Every year, Jackson and Rachel gather like a conclave of popes to discuss what Netflix has done to Christmas. This year’s offerings include Hot Frosty, a movie about a snowman who comes to life to seduce a widow, and Lindsay Lohan’s latest, Our Little Secret, about exes who unintentionally converge at Christmas and must grapple, profoundly, with their unfinished business.

Rachel: Jackson, hi, and welcome to our semiannual conversation that I force you to have about Netflix’s Christmas properties. I was just reviewing our past work in this vein, and this is either the fourth or fifth time we have done this. I am so sorry and also there is nothing else I would rather do. Let’s first talk about Hot Frosty, which is in my estimation both a Jesus allegory and a complex work of art examining the failings of our justice system and the consequences of fascist police overreach. I am Jewish so my knowledge of Jesus is limited, but let’s address that one first: This is a movie about a dead(?) snowman who comes back to life and becomes a carpenter with good morals. Is this a Jesus movie?

Jackson: Well, both my parents are Catholic, but I was never baptized — but I did just watch Conclave so I’m just going to assert myself as an expert here and say yes. Hot Frosty is an allegory for the life of Jesus as told through the prism of a perpetually damp and sleeveless guy who used to be on Schitt’s Creek and Lacey Chabert. She is, I guess, a sort of Virgin Mary, because she wills “Jack” into existence by giving the chiseled snowman a magic scarf she got from a knowing older couple at a thrift store, as well as a Mary Magdalene, because she is very horny for Jack. Her own husband died of cancer, we discover, and she needs to lust after a hot cold snowman to move on. What I found remarkable about this movie is that the Netflix Christmas Operation seems to be trying to differentiate itself from Hallmark and the like by being ever so slightly more erotic than the rest, while still falling back on the traditional values of the genre — vague faith-based allegory, small-town values, home renovation. He learns a lot about the latter by watching TV. What did you make of the surprising rate at which Jack picks up skills from television?

Rachel: I have a lot of questions about snowman taxonomy, biology, and psychology after watching this film. Jack emerges fully formed from his snow body, able to speak English perfectly, to understand and embody the concept of love, and, in a sort of charming, Robin Williams–as–other–Jack way, to behave like a relatively normal human person with light brain damage, but he has otherwise totally unexplained and massive holes in his personality and knowledge bank. For example, he knows what Christmas is but not cancer. He knows how to use a crayon but not a TV remote. He is an instantaneous victim of compulsory heterosexuality and is basically born attracted to Lacey Chabert but does not clock it when every other woman in town hits on him. We never get any information about from whence he sprung — was he once a human man cursed by a witch? Who built this ripped, anatomically graphic snowman for the town’s “annual snowman competition” and what kind of other haunting supernatural powers does this talented gay possess? Does the scarf that Lacey’s friend gives her to put around his neck specifically have snowman-turning powers, and does that mean that Lacey’s friend’s husband is also an ex-snowman? Does this imply that there is a world of snowmen offscreen waiting to be turned into sex objects for widows? I demand almost nothing from my Netflix Christmas movies, but I want at least a winky nod (ideally by some elfin sprite who has nothing to do with the plot but pops up to cause some drama, as is Netflix tradition) to some kind of internal logic. What are your thoughts on Jack’s unholy provenance?

Jackson: I spent a lot of the run time pondering Jack’s fondness for the other snowmen in the town square whom he implies are missing out on the joys of being human. Those snowmen look like, well, snowmen! If Lacey Chabert had placed a scarf on one of them, would we be watching a whole movie about a fleshy humanoid being made out of three giant spheres? The body horror lingering at the fringes of this is very eerie. Also eerie, as you mentioned: the way this Netflix movie dabbles in the politics of surveillance and police violence. This little town has a police officer played by Darryl Philbin who is so intent on cracking down on the smallest crimes, he becomes obsessed with reports of a man streaking in the town square (Jack, when he’s just wearing his scarf; the way they make sure the scarf is always connected to Dustin Milligan’s crotch is hilarious). Jack becomes the White Whale to his Captain Ahab. He even uses the hidden camera on an ATM to track him down. The eyes of the police state are everywhere, even at Christmas!

Rachel: Yes, this is a film about how absolute power corrupts absolutely and how there is no hope of true justice under late capitalism. I could not believe how harrowing a turn this movie took, especially near the end. Jack, who has spent the movie avoiding the police for the reasons you mention above, is finally caught and accused of terrorism (because he has no fingerprints), locked up overnight, has his bail set at an unreasonable $2,000 (this is likely Lacey’s entire year’s rent for her house that has a lot of holes in it and no heat), then denied his basic human rights, even as the townsfolk gather and protest outside the police station. He ultimately dies in police custody. We literally watch as an overheated Jack codes out on the street in a town that “hasn’t had a murder in 100 years,” suggesting that the corrupt local police force has been manipulating the numbers all along. Then, Lacey, who purports to love him, is led away from his corpse by the town doctor (side note: was also obsessed by this doctor’s availability; Lacey is able to walk in whenever without an appointment, a health-care fantasy that I would watch an entire movie about), who puts her arm around her friend and says, “Let’s go, honey — let the sheriff take care of this.” The very sheriff who murdered him in the first place!!! At this point, I was screaming. Lacey puts up no argument, kisses Jack, then walks away from her boyfriend, who, again, was just killed in public by the cops. Jack comes back to life shortly thereafter as a human person, which is never explained, and everything is fine again, but I don’t think we can ignore the urgent implications of the above plotline. Is Netflix ACAB?

Jackson: I can only assume that, in the style of Hail, Caesar!, someone deep inside the Netflix Christmas operation is trying to sneak leftist messaging into these movies. Also, I have to add that I was haunted by the idea that the prison is too hot for Jack to survive in, and that he is, in fact, dying at every moment that the temperature around him is above freezing. What could be more Christlike than coming to Earth to die constantly over a few days, all to redeem Lacey Chabert’s belief in humanity? (And also institute some very minor reforms to a small town’s bail operation.) I hope that we all take Jack the former snowman’s lessons to heart and chase after what we love this holiday season, no matter how much it interferes with the intentions of the carceral state. It’s a wild ride puzzling out the morals of Netflix’s Christmas movies, which seem intended to be both wildly progressive and conservative at the same time. Take Our Little Secret, a movie about how no one will love you as much as your childhood ex that is also pro consensual cheating if it keeps a marriage alive? What did you make of the Netflix-y collision of one Lindsay Lohan into the extended family of one Kristin Chenoweth?

Rachel: I have to say that Our Little Secret is the first Netflix Christmas movie I have ever seen that appeared to have more than the budget of Jack from Hot Frosty’s bail. They really stepped it up at least 14 percent with this one, primarily in terms of Lindsay’s wardrobe; historically, in all of these holiday movies, including Hot Frosty, the women are forced to wear the block-heeled ankle boots, stretchy skinny jeans, and empire-waist trench coats of 2009, but Lindsay looks great here throughout, dressed like a human woman in the year 2023, at the very least. Similarly, there was not one scene set inside that one Netflix cabin in a wintry wood, nor a single fluorescent-lit castle made of laminate wood. The script — while, to be clear, not good — was also at least one level less awful than previous Netflix Christmas properties. What I am trying to say is that this movie was not very bad, or that it was the kind of bad that sometimes allowed me to forget it was bad. All of that said, whoever came up with the opening credits — which evoke the passage of a decade between Lindsay’s breakup with her childhood ex and her new life via “newsy” images like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding, Notre Dame Cathedral burning down, Elon Musk inventing the Cybertruck (I can hardly bear to keep typing), the success of the show Bridgerton, which just happens to be a Netflix property (I’m walking into traffic), and the invention of ChatGPT (which I have previously suspected of writing these movies) — should be put in small-town jail next to Jack. Do you agree that this movie felt like a step up for our most craven streamer, or am I the latest victim of the Netflix Christmas Industrial Complex?

Jackson: It was also haunting that that montage scrupulously avoided mentioning any elections directly, while dancing around political news — Elon Musk turning Twitter into X, for one. But maybe because of this head-injury Up sequence, I found the rest of the movie to be pretty pleasant! Lindsay is now dating a new guy played by John Rudinsky, who was in the movie Home Again and whose presence calibrated this whole thing at a level of quality around that of, well, the movie Home Again. Her ex, a guy named Ian Harding who does have what I call “Vancouver Face Syndrome” (in which someone is both handsome and forgettable, in the style of a cable show that films in Vancouver), is also dating a new girl who is extremely young. They share a crazy mother-in-law, played by Kristin Chenoweth! She hates Lindsay. She loves Ian. They decide to pretend to not know each other, simply to prevent awkwardness. (Avoidant personality representation.) The high jinks that ensue are tame — Lindsay accidentally eats THC gummies; Lindsay blames the dog for eating the cookies she ate while high — but I appreciated that there was a general structure around which the movie could hang hijinks? There’s at least a vague sense of Aristotelian plotting here, building to a climax where everyone starts shouting each other’s secrets at each other — naturally, during Secret Santa. But before we divulge those secrets, what did you think of the movie’s most surreal gag: the fact that Kristin Chenoweth keeps commissioning family Christmas portraits in which she does not age?

Rachel: I loved that gag at first and kept waiting for some kind of Picture of Dorian Gray plot twist, but then the camera returned to the paintings so many times without elaborating that I realized it was just a goofy inexpensive transition device and I chided myself for forgetting to manage my expectations. I really do feel like this movie — Lindsay’s third in her Netflix contract — is the perfect stepping stone for her to start doing real movies again. You can visibly track her comfort and return to form onscreen by watching all three of them in a row over as many years, as we did; I turned off this movie thinking, She’s ready. I have medium hopes for Freaky Friday 2. I did notice that, per her contract, she was still only allowed to have one tongue-free kiss with her love interest, wear dresses that hit just below the neck and below the knee, submit one (1) song to the soundtrack from Aliana Lohan, and speak only one “bad” word (“shit,” weirdly — she has to spell “S-E-X” and can’t actually speak it aloud lest she incite some kind of revolution). I also noticed that nobody in the movie ever calls weed “weed,” just “THC,” which I have to assume is also in there contractually, due to Reagan-esque family values. I do worry, though, that while this film bodes well for Lindsay’s future career, it bodes poorly for the future of rom-com jobs. We were already in trouble with Emily in Paris, which is about a marketing person who is good at Instagram. Lindsay’s ex is an architect, which is a classic rom-com job, but he is not building dream homes or doing some kind of quiet pro-bono work, he’s doing “lifestyle complexes”; Lindsay is lauded throughout the film for becoming a successful consultant whose expertise is so vague as to include helping her ex with his school-project-looking-ass architecture proposal. Did this similarly haunt you?

Jackson: It is, frankly, so strange that Lindsay’s skill set in this movie is “incredibly good at formatting proposals,” while the ex’s skills are “drawing nice amenities for luxury housing”? I’m worried about him, because he seems to be flailing professionally, until she sets him on the right path by slipping some of those drawings into his folder with his actual proposal, so that, at the end of the movie, a random real-estate developer can be like, “Actually, we love this idea.” I kept imagining him as the mind behind those people building giant rental towers along the Gowanus. It is also concerning that we are supposed to be rooting for Linday’s character as an underdog rom-com heroine when she has enough cash on hand to throw around a down payment for her childhood home without a second thought. There is a quality of actual CBD (a force stronger than THC, though never to be brought up) setting into the logic of this movie as it gets near its end, though. A lot depends on the sociopathic 18-year-old son of Kristin Chenoweth, who discovers what Lindsay and her ex are hiding and tries to blackmail them. But a lot also depends on the reveal that Kristin Chenoweth’s husband, Dan Bucatinsky, has been secretly hooking up with Judy Reyes! I was prepared for the reveal that Lindsay’s boyfriend would be secretly in love with Judy Reyes’s hot daughter just back from Australia, but I did not expect there to be multi-generational shenanigans going on. What did you make of the not-so-ethical non-monogamy at play?

Rachel: The ethics of this movie are backwards in every sense — we’ve touched on Netflix’s consistently odd and inconsistent ethical overtones, but we haven’t even talked about how Lindsey’s down-home Everywoman Georgian small-town girl pays off a vet to give a three-pound dog a fake procedure so that she can save face, or that her dad makes her buy her own house from him even as he’s jetting off on tropical vacations, or the alarming nepotistic implications of the architect getting the lifestyle-complex job because of his family connections. Nor have we discussed the fact that Lindsay’s dad is narrating the film about his daughter’s intimate love life, which I found odd and a little bit disturbing, but then I remembered that all Netflix Christmas movies start with a random narrator really quickly explaining what the fuck is going on for ten seconds in a desperate plea to grasp our rapidly waning attention spans as we click through our 10 billion streaming options for the evening. (Every time a viewer sticks with a Piece of Content for more than 10 minutes, Netflix hurls one less human screenwriter into a volcano.) Hot Frosty’s opening V.O. might actually be one of my favorite examples, spoken by a British person who never appears onscreen nor speaks again: “Since the dawn of time, Christmas fairy tales have often included the wonder of a snowman coming to life, destined to bring its magic to the right person.” Every single clause here deserves attention. Since the dawn of time??? Christmas fairy tales have often included? The wonder of a snowman coming to life? Destined to bring its magic to the right person?????????? I will never stop watching these movies.

 Netflix’s Our Little Secret is the perfect stepping stone for her to start doing real movies again. I turned it off thinking, She’s ready.