A Different Kind of Holiday Affair: Carol at 10

As Todd Haynes’s classic love story turns 10, Carol invites us to reimagine the holidays.

It’s been ten years since we were given the holiday gift of Todd Haynes’s Carol, a sumptuous adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel about two women who fall in love over the course of the holidays in 1950s New York. Immediately upon its release, Carol was placed within the pantheon of Classic Christmas Films, a position hard won within a genre that seems never free of cinephiliac tendencies to litmus tests and hair-splitting. At the same time that Carol evoked the melancholy romanticism of studio-era Hollywood Christmas films, it offered a unique perspective on both the holidays and their cinematic incarnations – one that continues to resonate a decade after its release.

There is no way to divorce our experience of Christmas from classic Hollywood films, which have become as much a part of the holiday ritual as eggnog and stockings. For many of us, films like Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) or George Seaton’s Miracle on 34th Street (1947) are playing in the background of our childhood holiday memories, ever-present on Christmas day either because of family tradition, or seasonal television programming. These films have also shaped our collective idea of what Christmas should be: a loving family backlit by the soft glow of a Christmas tree, exchanging gifts that matter less than the love they feel for one another and appreciate most at this tender moment of togetherness. 

This isn’t to say that Hollywood only offers holiday fantasies of the perfect family. On the contrary, the Christmas film canon is full of stories about odd or incidental connections, about finding family and love in unexpected places and through unideal events. In Michael Curtiz’s We’re No Angels (1955) escaped convicts and a beleaguered family find themselves both changed by a holiday spent together. A family is formed in Garson Kanin’s Bachelor Mother (1939) when a woman fraudulently claims an orphaned infant as her own, leading to a comedy of errors that eventually wins her a loving (and wealthy) husband. The ruthless DA in Mitchell Leisen’s romcom Remember the Night (1940) suspends trial proceedings until after the holidays, hoping the jury will be less disposed to charity then, but he winds up falling in love with the beautiful shoplifter he’s prosecuting before the new year even arrives. Criminals and curmudgeons are reformed, and all barriers to romance are rendered obsolete by the almost supernatural forces of falling snow, twinkling lights, and a general spirit of human communion. Christmas, Hollywood tells us, makes anything possible. Hollywood, we know, is a machine of illusions. 

Carol knows this too, simultaneously conveying the season’s romantic spirit and showing how divorced Hollywood’s cinematic fantasies often are from the actual holiday experience. Over the course of the film’s first act, we see two women from different generations and social classes fall in love against a richly textured backdrop of winter coats and scarves, decorated storefronts, holiday standards, and Christmas cookies with tea. And yet, it also shows Christmas in Manhattan as an impersonal crush of frantic shoppers trudging through snow that’s less a pristine blanket than it is a dirty slush made by neverending traffic. It’s in this imperfect Manhattan that Carol’s romantic leads are brought together by a chance encounter when Therese (Rooney Mara), a clerk at a department store, sells Carol (Cate Blanchett) a toy train to give her daughter for Christmas. This is also the inciting event in Don Hartman’s Holiday Affair (1949) but the connection formed between the women in Carol is distinct in its feminine specificity. Theirs isn’t a meet-cute borne out of comedic hijinks, but rather an exchange of confessions of insecurity. “I’m sorry, shopping makes me nervous,” a flustered Carol confesses. “It’s okay, working here makes me nervous,” Therese responds. It’s the kind of shared vulnerability that’s so common among women that it largely goes unremarked by us and unseen by men, its contemporary twin the automatically repaid compliment: “I love your dress!” “Thank you, I love yours!”

That this exchange takes place within the feminine domain of the department store – the doll counter, no less – clearly places the film within the world of women. While men hover at the periphery, their attempts to insert themselves into Carol and Therese’s intimate shared world are rightfully experienced by both women as unwelcome intrusions. In contrast, both Therese’s boyfriend, Richard (Jake Lacy) and Carol’s husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler) are baffled by the women’s quick affinity for and deepening attachment to one another. Their confusion is partially the result of masculine ego – how could a woman be their romantic rival? But it’s also an insecure response to the loss of their own holiday fantasy and the pride of place they enjoyed within it. Richard is meant to be his family’s golden boy, with a pretty fiancée on his arm and a bright future ahead of him. Harge is meant to be the successful patriarch, with a beautiful daughter bouncing on one knee and his elegant wife at his side. This is, after all, what Hollywood has taught them they should be entitled to. 

For all their differences, Carol and Therese share a sense of alienation from not just their heterosexual relationships (and, perhaps, heterosexuality itself) but also the holiday pageantry that often imbues those relationships with unearned romance. Instead, we see them genuinely capture the spirit of the season – and the promise of love it seems to offer – in the moments they share exclusively with one another. These are not big Hollywood moments full of saccharine spectacle, like those in Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas (1954). They’re small gestures: photographing the person you’re in love with as they laugh in the Christmas tree lot, watching them tentatively play a holiday tune on a piano, nervously giving them a gift you’re unsure that they’ll like. These common experiences, shared by two women at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offense, resonate differently for anyone who has experienced a love that’s unable to be expressed publicly during a season that encourages the public expression of love. 

This is, in part, why the two women abandon Manhattan and all its twinkling lights for a road trip through decidedly less romantic midwestern states. The trip is an escape from the seasonal stress they feel at home, but it also provides the privacy and anonymity required for them to have the holiday affair so easily afforded to heterosexual couples in films like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and William Dieterle/George Cukor’s I’ll Be Seeing You (1944). Unable to stroll arm-in-arm through Central Park or kiss in front of the tree at Rockefeller Center, Carol and Therese instead turn a series of impersonal hotel rooms into self-contained spaces of feminine domesticity and companionship. By New Year’s Eve, their tentative romance has developed into something much deeper, and we are given a holiday fantasy unprecedented in any of the films Carol evokes: two women confessing and consummating their love for one another.

Critical commentary that followed Carol’s celebrated premiere at Cannes in 2015 focused on its revision of the classical Hollywood “woman’s film,” bringing the genre’s lesbian subtext to the surface and foregoing the spiritual punishment that films like King Video’s Stella Dallas (1937) or David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) doled out to women who dared to follow their own desires. 

But Carol is also a self-conscious revision of the Christmas film, appropriating its tropes and reimagining them from a specifically lesbian point of view that fundamentally sees the holidays differently. It is also, simply, a deeply moving love story, one that transcends any of the cinematic traditions to which it might belong. If we’re lucky, Carol will become as much a part of the holiday tradition as its predecessors, providing all of us with a model for investing in life over fantasy and always – whatever the season, obstacles, or cost – seeking love.

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