Review

Emily in Paris: Bonjour clichés!

by Darren Star

The new series 'Emily in Paris' has already received a lot of attention, but not without the critique. Parisians are routinely portrayed with a very essentialized and stereotypical national identity, which shapes our idea of 'Frenchness'.

Tinka Krikke

Published date

05/05/2021 - 09:00

Courses

The multicultural individual

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Read time

7 minutes

All Americans are obese, all Asians are good at math, and all black people are poor. Such generalizations inappropriate but are still used by the media and they are also omnipresent in Emily in Paris. Different characters in series are easily understood as representative for a certain culture, but some series miss the complexities that a culture actually holds by presenting an easy story. When the series Emily in Paris appeared on Netflix, many French viewers indicated that they were offended by the way the Parisians were presented. I will analyze how the French identity depicted in Emily in Paris clashes with the idea that we live in a multicultural world.

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Emily in Paris

Emily in Paris aired on Netflix October 2, 2020, and has already received a lot of attention. The series is about Emily (see figure 1), a 22-year-old girl that moves to Paris for work, without speaking French. She is sent there to give an American point of view in a luxury marketing firm, but she struggles to get along with her colleagues as she attempts to adjust their French culture to the American way. Emily shares her journey in Paris through her photos on Instagram, by which she becomes an influencer crazily fast. She is confronted with mean Parisians, aggressively flirtatious Frenchman, lazy and smoking colleagues, and many more stereotypical characters.

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National identity in Emily in Paris

The series seems to present ‘Frenchness’ as a national identity that is very much stereotyped and essentialized. This notion of national identity contradicts our contemporary idea of a globalized and multicultural world. Castelló (2009) explains that our idea of a national culture is significantly formed by television fiction, mainly by the routinizing and banalizing way it is presented. Netflix, as a mass media platform, plays a central role in the process of culturally defining types of nation. “American media, in particular, feature a very limited amount of French culture” (Ferber, 2008). are a cultural product that is created and consumed as a routine (Castelló, 2009). This means that a platform like Netflix adds a little bit to our idea of a national identity everyday, which is partly why it is so effective in building this national identity.

The creators of the content, in this case among others Darren Star, decided which identity issues are salient. The characters in Emily in Paris are stylized in a way that makes them ‘typically French’. Based on this, the people who watch the series will make assumptions about the reality of the French culture. Their main motive for watching the series is presumably entertainment, which is why they learn these things in an implicit way. People are likely to put individuals in boxes, simply to make sense of the bigger picture. These abstract boxes are used by the mass media as a strategy for entertainment.

The characters in Emily in Paris represent the behavior of a bigger group, namely of the Parisians or even all French people. For example, all the men in the series are presented as demanding flirters. There are few men that Emily meets and do not ask her on a date or flirt with her, which might suggest that every Frenchman is assertively flirtatious. The reality is always far more complex, but because this stereotype is routinized, it is perceived by the audience as a fact. However, this fact can be challenged by people who regard the characters as inappropriately stereotyped.

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Emily in Paris: French critique

A lot of critique from the French audience has appeared on, mostly the stylization of the characters. A French critic said the following: “Frankly, watching Emily in Paris there’s plenty to feel insulted about. When they decided to caricature us, the authors didn’t hold back” (The Guardian, 2020). By saying that the authors caricatured the Parisians, the critic refers to the stylization (Koven & Marque, 2015) of these fictional characters. The characters are presented with so many typical features that it comes across as comical.

Not all French people, however, were offended by the way in which the Parisians were presented. Although Chenal (a Paris-based girl) describes in her review that she does not agree that these stereotypes are a good representation of reality, she does not take it too serious. “I think the cliches and the stereotypes are so concentrated and exaggerated that they’re making the series comical” (Chenal, 2020). She describes that people that actually visited Paris should know that the Paris in the series is more a fantasy version.

Besides the caricaturization, the fact that the stereotypes aren’t portraying reality also seems to offend the French audience. In the first episode, Emily arrives in her ‘chambre de bonne’, which is a relatively cheap and small room in an apartment building. The ‘chambre de bonne’ in the series, however, is actually a beautiful and big apartment according to the Parisian standards. The episode was followed by Parisians who shared videos or pictures of what their ‘chambre de bonne’ looks like The caption of the second TikTok says “Non Emily, ca c’est une vrai chambre de bonne a 14m2” (No Emily, that’s a real chambre de bonne of 14 square meters), which indicates that they do not regard the one in the series as ‘real’.

Throughout the series, the French people are continuously portrayed as mean (see figure 2). Especially the Frenchwomen seem to have an aggressive, jealous, and anti-feminist attitude. This behavior does not sit very well with the French , one Parisian stated that “If you come into a store, don’t bother to say “Bonjour” and start talking in English right away, people might not take it super well”. (Telling, 2020). Her message indicates that French people are not always mean, but Emily just adapts insufficiently.

While Star reduces the French characters in ‘Emily in Paris’ to their supposedly essential Frenchness, she presents Emily as a typically American. Emily is very dedicated to her job and her every move seems to be career oriented. When she describes this to her French colleague, he answers with “you live to work, we work to live.” This puts the essentialized version of the American culture in opposition to the French one. Another example is a scene in a restaurant in which Emily does not like her steak and sends it back to the chef. The chef tells her to just try it, after which Emily teach him a lesson about costumer service (see figure 4). These are just two of many examples where Emily’s American mindset conflicts with the French one. These group boundaries fail to reach the complexity of reality.

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A single story

Whether the cliches are true or not, people are likely to (unconsciously) this stereotypical idea of French people, especially if the media is their only source of knowledge about the French culture (Ferber, 2008). In reality, identities are influenced by many aspects, of which national identity is just one. This one-sided way of representation in the media is what Adichie would call “the danger of a single story”. The characters in ‘Emily in Paris’ possess Frenchness as their single story. Adichie (2009) describes that a single story limits people’s knowledge and expectations of a concept, in this case France. Many watchers will assume the series represents what is ‘authentically French’, whereas the critique of the French watchers seem to disagree.

The highly popular series Emily in Paris raises questions about cultural as the French critique suggests that Darren Star might have inappropriately borrowed cultural stereotypical features and put them in the wrong context. The characters were constructed out of these concepts that seem essential for ‘being French’, but the reality is that individuals are members of many groups. The Parisian characters thus seemed to have no other dimensions beside their Frenchness, but being . If this stereotypical image is the only story that is being told to people, they will form their expectations of the French culture on this story. The comical stylization and stereotypes are entertaining, but simultaneously challenge our view of a multicultural world.

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