Vox Sentences - The most romantic time of the year

Friday, December 22, 2023

Good afternoon,

First, a programming alert. Two, actually. First, Sentences will be going on break for the holidays! We’ll be back in your inboxes in the new year.

Second, this will be my last edition of Sentences. I’ve quite enjoyed writing it and getting the chance to interact with so many of you. Send your favorite Christmas cookie recipes over to dylan.scott@vox.com if you are so inclined. And I assure you, you’ll be in good hands in 2024.

Here’s the agenda today:

UP FIRST: Cinematic Christmas kisses

CATCH UP: Barbie Botox and Ozempic

—Dylan Scott, senior correspondent

Why we love romantic Christmas movies

Hallmark

Run from it, hide from it, there is no denying it: A Christmas movie feels incomplete without a big ol’ smooch at the end. Vox’s Meredith Haggerty has a theory about why we love our Christmas cinema with a healthy helping of kisses.

It is not necessarily intuitive that the dominant theme of so many Christmas classics would be romance. The reasons for the season tend to be more about a love for all humanity, and many of us cherish this time of year because it is time to be with our family. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)

I am not aware of anyone in my life who has fallen in love at Christmastime. And yet, the long list of seasonal hallmarks — from 1940’s The Shop Around the Corner to 2003’s Love Actually — would suggest we should all be coupling up when the mistletoe is hung. It’s a trope as old as Christmas movies. The now-inescapable cottage industry of Hallmark movies and their rivals on all the other streaming services is founded entirely on this idea: If you are making a movie set at Christmas, it must be a romantic comedy. (I’ll leave a plug here, however, for 1988’s action thriller Die Hard and 1974’s horror classic Black Christmas.)

So what is it all about?

Meredith puts her finger on something interesting, I think. As I said, Christmas is traditionally focused on our families. What these stories often chart is the start of something: A romance that may one day lead to a family. It is (in her words, not mine!) the sexiest phase of the family cycle. And that just makes for good cinema.

It is easy to be cynical about, well, everything, but especially Christmas movies. Many are formulaic and reactionary, focused on preserving the fantasy of the white heteronormative nuclear family. But the best appeal to a more universal hope for belonging and for connection with our fellow human beings.

In the spirit of the season, let us focus on that message. I think Meredith says it best:

I can’t deny the appeal of the thing at the heart of the matter, the warmth and vitality that makes us want to connect, to care for people, to continue the species. The best movies, from It’s a Wonderful Life to — fight me — While You Were Sleeping, make you feel it. It’s difficult to capture that kind of hope, not only on film but lately in our day-to-day discourse. It’s not that hard to understand what’s good about love, though, the rare times when you get to look right at it. I am glad we don’t give up looking.

Read the rest of her wonderful essay here.

The year of Barbie Botox and Ozempic

Madison Ketcham for Vox

Two of 2023’s dominant cultural phenomena — the blockbuster film Barbie and the weight-loss drug Ozempic — exposed the lie at the heart of corporate America’s supposed embrace of body positivity.

Vox’s Constance Grady pens a searing and provocative essay about how Hollywood’s eagerness to embrace the latest get-skinny fad after years of supposedly supporting the body positivity movement reveals its insincerity — and how the same contradiction complicates the feminism at the heart of the year’s biggest film.

This is a piece for which my paraphrasing cannot do justice to what Constance herself has written. In her words:

• The conversations about Barbie and Ozempic are mirror images of each other. They are about what happens when a moment that is ostensibly about teaching women to love their bodies bumps up against the enormous amount of money there is to be made by selling women stuff that teaches them to hate their bodies. They are testaments to the failures of the past decade of mainstream neoliberal feminism.
• The message of Barbie as a work of art … becomes harder to square with the message of Barbie as a commercial property meant to sell dolls and their merch. Mattel used Barbie as an opportunity to score over 100 licensing deals, including many, many skin care and makeup products that exist to teach women to correct all the so-called physical flaws that Barbie doesn’t have.
• Ozempic seems to give our body-fascist culture permission to say the quiet part out loud, the quiet things we whisper to one another when we sell Barbie merch: Your body is not enough. You should hate your body, you can fix your body only by suffering and injecting and sacrificing money for its eternal maintenance. Those ideas were supposed to be on their way out of the culture by now. Ozempic and Barbie make it clear that they’re just as strong as ever.

• Hunting for America’s vanishing Venus flytraps. This one-of-a-kind plant grows naturally in only one place on Earth: the Carolinas. But even as its habitat is threatened, activists have struggled to get federal authorities to take notice. [Mother Jones]
• A second malaria vaccine gains the WHO’s endorsement. The WHO granting “prequalified” status to the new Novovax vaccine allows the relevant UN agencies to procure the vaccine to prepare to deploy it. Despite the recent progress in vaccine development, malaria still killed more than 600,000 people last year. [Times of India]
• Immigrant dairy farm workers can’t rely on workers’ compensation. It can be a dangerous line of work, and yet state and federal exemptions for small farms prevent their workers from accessing financial support if they get hurt on the job. [ProPublica]

This year’s “great man” biopics have a couple of things in common

We dined out less this year — but it wasn’t just about the price

When is a nose just a nose? A brief history of non-Jews playing Jews onscreen.

Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney’s chemistry can’t save Anyone But You

Today’s crossword

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