner if he has a go-to card that means a lot to him to enter, since the contest is in a few hours. He’s had this card that he worked on a decade ago while backpacking across Europe. However, it was torn in half, and he only has the part with the illustration. He could never quite recapture the spirit of the message he wrote in the other half, and it’s been so long since he initially made the card, so he can’t remember the original text. Ashlynn reaches into her Prada bag and pulls out a torn piece of paper of a note that spoke to her soul, a brief treatise on love and hope and perserverance that motivates her to find that special soulmate. It turns out, they were both backpacking in Europe around the same time, and she found it on the ground near the Eifel Tower. She asks Tanner what inspired him to make this card, and he said he was reeling from a break-up and it was a letter to his future self to never lose the hopeless romantic side of him and that true love is the best Christmas present.

With two halves of a magical sentiment, they reassemble the card and get to the competition just a few minutes before it begins. The CEO of Handcrafted with Love sees Ashlynn and notices that she is listed as a competitor, but she diverts him by saying she entered the contest to A/B test the AI model. The judges score Ashlynn’s and Tanner’s card first, and score it a 9.5. After a few other cards are scored (all of them lower), the Handcrafted with Love AI card is the last to be evaluated. It gets a perfect 10. Tanner is sad at the prospect of losing his pet sanctuary, but is overwhelmed by the crushing existential realization that his creative efforts will be thwarted by AI and technological greed, and that late-stage capitalism will destroy whatever tiny enjoyable aspects of life we still have.

But one of the judges has a second-take on the Handcrafted with Love AI card and notices something peculiar about the loving couple in Santa outfits on the cover. The people’s faces have an uncanny resemblance to Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. The AI card is disqualified, and the Handcrafted with Love CEO is angry that this somehow slipped past quality control, but realizes his short-sighted pursuit of maximum profit spurred his decision to denigrate his company and cheapen his product. Tanner and Ashlynn hug and have their first kiss.

A few months later, Ashlynn quits her fancy tech job and moved in with Tanner to help him run his animal sanctuary. They started their own independent card company that now makes more money than Handcrafted with Love. The pack of beagles all have puppies, and each of the judges gets one for some reason and the Logan Airport Enterprise forgives Ashlynn for never returning their rental Range Rover.

They get married on the following Christmas Eve, and read their vows off their own custom-made holiday card.

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