On narrative, language, perception, Trump, and of course, the Hallmark Channel
Or, alternatively, rhetoric matters in a Hallmark screenplay, a John Green novel, or a Trump tweet
Good evening (or whatever time of day you are reading this). As I write this newsletter, it is November 3, 2020. No, I am not okay. But I did vote.
Here’s the selfie I took for my Instagram story
Just to warn you before we begin, things will be a little different this week. Like probably everyone else in the good ole US of A, I am at peak anxiety mode — and crafting a cohesive narrative is proving to be a challenge. So, if anything, this piece will likely serve as an unscrambling of thoughts that have been circling in my brain for the past few days in a flurry of fear, rage, exhaustion, and, dare I say, cautious optimism??
I had grand plans to write about the Hallmark Channel this week. I’ve become a bit obsessed with the Hallmark brand and their subsequent programming — there is something bizarre and suspiciously sugary about these movies.
…and perhaps the most upsetting thing about Hallmark movies is that I am not immune to their charm (“Holiday Date” was actually good, okay? It has a fake relationship trope and everything).
But what started as a single-minded quest to learn why these movies are so bland yet so addictive turned into a reflection about words and America and narrative (or a lack thereof). Anyway, what follows is the result of my little intellectual exercise.
It always starts ironically. I’m flipping through channels and decide to have a little laugh at “Happy Holly Christmas in Sillyville” or whatever it’s called. I poke fun at the candy cane lanes and fake snow and WASPy home decor. And then somehow I’m still sitting in front of the TV four hours later, watching another film with almost the exact same plot, aesthetic, and characters as the previous one.
This is on purpose, of course. Hallmark movies are engineered to have identical “beats” or “acts.” The comfort is in the familiarity. I recently read Sarah Larson’s fabulous New Yorker piece on the network, in which she analyzes the precise recipe that allowed Hallmark to take over television:
The familiarity of the films is essential to their success. Hallmark screenplays have nine acts, each of which hits specific plot points—a meet-cute in Act I, before the first commercial, an “almost kiss” in Act VII. The shots are lit with a distinctive warmth. Actors recur.
This isn't mere predictability. It’s branding. And within Hallmark’s brand universe (the HBU, if you will) negativity is simply off-brand. My favorite part of the Larson article is when she asks Bill Abbott, CEO of Hallmark’s Crown Media, about a recent film she saw that contained the word “suck” in its dialogue. “I was so mad at myself for not catching it,” he replies, visibly distressed. “It’s a— it’s just a negative. It shouldn’t be on our channel.”
As I continued my Hallmark research, I came across article after article that spoke to the family-friendly, sweet as honey, “apolitical” fantasy land these films create — and the extremely strict framework needed to keep it that way. In a piece for Entertainment Weekly, two anonymous Hallmark screenwriters shared a glimpse of their creative process, saying: “Everything goes through a mildness filter. You have to mild-ify everything that you do just to kind of take all the edges off.”
The idea is to create an escape. I get that. And it’s not about what actually happens in these movies — it’s about how they make you feel, and what they let you avoid thinking about. But while Hallmark takes great lengths to avoid politics (in Abbott’s words, creating, “your place to go to get away from politics, to get away from everything in your life that is problematic and negative”) I couldn’t help but recognize this strategic manipulation of language to create a false narrative, an alternate reality version of America.
I don’t follow President Trump on Twitter. I don’t think it would add anything to my life. I’m never surprised by anything he says anymore. It’s easy to write off his tweets as ridiculous, which they are. But they aren’t accidental, nor incidental. They’re strategic.
In a 2018 Medium article called “Analyzing Trump’s Tweets: A Data-Based Analysis of Trump’s language on Twitter,” Michael Tauberg used a large corpus of text data comprised of every Trump tweet ever (to date of the article’s publication) to conduct a text analysis, hoping it might provide some insight “into the man’s mind.”
This is a word cloud from Tauberg’s analysis, showing Trump’s most-used vocabulary in the largest type. As you can see, he tweets about himself just slightly more than he tweets about Obama.
But the most interesting insights, in my opinion, pertain to polarization. In Trumpland, opposites are key. Things are good or bad, the best or the worst. News is fake or fair. People are smart or dumb.
Of course, Donald Trump didn’t invent the two-party system. America has been divided since its conception. But Trump uses this division to his advantage. He even campaigned on the idea of a before and after: America was once great and now it is a failure.
This narrative conveniently leaves out details. There are characters, of course. But only two kinds: the Democrats, who are described as weak, stupid, and failures, and the Real Americans, who are good and great.
Essentially, the point I’m trying to get at is this: it doesn’t matter what Trump actually says. It’s the emotional response his language elicits in his supporters. The simplicity of his language is effective because it solidifies the creeping biases we may have about one another. Instead of working through the gray area, he offers a clear us vs. them, and anyone working against “us” is stopping America from returning to Hallmarkland, where there is nothing “problematic” or “negative” and we can all get back to eating Christmas cookies and singing by the fire (that is, if you are white, heterosexual, and have generational wealth; otherwise you’re out of luck).
But the problem is, America never was Hallmarkland. As many have been asking since 2015, exactly when was America great and when did it stop being that way? What magical time is Trump saying we should return to? The 1950’s, when schools were segregated? The 30s, when so many Americans were trapped in poverty?
But of course, these questions remain unanswered, because the devil’s in the details. Unfortunately, in real life, things are problematic. And negative. And the only way to solve these problematic, negative aspects is to face them. To grapple with them. To acknowledge their existence, and to care about the issues — including the ones that don’t apply to us directly — because we give a damn about our fellow Americans and their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But empathy doesn’t sell, I guess.
While I’m enraged by false narratives about the gold ole days in America, I do recognize the attraction to an idealized world that is rooted in reality, but has no real conflict. While the Hallmark Channel could use a serious diversity intervention, I appreciate the attempt to highlight human relationships and how we can make each other’s lives better. It’s cheesy, but the good kind of cheesy, like a Paul McCartney love song or a sweet Valentine’s Day card.
And when things are this bad, escapes matter, and I have plenty. I don’t spend too much time on YouTube anymore, but I do still subscribe to John and Hank Green’s channel: Vlogbrothers, in which the two brothers (of Crash Course, hit teen novels, and most recently, TikTok fame) each film a video addressed to the other each week on a random topic. It’s delightful. While researching for this article, I took a quick break and watched John’s video from Tuesday, called “Alaska for Looking.”
Serendipitously, this is what gave me the lightbulb I needed to finish my writing this week. In the video, John avoids talking too much about the election and instead chooses to share the story of a fan project called “Alaska for Looking,” an alphabetized list of all the words in John’s first novel, Looking for Alaska.
The result is an unscrambling of the narrative, or, in John’s words, “a strange, dizzying, uncanny version of itself.” It is rhetoric out of context, but in ditching the narrative, so much is exposed.
John continues, “To read a book alphabetically is to understand it’s preoccupations, but not it’s narrative.” I thought about how Looking for Alaska is boiled down to the theme of growing up in this form, and how that isn’t so different to what I took away from it in its intended form when I read it as a teenager.
And then I thought about how there is no clear narrative in our present political, cultural moment, nor is there in history. I thought about how that scares me, and how easily words and data and facts are manipulated, especially in the Digital Age, and how sometimes I wish everything had a clear beginning and end. Which is probably why I studied English literature in college, and why I find myself glued to the TV watching Hallmark movies with exactly nine plot points that always end with true love’s kiss.
And unfortunately, as in life, today I end with no clear conclusion. But as a parting gift, here is another YouTube video that gave me an escape this Election Tuesday (but let’s not discuss the fact that it found me because Google is scary and targeted me based on my recent searches…or that it worked…one point for surveillance capitalism!)
As always, thank you for reading. Sending peaceful vibes to help you get through this particularly hellish week.
<3 Jen