Why I tried to watch Emily in Paris and Why I Couldn’t Bring Myself To

 

The gorgeous shots of the Paris landmarks, the attractive lead actress, and the lighthearted comedy of the show, all got nearly everyone talking about Emily in Paris. Here is why I tried to watch the show, and why I couldn’t.

 

Why I tried to like it

First, of course, there is the show’s setting: the city of Paris itself.

No no no no, this is not going to be about any of the fantasies surrounding “the city of lights” or clichés about the “city of love”; je m’en fous about everyone’s (largely unrequited) love affair with that place.

Paris is a city I love to hate. I have never passed on a chance to visit (even during layovers, as long as I had a valid Schengen visa and enough time to go in and out of the airport; I happen to have even entered Paris twice on the same day but that’s a different story for a different time), and yet I never stop complaining about it. If you think of it, partaking of whatever joy the city brings while endlessly complaining about it is the most suitable attitude towards the city that invented miserablism, and perhaps one of the very few things I agree with the French upon.

The other thing I agree with the French on is their attitude towards Americanism. Of course French anti-Americanism is loaded with white entitlement, imperial nostalgia, and contemporary colonial competition with the imperial hub, and of course it unfolds in snobbish and rude (in other words particularly French) ways that do not spare non-Americans, but one thing that makes French snobbishness bearable to me is knowing that the Americans are getting no preferential treatment.

The show, then, seems to strike many points all at once: depicting the beauty of Paris while satirizing the rudeness of the Parisians (don’t accuse me of generalization; I said the Parisians, not the French!), satirizing American uncouthness, parochialism, and entitlement, while presenting a conceited American tourist who gets slammed by the French for her cultural insensitivity and her parochial attachment to her American ways. What is not to like?

Well, a lot!

Emily and Imperialism, or why I cannot stand the character

But Ahmed, is there anything that isn’t about imperialism?

No, there isn’t.

 

Now let me get something else out of the way: I would hate to see the tide turning for Emily. It is not (only) that I am a hater or that I am practicing reverse-racism against white Americans (hey! I have white friends, okay?!) but it is that Emily represents many things I hate about Americanism: she can decide to go to France on a whim— exploiting her passport privilege and not needing to worry about security screenings, background checks, or even a sound work skill or expertise that qualifies her for the move (instead she barrels her “American perspective” as if merely being American is enough of a qualification and an excuse to impose one’s point of view, personally and professionally— more on this in a moment, but let us not pretend that a transnational American firm acquiring a smaller French one and sending an unqualified American to oversee the acquisition have nothing to do with financial imperialism), and she does that with a singularly American arrogance and hubris. She doesn’t even speak the language and when asked how she expects to survive a job in Paris without a word of French she whimsically screams in her unbearable mid-western squeak “fake it until you make it!” She does try to learn French but her attempts seem to be half hearted, and she only says cliché words (bonjour, j'aime beaucoup) in an abominable American accent. Her arrogance extends not only to objecting to anything that deviates from what she would expect in America  but also to trying to give her colleagues lessons in work ethics, feminism, and political correctness—and while allowing the French characters to articulate a different perspectives, especially on gender politics, the show seems not the least bit critical about this American messianism.

This turning of the world into an open field for American missionary activities is enacted by the production of the series itself. It manifests not only in the fact that Netflix marches its crusade for political correctness through the streets of Paris and markets it to the rest of the world (latching onto the clichéd appeal of the city and the worldwide fantasy of the city of love and lights to the extent that one of the bleakest cities in the West is marketed as cheerful) but also through the acting and casting. Next to Lilly Collins who plays Emily with no skill or on-screen presence, the show casts seasoned, skilled, and present French actors (like, for example Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu who does not reach her full potential in this show, but you can watch her shine in Dix pour cent). It is as if Americanness simply elevates the American actor to the level of the other non-American stars, the same way the Americanness of Emily who lacks experience and vision allows her to be parachuted as a media expert on her French firm to provide (read impose) an American perspective.  It is the same imperial hubris whereby an incompetent American can expect to “fake it until they make it” anywhere in the world, even if at the expense of everyone else.

The Clash of Imperial Arrogances

I know, the French are not victims of imperialism; if anything they provided America with the precedent and remain complicit in contemporary financial imperialism, bids for global dominance, and near-genocidal colonial wars. But, to me there is something profoundly troubling with the attempts of Americans (officials, non-official organizations, and individuals) to act the savior wherever they set foot. As the show presents a riff on the overused “American in Paris” story setting, Emily’s insistence on playing the educator and the savior reenacts (sometimes consciously) the American savior fantasy that characterizes the remembrance of the liberation of France (and obfuscates how the Resistance, the Communist Parties, and the Soviet Red Army played the most decisive role in this victory). Emily’s prosaic, mainstream, and basic reference to D- Day and Saving Private Ryan when her neighbor tells her he is from Normandy is situated in that same context. Her neighbor seems oblivious about the reference—which in fact does not make sense, neither the history of WWII nor mainstream Hollywood is something an average non-American anywhere in the world (and in France of all places) would not be familiar with. The neighbor’s obliviousness, nevertheless, can be seen as a typically French passive aggressive response to the American exhibitionist saviorism. Perhaps without knowing, the makers of the show depicted in this scene the clash of imperial arrogances.

But, if the French seem arrogant, Emily masters her colonial arrogance from behind her imperial gaze—equipped with the gadgets of post-modern imperialism/saviorism and eager to live in an American bubble even if this bubble only exists in cyberspace and only lives from hashtag to hashtag. Emily’s (imperial) arrogance extends to taking and posting pictures of people without their permission (including pictures of children, which is in fact illegal in France unless both parents consent), and marking them with judgmental and/or exoticizing hashtags. Anthropologists need to coin a new term for this phenomenon when the power of the colonial gaze meets the power of social media (the instagaze? The imperial hashtag? An American in cyberspace? Still working on it).

This “the world is up for grabs” attitude is so American, so imperialistic, and yes it may be refreshing to see this attitude for once directed against another white population/western culture instead of having it incessantly directed at us, it is still troubling (troubling even from an American point of view: the glamorization and idealization of American provincialism and ignorance, sometimes to the extent of consecrating it as the normative and the politically correct, curtails any prospect for the Americans to learn and/or grow. Of course not all Americans are that ignorant or provincial—again, I have American friends, okay?!— but this attitude makes it easier for Americans to stay ignorant and arrogant—and by extension hated; but, then again, je m’en fous). The show’s narrative and trailer affirm this troubling imperial positionality as  Emily is described by her French boss as a strong woman ready to conquer the world; but she isn’t: she is a naïve and arrogant American girl unwilling to learn, but yes, she is ready, eager, and about to conquer the world equipped with the cutting edge technological and discursive tools of the American empire.

Emily is the quintessential metropolitan subject of the empire, the subject who really thinks the world is “their oyster” and is ready to devour it without even worrying about any culturally specific table manners—worse she is ready to devour it without savoring its real taste.

On how Emily is not Carrie Bradshaw

Some have compared Emily to Sex and the City heroine Carrie Bradshaw— mainly because both shows share the same producer. And yes I see the similarities, Carrie, like Emily, is an entitled, selfish, privileged, and spoilt rich white woman who promotes a certain brand of feminism that only accommodates white upper class city women and enables them through the rich and influential men who admire (read sexually desire) them (anyone else suspects that Mr. Big may in fact be Donald Trump?). There is a big difference however, and it does not only lie in the fact that Lily Collins, who plays Emily has none of the charisma or charm of Sara Jessica Parker. More importantly, Carrie is a very well written unbearable character whereas Emily is a very badly written unbearable character. In fact part of the appeal of Sex and the City, I would argue, is that while the main characters represent familiar stereotypes, it fleshes out these stereotypes, shows us their doubts, their failures, their attempts to change, etc., ultimately making them more real and relatable. The result is: one probably could not bear Carrie for a few minutes if one were to meet her or her likes in person, but you would watch her for hours on television and not get bored. The same could not be said about Emily.

 The character is weakly written in every aspect: not enough background (the show makers do not even know how old she is and when Collins, who clearly did no character research before faking it until {barely} making it ventured an answer she did not make sense), no direction or character development, no human reactions to what is going on around her—aside from American entitlement and self-pity. Of course what I see here as bad writing can be turned into good writing if we think of the show and the character as satires for the stunted imperial American subject who fails to grow, but even on the most intimate personal level, and even in relationship to her America, Emily remains a non-character and fails to react to her world and what happens to her in her world. The clearest example: her boyfriend, whom she describes as her “almost fiancé,” all of a sudden breaks up with her. And though she did not anticipate this move, we see zero screen time dedicated to her reaction or how she moves on—aside from a casual self-pity note that glamorizes her individuation in the face of Paris, and a casual note on how she is getting over him through croissants.

 Do not get me wrong, I am all for moving on after bad breakups, and if you can move on in a matter of a few days, all power to you, but when the character in front of us describes someone as “almost fiancé” and then he breaks up with her, then we need to see how the breakup affected her and how she got over it, even if would only take a few minutes on screen. But she doesn’t get sad for a minute. The character is either so badly written, or so narcissistic that her withdrawal into herself, her hashtags, and her croissants does not allow her to really become invested in someone she was expecting to marry (indeed she can live without him but she cannot live without her American peanut butter). 

The writers did not create a strong character that was able to move on, they created a weakly written character who is not affected or further developed by the events that happen to her. Or worse, they created and glamorized a self-involved, self-contained character that fails to interact with the world around her or to grow. A character who listens to the legitimate if harsh critique the other non-American characters point at her, but instead of learning anything from what they said, resorts to self pity and then repeats the exact same things she was criticized for. The narcissistic subject of the empire becomes a glamorized hero, and I’d hate to see her getting away with it.