Our Little Secret, the new Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie, has a cute enough setup. Netflix’s description explains that it is about “two resentful exes are forced to spend Christmas under the same roof after discovering that their current partners are siblings.”
I will never watch it. The title reminds me of an extremely upsetting PSA that ran throughout my childhood.
In the film, Lohan is playing a young woman named Avery (great name) who discovers that her new boyfriend’s sister is dating a man named Logan (Ian Harding) whose marriage proposal Avery turned down a decade ago.
The PSA ran during cartoons as I grew up in the Los Angeles area, during the 1980s, and features an adult voice saying “Now don’t tell anyone where I touched you. It will just be our little secret.”
In the movie, Avery and Logan decide, for the sake of keeping the peace, not to tell their respective partners about their shared history. But of course this leads to romantic tension in a house full of relatives trying to enjoy the holidays.
I’ve been trying to find the creepy PSA, via YouTube and Google, since being surprised by the title of the movie. Surely someone in the Netflix chain of command remembered this ad? Surely lots of Netflix employees grew up, like me, in Los Angeles in the 1980s?
The Our Little Secret Movie vs the Our Little Secret PSA
I’m a solid Lindsay Lohan fan and would ordinarily be happy to watch a movie with this cute hook — kind of reminiscent of the terrific Glen Powell-Sydney Sweeney rom-com Anyone But You, one of the big theatrical success stories of 2023 and subsequently a cute movie to watch with your special somebody on Netflix.
Also: I know I didn’t imagine this very scary PSA, but only because of a Reddit post where someone wrote: “I remember this creepy PSA that would air growing up in the 80s, very similar to the ‘stranger danger’ commercial, but this one had a creepy guy talking to a little girl, and touching her dress, and he specifically said, ‘Don’t tell anyone where I touched you. It’ll be our little secret.’ My coworkers looked at me like I was crazy! I know I’ve seen this before! Help!!” That’s more detail than I remembered.
Christmas movies, like rom-coms, are all about comforting people with familiar setups — meeting the family, etc — with just enough problems for the audience to feel like the main characters have overcome something. But wouldn’t you want the title to not creep anyone out?
One more thing about the Reddit post: In the three years since that person posted it, somehow no one has posted the original video, which somehow makes the whole thing even creepier to me. This is perhaps the only video I’ve tried to find online that I can’t find.
Do you think major studios and streamers have a department that vets titles to make sure they don’t have any weird associations? It’s totally possible that I’ve just aged out of the demo — I mean, I grew up in the ’80s, making me a full-fledged Gen Xer. Is everyone at Netflix younger than me, maybe? And am I what Gen Xers often accuse younger generations of being — too sensitive?
Also, is it possible that the reason I can’t find the PSA is that it was pulled for being too creepy? But that it was upsetting enough to have remained in my head all these decades?
I’d watch the movie if it had almost any other title, I really would. How has no one else noticed this? I’m not saying to ban this movie or boycott it or something, not at all. I’m basically a free-speech absolutist. But this just seems like a marketing misfire. Or maybe not, since no one else seems to be aware of it or care.
Also, I can’t tell you how common these kinds of PSAs were in the ’80s — there’s even one with He-Man and She-Ra. And I don’t think the effort was misplaced, either. I grew up very aware of the McMartin pre-school case, which, though it was later linked to the Satanic Panic and led to zero convictions, definitely established for me and my childhood friends that we had to be careful. I had several friends who I later found out were abused in the less-regulated ’80s. That’s part of the creepiness and sadness I feel from the phrase “our little secret.” When I hear people complain about how kids today are too supervised, I always think, OK, but what do you think that is?
