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EMILY STANDS in a line of supplicants. Her marketing team is wooing a potential client, fashion designer Pierre, each of her colleagues more obsequious than the last. As she begins to sputter inanities, she draws his ornithoid scowl. His eyes dart about until they fall upon her bag charm, a gilded Eiffel Tower. “RINGARDE,” he shouts in dismay. Translation: “He called you a basic bitch.”
Now Emily storms Pierre’s private box at the Palais Garnier and begins to soliloquize. TV like Gossip Girl had filled her younger self with a desire for “gorgeous, crazy-expensive couture.” But on her teenage allowance, all she could afford from any luxury brand was “a clip-on charm from an outlet mall in Winnetka.” As she speaks, her apologia becomes an accusation. “You may mock us, but the truth is . . . you need us. Without basic bitches like me, you wouldn’t be fashionable.” Thus speaks Emily in Paris.
Pierre depends for his fame and fortune on exclusivity. But being exclusive depends on exclusion, cultivation on contrast with the uncultivated masses. For our heroine, it is not a question of wealth. Winnetka, Illinois, is, after all, one of America’s richest suburbs, and present-day Emily goes jogging in a $1,500 Chanel blouse. Rather, class features as discriminating taste, that which separates Emily’s famously gaudy clothing from the elegant art of haute couture. Pierre thus resents Emily’s trinket not because it costs less than one of his dresses but because it reduces high fashion to middlebrow ornament. The artist lives in a state of perpetual war: war with Emily.
In her defense of basic bitches, Emily is not censuring Pierre, not really. Her target is not him but me. Or, better, Emily admonishes Pierre so that Emily can rebuke me. I loathe our heroine for the same reason he does: because she reminds me that I need her. She shows me what I must disavow to let myself feel superior. As Pierre reacts to Emily, so I react to Emily. At first, I agreed with the critical consensus that the show is mindless entertainment, superficial and vacuous—RINGARDE. But I am now sincerely, even zealously convinced that, in my initial reaction of smug self-satisfaction, I was lured into an ambush, my response anticipated and rebutted: not in Emily’s trite soliloquy, but in Emily’s portrayal of Emily’s self-deception. For it is not just that I need her; I am her.
I hate Emily most when she is most like me. As soon as her friends leave her table, her phone leaps to her hands. She cannot sit with herself, cannot tolerate boredom. To her, conversation is not inspiring but inspires “inspiration.” She endures the continuous flow of time as a background to discrete events, experiencing experience to occasion “experiences.” In space as in time, Emily dissolves the whole into functional parts. For her, Paris is a concatenation of disparate sites, each destination a disconnected pixel.
These traits make me squirm with recognition. Most disturbingly familiar, however, is the subterranean mining operation that runs beneath Emily’s whole life, a constant alertness for usable material. Likewise, I cannot read a book, contemplate a painting, or even watch Emily without updating my mental inventory of raw material for future interpretation. This recognition fills me with a horrifying thought: What if I am to criticism as Emily is to marketing, the same opportunistic hustler in more elitist packaging? And so Emily fills me with resentment, first, because I feel that I see through her. But, more enduringly, because I sense that she sees through me.
ONE: TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT EMILY
Emily personifies valueless existence. She lives for her fatuous career as a ladder-climbing flunky at a multinational firm. She seems to want only two things: professional recognition and Instagrammable occasions. She is human capital and she likes it, measuring her worth in units of efficiency. She plans her life on a spreadsheet—“taking into account vacations and sick days.” Time must be conquered.
We first meet her as she finishes her daily jog, arrested by the congratulations of a mechanical voice: “eighteen seconds faster than yesterday.” Nothing is real unless it can be measured. And so the body must be tamed. Asked why Americans eat garbage, she cheerfully admits, “It’s true, we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic.” Luckily, Merck is one of her biggest clients. “They make a diabetes drug that we marketed the heck out of. Sales went up 63 percent.” Replies her bemused superior, “So you create the disease, then you treat the disease, then you market the treatment of the disease.”
And what’s wrong with that? Before she turned to luxury goods, Emily specialized in pharmaceuticals. The first time we hear her speak, she is peddling a new treatment for irritable bowel syndrome. Her eyes gleaming earnestly, she makes her pitch. “It’s a social initiative to add meditation to your medication.” Mindfulness without mindedness, spirituality without spirit—this is her world and ours. She exists to help us shit.
After IBS, she moves on to vaginal dryness. As she types out her pitch for the restorative product Vaga-jeune, her text fills the screen. “The irony of menopause. Just when you have the time to really explore your mature, adventurous, sensual self . . . the vagina goes on strike.” To her, the body does not wither: It pickets. The words betray her implicit faith that she herself will never decay, that a combination of exercise and drugs will keep her skin taut, her vagina moist for a day of reflection that will never arrive.
TWO: IS EMILY IN PARIS?
The word cliché began as onomatopoeia, imitating the clicking sound of industrial dies striking metal plates, a step in the printing process called stereotyping. For Emily, on the other hand, the sound we hear is essentially dematerialized, that not of a mechanical shutter but of its digital ghost, programmed into her iPhone as aural confirmation that the cliché has been stamped. Emily parodies such skeuomorphic facsimiles with its heroine’s smartphone case, shaped like a point-and-shoot camera. The joke works best in her selfie shots, where we see the merely ornamental lens superimposed with the real one at top left—knowing that neither is in use.
Emily’s Paris appears through that camera, which seems engaged in an endless tug-of-war with the cinematographer’s. Inset images from her iPhone provide periodic reminders that the world appears to us already filtered, even when #nofilter. “The entire city looks like Ratatouille.”
Emily visualizes this flattening in its relief-like compositions, which tend toward the planarity of decorative wallpaper. Shallow space becomes a container for knickknacks, a vitrine of engineered kookiness, the convictionless decoration that goes by the name “eclectic.” What Emily lacks in curiosity, she makes up for in curios. Formalizing her worldview, Emily’s interior photography solicits a mode of beholding as consuming—one we can realize via the many websites showing us where to buy the bric-a-brac on display. Shapes in the frame repeat and align, enhancing the planarity of the image on our screens. Emily often appears through rectangular openings, as in a shot where we see her framed within a window. Her head aligns with some decorative shelving that forms an accidental halo, a prefab nimbus for the airspace Madonna.
Emily fills me with resentment, first, because I feel that I see through her. But, more enduringly, because I sense that she sees through me.
At its most extreme, the world seems to mold itself to Emily’s body as though by sympathetic magic. Look at her gawking face as it fades over the Arc de Triomphe, her disembodied head materializing in its vault. She is a latter-day Wizard of Oz, the fraud who can give neither heart nor brain. Her features seem to dictate the monument’s dimensions, its span coextensive with her face, its intrados echoing her middle-parted hair. Appearing in this quintessential monument to the conquest of Europe, she seems to promise: As Napoleon conquered Austria, so Emily conquers Paris.
Since the show began airing, a whole industry has sprouted of Emily in Paris tours, which shuttle visitors from site to site. These include both those already famous for their cultural significance (the Pantheon) and those famous only as Emily locations (her firm’s office building in the place de Valois). When passing these places, I too have caught myself seeing Paris through Emily’s eyes, as though drawn by an invisible graffito: Emily was here.
The show thus promotes a meta-televisual mentality. It compares the experience of tourism—jumping from destination to destination—with the conventions of TV montage. To that end, the show pointedly banalizes the major cultural institutions where it was shot on location—the Palais Garnier, Le Champo (where she sees Truffaut’s Jules and Jim), and many, many museums—reducing settings into sets. The Musée d’Orsay, for instance, functions as a backdrop to Camille’s proposal to her boyfriend, Gabriel. There, the lovers sit before Renoir paintings of dancing couples, the juxtaposition drawing a comparison: Like the impressionist, Emily uses saccharine decorativeness to support clichés of sublimated eroticism. This dialogue with fine art finds its most brutal realization when Emily goes to the immersive Van Gogh Experience, where projected brushstrokes convert her body into a human canvas. Art lives on in an undead state as ambient light—just like Emily itself.
THREE: THE FACT OF EMILY
Emily premiered amid the Covid-19 pandemic, when public health became an urgent problem. Coincidentally, Emily has experience promoting vaccination. When a client developed an inoculation against the tropical chikungunya virus, Emily “saturated the Web with such gorgeous content, we were actually responsible for increasing tourism in the Virgin Islands by 30 percent. If you googled ‘tropical beach,’ ‘vacation,’ ‘paradise,’ or even ‘topless beach selfies,’ you were directed to our product.”
These lines are less absurd than absurdist. We are asked to believe that internet users searched for girls gone wild, saw a sexy ad for a chikungunya vaccine, and booked a Caribbean getaway. But of all possible answers to a potential client’s inquiry—how would she market a luxury perfume?—why this outrageous example? We find an answer at the end of the monologue, when Emily seems to step outside the fiction and comment on the behavior-tracking analytics of Netflix itself: “The best thing is, we can track everything. Who have used what, when, where, and for how long.”
When it hurtles into bizarrerie, Emily mocks us for not paying attention. It anticipates and parodies its expected reception as “ambient television.” If, as Kyle Chayka has written, the show is best consumed while staring at our phones and scrolling through Instagram, then its dialogue is arbitrary, meant merely to keep our TVs on so that Netflix can mine our data. Already in 1982, Stanley Cavell remarked that sitcoms were meant not to be watched but to be monitored like security systems. Television thus provides a content-indifferent stream that merely keeps its absent-minded viewer company. For that reason, a show could count as art only if it discovered ways to acknowledge its medium-specific condition as ambient entertainment.
The modifier ambient, I gather, opposes prestige, a word reserved for shows that lend themselves to discussion over artisanal cocktails. Quasi-Shakespearean monologues, unexpected narrative twists, and ostentatious raking focus remind us that this is serious business. Such artsy conventions underwrite engagé commentary on social issues, connecting the artistic and political senses of “representation.” To watch, contemplate, and discuss such programs becomes a mark of social distinction. Emily, on the other hand, undermines these rituals with its vulgarity and triteness. If shows like Succession enlist a think-piece commentariat to bolster their pretended sophistication, Emily casts such critique—including, I take it, the one I am presently writing—as status seeking.
With platitudinous self-righteousness, Emily tsk-tsks one of her clients, a luxury perfumer, for using naked models in its advertising, chiding, “It’s the male gaze”—not because she doubts the social value of hawking what her client charmingly calls the smell of expensive sex but because she believes the tactic will alienate their target demographic. Such hollow politics find their parodic extreme in the episode “Masculin Féminin”—its title an homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 satire of consumerist leftists, which, the auteur said, he might also have called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola. When Emily learns that le vagin is masculine, this spawn of Chanel and Laura Mulvey registers her outrage on Instagram. Cut to a reaction from the Élysée Palace, where Brigitte Macron types exactement as a butler in tails brings her tea on a silver tray.
FOUR: MADAME EMILY
Emily may be basic. But that’s not really what Pierre meant in calling her ringarde. If nothing else, her garish style of dressing conveys a sense of personal taste, however clownish it might be. Rather, he meant that strange combination of expensive and cheap that goes by the name kitsch—which Emily ironizes as a champagne made just for spraying and the rom-com actress who exclaims of her million-euro watch: “I just love that I can wear the GDP of my hometown on my wrist!”
Kitsch, wrote Clement Greenberg in 1939, is “vicarious experience and faked sensations. . . . Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.” This is what makes Emily ringarde—not her bag charm but her values. Instagramming life instead of living it, she makes experience vicarious all the way down. But if, today, Greenberg’s warnings seem Cassandran, his tone betrays his insecurity. He fears kitsch because he feels its temptation. By his strenuous disavowal, he seeks to purge his own bourgeoisness by denouncing it in others. Or, “it’s a bit ringard to call someone ringarde.”
That line issues from Thomas, the sleazy philosopher who approaches a sulking Emily at an outdoor café. Pointing to a nearby couple, he asks, “Do you think he’s her son or her lover?” He bets her that he can judge correctly, and, when she asks him how he’s so sure, he replies that decoding gestures is his job; he’s a professor of semiotics. Before he can mansplain, Emily interrupts him, “Study of symbols. I have a master’s in communication.”
To Emily, semiotics is just a fancy word for public relations. As Freud’s nephew sold psychoanalysis to admen as a cheat sheet to the mind, she takes Roland Barthes as a guide to pushing perfume and champagne. But this is nothing next to Thomas, for whom it’s a box-top-mail-in decoder ring for human behavior, a low-rent tool for a not-so-slick pickup artist.
It is therefore unsurprising that Thomas ultimately reveals himself to be, as Gabriel says, just “an asshole masquerading as an intellectual.” At first Emily is enthralled. “He quoted Rimbaud to me and it was hot.” But that night, the two meet at the Paris Opera for her showdown with Pierre. Scolds the philosopher: “Did you know they were performing Swan Lake? Is this a joke? Swan Lake is for tourists.” “Thomas,” she sighs, “you’re a professor of signs—I’m sure you won’t have any trouble recognizing this one,” extending her middle finger toward Thomas—and us. And with that, she storms off to do battle under the banner of the ringardes.
In her rebuke to Thomas, Emily ingests her critics and spits them out. She lures us into her world and dares us to dismiss her. And it works. We condescend in exactly the way she expects. As for me, she reveals the Thomas in myself, which is precisely the part that cannot bear to be Emily, the part that defines myself in negative as whatever she is not. But in the end, this predictable and predicted reaction is just a roundabout way of being her, of being cliché—it’s basic to call her basic. And so I recoil from Emily as from a magic mirror that shows me who I really am. There, in that haunted selfie screen, I see Emily smiling back.
Harmon Siegel is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the author of Painting with Monet.