Hello fellow thinkers!

This week I watched Hot Frosty with my friends and, naturally, had a lot of thoughts™️ about it. So much so that there is going to be a PART TWO to this. Can you believe it? (If you listen closely, you can hear everyone I’m in a discord group with saying “yeah, you never write less than 1200 words on any given topic” and they’d be right). This post is not a review, but a drive through Thought Lane ✨

Spoiler warning: I am talking about the whole movie! Don’t read further than this unless you’ve seen the movie or you don’t care about having the plot spoiled 💖

For anyone who is unfamiliar with Netflix’s latest jaunt down Christmas Movie Lane, ‘Hot Frosty’ is about a young widowed woman named Kathy, who accidentally brings a naked (but tastefully framed) six-packed snowman to life with a magic scarf. This snowman wakes up, unknowingly streaks through town, breaks into a shop and steals a bare-armed outfit which allows him to take up the name “Jack”, all before he meets Kathy, who invites him to her diner the next morning. From then on, in classic cheesy romance movie fashion, they begin to fall in love. It’s a Christmas romance, and a weirdly frightening story about police violence and incarceration—but that’s not what this post is about. 

That’s next time. This post is about the romance, about the relationship dynamics, and the two people involved in it, I promise.

Watching this movie, about three things I was absolutely positive. First, Jack was a snowman. Second, there was a part of him—and I didn’t know how potent that part might be—that thirsted for Kathy’s love. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably frightened for him.

To begin with what I liked, I will say that I found the emotional undercurrent of the Kathy’s character to be relatable. She’s suffered the loss of her husband, is living in a house that needs repairs and whose heating system is broken, and doesn’t know how to pick herself back up yet. One of the themes of the film is learning to love yourself, and I felt like I could not only buy into it but was also generally happy with the way Jack doesn’t swoop in and heal her so much as he encourages her to heal by confronting her feelings and providing an optimistic backbone of support that she’s been without for a long time. It was never going to be a serious romance or a serious film, but I felt like that element was handled with care—and it makes sense, as the writer (Russell Hainline) states in their Letterboxd review:

“yes, the movie’s got laughs, yes, it’s very silly, and yes, it’s got a very Hot Frosty... but I really, really tried to make the heart of the movie something that felt real to me. learning to love yourself, learning to find ways to move on.” 

And who better to facilitate this than a ripped snowman?

Looking more deeply into their dynamic, it relies on a kind of character archetype and relational dynamic that always unsettles me to some degree.

Born Sexy Yesterday?

I feel that “Jack” is a gender-flipped Born Sexy Yesterday (BSY) character—an archetype we most often see with female characters in speculative media spaces, named thus by Pop Culture Detective, who describes it as:

Born Yesterday is an idiom meaning extremely naive, inexperienced or ignorant. The female characters that this trope is built around are defined by their innocence of, and inexperience with, worldly things. Especially when it comes to sex, romance or basic social interaction. Born Sexy Yesterday is not a modern trope. In fact it’s been a fixture of the of Classic Hollywood science fiction films since the beginning of the genre. Since Born Sexy Yesterday hinges on a lopsided power dynamic, it’s almost never portrayed the other way around.

In the case of Hot Frosty, it is in fact portrayed the other way around: Jack is for all intents and purposes male, and he embodies a lot of what makes up the typical Born Sexy Yesterday characters. He is naive, whimsical, and innocent, while also sexually and romantically appealing to the young widowed love interest (as well most of the other female characters).

Not only are these traits fundamentally present in and associated with children, these characters often act and are treated as though they are a child who needs the ways of the world explained to them, and who need supervision and guidance. Jack’s ineptitude and his unawareness is often the butt of the joke, and places Kathy in a position where she sometimes sounds like a mother speaking to a kid she’s been tasked with babysitting. I find it interesting that when the genders are reversed, and the BSY character is a man, the woman usually takes on something of a maternal role (while men don’t often tend to take on paternal roles when the BSY character is a woman).

The crux of this trope in other media, with a female BSY character, usually holds a fixation on male superiority in some way—the male hero holds power over her, and even sometimes manipulates her or takes advantage of her naivety so as to unknowingly engage in sexual (or sexually-charged) acts. Hot Frosty, differs from this in a few ways, namely that aside from developing feelings for Jack, Kathy doesn’t actively coerce him or take advantage of his skills for personal gain. In fact, when she eventually does try to kiss him, she respects it when he pulls back.

Additionally, though the movie does uphold some culturally conditioned ideas of masculinity—Jack is implicitly and explicitly what a very attractive and highly desirable man looks like thanks to all his muscled, six-packed, sleeveless or outright shirtlessness—the movie doesn’t relegate Kathy to an idle recipient who must rely on him to perform labour through skills that are typically seen as manly. The movie ends with Jack gifting Kathy a how-to book on home repairs and helping her successfully fix the heating in her house, and I really liked that.

There’s snow better way to fall in love… right?

The way Jack comes to life, plus his lack of life experience and subsequent childish characterisation kind of soured the romance for me. The movie would have you ignore it, but there’s always something a little uncomfortable to me about a dynamic in which one person has all the life experience and knowledge, while the other is naive and ultimately very young, and very little time passes in which to try to equalise this imbalance. Jack’s childishness is reinforced a couple times throughout the movie, sometimes very clearly, such as when he’s seated at a kids table and is colouring in while at the doctors office, while Kathy is the responsible adult charged with looking after him.

Kathy is the most desireable woman to Jack, who looks at no other woman the way he looks at her, partly because he’s not being old enough to have met anyone else, and because he’s literally made by her. She didn’t have a hand in sculpting his snow-nipples but she did give him her scarf, and he knows her from the minute he sees her with his not-snow eyeballs. He is her very first memory. He trusts her because she is the one who put the scarf on him. He has no past, no past partners, and no past romantic experiences—he is essentially a clean slate, unswayed by anyone else, and knows from the very beginning of the movie that he wants to be around her and that he loves her. 

This romance is snow joke!

It suggests a slightly unnerving lack of agency, to me, because he seems somewhat purpose-built for Kathy; There is nobody else for him. He begins his life as a pseudo-human already loving Kathy, and although she explains he doesn’t really love her because they haven’t spent enough time together and that’s not how that works, most of his behaviour is engineered to either help her, fulfil her needs, or just generally appeal to her.

Some of this purpose-built compatability is very typical to the romance genre—what do you expect? A movie where the two love interests don’t get along at first, making assumptions based on pride, perhaps even prejudice!?🤭—and I get why she falls for him, to some extent. But the fact that Jack only lives and breathes because of Kathy, and because he is romantically interested in her from the beginning, I wondered just how much of his personhood is his own, and how much is a result of any traits and subconscious wishes Kathy may have passed onto him.

This is, obviously, speculation; The movie does nothing to say this in any explicit way outside of characterisation, but I kept thinking about it. Being around her makes him extremely happy. She hasn’t cooked for herself in a long time, and what should he be but a man who cooks with her at home? She has a house in disrepair, and what should he be but a man who can learn and use the skills needed to fix things? She hasn’t taken care of herself, and what should he be but someone who accepts her as she is while also encouraging her to love herself first—the one thing she states she never learned how to do, even with her husband? She is kind and helps people, and what should he want but to be and do the same thing?

Because I feel like I’m sounding pretty critical, I do want to add that I liked how Jack’s character is designed to be rather gentle and caring. I found that nice, and I also found his “I got a job!” storyline quite wholesome. I feel it was a good choice to have Jack act independently of Kathy throughout the romance, making friends with people and even going to one of the other prominent male characters for advice.

Going back to the Born Sexy Yesterday of it all…

Not only does he behave and have the mind of a child who takes things extremely literally—except for when the plot needs him to be a competent roofer, electrician, or otherwise skilled handyman—he is, in typical Born Sexy Yesterday fashion, someone with no previous sexual experience, embodying innocence while being explicitly objectified and sexualised both by the film in regards to its framing and costume design, but also in-movie by a group of older women.

The scenes where he is overtly objectified feel, as they say in totally legit academic vernacular, “a little uncomfy” to me because this child-like naivety is taken advantage of; He doesn’t know what is happening or why he’s being asked to come to a strangers house to hang a light, but he does, and is ogled, seemingly none the wiser. Before he even makes it to the stranger’s house, there’s a scene where he’s pushing the back of an older woman’s car and innocently delivering lines that are frames as sexual innuendos, while the woman in the front seat acts… let’s just say, very into what’s being simulated, and seems to be almost ✨arriving✨ at her destination.

Further, Jack’s desire for romance with Kathy and his awkward inexperience is somewhat paralleled on-screen with a sudden budding romance between two students at the school he’s helping decorate for the dance that he will attend with Kathy—the teenage boy nervously asks the girl to the dance and they nervously hold hands, which inspires Jack to seek help from another man about asking Kathy to the dance too. Later at the dance, the teenage boy admits he doesn’t know how to dance with his partner, and Jack tells him to copy his moves, which I found to be cute! But I also couldn’t shake my weird feelings about the romance, because in his relationship with Kathy, she felt closer to a teacher while he felt more like a student.

Fantasy Romance

As a romance enjoyer, it got me thinking about the ways male characters are commonly written in books, particularly in the fantasy romance space, which sometimes feel less like people than someone for the protagonist to kiss and be loved by. Further, in chasing the “female gaze”, male characters are sometimes sexualised and objectified to degrees that have me feeling like we have lost the right to make fun of men writing lines like “she breasted boobily”. I was wondering about informed consent, and if Jack can technically consent to anything—he wants to kiss Kathy, but does he really understand what kissing is or can mean? Is his desire to kiss her his desire, or is it part of his design? Informed consent isn’t often written with as much importance for male characters as it is female characters, and I find that not only a shame, but also an obstacle to my enjoyment in stories like these.

I know that within this kind of fantasy we are meant to understand that this is a safe place and that because of genre and sub genre conventions, when characters pursue a romantic relationship, everything will be fine and work out great. And at the end of the film, Jack and Kathy are clearly very happy together! But this kind of imbalanced dynamic just isn’t for me, and unfortunately, I left with more discomfort and questions than I did happy spirit-of-christmas joy…

Especially because his youth, newness to the world, and naivety, as well as the fact that the narrative constructs his difference as disability, all make his fake-out ending rather more sad and uncomfortable for me—Jack is locked in a jail cell by a ridiculously law-loving sheriff (one of the only prominent black characters/members of the community!) despite obvious “extreme sensitivity to the heat” which is making him sweat/melt and lose cognitive function, and he literally dies in custody!!

Talk about a horror feel-good “very silly” romantic christmas movie! ☃️

Interested in more thoughts on that? I’ll be talking about it in my next substack post where I talk about how this movie engages with narratives around disability and the carceral system. I’m sorry and you’re welcome.

What do you think? Have you seen Hot Frosty?

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