Probably the latter. Because, as much as I have managed not to watch the show, and promise myself I never will, it seems to have invaded my subconscious on the strength of silent imagery alone. I already found myself the other night waking from a particularly lucid nightmare—featuring me trapped in Paris, trying to buy something expensive at a clothing store, and discovering to my horror that my credit card had been declined. Whatever it is about this show that lodged in my brain, it is not something I have been able to assimilate to my conscious sense of self, but it appears to be potent nonetheless.
I therefore turned to Handler's article to try to make sense of it. She conveys what we are all feeling, when confronted with Emily in Paris. First, a vague irritation and sense of personal injustice. How can someone afford a new outfit like that every day, while still being enough of a put-upon underling at her work to be relatable to the audience? But then, following this: a grudging admiration for how well the show seems to tap the wellsprings of unconscious desire. Glamour, travel, sophistication—especially while we're all stuck here in COVID... What else would America prefer to binge at a time like this?
There is one aspect of the show's premise, however, that just scores too high on the implausibility-meter, even for the elastic suspension of disbelief we are willing to grant to something that plainly knows itself to be a fantasy; and it's not the main character's couture. It's the fact that she strikes it big, as the series' plot develops, by amassing an Instagram following that places her in the ranks of the platform's top influencers and launches her career in digital marketing, all on the strength of pictures and captions of herself she posts while strolling around her temporarily-adopted city.
Obviously, such a thing could happen. But Handler was not quite convinced by the examples provided of the eponymous Emily's Instagramming. Would these things really go viral? (The problem is a bit like the allegedly hilarious sketch routines ("Science Schmience," e.g.) that Aaron Sorkin penned for his show-within-a-show, Studio 60, which, perhaps inevitably, mostly amount to hectoring political speeches, delivered from Sorkin's own territorially exclusive center-left position, and spoken from the mouths of actors yet unmistakably in the stentorian voice of their omnipresent screenwriter/creator.... Would these actually be the basis for a hit comedy series?)
Our Vulture-author therefore decided to turn to real influencers on the Instagram platform—people who have made it big in real life by working the "foreign girl in Paris" beat. Based on the evidence of Emily's Instagram-posting in the series, Handler asks them, would she really garner such a large following? I mean, aren't these jokes a little trite? Isn't Paris-as-glamorous-destination pretty played out by this point? Didn't Jean Seberg already cover all the bases on this sort of thing, half a century ago? Does the world actually want to see more doofy Americans ogle painfully familiar and iconic works of art and architecture in the city of lights?
We sit back, arms folded, waiting for the real Instagram stars to tear apart fake @emily_in_paris.
Except... something dreadful happens. As we read through, and see Handler present these real-life influencers with one example after another of fake Emily's bland, milquetoast posts, we are pained to discover that the barbed take-downs are not forthcoming. Instead, something grotesque and inexplicable unfolds before our eyes: the influencers actually like them! They approve of the posts! They don't defend them as works of artistic genius, per se, but they acknowledge that they probably would do fairly well on the platform, attracting a lot of likes and clicks.
Perhaps the low point comes when the influencers are presented with a post in which the fictional Emily takes note of a pile of dog droppings on a city sidewalk. "Mind the merde!" she captions the image. Here surely, we think, the Netflix show will be castigated for its failures of realism. No way would that be a popular or interesting post, let alone something strong enough to build a reputation and career upon.
But no! Alas, the real-world Parisian influencers like this one perhaps most of all. "So funny!" they say. And "it shows she's improving her vocabulary!" Vocabulary? A single French profanity is vocabulary now?
The other posts seem scarcely more defensible. "A room with a view" as a caption under a picture from a hotel balcony? I mean, fine, sure, an allusion, it would make much more sense if she were in Italy, but whatever. "Chiseled abs" under the picture of a male nude statue? I mean, cue the sad trombone, right? Except... no. Every time, the influencers basically like it! We keep our arms folded, but with pouting resignation now.
This sort of thing is all it takes to become famous on Instagram? one thinks. How am I not famous, then? Why does no one read my blog? I can dish out the merde as good as anyone!
Uh oh... better nip that thought in the bud. This is the familiar stage in one's self-reflections in which one has resort to all the consoling Romantic mythologies: that true art is the preserve of a select few, for instance; that genius is always unappreciated in its time, and so forth. In William Gaddis' postmodern tome, J R—which I finally finished over Thanksgiving break—the character Jack Gibbs likes to quote a particularly fine example of this literature of consolation: Yeats' "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing." The true artist is Bred to a harder thing/Than Triumph, according to Yeats, and thus should take defeat/From any brazen throat.
Primarily Gibbs uses these verses in the novel to mock the poor composer Edward Bast, since the latter is his rival for the affections of the rich and beauteous Amy Joubert. The irony that Gaddis no doubt has in mind, however, is that Gibbs is himself a struggling artist whose "work has come to nothing"—a would-be writer whose great book on the mechanization of the arts has been talked about for years, but has never yet materialized. (Gaddis was himself constantly stopping and starting such a project, in the years he worked on J R—and thus Gibbs joins the ranks of other characters in the novel who represent an aspect of his creator.)
As much as Gibbs parodies the type of artistic-literary sour grapes that Yeats' poem represents, therefore, he also needs it for himself. As do I, some days of the week...
Back in October, before the election, I read the poem aloud to a friend and mentioned my view that it might be worth keeping it in our back pocket in case things didn't go our way the week of November 3. Trump, after all, is a "brazen throat" if ever there was one (I mean... the man is literally orange), and I thought that we might take solace, if we lost, in knowledge of the quiet moral superiority of our cause.
My friend waved this away, however. "Cold comfort!" he said.
Then, last night, we were talking about Emily in Paris and the Vulture article, and I expressed my dismay that the fictitious fashionista's Instagram posts really did seem to pass muster with those who knew the platform best. "It just goes to show....," I said. "The injustice of life?" he interrupted. "Well yes," I said, "but also..." and I spilled out my whole usual Romantic-artistic mythology again, about how true art is never appreciated by the masses, and is certainly therefore unlikely to flourish on such a quintessentially democratic platform as Instagram, and so on.
One of the closing admonitions of Yeats' poem came back to my mind in this moment: "Be secret and exult." And it occurred to me that if this blog were a building with a portal, this was the motto I should inscribe thereupon.
All of which may sound elitist and condescending, but don't worry—it is adopted purely provisionally, until such day as I become famous and develop a huge online following. At that moment, I will shift theories, and embrace once more my belief in the unfailing wisdom and artistic perception of the masses. It is only until said time that one must have recourse to the diet of cold comfort and sour grapes.
Because, let's face it... whatever there is inside me that tells me I'm supposed to view such a show as Emily in Paris as "bad"; there is something much more powerful still that tells me it is intrinsically interesting in some undefinable way. Because here we are, and even though I have yet to hear a single word of spoken dialogue from the show, I have already spent just shy of 1,500 words talking about it. The world wants this series to exist and to be seen, just as the world wants merde on Instagram, and plainly I am no exception to its general and inscrutable laws.
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