Happiest Season: A Manifesto

(Spoilers for Happiest Season throughout - obviously)

I remember watching The Intervention – Clea DuVall’s debut feature – huddled in my bed over my laptop screen, having bought the digital download as soon as it was released, my plans to see it at Sundance London thwarted by sold out screenings. I had been a fan of Clea’s for a while – as any self-respecting lesbian with even a passing interest in movies and television should be – and was excited to see her first feature, especially after hearing rave reviews from the original Sundance festival months before. I was expecting to enjoy the film, but I fell deeply in love with it instead. It was the kind of film that you didn’t want to end, that seamlessly let you into the lives of difficult, flawed characters and made you love them, that was equal parts funny and sad, and all the while seemed completely effortless. The Intervention quickly made its way onto my list of perfect films, films which I could not find fault with, films I would always watch from start to finish without even thinking of checking my phone.

So it’s no surprise that I was excited for Clea DuVall’s sophomore feature – Happiest Season. I was excited when it was announced that she’d be making another movie, I was even more excited when I read that it would be a Christmas film about a lesbian couple. I was more excited still when cast announcements started appearing and several actors who I loved were signed on – Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis of course, but also TV favourites Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza and Dan Levy, not to mention comedy legend Mary Steenburgen and the always welcome Victor Garber. I was very excited for this film – I had already pretty much decided I’d love it before it was even released – but it was only when I watched it – huddled on my sofa this time, alone, at night so as not to be disturbed – that I truly felt like Clea DuVall (and co-writer and star Mary Holland) had looked into my brain and made a movie just for me.

I recently finished writing my master’s thesis. After a tumultuous two and a half years of research and writing, disrupted first by redundancy – twice – then by family crises, unemployment and training for a new job, oh and then an oral exam at the start of a global pandemic – I finally submitted my work online, and received, months into lockdown, a paper copy of my degree and an invitation to an (unattended) virtual graduation ceremony. I’d put all thoughts of my thesis aside months ago, with far more pressing things to worry about (redundancy, yet again) and pleased to no longer have to focus all my spare time on finishing the thing. Then Happiest Season came along – along with the subsequent discourse – and brought my thesis back to me.

For the past couple of years I had been researching and writing about queer happiness and representation on television. My thesis focused on the idea that marriage equality had fundamentally changed the way network television presented its gay and lesbian characters – that they were no longer tragic figures doomed to a life of sickness, loneliness or abuse, but were now universally, ubiquitously happy, and that marriage equality had provided the perfect way for network shows to find that happiness for them. My theory was, that in an attempt to move away from the negative stereotypes of old, network shows had veered gay representation to the opposite extreme, presenting their gay and lesbian characters’ lives as frictionless, happy, devoid of any homophobia, and of course, almost always married. My point – which I got to in around 30,000 words, was that happy representations of perfect gay couples who experienced little to no issues related to their sexuality, or whose issues were resolved once they were married, presents a skewed, homonormative image of what it’s like to be queer today. An image that not only tells us that marriage equality solved all of our problems, but also tells us that gay people can only find happiness in heteronormative institutions like marriage. These images more often than not strip the queerness away from gay and lesbian characters, and focus on that seemingly progressive idea of “this character just happens to be gay” as if it’s better that our queerness be removed from our identity, or demoted as something negligible, that can be ignored if so desired.

At the end of my thesis – which of course goes into an awful lot more detail, I had quite the word count to meet – I wished for more truly queer representation in media, queer characters who were allowed to be difficult, allowed to experience sadness – and queer sadness at that. I wished for characters who reflected our lives accurately, who felt authentic and were provided with full, rounded stories that didn’t hide our identities or our experiences away as a footnote to please straight audiences, but told them front and centre.

Enter Happiest Season – which gave me all of that and more, packaged in a Christmas bow. As mentioned, I was expecting to love this movie. I was not however, expecting it to be such a brilliant example of the kind of queer representation I had been wishing for in my thesis. Clea DuVall excels at writing fully realised, flawed characters. Characters who fuck up, who make mistakes and who are often blind to the damage they’re doing. She writes characters who feel like real people, and she dares you to love them anyway, despite their difficulties, and often in fact because of them – because nobody is perfect all of the time, and because we all have our own shit to deal with. I loved that she brought that skill to Happiest Season, which gives us Harper, a woman living a happy life with her girlfriend Abby, who she brings home for Christmas despite not yet being out to her family. Harper pleads with Abby to keep her in the closet for the holidays, after which she promises she’ll tell her family everything – and Abby agrees because she loves her, and shelves her plans to propose to her on Christmas day. We then watch as Harper reverts back to a terrified teenager, pulled back into family rivalries, her role as the perfect, dutiful daughter, and the walls she built up to keep herself a secret.

Though the film is largely told from Abby’s perspective as she navigates Harper’s waspy family, and feels the pain and rejection, over and over again, of being dismissed as Harper’s friend/roommate and nothing more, for me Harper is just as captivating and sympathetic a character. I’ve watched the film twice now, and spent my re-watch shifting my focus to Harper throughout. Mackenzie Davis’ performance is full of subtle nods to the internal agony of her position – glances to Abby across a room, barely concealed panic, and stolen moments of affection. The scene where she holds Abby’s hand during her father’s speech, then pulls away as soon as her mother starts taking photos, struck me as deeply relatable from both sides. I’ve been both these people in my life – the person terrified that someone will see me, and the person devastated by my partner’s fear. Harper puts herself in the worst position possible for a closeted person. Bringing her girlfriend home sends her reeling – she’s torn between wanting the woman she loves to be with her for her favourite time of year, and being absolutely terrified that even being near her will give away her secret. I remember the pain of being in the closet keenly – I remember checking every part of myself, second guessing everything I did – how I spoke, how I stood, how I sat in a chair, what I wore, the kind of bands I liked, what my hair looked like. I remember panicking when a lesbian character appeared on TV because if I looked too interested it would give me away, but if I looked away that would be suspicious too. I remember feeling entirely alone, and so far removed from myself and everyone around me. I remember the never-ending guilt, and I remember the fear and the instincts I built up to protect myself. I saw all of that in Harper, who switches almost immediately from the woman who climbs on a stranger’s scaffolding to show the love of her life how beautiful Christmas is, to the teenager who does everything her parents ask of her, and falls back into her high school clique, leaving Abby to deal with her fish-out-of-water-ness alone.

Over the course of the film, Abby doubts Harper’s love for her as she doesn’t seem to notice how much her actions are hurting her. Abby befriends Harper’s old high school girlfriend Riley, who tells her that their secret relationship ended when Harper outed her to save from being outed herself. This revelation reinforces how much Harper has regressed to her teenage self and her old protective instincts to lash out at others and deflect attention from herself. Things come to a head when Abby has finally had enough, and tells Harper that she’s leaving at the family’s Christmas Eve party. Harper finally realises what she’s about to lose, and pleads with her to stay. She tells Abby that she’s not hiding her, she’s hiding herself, and that she knows she’s been awful, but she’s so scared of losing her family, and now she’s so scared of losing Abby. Harper thinks that hurting herself is acceptable, but she hates that she’s hurting Abby as well. Harper’s sister Sloane then walks in on them reconciling, and promptly outs her to their family. Here Happiest Season refuses to do the expected – you’d think this was the point where Harper, outed and facing her girlfriend who has just told her how much these past few days in the closet have hurt her, would just come clean there and then but she doesn’t. Her reflexes kick in again and she denies it, right to Abby’s face, telling everyone that Sloane is lying. It’s devastating, for Abby yes, but also for Harper, who realises at that point just how much she’s able to hurt the people she loves when she’s scared and desperate.

What follows is a series of classic rom com “big speeches”; Abby’s friend John provides the overall message of the film which is that coming out is personal, that everyone’s journey is different and that just because Harper isn’t ready, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love Abby, Harper finally comes out to her parents on her own terms, acknowledging how much she’s hurt Abby (and Riley) and vowing not to let that happen again, and Harper’s parents realise just how much their need for perfection has damaged their daughters. And of course, there’s a scene where Harper chases down Abby, declares her love for her and promises she’ll spend the rest of her life making up for the hurt she’s caused over the last few days. All of this nicely wraps up Abby and Harper’s story – Abby realises that Harper still loves her, even though things have been tough, and Harper realises how much being in the closet has hurt the people she loves, not just herself, and finally plucks up the courage to put herself, and her relationship first.

For me, the fact that this is a central storyline in a big budget, mass marketed film is revelatory. This is a queer story, through and through - not just in its cute moments of Abby and Harper’s love, Aubrey Plaza’s effortlessly cool lesbian chic, Dan Levy’s quips about heteronormativity, or the joyful cameos of Ben De La Crème and Jinx Monsoon – but in its fearless telling of a story that is uniquely queer, an experience that resonates with every queer person, and in its unashamed plea that you find compassion and understanding for Harper, a person we have all been at one point or another. Happiest Season also queers the rom-com, opting for a complex, layered storyline over simple girl meets girl cheese. The film plays with its genre, finding ways of turning some conventions on their heads, and fulfilling others with earnest – see the aforementioned “big speeches”. One particular moment that stuck with me was the Chekov’s Gun appearance of Jane’s beautiful painting, which we all expected would be something as weird and wonderful as she is, but turned out just to be wonderful. I spent the entire fight scene between Harper and Sloane thinking someone would fall into that painting, and then they didn’t. And then Harper breaks it on purpose instead, in another symbol of how her fear blinds her to everything else, and allows her to hurt the people closest to her.

I loved that Harper was flawed and that Happiest Season asked us to love her anyway. I loved that this film, whose studio marketed it like any other big release even when it got demoted to a Covid safe streaming release, told that story and refused to be just another heteronormative rom com. Clea DuVall gave us a story that spoke to us, that treated us like real people with multi-faceted personalities and uniquely queer problems. She told a story that was much like her own, but was also an awful lot like all of our stories in one way or another. She could have made a cookie cutter rom com that transplanted a lesbian couple into your typical heterosexual rom com storyline – that probably would have been easier. But instead she gave us something authentically queer, with a cast of queer (and queer adjacent) actors, that didn’t shy away from the tricky stuff. And for that film to have such a huge platform is a massive step towards the representation we should all be fighting for. Yes, we should be able to see ourselves happy on screen – we should be able to see Abby and Harper be cute and in love, and we do, a lot – but we should also be allowed to see our sadnesses, to see our struggles, to see our pain, and to see ourselves come out the other side. Happiest Season gives us both, and provides a happy ending to boot.

When I wrote my thesis, I didn’t expect to see the kind of representation I was hoping for on a mainstream stage. Maybe on cable, in an indie film - definitely not in a winter blockbuster starring Kristen Stewart. The fact that Happiest Season exists in this way is a marvel – and the more than disappointing reaction from select queer audiences was unfortunately expected. One of the drives behind writing my thesis was the frustration I felt with reviews of queer media written by queer women who denounced any time a lesbian character dealt with sadness or difficulties as “bad representation”, and were constantly calling out television or films for not allowing their queer characters to exist in some kind of happy stasis where nothing ever happened. I knew as soon as I watched Happiest Season that this lesbian internet hive mind would completely misunderstand it, and when this prediction proved sadly all to true, I felt a deep sadness that this wonderful film would be pulled apart by the people it should have spoken to the most. I’ve had to remind myself that the internet is not the entire world – Happiest Season has received the rave reviews it deserves and has done remarkably well commercially considering all the challenges it has had to face. And I’ve seen plenty of queer women online who have understood and loved the film as it was intended, and all this gives me hope. I do wish though, that as a community we were more able to accept our flaws and appreciate seeing them on screen. I wish that we could support a queer movie, made by a queer woman, starring queer actors, that humanely and sensitively tells our stories whilst also being funny and adorable and a really good time, without the impetus to pick it apart, to focus on what the film wasn’t instead of what it was, to find something to complain about. I wish we could get past this juvenile obsession with demanding fan fiction, not stories, and wanting gay-washed replicas of straight tropes. I wish we could all recognise a great thing when we see it, and throw our support behind queer creators telling honest queer stories, instead of revelling in tearing our own people down.

I hope that Happiest Season paves the way for more stories like it, and I hope that when those stories come, those parts of the community that so frustrate me (as a fan of good movies and a queer theorist) are ready to love them.