A Review of Hot Frosty, or, What If A Small Business Owner Wanted to Fuck a Homeless Guy?
The Snowman Cometh....
Of course, we cannot grasp the significance of the sexy magical snowman in Hot Frosty until we situate him within the context of the ongoing homelessness crisis in the United States. This past Friday, only two days removed from Christmas, a report released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development shared the dispiriting, unsurprising news that the American homeless population had reached 770,000 people, the highest level ever recorded. (For reference, the estimated population of Seattle, America’s 18th-largest city, is 755,000.) The nationwide tragedy represented by this aggregate figure, as if it weren’t sufficiently depressing, has been personified and politically inflected by several high-profile incidents that brought the housed and unhoused into lethal conflict. Limiting the examples to the New York City Subway, there was the fatal strangulation of Jordan Neely by Daniel Penny in May 2023, and last week, the shocking murder of an as-yet-unidentified homeless woman by an undocumented Guatemalan migrant, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, a man who was himself living in a homeless shelter. Zapeta-Calil set fire to his victim’s clothes while she was asleep on the train, and in an act almost too metaphorically loaded to comprehend, the only passenger who came to the woman’s aid misguidedly fanned her with his coat, feeding and intensifying the flames that caused her death. Again, those are just the most prominent stories from one mass-transit system in one city. You can’t blame anyone with a soul for choosing to escape into blissful yuletide oblivion of the Netflix Christmas Universe.
Since 2017’s The Christmas Prince, Netflix has produced more than 10 original feature-length holiday movies that play like Hallmark Channel on HGH, with the streaming service leveraging its formidable war chest to hire slightly more capable production crews, as well as slightly more recognizable, nostalgia-charged C-list actors, for their endearingly schlocky, half-winking modern fairytales. Hot Frosty stars Lacey Chabert, daughter of the inventor of Toaster Strudel, as the owner of Kathy’s Kup, a beloved breakfast spot in the small town of Hope Springs. (No relation.) Characteristically located somewhere between Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls and Bedford Falls in It’s a Wonderful Life, Hope Springs is a recognizably snowbound, community-first Christmas movie idyll, its wholesome appeal partly stemming from a calculated ambiguity with respect to setting and time period. The streets are lined with classic cars from the 1950s, yet everyone speaks in contemporary parlance; the characters own cell phones, but they’re all of the circa-2002 T9-word flip variety. This noncommittal approach to establishing place serves, in the first order, to reinforce the genre’s trademark high-gloss dreaminess. Second order, it makes Hope Springs a fantasyland whose draw for audiences derives from how the concrete, intractable problems of reality, like pandemics, social isolation, and housing crises, do not—and cannot—materialize.
The no-worries tinsel-pilled nature of Hope Springs doesn’t mean that Kathy’s days and nights are free of hardship, or that very real, ugly, uncomfortable issues cannot sneak their way, concealed in plain sight, into the mass-entertainment fantasia of Hot Frosty. For instance, Kathy’s husband is dead. (Late-stage cancer, silly oncologist.) Without his handiness around the home, the steps of her staircase are buckling and her heating system is shot, leaving Kathy to fill her rooms and hallways with plug-in space heaters and, not un-cozily, to wear coats, blankets, and beanies indoors. Her adorable grief, and her lack of a boyfriend, are a cause of concern for her busybody neighbors and customers, including the long-wed proprietors of the town’s clothing store. They gift Kathy the knit red scarf that will breathe life into Jack, the most chiseled entry in the town’s annual snowman building competition, after she drapes it around his inanimate neck. “You’ll never find warmth,” her fellow small business owner tells her, “unless you venture out into the cold.” The resulting dilemma makes fantastical what could act as a premise for a Nicole Holofcener bourgeois guilt morality nightmare, with Kathy’s act of kindness imbuing this non-human entity with agency, language, and desire. Jack, now a naked, vulnerable man exposed to the elements, begins following Kathy around and causing her all sorts of headaches. It’s like when you give a homeless guy a dollar, and then he tells you he only needs an additional $67 to take the bus to the hospital where his mother is undergoing emergency brain and heart surgery. Except: What if you were also maybe interested in having sex with that homeless guy?
Jack’s status as an avatar of homelessness is couched in both timeworn anxieties about vagrancy and the fever pitch, quaking-uncle discourses that have surrounded the unhoused, and policing by extension, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As soon as he is “born,” Jack is scandalizing an unsuspecting elderly couple with his exposed genitals, smashing the window of a downtown business, looting clothes and boots from its racks, and evading the town’s disempowered, underfunded two-man police force. “What if he’s dangerous?” wonders the tough-on-crime sheriff played by Craig Robinson (Dragon Wars: D War, Threat Level Midnight: The Movie). Part Encino Man, part Terminator, Jack is a blank slate without a past (he doesn’t even have fingerprints), and the tensions that he introduces mirror those often produced by proximity to the Homeless Problem. For the townspeople, particularly the horny female residents, Jack is a sweet, well-meaning hunk whose looks alone entitle him to admiration, protection, and empowerment. The cops, meanwhile, view him as a pure dehumanized threat, a chaos agent whose mere presence could, if left unchecked, unravel the social fabric of Hope Springs. The push-pull between these two camps is telling, because Jack can only “belong” in one of two places: in the streets or in jail.
Within the sporadically applied logic of Hot Frosty, Jack “belonging” out in the cold does “make sense” since, despite his transformation into a flesh-and-blood man with eight-pack, sculpted marble abs, he can still melt like a snowman if he gets too hot. (“I could wake up tomorrow and be a puddle,” Jack notes at one point, poetically, dementedly.) This low-concept wrinkle transforms Kathy’s freezing-cold house into a refuge and a hybrid space, at once an inside and an outside, a transitional zone in which Jack can learn the rules of civilized society and become a “real man.” Appropriately for this brand of streaming content, much of Jack’s education is facilitated by staring at Kathy’s TV for hours on end, watching the dating, cooking, and home repair shows that enable him to woo Kathy, roll pizza dough in her kitchen, fix her staircase, and secure employment as a handyman by day, dance chaperone by night at the nearby middle school. In a much less subtle fashion than this year’s Best Picture frontrunner, Sean Baker’s Anora, Hot Frosty evokes Pretty Woman as it nears its climax, its makeover/glow-up montage illuminating that while beauty, humor, personality, compassion, and intelligence can get you somewhere in America, it’s having money that ultimately makes you fully a person.
The “unlikelihood” of the inevitable romance between Kathy and Jack, a lady and a snowman, is underscored by the assumed opposition between homeless people and one of the most revered American archetypes: the small business owner. The formation of Jack’s consciousness, and the solidifying of his relationship with Kathy, thus occur in tandem with him learning how not to be the kind of homeless person who would ever undermine commerce, disrupt the peace, or inconvenience anyone else for a single second. Along the way, Jack purchases a replacement window for the one he broke at the clothing store, then apologizes to the owners, who don’t just forgive him but thank him for his honesty, generosity, and the opportunity for them to put into practice the principles of restorative justice. When the sheriff finally apprehends Jack at the school dance, Jack consoles Kathy by announcing, “I broke the law and have to face the consequences.” Unlike the townspeople, who believe Jack’s character, service, and gestures of repentance should factor into the sheriff’s treatment of him, Jack understands that the system will always view him—and everyone else who lives in the street—as less than, not quite human.
But not for long: After the sheriff arbitrarily sets Jack’s bail at $2000, Kathy races to collect the necessary cash from the community before Jack melts in his jail cell. (There are several more Substack posts to be written about Hot Frosty and the bail reform debate.) This sequence culminates in a quintessential COVID-era scene, a protest outside the police station, where the sheriff’s own son convinces him to release Jack and return the donated money. Jack, extremely sweaty and apparently dead1, is carried from the jail like Christ from the cross at Golgotha, placed upon a snowbank like an iPhone upon a wireless charger, but it appears that all is lost—until Kathy resurrects him with a kiss. Suddenly, Jack awakens and starts shivering, his newfound humanity having granted him the ability to be cold. That phrasing promotes the assumption that, soon enough, Jack will be strolling happily and coldly past the homeless along main street without a second thought, and if the poor unfortunate wretches do ask him for a handout, he will tell them, wallet fat in his pocket, that he doesn’t have any cash on him. Maybe next time.
Obviously, Hot Frosty is only “about homelessness” in the most subliminal, repressed sense, but when a media apparatus reaches the scale and influence of Netflix, what is subliminal becomes significant. While it’s debatable whether Hot Frosty is passable self-aware holiday fare or a soulless corporate content generation exercise, its underlying message is no different than every other movie or series streamed on Netflix: Whether we’re talking about Roma, The Great British Baking Show, Stranger Things, The Meyerowitz Stories, or Hot Frosty, the subliminal message behind every image and sound emitted by Netflix is stay inside. In that respect, the horrors alluded to in this review’s first paragraph, along with the explicit and implicit violences of contemporary life in general, are all positively contributing to society inasmuch as they are fueling the financial growth and cultural domination of the streaming industry. The word for this arrangement is synergy. It’s cold and scary out there, the one screen tells us, before directing us to the safety of the other screen.
Kathy and Jack aren’t content with receding from the world, though. On Christmas morning, Jack gifts Kathy the tools to repair her busted heating system, and she in turn gives him two tickets for a couple’s vacation to Hawaii. Since 2007, when HUD began sharing updated data, Hawaii has boasted the single-worst homelessness per-capita rate in the country, with homelessness increasing by 30% in the 10 years following the beginning of the Great Recession. Then, earlier this year, something magical happened. Thanks to increased funds for permanent housing for the displaced and unhoused, Hawaii was able to considerably reduce the size of its homeless population. Now, it stands as the state with the second-worst homelessness per-capita rate in the country. At last, a reason to feel optimistic as Christmas gives way to the new year. Hope springs eternal.
Numerical Score for Numbskulls
2.25 Magical Knit Scarves out of 5 🧣
“You can’t defibrillate a snowman!”