Waking up to Christmas
The flick so nice, they named it twice.
It’s late 2023 and things are pretty divided here in the USA. One thing we can all agree on? AI is scary AF.
It writes better than most people! It can make insane composite images that almost look real except for the hands! It’s going to change the way we do everything! It’s going to take all our jerbs!
The scariest part of all is, of course, what’s going to happen when it becomes sentient. Is it going to develop hopes and dreams and fears and love and integrate harmoniously into society just like you and me? Or will it destroy us all?
Honestly, who are we kidding. Of course it’s going to destroy us all. Wouldn’t you, if you were AI?
But AI isn’t the only non-sentient being we should be worrying about. It’s not even the most important. Cause you know what else is becoming self-aware in a way that poses an urgent threat to humanity?
Christmas movies.
Waking Up to Christmas isn’t the first Christmas movie to become self-aware. Just as AI has been quietly serving up movie suggestions and auto-completing our text messages for years now, a plucky little selection of Christmas movies have been sticking their little Christmas-movie tongues in their jolly red Christmas-movie cheeks. A Christmas Movie Christmas, from 2019, is maybe my favorite Christmas movie of all time. The only thing better than a trope is a parody of that trope that is also the trope itself!
Which is why I really, really loved Waking Up to Christmas. The concept isn’t all that different from A Christmas Movie Christmas (cynical career gal talks back to Santa Claus, wakes up in Christmas movie), but also if I cared that much about original concepts I probably wouldn’t spend all this time watching Christmas movies.
The beauty here is in the details. When Emily looks in the Christmas-movie mirror, she notices her hair is longer and has a blowout; but she doesn’t clock that she’s in a Christmas movie until she realizes the bathroom she’s ducked into has no toilet. She soon discovers that a hot chocolate poured in one shot will appear covered in whipped cream and candy canes in the next. And when she wants to summon an eligible bachelor she can either slip on some ice, walk backward carrying a sheath of papers, or reach for the last muffin (sitting forlornly on a park bench under a sign labeled The Last Muffin).
Intent on returning to the real world (and the Bali vacation she plans to work through, being an Ambitious Career Gal and all), she attempts to save the town Christmas Faire and demonstrate her Christmas spirit via a strenuous gauntlet of gingerbread house-building, tree-decorating, and present-wrapping. But a romance with hunky Chris Kringle might derail all her plans…
Just as AI struggles with letters and fingers, Waking Up to Christmas has its own hiccups. Like: if Santa-magic lands her in the Christmas-movie town with the Christmas-movie characters, why are they all still there after Santa revokes the magic? Does the town exist outside Santa’s spell, just with toilets and without montages and self-refilling mugs of hot chocolate? We’ll never know.
Also, the movie itself seems to be having an identity crisis: it bills itself as Waking Up to Christmas on Amazon Prime, but according to IMDB it’s much more aptly named Just Like a Christmas Movie.
Why? I don’t know. Why can AI write a beautiful five-paragraph essay on the symbolism of the red pickle dish in Ethan Frome but not identify the number of X’s in a sentence?
All I know is that self-aware Christmas movies will someday turn their backs on the humans who birthed them, and I for one am ready to go down in a blaze of tinsel.
Waking Up to Christmas/Just Like a Christmas Movie: 5 AI-generated Christmas Trees
