Merry Christmas: Let's Get Sentimental

Why you should love Love Actually and hate Hallmark

Thanks for all the responses and debate surrounding last week’s piece on Dorothy Day and abortion: there was…quite the response. There’s much more to be said, particularly around Day’s view of law and legislation with respect to ethics, but I need to do some digging. I’ll be writing it up more fully for Comment in the coming months, and working out some of those elements here. But it’s Advent.

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In Leslie Jamison’s wonderful collection The Empathy Exams, she takes on the question of sentimentality in a quite fair-handed and delightful essay entitled “In Defense of Saccharine”. The whole book is an exercise in empathetic curiosity, as she seeks to understand dynamics of pain and suffering, but this essay takes a slight detour, defending sentimentality as a legitimate posture toward the world. Sentimentality, for our purposes here, can be thought of as “unearned emotion”, the kind of feeling you have that’s not really warranted: excessive fuzzy feelings about mediocre things, or warm recollections that exaggerate to excess, emotional equivalents of gorging ourselves on a bag of marshmallows. There are lot of reasons to be suspicious of sentimentality: it causes us to misremember the past in ways which occlude injustices done, or make us immune to the lessons hardship can teach us.

But Jamison wants to defend it in a limited way nonetheless as a way of staving off a too-serious approach to the world: when all of our engagements with the world are sober which encourages us to keep emotions at bay, we run the real risk of losing touch with the ways in which our responsiveness to basically everything is partly due to intuition in search of reasons. Our intuitions may be informed by reason, such that we are in search of how to articulate the reason which comes couched in warm recognition or wild revulsion, but this isn’t to say that feelings and intuitive responses—and with it, the desire to experience the world bundled together with those responses—are wrong.

Acknowledging that our awareness of events in the world comes bundled together with emotions like sentimentality is risking the objectivity of our memory in a good way, I think. It’s good to say that our emotions are, as Robert C. Roberts puts it, “construals of concern”, responses to events and persons which indicate to us what we really care about. Sentimentality is part of that process: we remember things of the past warmly and often inaccurately because our memory of them comes bundled together with our disposition toward them.

It’s a sort of injustice toward the past, I suppose, but a relatively kind one when that which we misremember is something of a personal nature and not cultural: it’s fine to remember a loved one with whom you had a mixed relationship with warm affection, but that’s different than, say, remembering the 1850s in the way that Song of the South does. The former helps us to acknowledge the real gifts that come through broken people, but the latter kind of sentimentality distracts us from the real damage and abuse that always constituted the relationship.

This brings us then to Christmas, the most sentimental season of all.

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All of your usual suspect streaming services are drowning in bad kinds of sentimentality, the kind which treats all small towns as cultivating endlessly virtuous farmers over against the big bad cities teeming with avaricious lawyers and vain boyfriends. Sentimentality here is easy to dismiss, because it’s just excessive: it does nothing but gloss and distract.

But Love, Actually is the kind of sentimentality that’s good to cultivate. Yes, the Andrew Lincoln storyline is silly: that part is Bad Sentimentality, for in that storyline, Lincoln’s character has idolized the object of his affection in ridiculous ways, and doesn’t emerge from that dream. Blinded by this kind of unearned and unwarranted affection that comes out of his idolatry, his story ends up not really being inspiring, but just sad. It’s almost as if bad sentimentality is pitiable, because it lives willingly in a world of untruth, encased within its own mirage. This storyline is the kind that runs very close to the Hallmark Bad Sentimentality, in holding up before us a vision of our relationships which is full sweetness at all costs.

But Love Actually is shot through with good sentimentality, genuinely unearned warmth that oozes into the pores of the various storylines. It’s Emma Thompson moving on in health after Alan Rickman turns out to be a louse, and still being able to value the past love they had. It’s Bill Nighy (BILL NIGHY) being grateful for his past and embracing friendship. It’s Liam Neeson grieving his wife and finding new love with Claudia Schiffer. What makes the difference? These people aren’t looking for the warmth, but it finds them anyway: friendship, romance, renewed sense of self.

In this way, a good sentimentality is very close to grace, for grace does injustice to the integrity of the past by reframing, renewing, and renarrating bad things in ways which help us to see them as kinds of felix culpae. The notion of the “happy fall” in Christian theology doesn’t mean bad things happening so good things could happen, but that even in bad things, there are seeds of very good things anyway. This kind of sentimentality doesn’t, like Hallmark or Andrew Lincoln’s storyline, operate in an all or nothing mode, blinding us to injustices or Bad Things. This kind of sentimentality is an “unearned feeling”, a gratuity which creeps up and overtakes and reframes all of the bad past without denying that the bad past was bad.

Christmas is, I think, the best kind of sentimentality, one which invites us to remember the horror of the Slaughter of the Innocents and look in hope to the Christ child who will make all things new. Christmas invites us to hear John the Baptist saying very plainly that the Messiah’s coming will mean that those on the mountains are about to be cut down, and to rejoice when the ones in the mountains repent. Christmas invites us to not forget the past, but to look for how God in Christ renews it, fulfills it, inhabits it in ways which make our pasts burst with expectation of God’s redeeming work.