BRAZIL. EMILY IN PARIS... COMEDY?

 EMILY IN PARIS

www.google.com.br/images. Series list. Irreproachable. Want to know who's who? Watch.

Marina da Silva

 

Emily in Paris is the name of an American series - it was produced before the Covid-19 pandemic - and which premiered in October 2020 in the United States and Brazil1, if my memory serves me right, between the end of 2021-2022 on Netflix. In the country of soap operas, Brazil, the television series is classified as a romantic comedy, a soap opera by Globo at 7 pm and could be seen only as a bit of humor to endure the pain and mourning of the genocide committed by the #bolsonarogenocide government during the pandemic Covid-19 in Brazil (Apr./2020-2022). Laughter is the best medicine - says the popular saying - and Emily in Paris is just another silly comedy. But it will be?

Let's go with Emily Cooper (Lily Colins) a young XXI century to unveil the plot of the series. Emily works for an American marketing and advertising corporation in Chicago, Illinois - Gilbert Group, and, despite her inexperience, was chosen by her boss Madeleine Weeler (Kate Walsh, actress of the series 13 Reason why )2 to replace her in the French branch Savoir, marketing aimed at the luxury market, nec plus ultra, recently incorporated by Gilbert.

www.google.com.br/images. Emily's boss, phenomenal actress Kate Walsh the ultimate laugh-maker!

Emily, an office-girl*, a trainee who takes care of the boss's coffee and coat, is chosen as a substitute for Madeleine Weeler, personality of the Year, head-director of the Gilbert group to be the new boss in Paris, the city of Lights, birthplace of republican ideals, the French Revolution and the ideals of liberté, equality, fraternité, humanism, encyclopedism? Cradle of Rosseau, Diderot, Saint-Simon, of Napoleon's imperial power, of great authors such as Balzac, Victor Hugo, Zola, Guy de Maupassant? Strange. It can only be comedy.Yes, it was this great strangeness: the bold-faced Emily, who doesn't speak French and knows little or nothing about France in general and Paris in particular, who readily accepts as sub-manager of the French luxury marketing team who  made me follow this saga. It has to be a joke, right?

https://www.pods.com/blog/2021/02/chicago-living/. Chicago...UAU!

Quer conhecer, viver, morar em Chicago?  

 

"Chicago is the birthplace of skyscrapers. The first skyscraper in the country was built there, in 1884, with 10 floors and a steel structure."https://engenharia360.com/chicago-historia-arquitetura-urbanismo/

Beautiful, historic, rich, founded in 1837 (186 years), about 2.7 million inhabitants. Chicago is the third most populous city in the USA. It mixes the historic and the contemporary (downtown) and the rich area of the suburbs. Chicago is known for the University of Chicago, Big Tech companies, the Chicago Bulls -NBA basketball; sad historical facts of racism told in Hollywood movies like Chicago Burning. And of course there's a lot of history beyond this paragraph. The opening images show the ultra modern city of Chicago, full of tall buildings and Emily jogging, all equipped with a cell phone and a performance application. For those who know History and Geography, the narrative is already explained in this opening: New world and Old world, but both countries, two imperialist capitalist powers where the Old world was overcome and destroyed in the two great wars of the 20th century - World War I (1914- 1918) and World War II (1938-1945).

https://www.tudosobreparis.com/historia.Everything about Paris is almost nothing of a city founded in the 4th century BC. Yes, Paris is old and there is no way to study world history without talking about the importance of Paris.

Emily is the freshness, the youth, the liberal “new world” that, in the 1970s, starts to impose itself in the so-called neoliberal wave and/or revolution and that arrives in the 21st century ultra neoliberal, anarcho-capitalist-conservative-libertarian ( a paradoxical designation) globalized, neocolonialist, imperial, fascist, extremist where the dispute to maintain the USA as the only power in the world takes place on the same old fundamentals: exacerbated individualism, selfishness, competition, profit at any price, greed, bet, risk, creativity (return to wild practices), free market, private property, unrestricted freedom (same as market deregulation, minimal state) and the anything goes vision of Silicon Valley's young big tech billionaires. With the supremacy of financial capital over productive capital, the planet begins to live with crises produced on Wall Street where fortunes disappear, billionaires sprout in the manipulation of the digital economy, interconnected in currencies never seen before.3 The great example of the current century was the mega theft of Wall Street, the great financial speculation, known as the subprime crisis)4

    

www.google.com.br/images.Emily in Paris reminds me of Black Mirror season 3 episode Nosedive. An unmissable critique of the social dilemma that guarded living has become  in cyberspace

"Paris was founded in the 3rd century BC on the île de la Cité by a community of Celts. They were a group of tribal fishermen called the Parisii who, pushed by emigration to the banks of the Seine, made a permanent settlement there and profited from the fertility and the area's temperate climate, plus the Seine Islands seemed the perfect place for this small community to establish its capital."http://www.paris-city.fr/GB/paris-city/au-fil-du-temps/histoire.php

Emily introduces herself to her new job in advance and is greeted like an ET, an outsider, arrogant as the Number One powerhouse with her feigned and offensive naturalness. There is a big cultural shock between the old world and the new world; between the $1.99*, generic, mass life style against the exclusive, rare, luxurious style; the ordinary versus the elegant; the sophisticated versus the vulgarity of ostentation. Emily doesn't even notice this cultural contrast and clash. She sees Paris with the eyes of a tourist who photographs everything and hashtags #EmilyinParis on her Instagram profile and sees her likes and followers grow at North American speed, that is, the speed of light. Her admiration empty of content in historical sights represents only the ostentation to show that she is in the very expensive city of Paris, the Paris for few, “second class” French people, included.

Emily is the fast life, drive-thru Mc Donald’s, the world of unbridled consumerism with no time to enjoy a break for wine, a cigarette, a chat with colleagues on a break from work. The first season is very rich: of dialogues, confrontations of two different worlds, narratives and visions that collide, of different cultures and ideals, of vision of companies, of relationships and work management that do not/or mix in personal life. Chronicles in the Brazilian media call them mere clichés and there is a reason not to believe in this prescription and to view Emily's romantic comedy in Paris with critical eyes.

The animosity between the old and the new is reflected in the watch, oops, cell phone, in the young woman's obsession with schedules, and physical activity. Emily is the new Forrest Gump, all the historical and architectural wealth of Paris is invisible to her and her camera captures only superficialities and their faces and mouths in selfies. The locations are real, beautiful, have a historical charge that populates French literature. The sold image of Paris is superficial, the "Lights" today are represented by the lighting of the Eiffel Tower. You can laugh a lot in the series, more so with the cast of Savoir.

www.google.com.br/images.This trio is fantastic, provides great laughs: Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu (Sylvie is Paris embodies the complex spirit of the city, the chic, elegant, biting and acid laugh); Samuel Arnould (Julian, would be "Emily" well dressed, wonderful looks), Bruno Gouery (Luc, mysterious character who speaks what others do not express verbally, intentionally lets secrets escape, is the conspirator).

Emily is the ideal type of worker: workahoolic, she doesn't distinguish between work time and life time; work and fun/leisure. It is plugged in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without interruption. Emily confuses soiré - party, dinner, date from the end of the afternoon and evening with the same as extending the working day into the night, without Saturday, Sunday, holidays, vacations. All of Emily's energy is focused on working like a robot to have the merit of reaching a sub-director, sub-management believing in the fake self mad doctrine of the American dream, her life and joy revolves around work even when she is only sharing “their discoveries” like the deliciousness of a croissant or their stepping in the shit of a madam's dog, their runs through famous streets and squares, any discovery is a shock shared on social networks. Tongue twisters in the pronunciation or gender of a noun become caricatured war of the French language: un and une; le (definite article) used in a feminine noun vagin: le vagin not la vagin. And the direct link to wikipedia culture is hilarious: the pronunciation vagin (vajan) refers Emily to the famous character of Vitor Hugo Jean Valjean (jan vajan) Les Miserables; Does Normandy remember D-Day?

The new is public, superficial, spiritually poor and shared with billions of human beings in cyberspace, where pets, choreographed dances on Tik Tok, haters, fakenews,5 absurd bets like sticking a cell phone in the vagina or anus.6 Even the interactions friendship, family, love are poor, they don't forge true ties and can be done from a distance without physical approach as in the crude scene of Emily having virtual sex and getting in the hand, oops, her boyfriend's premature ejaculation and his vibrator that didn't respect her voltage from the old building and shorted out the neighborhood.

Two life narratives are clashing, very cartoonishly, in the series. Which world (or free market) will win in the 21st century? The poor, generic, fake, pirated, mass consumerism and globalized by the fast, furious, deregulated, meritocratic, deindustrialized, financialized and speculative market, authoritarian ultraliberal libertarian world, of the militarized minimal state, of superconcentration of wealth in 1% billionaires like Elon Musk or the old world, of rare, very expensive, high quality goods for the few and where the separation of factory and home still resists; work and life; labor rights, wages, working hours and leisure, sovereignty even if watched over by the US, human relations and richer labor relations that still allow forging strong human ties? 

www.google.com.br/images. Clothes, shoes, bags, sandals, boots, berets, and countless accessories, including the Eiffel tower keychain.

In the first ten episodes of the first season, all this discussion above is veiled by tourist landscapes of Paris, by the super fashionista wardrobe: Emily dressed for work. Emily is a hanger, a body for merchandise from head to toe, the walking poster girl for several famous brands selling products on her social networks, that is, on Mark Zukerberg's networks just like Anastasia Steel, the poor virgin who falls in love with the billionaire Mr. Gray and surrenders to luxury goods in more than 50 shades of Gray.7 If we stop to think a little about the place where Emily lives in Paris, a loft(?) of about 40 square meters, formerly a room for servants of the French nobility, we would ask: where the hell does this woman keep so many shoes, handbags, famous designer clothes? But there are still many questions posed in this first season and they will come in the following text. Wait because the story continues in episode 2 of season 1.

 (continued) EMILY FEVER IN PARIS IN BRAZIL'S CYBERSPACE.

 "In times of a pandemic, watching a series “water with sugar” makes your heart warm, and that's what I did over the weekend: I marathoned the series “Emily in Paris”, on Netlix (which also talks about my work, and for this became a post here lol). Those who follow me on Instagram saw some clippings I made while watching, but now I sat down to write about the costumes for the series Emily in Paris and what we can learn from it!" https://vestindoautoestima.com.br/figurino-da-serie-emily-in-paris/

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Source

*Emily Cooper appears - in S1Ep1- running after her boss, grabbing her coat, bringing coffee, but she is a promising employee, she has an MBA with a master's degree in advertising and mass communication in social networks, cyberspace consumers.

** Life style $1.99 is a neologism, an expression coined or appropriated by me in the quest to understand, learn and apprehend the changes that occur with the so-called “3rd technological revolution” from the productive restructuring based on microelectronics, robotics, etc. , which affected the world of work and the social relations of production, leading to the corrosion and corruption of the construction of human sociability that was put in place in the post-World War II period, known as the Keynesian state or the welfare state.

1. Emily in Paris. Netflix (2020) https://www.netflix.com/ 1

2. 13 Reasons why, Netflix.

4. FERGUNSON, Charles H. THE HIDDEN OF AMERICA. How financial corporations corrupted the United States. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar publishing house, 2013.

5. On the social media dilemma, see: HACKED PRIVACY/ THE GREAT HACK https://www.netflix.com/ and THE SOCIAL DILEMMA https://www.netflix.com/watch/ Netflix Documentaries

6. On the subject, see THE MOST HATED MAN ON THE INTERNET. Netflix Documentary https://www.netflix.com/watch/81413925?trackId=254761469

7. Fifty Shades of Gray Trilogy movies available on Netflix