#83: The subtle treachery of 'Emily in Paris'
#83: The subtle treachery of 'Emily in Paris'
Good morning!
The below essay is about Emily in Paris, but it doesn’t contain spoilers nor do you need to have seen the show to understand what I’m talking about (I don’t think). Originally I’d planned to write about a bunch of media properties that are converging to create a parallel universe that exists exclusively in the collective conscience, but ultimately settled on the pinhole to unreality that is Darren Star’s latest and greatest success. On y va!
The Subtle Treachery of Emily in Paris
In season two of Emily in Paris, titular character Emily Cooper wears fingerless leather gloves on seven separate occasions. (In case you missed that, I said seven.) There are many questions worth asking in light of this development, such as: What do fingerless leather gloves have to do with a Chicago marketing executive whose entire personality is that she wants a promotion? Or maybe: Wait are fingerless leather gloves a thing? Or most simply: Why? But the question Emily in Paris costume consultant Patricia Field wants you to ask is more straightforward: Where can I buy myself a pair of fingerless leather gloves? The answer is from Field’s new collaboration with glove brand Seymore, which consists of not seven but 11 pairs of fingerless leather gloves.
When Page Six asked the infamous Field to share her favorite outfit in season two, she replied: “[Emily] takes the railroad from Paris to the French Riviera, and gets off the train and she’s wearing this silk coat—really pretty, with a light print on it—and the white fingerless gloves. I was really happy with it.” It’s unconfirmed whether Field was intentionally plugging her glove collection here (almost certainly) or if the gloves were simply featured so heavily in the season that it was almost impossible not to plug them (also true), but the effect, of course, was the same. And after completing season two, released over the holidays, I believe this is precisely the genius—which is to say, the depravity—of the show itself. It’s impossible to disentangle Emily in Paris from its marketing, or even from marketing as a general concept.
For the uninitiated, Emily in Paris debuted in October 2020 and shot to the top of the Netflix charts and proceeded to dominate Twitter for weeks. It was important that the show was extremely digestible—a crib mobile for adults, best watched quickly, eyes barely focused, dignity prostrate before the spectacle. But it wouldn’t have had half the staying power if not for its discourse-piquing idiocy: the garish designer outfits, the implausible plot lines, the facile depictions of social media, the glamorization of the “American work ethic” and the endless French stereotypes. To love Emily in Paris was to bathe in its badness. It was to understand, on some unspoken level, that if the show were better, it’d be worse. It was post-irony commodified.
Season two helped me understand all this with a new clarity. Perhaps in response to criticism, it seemed like the writers were trying to do better this time around—diversify the storylines, teach Emily a lesson or two. Most obviously they deviated from the brain-dead formula of season one: marketing challenge ➡️ marketing plan ➡️ marketing hiccup ➡️ marketing victory. (I happen to think this was a winning formula.) The effect was a scatter-brained season featuring an unforgivable amount of musical numbers and only marginally better politics. Watching it felt like doing homework. But for the price of my dedication I gained a fresh perspective on why the show feels like it’s bringing us ever closer to the sun. Contrary to Twitter critics, it’s not the unlikeable protagonist or idiosyncratic narrative decisions around American versus French work culture, irritating as they are. It is actually the show’s rotten, ideological core: a sustained, devout belief in the art of marketing.
Of course, you don’t have to “believe” in marketing to recognize its permeation into nearly every aspect of modern life. But Emily in Paris does more than dip that notion in sugar; it imagines an alternative universe in which marketing is not a nefarious, overreaching presence in our lives, but a conduit for infinite possibility—even a force for good. In Emily’s world, advertising campaigns are never cynical or tricky or market-tested; they’re aha! moments, a twinkle in the eye of a skinny 24-year-old in an unconvincing wig. Her designer clothes don’t advertise her class position; they’re a quirk of personality. As if acting in a commercial for Instagram, Emily’s use of the app only barely interrupts her life or work: photos are snapped once, captions are written with a flick of the leather-gloved wrist. And her resultant digital fame never translates to time wasted scrolling, or fretting about her perception, or dealing with trolls. If a good story is defined by tension and release, the tension of Emily in Paris is never more than a good PR spin away from release. About that fact, it’s never cynical.
Forget accusations of the show being unrealistic; the reality it depicts is essentially “the upside down” of our own. An ad for ads. Marketing for marketing itself. As critic Sophie Gilbert put it, there’s a “meta-emptiness to it where it’s just levels and levels of anti-depth.” In this way its purported escapism takes on a darker character. We use it not to escape the onslaught of marketing in our lives, but to experience the onslaught without its consequences.
This fantasy extends beyond the scripted show. When Emily’s friend Mindy performs countless songs in pursuit of a music career in season two, viewers wonder if it’s actually the actress Ashley Park who’s pursuing one. When star Lily Collins discovered a defaced Emily in Paris billboard last week, she pulled an Emily and cheekily spun it into good press. When Patricia Field said her favorite outfit in the show featured fingerless motorcycle gloves, did that count as scripted or unscripted? If it’s true that “every force evolves a form,” the brutal, unstoppable force of marketing in our lives finds its quintessential form in Emily in Paris. The line between fact and fiction becomes obsolete. Nothing’s so good it can’t be flattened, reproduced, and sold. Everything’s an ad for something else.
There are actually plenty of shows I’ve found more annoying to watch than Emily in Paris. And some aspects of it I genuinely appreciate, like Emily’s boss Sylvie, the beautiful shots of Paris, and the tidy little narratives. But I disagree with the popular opinion that the show is comforting to watch only because it’s tension-less fluff. There is more to it. Something darker embedded at the root about what it means to participate in modern life. Like an ad featuring an exercise bike stationed in front of the Seine river, Emily in Paris has a disdain for its audience that’s easy to miss. More and more, I sense this subtle treachery with “turn-your-brain-off” entertainment: a sales pitch repackaged as a spa day. We can spend our time arguing over the details—who’s good and who’s bad, whether this or that thing is realistic or effective or cringe. But ultimately we’ve already bought in.
My favorite thing I read this week was “The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive,” by Dan Brooks for Gawker, on the startling lack of imagination on the part of the software engineers and hedge fund managers who have tasked themselves with bringing about “the future.” This past week’s 15 things also included my new favorite game, cocktail, and coat feature. Lastly I asked my subscribers to recommend the perfect body soap (I’m out of mine) and received a barrage of impassioned comments. I can’t believe everyone’s been loving their body wash for years without telling me about it.
On the podcast this week: And Just Like That…Emily’s in Paris
Thrilled to invite Avi Bonnerjee and Harling Ross back on the pod this week to discuss Emily in Paris S2 and the new SATC reboot, And Just Like That… (famously a series that not only starts with a conjunction but ends in an ellipsis). It is decidedly more fun than the above newsletter, with discussions re: outfits, character arcs, surprises (good and bad), and so much more. It’s a spoiler superhighway, you’ve been warned. Out Tuesday, 9 a.m.
Thanks so much for reading! I hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley