With Regard To Anal Sex And Christmas

Heartwarming. Subtle. Good. Not the movie we watched last night.

Dear Mom,

I just wanted to let you know again how sorry I am that I rented Bad Santa last night. I had thought that it would be fun to mix up our standard Christmas movie watching ritual by renting a well-regarded movie that we’d never seen before and knew nothing about.

Thus, I was not aware that in the course of the movie Billy-Bob Thornton has graphic anal sex with a lady. This was something that we all found out at the same time, together.

I guess Bad Santa seemed like a really good idea at the time, and then, like most ideas which turn out to involve anal sex in some way, wound up being a bad idea.

For everybody else who’s reading this, Mom, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to explain some of the background:

My family has one enduring holiday tradition: the movies. We are admittedly a family of movie nuts and always have been – I’ve seen video of my parents at parties before I was born absolutely kicking their friends’ asses at movie trivia, and now I’m like their superhero movie trivia offspring, and I guess when our powers unite we form a gigantic VCR and fight Communist librarians in space or something like that.

The movies we watch, every year, in roughly the same order, are:

1) Love Actually
The most recent addition to the list, my parents saw Love Actually a few years back thanks to Netflix and fell in love with this clever, orgiastic, schmaltzy salute to love and Christmas and watch it three or four times every Christmas season. This usually comes first in the rotation because the movie begins five weeks before Christmas, and that sort of thing matters around the Capps household.

2) Scrooged
You may have seen this movie on TV because apparently you can get the broadcast rights for a nickel and a corndog, and around this time of year AMC is always looking for something cheap they can throw on until Mad Men comes back. We’re all Bill Murray fans, so several years ago we found the DVD in a bargain bin and added it to the rotation.

3) A Christmas Carol
This is when you know it’s serious. When we throw on A Christmas Carol, we’ve got about five days left until Jesus’s birthday. This, by the way, is not the dull as hell black and white 1951 version that everybody waxes poetical about, but instead a 1984 made-for-TV movie starring George C. Scott.

4) A Christmas Story
I double dog dare you. I can’t put my arms down. How do the little piggies eat. Bumpuses.

5) It’s A Wonderful Life
Christmas Eve. Every year. This movie is a national treasure and if you disagree I will personally kick your ass.

My family doesn’t have religion to pull us all into the same room at this most auspicious time of the year, so we’ve turned to the same thing that we’ve always shared – sitting around watching movies. And that’s great. It’s part of Christmas. But this year, I wasn’t feeling the Christmas spirit.

We watched Love Actually a couple of nights ago (it was already my parents’ second time watching it this month, and they’ve seen it so many times in total that it’s like The Rocky Horror Picture Show to them) and for some reason it just didn’t work for me this time around. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s the mileage, maybe it’s my decidedly less than cheery experiences with love over the past year, but I found a good chunk of the movie to be almost sickeningly heartwarming. It’s all the most overbearing sentiments of Christmas smashed into all the most overbearing sentiments of Valentine’s Day, and while it hadn’t bothered me in the past, this year it was like getting blasted in the face with a shotgun filled with happiness.*

*This may sound like a good thing, but I know from experience that it’s never good to be blasted in the face with a shotgun filled with anything.

Yesterday afternoon I knew that Scrooged was our movie for the evening, and I knew what was in store – Bill Murray is an asshole (a bigger asshole than he is in Kingpin but not as big an asshole as he is in Groundhog Day) who has a variety of encounters with colorful ghosts until he realizes the true meaning of Christmas and does a 15 minute long monologue to a bunch of TV cameras about how super Christmas is, culminating in caroling and a rushing tidal wave of heartwarming.

Don’t get me wrong; I think heartwarming is great. But I think all things should be done in moderation. Lots of great movies are heartwarming - Rushmore, Boogie Nights, The Room - but they do so in such a way as not to beat you over the head with it. They’re subtle. At Christmas, however, the law of subtlety does not seem to be in effect.

I realized that I could not take it – not last night, at least – and endeavored to make a change. I had to spice up our viewing schedule in hopes of not completely burning out my ability to feel by the time we got to the jewel in the holiday movie crown, It’s A Wonderful Life.

“Hey!” I said to my parents over dinner. “Why do we always watch the same old movies at Christmas? Maybe we should try something new!”

My parents looked at one another as though I’d requested an autographed copy of Going Rogue for Christmas.

“Well,” Dad said, after a pause. “What did you have in mind?”

Here he had caught me off guard – I had mostly expected them to stone me for blasphemy and was not thinking this far ahead. I suggested that we defer to our friend The Internet, and after looking up a list of the 25 best Christmas movies, we decided on Bad Santa, a movie none of us had seen or knew much about, because it was a departure from the norm and we all liked Billy-Bob Thornton.

I ran to the video store and picked it up. On the way back, I realized that if what I expected to be a quirky, slightly risqué comedy was a big hit with the parents, this could be my big break. I could steer our holiday choices away from the mind-numbingly heartwarming and into subtler, more avant garde territory.

And then we threw on Bad Santa, and within the first five minutes Billy-Bob Thornton had vomited, wet his pants, and angrily cussed out enough children to fill two school buses.

This has to end soon. I thought to myself, watching the titular Bad Santa be thoroughly unlikeable for fifteen, then twenty, then twenty five, then thirty minutes. Somewhere in there, Billy-Bob bones a girl in his car while she yells “Fuck me, Santa!”

This guy has to start redeeming himself eventually. I assured myself. I mean, they said this was the 19th best Christmas movie of all time. This guy can’t just be a wang the whole time, right?

And right as I thought that, the Bad Santa had anal sex with a fat woman in a department store dressing room while John Ritter watched.

I don’t know your opinion on anal sex, dear readers – I don’t know if you’re into that or not, and either way it’s fine with me because we’re all into weird things. I mean, I like Battlestar Galactica, maybe you like anal sex. That’s cool. I’m not judging – it’s Christmas. But I’ll tell something about anal sex – like it or not, it’s not the sort of thing you want to acknowledge the existence of when you’re sitting next to your mother.

God bless my mother, because she’s a wonderful woman and she’s told some of the dirtiest jokes I’ve ever heard. Some of them have even been about anal sex. But it’s a whole new sack of potatoes to be sitting there with your mother watching people have anal sex. When you’re just talking about it and not watching it, anal sex is all conceptual. You can laugh and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Now, though, I can hear her thinking:

“Oh, my. This movie was popular with my son’s generation – are they into this sort of thing? Is… Is he into this sort of thing? Good heavens!

And no, Mom, I’m not into that sort of thing, although I’ve found out that a lot of people are. Anal has gained a lot of social acceptance recently – it’s not just for gay men anymore, I guess.

I’m as shocked by all of this as you are, Mom.

And I know that all three of us agreed on Bad Santa, and so maybe we’re all a little at fault, but honestly, when you think about it, if I hadn’t gotten a bug up my ass about heartwarming movies in the first place we could have avoided this whole unfortunate incident.

I’m sorry that my misguided need for variety resulted in me bringing anal sex to our house, Mom. I can’t promise you that this will never happen again, but with God as my witness I’ll do my best to prevent it.

What I’ve learned from all of this, Mom, is that while it can be a little sickening when movies are aggressively heartwarming, the alternative is far, far worse. And really, Christmas itself is a sickeningly heartwarming holiday – the movies are only keeping pace, and given all the subtlety with which we approach heartwarming themes throughout the rest of the year, maybe now is the best time to get it out in the open.

And by God, after seeing the festering turd of a movie that was Bad Santa, some heartwarming, mainstream stuff like Scrooged would really hit the spot right about now. All with those Christmas carols…

Look, anyway, I just wanted to apologize again, and let you know that I hope we can make it through the rest of our holiday movies without having to watch any more kinky sex acts together.

Merry Christmas, everybody. God bless.

Love,
Truman

Truman Capps is eagerly anticipating all the hits he's going to get from people Googling "ANAL SEX MOM LOVE".