(Un)Happiest Season: What’s So Romantic-Comedic About Forcible Outing?
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It was at least partially out of obligation that I watched the newest instalment in the (admittedly tiny) lesbian Christmas romantic comedy cinematic canon: Happiest Season (2020, dir. Clea DuVall). It is out of another sense of obligation that I’m writing about what is wrong with it.
I’ll get to the point: this movie’s title is not just a misnomer, but an insult.
I settled down with Happiest Season in the middle of a November night, which is in my opinion no real time for a Christmas movie. But I was optimistic: I’d heard good things from friends online, and it all started off vaguely promising. Even Harper’s abrupt announcement that she and Abby were to pretend to be straight while visiting Harper’s family for the holiday did not immediately raise red flags for me — the film’s premise is not inherently problematic. For at least the first half of my watch, I was convinced that the reason I felt so ill was little more than second-hand embarrassment at Abby’s awkwardness. Then I decided these two simply were simply incompatible, and romcoms are hard to watch when you think the couple at the centre of them should break up.
Finally, though, I realised the truth. This apparent romantic comedy is traumatic, and in the worst kind of way — the way where it pretends that it isn’t traumatic at all.
I have spent the past day trying desperately to understand why so many people I respect have been expressing love for this movie. And why, also, I have seen such little criticism of anything aside from Harper’s cold treatment of Abby, a clunky script, and a bad wig.
Coming out stories are still necessary. Stories about forcible outing are still necessary. As someone who has experienced both, I believe this wholeheartedly. LGBTQ stories, and WLW relationships in particular, should be allowed to touch on and even embrace toxicity, and to be altogether as ‘bad’ as heterosexual stories can be. But when I say that LGBTQ people deserve ‘good’ stories, I’m not using the term to prescribe morality, or wholesomeness. We deserve nuanced stories, careful stories, stories which don’t actively harm us.
How is Happiest Season harmful? I’ll show you what I mean.
There are two ‘forcible outing’ plot points in this movie. The first involves Harper outing Riley, a high school girlfriend. Harper, under threat of exposure, not only outs Riley but says that she made unwanted advances towards Harper.
You can excuse, or at least understand, many of the harmful mistakes people make in the interests of keeping the closet door shut. But closeted fears cannot justify outing somebody else. Riley is exposed to homophobic bullying and potential violence, all emboldened by Harper’s ‘predatory lesbian’ lie. To keep herself out of danger, Harper puts Riley in the same kind of danger that she is attempting to avoid. And then…is this followed up, is it substantially addressed at any later point? No, it only serves as a backdrop to homophobia, and to put a more disturbing glean onto Harper’s actions in the present. I felt Harper’s treatment of Abby very deeply — it seemed almost cruel, at times. And in the context of Harper’s past outing of Riley, all my alarm bells starting ringing.
Maybe this issue wouldn’t be such a concern on its own. However, because apparently one mishandled forcible outing wasn’t enough, there is another!
In the climax of the film, Harper’s sister Sloan outs Harper to not only their family but a room stuffed full with miscellaneous others (a vaguely conservative bunch, though the movie shies away from using partisan terms). This is done sadistically: out of spite, revenge, and competitiveness.
The very hinge of this film, the reason for its existence and the point around which the conflict resolves — Harper’s fear of coming out — is reduced to a shock value scene that is par for the traditional romcom course. But when translated to an LGBTQ context, this scene is difficult to watch.
To out someone without their consent is a violent act. Sloan commits this violence in the knowledge that Harper desperately wants to stay closeted — they fight like wrestlers in the hallway over it, so her desperation cannot be doubted. Does the narrative acknowledge Sloan’s act as a reprehensible one, as one of violence?
No. Instead, the outing acts as the essential catalyst for our romcom happy ending.
Happiest Season is a web of contradictions. Well, more like two diametrically opposed story threads which repeatedly bash against each other as the movie goes on.
One: Harper is terrified of coming out. Her family is established as being conservative (the father harps on about family values in an early scene), homophobic (the mother makes a comment denigrating ‘lifestyle choices’), and so concerned about reputation that Harper has kept her secret for many years.
Two: Sloan is not held accountable for purposefully outing Harper to her family. The family, and the movie itself, handwaves away decades of homophobia. The outing is treated as essential to achieving a ‘happy ending’ for Harper and Abby.
What I cannot get over is that it was this forced coming out that made the romcom ending happen. The airport-running, kissing-in-public happy ever after comes about purely because Harper was outed to an ostensibly very homophobic group of people.
As someone who has been forcibly outed in multiple contexts, the unbridled fear in those situations is like nothing I have ever felt before (or probably ever will again). So I want to stress this. Forcible outing is never necessary to have a happy ending as a gay person. Harper’s actions, and a particularly heartfelt conversation between Abby and Daniel Levy’s character near the end of the movie, clearly establish the trauma of coming out. Yet, a forced coming out is key to the romcom ending. This is inconsistent and illogical. It is also, to my mind, wildly irresponsible.
Happiest Season was traumatic. But that is not the damning thing; the clincher is that it acted like it wasn’t.
I’ve encountered plenty of stories about coming out, and even forcible outing, in my time. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018, dir. Desiree Akhavan) dealt with these themes, and that film was traumatic, too, in a lot of ways. But — and this may be a virtue of the format, as Miseducation is certainly not a romantic comedy — Miseducation knew full well that it was traumatic. It was complex, nuanced, and did not veer into being reductive or overly trivial — all danger zones that Happiest Season plunged right into with little to no self-awareness.
Maybe a forced coming out story is incompatible with the format of a romantic comedy, which tends to oversimplify complex facts of life and solve mammoth problems in a single scene. After all, how can I fault a romantic comedy for…being a romantic comedy? But if you struggle to address the trauma of coming out in an appropriate way in a romcom format, as Happiest Season did, then I suggest interrogating why you are putting it in a romcom at all.
The vast majority of heterosexual romcoms do not even glance at traumatic topics. Meanwhile, as LGBTQ people, trauma is in our very bones. What that requires of LGBTQ romantic comedies is a nebulous question, one I can’t address here — but it’s an area in which, in my opinion, Happiest Season failed us. Even on my second watch, I couldn’t shake the nausea I felt upon seeing LGBTQ traumas couched in the shallow, plastic, and at times uncaring indulgence of a romantic comedy.
I want to end with some bold-ish statements. LGBTQ creators aren’t immune from creating stories that are bad for us. LGBTQ storylines should be subjected to a higher level of criticism given the social context in which they operate — including their impact on LGBTQ target audiences.
I think, too, that the blunders in Happiest Season should open up a few questions about LGBTQ romcoms as a whole: how can/should they function, what issues can/should they tackle and how? This film should stand as a warning against betraying the complex minefield of homophobia, coming out, and related traumas for the sake of adhering to the traditional, heteronormative rules of the romcom genre.
There is room for more nuance in the discussion than this short piece of writing will allow, just as Happiest Season sacrificed nuance in order to fit a tired romcom format. I’ve also seen some pretty damning commentary on the film’s approach to race and neurodivergent characters (which I will link here if/when I see such commentary published).
I accept that minds will differ markedly on the merits of Happiest Season. Plenty of subjectivity, and individual life experience, factors into this assessment. But there is also a universality to the problems with this film — or, as universal as a story about upper-class white American lesbians can get. What I’d like to urge is thinking critically about LGBTQ media, particularly as it becomes more prevalent and mainstream. My point isn’t that we can afford to be picky, it’s that we can’t afford not to be.
