Cinema is the least revolutionary of the arts: it happily plugs autocracy and hyper-capitalism with the Avengers franchise, and Ironman the pretend philanthropist and stupid Batman – infantile billionaires who save the world with weapons that you might conceivably buy in the Conran Shop should you fall down a wormhole to Chelsea.

Meanwhile, social democracy looks on, powerless and weak, for it has no superheroes. Real – that is, elected – politicians are the villains in this world, plus aliens. They are corrupt, and lacking in Batmobiles.

Christmas films – those set during Christmas, and those we habitually watch between Christmas and the new year – are as reactionary. They preach social conservatism and the compassionate possibilities of capitalism. Meanwhile, if you aren’t chosen for wealth and good fortune, they preach acceptance and gratitude. Suck your fate down, for there are no real gifts at Christmas.

Home was where George Bailey (James Stewart) couldn’t bear to be in It’s a Wonderful Life, but he learned to love it in the end. He had to, or die. An angel – a sort of heavenly management consultant, moving up the hierarchy – found Bailey contemplating suicide, such was the tedium of life in Bedford Falls.

Bedford Falls is a small American town, and the only place on earth that has actually practised David Cameron’s ridiculous doctrine (and nonsensical alternative to a functioning welfare state) which he called “big society”. Bailey is a banker of the righteous kind, and he battles with a banker of the wicked kind: Henry Potter.

The angel shows Bailey how Bedford Falls will be transformed if Potter prevails. It will become Potterville, a hell where sexual immorality, and even drink – drink! – are tolerated. That is, it will be a place where any sane person might wish to live.

Kansas! There’s no place like home: that’s a mantra to enslave a child. Who wouldn’t be happier in Oz?

It’s a Wonderful Life is very moving but it is really an examination of the consoling possibilities of capitalism, and it is fantastical. These are stories to warm a child; but the FBI still considered it communist propaganda – 1946 was quite a paranoid year.

Ray Bolger, Judy Garland and Jack Haley in the Wizard of Oz. Photograph: SNAP/Rex Features

The Wizard of Oz (1939) – spiritually a Christmas film and so shown at Christmas – preaches the same love of the hearth, the same mindless gratitude. Don’t yearn for what you can’t have, or attempt to transcend your fate; if something exciting does happen to you, wish it away quickly, with a prayer. Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) is blown to Oz to meet witches and wizards and she only wants, for some reason, to get back to Kansas.

Kansas! There’s no place like home: that’s a mantra to enslave a child. I have never understood why the Wizard of Oz became a countercultural obsession, but people can be very strange. Who wouldn’t be happier in Oz?

The adaptations of A Christmas Carol – the best is 1951’s Scrooge with Alastair Sim – tell the same story as It’s a Wonderful Life, but, as David Mamet has noted, it is told from the perspective of the Henry Potter character, partially redeemed – Ebenezer Scrooge. Prompted by ghosts, or possibly the urgings of his own subconscious, Scrooge mutates from neoliberal cartoon monster to the kind of paternalist who will not actively murder a child with poverty, and who buys a turkey for his friends once a year. The bar for cinematic Christmas saviours is quite low. George Osborne could, potentially, vault over it.

Eddie Murphy in Trading Places. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount/Sportsphoto Ltd

Or there is Trading Places (1983), in which a black tramp (Eddie Murphy) switches lives with a white commodities broker (Dan Ackroyd). Trading Places falls short of pushing Nazi-style eugenics, and that is to its credit. But, we must ask – does the tramp bring perspective to his new surroundings? Don’t be stupid, this is a Christmas film. He throws his old friends out of the mansion because they are untidy, or rather, poor and contemptuous of property. We wave goodbye to him on a Caribbean island, with his new rich white friends. All he needed to be a good man was wealth, and he won it, at Christmas.

For women, the Christmas genre is gruesome. Home Alone (1990) is a warning to bad mothers, and we are all bad mothers. She literally forgot Kevin. No wonder he felt the urge to be unforgettable.

Renée Zellwegger and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary Photograph: Handout

Bridget Jones’s Diary is nothing without a man attached to a Christmas jumper; her career – journalism apparently, which is depressing – is an afterthought to her real vocation, which is crying in socks. Even in 2001 being man-free at Christmas was something that would lead a woman to alcoholism – and who wouldn’t understand?

The Holiday (2006) told a similar story; only the actors were different. Die Hard (1988), meanwhile, is a fable about what happens when a woman accepts a promotion: her place of work is blown up by Alan Rickman. She survives, due to her husband’s skills with his fists, but she is humbled enough to take her married name again. Even in Casablanca from 1942 – another spiritual Christmas film – Ilsa Lund didn’t take the man she wanted, but slumped off with Victor, because Rick did the thinking for both of them.

So, merry Christmas, and happy 2018. May your Christmas season dreams be conservative dreams.