When I got home the other night, Wanda was watching a movie on the Hallmark Channel, something she likes to do. Since the movie was almost over and the baseball game had been rained out, I watched the rest of it with her.
The thing about Hallmark Channel movies is that you know what you’re getting. You know that, by the end of the movie, the right woman is going to fall in love with the right man, whatever the kids’ problems are will be resolved, the bad guy (it’s almost always a guy) will see the error of his ways, and everyone will live happily ever after. That’s just the way these movies work.
This is not meant as a criticism. People like Wanda, who watch movies on the Hallmark Channel, are not watching to see all the bad things in society. They’re watching precisely to get away from the bad things in society for a little while. They want to watch a story in which things work out the way we want them to work out. They want to see a world that is the way we wish the world was. The predictability of these movies is a feature, not a bug.
What’s interesting to me is that movies of this type are often derided as “unrealistic”. There’s an extent to which they are, of course. Nobody is pretending that, in real life, good always triumphs, people always do what they’re supposed to do, and we all live happily ever after.
On the other hand, this is a criticism that never seems to be made of movies that depict drug dealers, spouse abusers, or serial killers. Those movies are somehow considered to show “reality”. Why? Yes, they show a certain segment of reality, but so do Hallmark Channel movies. Are there really more drug addicts in this country than there are kids who don’t use drugs? Are there really more spouse abusers than there are couples who love each other? Are there really more serial killers than there are people who may have started down the wrong path, but then were able to change their lives?
Hallmark Channel movies may not depict all of reality, but they do represent a certain part of it. There really are families in which both spouses love each other, in which the kids are basically well-behaved, and who live in communities where people care about each other. Some of us live in those families, and most of us who don’t wish we did.
A part of getting what we want is being able to envision what we want. If we’re going to achieve a loving, caring society, we need to be able to envision a loving, caring society. Hallmark Channel movies, and similar movies, help us do that. I’m not saying you need to watch them, but there are a lot worse things a person could spend their time on.
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