Love the Coopers: Bringing It All Back Home

Now begins the time of year where “holiday” movies proliferate.  Frankly, since A Christmas Story and Die Hard perfected the genre, I don’t see the point, but I guess we all wanna knock Ali down.  Well, at least at that point in the ’70s when that meant something, before the mustachioed days when it was considered a dick move.

But, yeah, fuck these holiday movies.  This time of year pretty much blows when it comes to the time-appropriate fare, due not only to constant retreading of overly-familiar subject matters, but also due to straight-up X-Mas overload.  We’re talkin’ Hogan tiger-upercutting Begley, Jr.  Also, this shit just tends to be boring.

Enter Love the Coopers.

What could have been a decent script, especially the subplot involving black sheep Olivia Wilde picking up a random soldier at the airport to bring home to her family, gets bogged down quickly and frequently in genre cliches involving dysfunctional families and the importance and greatness of togetherness.  It’s your usual ensemble piece that makes no one look particularly good or bad, one that even features some kooky old folks for the sake of really wringing that cliche sponge to within an inch of its secondary life (lest we forget it started its journey on this plane of existence as a living, eating organism in the great, wide ocean).  It’s just more of what we’ve seen time and again, and fuck! does it feel it.

And yet I found myself somehow affected by this movie, drawn into the Christmas spirit.  Just not in the way the filmmakers likely intended.  No, I was reminded about how much I’ve begun to really dislike this time of year of late.

Indeed, I’ve become a regular Grinch (sorry, fanboys and fangirls, despite the pre-badass presence of Taylor Momsen, but I’m definitely alluding to the animated version of that tale, not that live-action trainwreck).  Don’t chalk this up to seasonal affective disorder or anything like that, though: the only seasonal-shift issues I have involve mild allergies and coordinated wardrobe changes.  No, this is real, honest-to-Eeyore depression and anger.

Let’s tackle the latter first, as it’s easier to sum up.  Simply put, I hate the way that the “Christmas season” has increasingly bled earlier and earlier into the year, culminating in decorations and sales at the beginning of fucking October.  Christ, people, Jesus is blushing at your apparent zealous desire to celebrate is “birthday”, Kirk Cameron’s interpretation notwithstanding.  I hate the way people expect me to be happy and cheerful just because it’s Christmas.  I must have missed that memo, Lumbergh.  I hate the preponderance of the same set of, like, twenty songs, infinitely covered, played constantly as though no other music could possibly suffice this time of year.  It gets old real fuckin’ fast, kids.

But those aren’t unique gripes, by any stretch of the imagination.  What’s mine (to some degree, anyway)  is the depression felt this time of year.  To understand this, though, I feel I have to give some minor-league personal info out.  I’ve dealt with depression in some form for years now, not just around Christmastime.  It’s mainly been borne out of weird self-respect issues ( not to be confused with self-esteem issues, mind you) and myriad anxiety difficulties that have plagued me for a long goddamn time.  My dealing with these things has varied wildly, from successful to why-the-hell-did-I-even-bother?-style failure.

What Christmas brings to the table is the same thing that has come up at friends’ weddings and other otherwise joyous occasions:  I see som much happiness and cause for celebration around me that my solipsistic monkey brain retreats within itself, forcing a period of self-reflection.  I think to myself about how happy everyone is and why, and then I remember all the reasons I don’t share with them, all the reasons I have to bemoan my present circumstances.  For example, at those weddings, I would see all the happy couples together and remember very strongly that I did not check my plus-one box, that I would be stuck dancing either alone or on the fringe of a group, that my odd-th wheel status was decidedly intact.  (For added fun, I would be aware of these thoughts and how selfish they sounded, so I would get angry at myself for having them, thus starting a vicious cycle of woe-is-me and fuck-you-buddy thoughts.  Good times.)

So every time Christmas rolls around, I’m bombarded by genuinely happy people, those faking it for whatever reason (this includes television specials and other works of fiction), and all sorts of emotional triggers that send me off in a tailspin of self-reflective bullshit.  I don’t have a big family to get together with for a huge meal, I don’t have the security of a faith blanket, I don’t have a reverence for Santa Claus, I dislike carols; seeing all of the people enjoying these things, reveling in their joyous bounty, is something that I just can’t really stand to be around for very long.  Sure, I still have my own positive moments, like the annual dinner party with my circle of friends and whatever little things I do with my family, but these are oases in a Saharan wasteland of lowness and mild-to-moderate misery.

And this brings me to why Love the Coopers set me off a bit in the theater.  I saw the Hollywood version of dysfunction and disaffection, the version that looks kinda bad but ultimately gets resolved (and is able to be resolved, no less) with relative ease.  I saw a half-hearted attempt to show some real emotional issues, only to have them reveal their truly superficial natures.  I felt pandered to as someone who doesn’t feel right around the glitz of the holidays, in that same glandhanding way that politicians use to rally bases they have no interest in actually conversing with.  I actually felt insulted, both at the intellectual level (really, the dog is narrating this thing?) and the emotional level.  That is rare, indeed.

Perhaps the average movie-goer isn’t mentally prepared for the real effects of familial and mental dysfunction, especially the usually boring-as-shit finales.  I dunno.  I just know that it’s movies like this that reinforce my negative views of this fucking holiday.  Don’t talk down to me, movie: I may often think pretty lowly of myself, but I know damn well I’m smarter than you, ho-sack!

To leave you on a lighter note, though, I want you to do what I like to do around the holidays to make things seem as bright as others see things:  Find the nearest dog, cat, bearded dragon, ferret, chinchilla, goldfish, whatever and give it a nice big hug.  Squeeze that little dickens and let it know it’s loved.  Be the good you wanna see in the world, even if it’s just to a little furry critter who’ll appreciate it no matter the occasion.  Remember that there is still some warmth to be felt in the world, and those furry ones don’t care what’s going on in your head, just what’s going on in your heart.

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.