This essay is part of Avidly’s RomCom Superlatives series
This essay is about a specific kind of Christmas RomCom: the one where Christmas matters so much to the romance that it starts to play, not to put too fine a point on it, the third party in a weirdly chaste threesome. The more chaste the movie, the more Christmas stands in for erotics. Think of many Hallmark holiday movies: instead of smoldering glances or pointed banter, it’s red-and-green cupcakes and candy cane parades, “the spirit of Chrismas” doing the work of jouissance. (I like the holiday as much as the next half-Jewish cultural critic, but any adult man who says his future mate must love Christmas is off my wish list.)
Enter its somehow-even-weirder cousin, the 1995 While You Were Sleeping, which wasn’t even intended to be a Christmas movie except that the studio insisted for marketing purposes. The movie, despite its holiday timing, barely beats back the doom and gloom, keeping cute company with The Apartment, which is, admittedly, the far greater movie. Christmas does not permeate so much as it looms, twinkly lights dangling above the frame of the action, a fir tree lurking in the corner.
Set in Chicago, While You Were Sleeping definitely knows what to do with its identity as a winter romcom, which means the leading lady’s body is coyly tucked away in puffy coats and the leading man can demonstrate his vulnerability by admitting he does, in fact, get cold in sub-zero temperatures. When the couple in question loses their balance on the ice and clutches at one another for balance, what you don’t get is the sense that they need a major holiday to sublimate their attraction.
But nevertheless, it is Christmas, very much so. Christmas barrels through the story of Lucy (Sandra Bullock) and the Callahan family with all the strength and subtlety of a Chicago L train. In While You Were Sleeping, Christmas works less like the spiritual corner of a throuple and more like an emotionally aggressive dom.
’90s romcoms made a habit of musing on fate and chance—Sleepless in Seattle, Only You, even Sliding Doors and the early 2000’s Serendipity—in which finding your person is about as magical and fleeting as a butterfly landing on your nose. The likelihood of finding that person is so slim, the danger of losing them in the crowd so grave, that the manic pixie dream ingenue just may have to act out and act fast. For her soulmate! Look, when you call her crazy, you’re just calling her in love.
While You Were Sleeping tells the same kind of story but with a strain of coercive tension behind it. Instead of asking “what if?”, this movie tells you: “it’s happening.” It is about the blunt force trauma of falling in love, courtesy of relentless matchmaker Saint Nick. Here, we say Merry Christmas… or else.
The movie follows Lucy, an L train employee, as she rescues her secret crush (Peter Gallagher, playing a guy also named Peter) when he is pushed onto the tracks. Through a series of absurd misunderstandings, the Callahan family, including the hunky brother (Bill Pullman), come to believe Lucy is their fallen son’s fiancée.
This happens on Christmas, by the way. Did I mention this happens on Christmas? Everyone in the movie keeps remind themselves, one another, and the viewer that, hey, it’s Christmas. He’s in a coma “on Christmas daaaaayyy,” his mother wails. “We didn’t get to celebrate Christmas,” the patient’s father explains when he invites Lucy to a family party that has delayed because one of them is—still—in a coma.
Let me repeat: a main character is in a coma. During the banter, during the holiday party, a main character lies attached to beeping machines, his fate uncertain, his brain possibly dead as the genre antics continue apace.
What is motivating this callous behavior on the part of nearly every character in the movie? Why are they making these repugnant choices? Who is pulling the strings of these hollow, ghoulish puppets?
Many have harped on the movie’s creepy, even deranged, plot, but too much of this insanity has been laid at the feet of the film’s heroine. The Callahan Christmas party is an ice-cold affair, exchanging expensive gifts and laughing with all the abandon of a family that doesn’t have hospital visiting hours memorized.[i] Lucy hugs a gift to her chest, taking in the scene with all the longing of a woman who has been alone too long. It’s charming… then it’s chilling. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as the soundtrack to what should be their darkest Yuletide? The situation is weird, as though everyone is being controlled by a force more sinister than any one sociopathic individual, something like the “big eastern syndicate” Linus Van Pelt insisted, decades earlier, ran this “commercial” holiday.
Twist! Christmas is the Grim Reaper, standing in the corner, scythe in one hand, eggnog in the other. Christmas is the pushy studio executive demanding rewrites. Christmas is the express train, barreling down the track no matter who it hurts. Christmas—not Santa, not even a chunkily-sweatered Lucy—is the one that watches you while you’re sleeping. And all Christmas wants from you is to deceive a little old lady or two, inappropriately learn and talk about a stranger’s testicular injury, and play the unrequited love of a local doofus for laughs. Is it really so much to ask in the pursuit of true love?
And here, finally, we get the real insight of the movie, delivered up perhaps inadvertently, the truth about Christmas WYWS knows: Christmas arrives in straight women’s lives less like a romance and more like a relentless to-do list.
“You know, Jack, I’ve had a really lousy Christmas,” Lucy tells Jack in the “boy loses girl” act of the movie. “You’ve just managed to kill my New Year’s. If you come back on Easter, you can burn down my apartment.” Everything happens for a reason, the Spirit of Christmas assures us. And if you don’t like that, you might just get pushed.
There is no way out of this cosmic-capitalist nightmare of American Christmas, so, fine, the characters act in erratic, even unforgivable ways. If these shadows have offended, think you have but coma’ed here, while these visions did appear. It’s a mid-winter night’s fever dream, brought to you from the guy who directed Cool Runnings.
Christmas works with an inexorable power, courtesy of the magic of the movies, the effect cloying and uncanny at once. It’s Eros and Thanatos; it’s red, green, and black magic; it’s PG-rated kissing under a highly poisonous sprig of mistletoe.
Why fight it? Let it get weird. It’s going to anyway.
Forget it, Jake. It’s Christmastime.
Annie Berke is the film editor at the LA Review of Books. Here writing has appeared in The A.V. Club, The Washington Post, Literary Hub, and Public Books.
[i] The family brutal streak is so pronounced that it’s hardly a surprise when we learn that, as a child, Peter Callahan bullied defenseless animals? That may be harshly worded, but I’ll take any chance I can get to recount Gallagher’s growling of the line—“I knocked ‘em out of their nest with a rrrrrock.”