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If I only watched movies where the character turns directly to the camera and says “I’m exactly the kind of liberal you are,” I would not watch very many movies. Still, it’s hard not to doom when every holiday season I’m accosted with anti-development, NIMBY-coded feel-good rom-coms.
Last year, I stumbled onto An Autumn Romance1, wherein a librarian loses her job and must, of course, move to a small Montana town to live with her brother. Her brother is working to “save” a historic hotel from developers who have bought it with plans to turn it into a resort and “bring more money into town.” One of those developers, played by Chad Michael Murray (!!), is a former townie who (you guessed it) is now a big-money-guy-who-has-lost-touch-with-what-really-matters.
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The librarian discovers that because the hotel is more than 100 years old, it’s eligible for landmark status2 — they just have to prove that a significant historical event took place on the property. You know where this is going, I know where this is going, and yet, I still can’t believe it.
Our main character discovers a photo of Teddy Roosevelt pictured in front of the hotel, saving the hotel and showing Chad Michael Murray that everything he’s been looking for is in this small Montana town.
The plot of An Autumn Romance was designed in a lab to give me an aneurysm, but it’s hardly the first. Two Weeks Notice even has my beloved Sandra Bullock lie in front of a bulldozer to prevent the erection of an apartment building.3
I’d been thinking for a long time about the prevalence of the anti-development holiday romcom when I saw a recent piece by comedian and writer Jeff Maurer who came up with his own, depressing, answer for why anti-development themes do better than pro-development ones in movies:
“YIMBY narratives aren’t compatible with screenwriting principles or with human psychology, generally,” Maurer argued, adding that “movies inevitably focus on the fear of loss, not the potential for gain.”
Maurer certainly has more expertise in the screenwriting business than I do, but I don’t think this is quite right. 4
First, because there is at least one very good YIMBY TV show: Show Me a Hero, starring Oscar Isaac. It’s the story of how NIMBYs in Yonkers, New York, stubbornly opposed the development of townhomes for low-income families. It’s a complicated (and tragic) TV show, but the villains are pretty obviously the NIMBYs. There are even subplots tracing the lives of low-income public housing residents who end up in the new development. 5
So it’s clearly possible to poignantly express the benefits of new housing through film, though I’d grant that it’s probably more difficult.
But why then has NIMBYism loomed so large in the genre?
Well, the holidays are a time when people tend to go back to their childhood homes, creating the perfect setting for reflecting on community, growing up, the poignancy of change, and tradition. In the same way that coming-of-age films augur change, dynamism, adventure, and striking out into the unknown, Christmas films set up the exact opposite dynamic.
Further, the very same forces that make YIMBYism politically hard — that losses from development prevention are concentrated and benefits are diffuse — are what make YIMBY narratives more complicated. It’s not that a complex film showing the knock-on benefits and harms of new housing is impossible, but it’s much easier to showcase conflict of a more direct sort: Developer bulldozes a family’s beloved Christmas treefarm.
For low-budget rom-coms, defaulting to a simpler, tried-and-true narrative is just safer than trying to subvert the genre.
