In the banal, saccharine world of Hallmark movies, we find, paradoxically, a profound confrontation with the abyss of Being itself. These films, with their predictable plots and saccharine sentimentality, seem to offer a kitsch escape from existential dread. But in their very banality lies the mechanism by which they reveal the Heideggerian truth of Dasein—that is, our being-thrown into the world.

Consider the archetypal Hallmark protagonist: the career-driven woman who leaves the big city to rediscover “what really matters” in her quaint hometown. On the surface, this is the bourgeois fantasy of returning to authenticity, of escaping the alienation of modernity. Yet Heidegger teaches us that authenticity is not found in external trappings—whether rural or urban—but in the confrontation with our own finitude, the Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death).

In this light, the Hallmark movie is not a return to authenticity but its negation. By structuring the protagonist’s world around clichés and stereotypes, the genre enforces what Heidegger would call Das Man, the “they” of everydayness, the inauthentic mode of existence where one avoids confronting the groundlessness of one’s being. The Christmas lights, the snow-covered streets, the inevitable kiss at the town square—all these are rituals of avoidance, not moments of authentic being.

And yet! There is a twist. In their relentless repetition and artificiality, these films also gesture towards a kind of radical emptiness. The overly constructed “perfect moments” become too perfect, and thus uncanny. We, the audience, start to suspect that the town, the love story, the holiday spirit—all of it—is hollow, an empty shell that conceals nothing but its own constructedness.

Here, the Hallmark movie inadvertently becomes a confrontation with das Nichts—the Nothing. It does not provide meaning but instead shows us the void around which meaning circulates. Like the Heideggerian clearing, it offers a space in which Being is revealed—but what is revealed is the vacuity of the rituals we construct to avoid our finitude.

The difference between Hallmark movies and “art movies,” or what we might call “serious cinema,” lies not in their ability to reflect the human condition but in the strategies they deploy to confront or conceal it. If Hallmark movies are the ideological opium of the masses, art movies are the bad conscience of the bourgeois subject, forcing them to confront the truth they would rather ignore. But, of course, the dialectic is never so simple.

Hallmark movies, as we discussed, are ideological in the purest sense—they create a fantasy that denies the inherent antagonisms of existence. Their simplicity and predictability anesthetize us, smoothing over the chaos and contingency of life with comforting rituals: the big-city career woman always finds love, the struggling small-town bakery is always saved. They allow us to believe, for a moment, that the world makes sense, that things fall into place if we only “rediscover the magic of Christmas.”

Art movies, on the other hand, revel in the gaps and fissures of existence. They expose the fractures beneath the surface: alienation, despair, the absurdity of human relationships. Think of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, where the boundary between self and other dissolves into an unbearable void, or Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which confronts us with the inscrutable and indifferent nature of the “Zone.” Art cinema often shatters narrative coherence, leaving us with ambiguity, incompletion, and unresolved tension. This, ostensibly, is its hardcore nature: it refuses the ideological comfort of closure.

But here is the twist: art movies can also become ideological. Their refusal to comfort, their embrace of ambiguity, can itself become a fetish. The viewer of art cinema might pat themselves on the back for being “cultured,” for seeing through the kitsch of Hallmark movies, but this too is a form of ideological fantasy. The art film connoisseur often inhabits a similar position to the Hallmark viewer: they are reassured, not by the world making sense, but by the feeling of having seen through its nonsensicality.

To put it bluntly: Hallmark movies tell us that life is simple, while art movies tell us that life is complex. Both, however, risk avoiding the true hardcore question: what do we do with this complexity?

The horseshoe analogy falters here because the core mode of engagement with Hallmark and art movies is fundamentally different. Hallmark movies don’t just offer fantasy; they provide a step-by-step manual for acting out that fantasy. They say, “Here is what you must do to align yourself with this idealized, prepackaged version of the good life: bake cookies, decorate the tree, fall in love in a snowstorm.” It’s ideology in its most prescriptive form—a checklist of symbolic gestures that promise fulfillment if followed.

Art movies, by contrast, don’t give you a script. Instead, they force you to confront why you even want a script in the first place. The director’s personal note—whether explicit or implicit in the film—functions as a meta-statement: “The world doesn’t make sense, but here’s what I did to cope. I made this. What will you do?” It’s an invitation not to perform a set of symbolic acts but to grapple with the impossibility of such acts ever being sufficient.

Take, for example, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries or even Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Both films deal with existential disorientation, but they don’t end in nihilistic despair. Instead, they gesture towards the necessity of creating your own meaning—whether through art, memory, or a conscious return to some kind of routine. The protagonist in these films doesn’t resolve their crisis by following a script; they do it by embracing the absurd and making sense of their reality, however provisionally.

Hallmark movies, then, are about doing without thinking. They reduce life to a set of externalized rituals. Art movies, on the other hand, are about thinking in order to rediscover the meaning of doing. The “meaningful routine” you mention is a key point: it’s not the routine itself that matters but the fact that it arises from a conscious reckoning with chaos.

Here’s where Hallmark and art movies diverge radically:

• Hallmark says, “Follow this preordained path, and you’ll find happiness.”

• Art cinema says, “Happiness doesn’t exist as a universal formula, but here’s how someone—me, the director, or this fictional character—found their way toward something like meaning. Maybe you can do the same.”

Art cinema acknowledges that meaning is not given—it’s made. And this making is hard, messy, and deeply personal. That’s why art movies often end with a return to some sort of imperfect routine—it’s not a resolution but a recognition that we must actively choose to live, even in the face of absurdity.

Hallmark movies are ideological because they obscure this effort, pretending that meaning can be bought pre-assembled, like a flat-pack Ikea Christmas. Art movies are existential because they insist that meaning must be constructed from scratch, piece by piece, through the labor of being alive.

Perhaps the truly radical act this Christmas is to watch Hallmark movies not as escapism, but as a meditation on the void—to gaze into their glossy, snow-covered surfaces and see, reflected back, the inescapable truth of our own being-towards-death.