Queer Audiences Deserve a Better Holiday Classic Than Happiest Season

Most queer people like myself grew up watching romantic comedies pretty much exclusively featuring straight couples. Not an earth-shattering revelation there. But one genre in particular takes the heteronormativity cake: the holiday rom-com.

That’s why when the trailer for Happiest Season was released, it sent shockwaves through the lesbian community.

Finally, a holiday movie featuring lesbians, director by a queer woman (Clea DuVall), written by two queer women (DuVall and the brilliant Mary Holland) starring an exceptionally queer cast that includes lesbian icons Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis (from Black Mirror’s amazing San Junipero episode), and Aubrey Plaza — and we were promised a happy ending. Holy fuck.

What Happiest Season actually delivers is some of the most 2020 shit I saw in 2020.

Twitter user Jes Tom puts it best:

If you don’t like spoilers, you can stop reading here.

The premise of Happiest Season is that a lesbian couple, Abby (Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) who have been living together long enough that Abby has bought a ring to propose, are going home to Harper’s family for Christmas for the first time.

The twist is that while driving to Harper’s family’s house, Harper explains that she lied to Abby about coming out to her family — Harper’s family still think she’s straight and that Abby is her heterosexual roommate.

Happiest Season treats this omission as if Harper is admitting she forgot to buy Abby a Christmas present.

Abby protests for a few minutes before agreeing to go to Harper’s parents anyway, under the pretence that they’ll come out at the right moment during the holiday.

I’d like to pause here.

Abby is about to propose to Harper. They’ve been dating and living together for a while.

Lying about coming out to your long-term partner with whom you live is not a laughable, inconvenient omission. It’s a wildly problematic, deeply charged lie that would break many relationships.

At this point, my skepticism about Happiest Season was high, but I couldn’t give up on the first proper lesbian holiday classic, so I kept watching.

What proceeds is an hour of Harper digging herself deeper into her lies, keeping her mouth shut as her parents shamelessly set her up with her high school boyfriend at a dinner with Abby, abandoning Abby through days of awkward family functions and general fuckery, and in a final crescendo, denying she’s gay even after her sister outs her to the family.

At the end of this hot mess of a movie, when Abby finally breaks up with Harper and leaves, as she should, Harper comes to her senses and asks for Abby back.

The happy ending is supposed to be paid off by the fact that Abby takes Harper back, and the film finishes with the family sitting together on Christmas, a ring on Harper’s finger and Abby looking content about the whole thing.

The thing about Happiest Season that pissed me and most of my queer friends off is not that it’s a bad movie.

It’s just that for a movie called Happiest Season claiming to be a feel-good lesbian holiday rom-com with a happy ending, it’s extraordinarily triggering.

Nearly every queer woman I know has been both Harper and Abby at various moments in their queer journey. It’s common that the period in which they are closeted, but still dating women, creates lots of emotional destruction around them.

It’s also common for queer people to get outed, like Harper, before they’re ready.

The problem is that Harper doesn’t actually do any of the work to clean that mess up before getting Abby back.

Her lies are not white lies. The way she alienates and isolates Abby are not innocent actions you can push neatly under the umbrella of ‘dumb shit I did when I was figuring out how to come out’.

Teaching young people that one apology is enough to repair a relationship deeply strained under the weight of the dishonesty being in the closet can create — and not just repair it, but serve as a foundation for marriage?!

I don’t buy that as a happy ending.

The second, more pressing issue I have with Happiest Season, in addition to the fact that it’s very fucking white, is that we have a lot of movies about lesbian oppression.

Most fall into one of two categories: lesbian period dramas (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Handmaiden, Carol, The Favourite, Ammonite) or depressing coming of age stories (Summer of Sangailé, Blue is the Warmest Color, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, etc.).

What we don’t have a lot of is stories about lesbian joy, which is what Happiest Season promised.

Don’t get me wrong, being a queer woman can be hard as fuck, but it doesn’t mean our stories need to be defined by our struggle.

We can be happy and out and in long-lasting relationships or have great one night stands. We can laugh and experience a staggering range of joy and love, both because of and independently to our queer identities. There are a few narratives that capture our joy beautifully. Alice Júnior does a great job centering a queer female protagonist without making the storyline all about coming out, as do Booksmart and Euphoria. But most don’t. and Happiest Season definitely doesn’t, which is a shame, because that’s what got the queer community so excited about it in the first place.