Home for the (Hollywood) holidays: Fathers, family, and the “true” meaning of Christmas on screen

Abstract

Since the 1940s, Hollywood has dominated the construction of the festive season in the Anglo-American cultural imaginary. The Hollywood Christmas film, commonly combining generic elements of comedy, drama, and/or romance, invariably centres on the family, whether its formation, its estrangement, or its idiosyncrasies, vulnerabilities and, inevitably, its resilience. Central to many such films, and building on a well-worn narrative that reaches all the way back to A Christmas Carol, is a man who must learn the ‘true’ meaning of Christmas. This lesson is invariably shaped by his fatherhood. (Re)discovering joy in the paternal role, or rejecting individual or financial achievement in favour of familial contentment, become pathways to masculine redemption. In exploring fatherhood in relation to this under-studied but commercially enduring form, this chapter examines examples including Elf (2003), Christmas with the Kranks (2004), Deck the Halls (2006), Four Christmases (2008), Love the Coopers (2015) and Daddy’s Home 2 (2017), interrogating the redemptive paternal narratives embedded within. In doing so, it acknowledges the particular construction of white, middle-class fatherhood in these films, and discusses this in the wider context of anxious white masculinity in post-millennial Hollywood. Into the twenty-first century, when Hollywood began to embrace a wider diversity of representation and express a tentative ambivalence towards the monolithic white, middle-class, American, heteronormative nuclear unit that has heretofore constituted the cinematic “family”, the contemporary Christmas film remains as a curiously nostalgic, conservative expression of family and, particularly, paternal values.