Netflix’s Christmas lineup is firing on all cylinders this year, and its latest output, Our Little Secret, is a perfectly mindless vehicle for holiday cheer and Lindsay Lohan’s comeback tour. That is, until seven minutes in, when you are smacked in the face with a staggering, unforgivable timeline montage that plays during the opening credits.
First, a little context: Our Little Secret begins in 2014, when our two main characters (played by Lohan and Ian Harding of Pretty Little Liars fame) break up in a way that only rom-com characters can, right in the middle of a surprise good-bye-party-slash-proposal gone horrifically wrong. Cue “Summer” by Calvin Harris — have I mentioned the entire movie takes place in chilly December settings? — and the opening credits, which play against a jarring montage of news events, before our characters’ lives pick back up at a fake-looking architecture firm in 2024.
Ostensibly, the opening timeline is supposed to show us a sampling of what’s happened in the ten years since these characters broke up. In reality, Netflix has tossed us a brutal fever dream of human-interest stories and aging memes from the past decade. Here’s a few things that are included: The ALS ice-bucket challenge, the legalization of same-sex marriage, Kobe Bryant retiring, the invention of Beyond Meat, the Thai cave rescue, Jeff Bezos’s rocket, NFTs, and Barbenheimer. Perhaps in a nod to the fact that Lohan’s character lives in London for some stretch of this time, a few royal events are tossed in — Harry and Meghan’s wedding, Charles’s ascent to the throne. There are also headlines about three (three!) different Netflix shows, in what I might call an exaggeration of the streamer’s impact on culture in the past decade.
Obviously, it is a huge misstep to let reality swing, wrecking-ball style, into a movie that we have turned to for total escapism. We come here for a full brain unplug, to dwell in a world where snowmen can have six-packs. We do not want to think about Cybertrucks and the dystopian fact that Netflix is advertising Stranger Things in its own holiday movie. To be clear, these events have no impact whatsoever on the movie’s plot beyond the fact that the characters may or may not have been thinking about them during the past ten years of their lives. (This feels like a missed opportunity — why not say LiLo and her new fiancé fell in love over a mutual obsession with the Suez Canal saga?)
One of my colleagues theorized that, in an attempt to prevent the good holiday vibes from being ruined, the timeline seems to have limited itself to positive — or, at the very least, neutral — events. That would explain why we see Bernie Sanders wearing a mask and mittens at Joe Biden’s inauguration, but there’s no mention of COVID-19 or any of the elections that happened during this stretch of time. The same goes for Bryant’s departure from the Lakers, conveniently omitting his death a few years later. And the royal news did not include any Harry and Meghan drama or even the queen’s death.
Yet, despite Netflix’s best (?) efforts, I am somehow still reeling from its decision to pack a decade’s worth of random real-life headlines into a 90-second opening-title sequence. Luckily, there’s still an hour and a half of holiday high jinks — and Kristin Chenoweth — after the credits to soothe my nerves.
