I honestly thought it was a parody account at first, but no. We've crossed some sort of weird event horizon now, beyond which stuff doesn't have to actually make any damn sense at all.I swear to god, it's getting harder to tell satire from sincere wokeness every damn day. https://t.co/T2buPpPkcU— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 26, 2019
Let's open the wrapper on this little jeremiad and see what we have...
Oh, look, a byline by Amanda Marcotte, which is as close as you can get to a guarantee there will be some stunningly bitter craziness ahead.
Running down this year's schedule of Christmas movie offerings is like a trip into an uncanny valley of shiny-teethed, blow-dried heteronormative whiteness, with only a few token movies with characters of color. It's like watching "The Stepford Wives," but scarier, since the evil plot to replace normal people with robots is never actually revealed.Wait, the headline promised fascism, but all we have are gripes about white people and heterosexuality. And robots. Are straight white people symbols of fascism? Are they robots? Are they nazi robots? I'm not sure where we're going with this...
None of this should be a surprise, because Hallmark movies, as cloying and saccharine as they are, constitute the platonic ideal of fascist propaganda.Nazis, then. Okay, I think I know where we're going with this.
That is probably a startling statement to some. When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl's films celebrating the Third Reich — grand, but cold sweeping shots of soldiers goose-stepping and flags waving, all meant to inspire awe and terror. But the reality is, even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of "normality."Ah, now I'm tracking. Goebbels made wholesome escapist glurge, therefore by the transitive property of Nazism, all wholesome escapist glurge is fascism.
You know what else Goebbels did? He took a shit. This is why I've never taken a dump myself, because I'm no Nazi!
The only real surprise in the article was that it took thirteen full paragraphs for Trump to be invoked by name:
Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.The tl;dr version of the Salon piece, in case you're in a hurry:
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