After Everybody Else Goes Home

christmas as a house party and a horror movie

sometimes it is in fact christmas time in the city

At Christmas, everybody is trying to go to somebody else’s party, and everybody wants to get inside every room except their own. Here are some movies.

Eyes Wide Shut

Most people who talk about sex all the time are the ones who are having it the least, and people who talk the most about cities understand the least about how to live in them. People who talk about how much they love the way New York empties out over the holidays are usually people who have rarely if ever spent the holidays in New York, and mostly people who love to talk about how Eyes Wide Shut is their favorite Christmas movie don’t ever actually watch Eyes Wide Shut on Christmas.

But Eyes Wide Shut is about all of this. It’s a movie about what happens when you finally get to go to the better party you wish you could go to instead of the one you usually attend, and it’s about a movie about how big cities really do empty out and turn haunted overnight on Christmas, and it’s a movie about how embarrassing it is to be the kind of person who wants everyone to know that a three-hour Kubrick movie about creepy rich-people orgies is your favorite Christmas movie..

In 2014, I was in London on Christmas Eve, trying to get myself and two other people to a friend’s house halfway across the city where we were going to spend the holiday. We were young and stupid and going through it and we’d lost track of time and left it too long, and we ended up trying to navigate the tube after dark on Christmas Eve. In what felt like about fifteen minutes, we went from enjoying a winter afternoon in a bustling city to being in genuine danger of missing the last train in an abandoned ghost town. The station through which we raced trying to change train lines, a station I had only ever previously seen clogged with crowds, looked like the set of a horror movie when it was suddenly, unsettlingly empty. Cities are always ghost towns, but they’re especially haunted on Christmas. A lot of stories about Christmas are ghost stories. Kubrick’s after-hours Christmas pageant is, in some ways, an entry in a highly recognizable tradition: A Christmas story about ghosts, and about a party.

Maybe nothing feels more like Christmas than being scared of ghosts and worrying about parties. Maybe nothing feels more like Christmas than going to a party where you don’t know anybody and trying to have a good time, walking into a stranger’s house all dressed up and trying to pretend that you belong there. A party is about whatever it is that everybody else has that you don’t have. This is true about New York City, and Christmas, and having sex with somebody to whom you’re already married.

At the holidays, everybody else’s life is always just barely out of reach, a fraction of an inch beyond the furthest span across which your own arm can stretch. I think everyone behind every other lit-up window is having a better, warmer holiday than I am, but at the same time, I also think everyone behind every other lit-up window is having some impossibly cool, impossibly sinister sex party to which I wasn’t invited. Eyes Wide Shut is half a horror movie, because every Kubrick movie is at least half a horror movie, and horror movies are about wanting to get inside of other people’s lives. The incorrect, overdramatic assumptions we make about what goes on behind everybody else’s windows is the stuff of horror, and the stuff of holidays, which are so often about going to somebody else’s house, and about wondering what’s really going on behind everybody else’s closed curtains.

I like that it’s almost always possible to go see Eyes Wide Shut in a movie theater at Christmas, and I like feeling smug about calling this movie a Christmas movie. I like going to Christmas parties at other people’s houses, and I like when New York empties out on Christmas, even if it doesn’t really do that anymore. I like that everybody likes this movie now, and I like that if Kubrick’s mysterious, anxious, polarizing, Illuminati Christmas take on After Hours has anything to say about the true meaning of Christmas—and probably one of its virtues is that it doesn’t—it’s that the world is full of horrors, and terrible questions with no answers, but you can always just go home to your own home, and your own spouse, and all the mysteries you already know, and maybe that’s the only good party there is.

The Holiday

The Holiday is the most perfectly concentrated dose of Christmas movie that has ever existed. It’s set in a world in which every single object, from sweaters to armchairs to beers to airplanes to rental cars to neighbors to cell phones, is made of cashmere. It’s so cozy and so charming and so warm and so enveloping and so little like anything that has ever actually happened, that I can almost forgive it for the fact that it invented Airbnb. It’s a great movie to watch with your family, a great movie to watch when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, a great movie when you want a movie to make you feel stupid and naive in the way only movies like this can, and a great movie to watch when you’re in a bad mood and want to watch a movie just to make fun of it. For being a movie that seems like it was created expressly to be put on in the background of a holiday party and then talked over, it’s way better than it needs to be. The Holiday understands that romance only happen in someone else’s house, and never in your own, but it has the decency to have absolutely nothing profound to say about it. I hope Kate Winslet is having a good day today. 

Metropolitan

Someone I really wanted to date and did a profoundly terrible job of trying to date a decade or so ago kept telling me I had to see Metropolitan and that was the only time I ever admitted to anyone that I’ve never seen Metropolitan. Now I have to just keep going about my life never seeing Metropolitan because I’ve been pretending for so long to have seen Metropolitan, and every time I pretend to have seen Metropolitan, I have to think about what a profoundly terrible job I did of trying to date that person I desperately wanted to date over a decade ago. The photos of Metropolitan that people post on the internet at this time of year are very beautiful in the way that rich people’s hair is very beautiful, all gloss and no split ends. I know there’s probably more to the movie than that, but I’m scared to find out. The thing about money is that it makes rough things smooth; the thing about successfully dating people is that mostly our lives unfold from the rooms we can get into, and which people we’ve managed to convince to invite us into which rooms, where the other versions of the world are waiting. 

There’s some other version of my life somewhere that looks completely different from this one, that takes place in entirely different rooms, and in that version, I’ve probably seen Metropolitan. But in that version of my life it’s still Christmas, and on some cold night I’m still going to a party on a dark street lit up with the snap and burst of holiday lights in the cold. Someone else I wanted to date very badly and never managed to date but did manage to love used to have a great Christmas party every year. All of his friends were good-looking and jovial and witty and rich in some unexplained way. I guess this is what Metropolitan is about? I don’t actually know what Metropolitan is about. Sometimes when I went to that party it felt like being in a bar at an airport, the buoyant sense that nobody there knew I didn’t belong there. Once, one of the good-looking friends who always came to that party appeared around the corner carrying a whole Christmas tree on his shoulder, panting only a little in the cold, and from a block away he mistook me for his also-red-haired girlfriend, and he called out “baby, I got us a tree.” I thought about how sometimes you walk into a room where you’ve never been before, and your whole life starts over again.

I stopped going to those Christmas parties and now they don’t happen anymore; the good-looking people who attended them have scattered and fractured. I still talk to that old friend I never really managed to date, whose apartment always felt like Christmas, and who was always inviting me into rooms I never followed him into, where my whole life might have changed, or might not have. We’re married to other people now; we’re happy. We go to other people’s parties. We never see each other anymore, but we text each other on Christmas. I’ve still never seen Metropolitan, but every time someone posts a photo of it, I think I came so close to living a different life in that room. 

Little Women (all of them but especially the 2019 one)

Little Women opens with Christmas in the most Christmas way possible: a complaint about how our Christmas isn’t good enough, and why can’t we have a real Christmas with presents like everybody else gets to have. That feeling that everybody else is succeeding at Christmas—and at love, and at family, at home and holidays and presents and celebration—and you aren’t is the heart of the novel and of Gerwig’s clever, self-satisfied, exuberant, film-school-valedictorian adaptation of it. Down at the bottom of its heart, Little Women is a Christmas party.

When I was a kid, my parents were required as part of their job to throw a big holiday party in our house every year. I think of a lot of things when I think of Christmas, but more than anything else I think of a party I last attended two decades ago. I think of my dad in the bow tie he wore exactly once a year, making an eggnog punch that could have killed a horse, in an enormous plastic bowl that lived the other 364 days on a shelf so high none of us could reach it. I think of the living room filling up with bodies until it was a relief to step out into the December air without a coat on, and I think of the people who showed up early so they could leave early, and the people who stayed so late they fell asleep and we had to make coffee for them at midnight or convince someone else to drive their car home. I think of the bright center of it, when our house seemed transformed and I had, for no good reason but the momentary critical mass of noise and lights and bodies and party dresses, the profound sense that no-one would ever be lonely ever again, not even me. On those nights, our living room was an artificial sun that could hold off any darkness. 

I remember those Christmas parties the way a child remembers things, because they only happened when I was a child, which is to say that every detail here is probably wrong, and my parents, who read this newsletter, will likely tell me in a few hours that I’m inventing something that never happened. Maybe I am, but that’s the point of holidays, and parties, and Christmas, too. This time of year, which is mostly dark, and cold, and anxious, and lonely, heavy with the twin impossibilities of money and family, is still sometimes a party, and a party means that we get to pretend. We pick a few joyful hours out of the darkness, and pretend life is like that all the time. We light up one house on the block and say that it’s what the whole neighborhood looks like. A warm room conjured out of the cold for a single night keeps the larger world around it at bay. We convince ourselves that everything is a little better than it actually is, while the honey-colored lights from the house shine out into the snow and the cold.

Once, when I was a kid, maybe just shy of being a teen, I went outside during that party and then came back in. Arriving at my own front steps, on that one night a year when light and noise and revelry spilled out of the house into the darkness, it felt like I was walking up to someone else’s door. Even when my own home was the one where the party took place, even when my own Christmas was the Christmas strung up in big lights, even when the warm windows I passed on the street were my own, I still longed enviously toward them as though they belonged to a stranger. The feeling that Christmas is something that only happens in someone else’s house, and that only other people’s families ever feel like family, doesn’t mean that my own family, or home, or Christmas, has never been loving, or warm, or celebratory. It means that that’s what the holidays feel like; they feel like somebody else’s house, even when it’s your own. 

Die Hard

I’ve never had a normal job so I just assume that this is what every office Christmas party is like.

it’s christmas movie week at griefbacon, a feature I am definitely not going to do every year. this is the wednesday edition, because sometimes wednesday happens at 5am on thursday. it’s fine. xo