The Worst Party is Still a Party: On Love Actually

on day two of christmas movie week, we go to the worst party in the world

every year for some reason I watch this scene with my parents, truly I shall never know peace in my heart

welcome to Christmas Movie Week here at griefbacon. It’s what it sounds like: Each day this week, there’s a post about a Christmas movie or movies, by the broadest definition of christmas movies. You’ve probably heard of this one.

Love Actually 

The thing about parties is that most of the time they’re bad. It’s very difficult to make it to adulthood without going to a bad party, so you already know what a bad party is like, but just in case you don’t remember: It’s like Richard Curtis’s 2003 blockbuster Christmas movie Love Actually. 

You can tell Love Actually is a party because there are too many people in it and all of them are yelling at each other. Love Actually is a party where every single one of your exes is there and the only other person you know is the host. Love Actually is a party where you’re a different amount of drunk or high than everybody else and you sit there while the ice in your drink dies pitifully and a stranger who’s done way too much cocaine tells you how money works. Love Actually is a party you go to with a friend and then that friend goes off to flirt with their crush and then someone you don’t know starts talking to you too close and very loudly about their divorce. It’s a party where everyone is way too obsessed with Christmas, where everyone has a grievance and everyone needs to tell you about the grievance, where everyone has a big theory about love, where everyone is committing too hard to the bit, and where someone keeps bringing up 9/11 for some reason even though there is absolutely no reason to bring up 9/11 at a holiday party. If you’ve never had any kind of social anxiety I am so happy for you, but if, for some reason, you want to know what social anxiety is like, you could just watch Richard Curtis’s 2003 blockbuster Christmas movie Love Actually.

Now that I’ve said all of this: I watch Love Actually every year on Christmas. One of the things I am most looking forward to this week is watching Love Actually.

My dad loves this movie, and my mom hates this movie. Every year we start our family fight about the movie earlier and earlier, which feels perhaps more like Christmas than anything in the movie itself does. My dad talks about how adorable and endearing and funny several parts are and then my mom counters with how terrible and misogynistic and stupid several parts are. Both of them are right. We end up watching Love Actually on Christmas, just like we do every year, crowded around the TV, the four of us not quite fitting onto the available couches. My grudging enthusiasm for the tradition turns, at some point around the time Hugh Grant does his dorky little dance, into genuine enjoyment of the movie, which doesn’t mean I think the movie is good.

Love Actually is a fascinating artifact. It isn’t a campy sort of bad; it wouldn’t ever be shown as a midnight movie at the arthouse theater in a college town. It isn’t so bad it’s good. It’s just bad, in the utterly pedestrian way that so many things are bad, like a harbinger of all the bad media that would come after it. Not everyone dislikes the movie but most people do, and yet an enormous cross-section of those people also have some particular personal affection for it. It’s almost as though it stood in for this whole season itself. 

Most parties are bad, and so are most movies. Most holidays are bad, too. Like Love Actually, parties and movies and holidays are rarely bad in the sort of operatic, campy, midnight-movie way that makes a good story later. Mostly bad things are boring; they just look the way everything else looks. Love Actually is exactly like this, bad the way most parties and holidays and families and dates and Tuesdays are bad, stringing together the sort of daily meaninglessness that British poets wrote about at the midcentury, all the uncaring intricate rented world.

But every year my family fights about a stupid movie while laughing at each other, and every year my dad’s face lights up while he points at one or another ridiculous plotline and excoriates us about “how can you not think that that’s moving?” It’s very easy not to think that that’s moving, of course, but every year that this happens in the exact same way, it becomes more difficult.

Sometimes, or even often, I don’t feel like I care much about Christmas itself, even if I want to. Sometimes I can’t convince myself that any party is a good party, or a party at all, even when standing at the center of it. But I keep hoping that if I participate in the traditions enough, the key will finally fit in the lock and turn. I like Love Actually in the same way I like holiday travel and when people people complain about it, in the same way that I like crowded airports and train stations and interstate traffic even when I hate all of it. I like it in the same way I like big holiday family gatherings even though I haven’t had one or had to attend one in over a decade and almost certainly wouldn’t enjoy it if I did. I like it in the same way I like a bad party, even while I’m desperately wishing I could leave, simply because it’s indoors and in someone’s house, on a cold night, during the holidays, and that means something is happening, even if that something is just how bad the party is. At least that made me part of it, this season when everybody attends terrible parties, and complains about them, and gets stuck in traffic, and goes home to see their families, and argues about Love Actually and then watches Love Actually.

I hate this movie so much and I can’t wait to hate it again. I’ve watched it in California and in Pennsylvania and in Delaware and in a small town in France, using a VPN on a laptop because it was just that important to watch a movie I don’t like. I’ve watched it in my apartment in New York up four flights of stairs, all crowded onto one couch in one overheated room, when I was young and when I was sad, and then when I was less sad and then less young. I’ve watched it with three people and then with four people, when my parents were in a fight and when they were in a good mood, while eating ice cream and while eating leftovers, with two huge cats on my lap and in a house with no cats, before a pandemic and during one, before I learned to be grateful and after I started to claw onto each next year’s passing as it ran out of the calendar and took too much with it.

Love Actually is a movie about people lying to each other, and being bad friends and bad spouses. It’s a movie about an irresponsible prime minister, and a sad wife, and a sadder sister, and a lot of oblivious men, and an impossibly young January Jones and an extremely endearing Bill Nighy and what London looked like before Boris Johnson. It’s about airports and Christmas pageants and Hugh Grant’s chauffeur singing the bass part in Good King Wenceslas, and scenes about a porn set that are way longer than I ever remember they’re going to be before I watch it with my family, and how hideous literally every single style trend of 2003 was. It’s about department stores and holiday parties, and having a crush on the worst possible person and doing the worst possible thing about it. It’s about making big gestures for love, and about humiliating yourself, and about kids in octopus and lobster costumes, and workplace romances, and whatever totally different and deeply tragic movie Emma Thompson is in, and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas (Is You),” and September 11th for some reason. It’s about a whole bunch of really terrible parties.

But what it’s about, for me, now, is gratitude: Here I am again, with these same people again, fighting about this same stupid movie and then watching this same stupid movie again. For one more year, I get to attend the same party, where four people crowd onto one couch and watch a movie that only one of us likes. For one more year, we get to keep taking each other and everything else for granted, pretending that there is so much time left to waste that we could use some of it to watch a stupid movie all of us have already seen and have an argument about it that all of us have already had.

The days pile up on themselves, indistinguishable and meaningless, and most things are bad in the most pedestrian way possible. But we get to do it again, whatever stupid thing it is, showing up to the next boring day and the next bad party. Maybe that’s all the holiday is, the miracle it celebrates in all its songs and its stories: We show up again. We get to do something again. The next stupid day comes, and we repeat ourselves, throwing the same parties, having the same arguments, gathering in the same rooms, pretending everything is better than it is, and pretending we don’t know that we’re taking it all for granted.

thanks for reading, and happy holidays, for whatever value of holidays. xo