Hey, everyone. It's Chelsea from
The Financial Diet. And this week's
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button right below. And today we are here to
talk about Emily in Paris. Huh, huh, huh, omelette
du fromage as our King said on the streets
of Philadelphia the other day when
Joe Biden won. So I watched the show Emily
in Paris, like many of you, and had a lot of feels
about it-- both as someone who lived like the really
shitty version of Emily's life, almost to a T a little bit. Sort of a combo of her and
her friend in the show, but we'll get to
that a bit later. But also someone who
is kind of passionate about the representation
of money in pop culture. As some of you guys might
have already been aware, this is another
Darren Star joint. He made Sex and the
City, he made Younger. He made all of
those shows that are sort of iconic for
representing women in a way that, for a lot of
us is just like, not it chief. Like, it's very focused on
conspicuous consumption, it's very focused
on male approval as being sort of the primary
value driver of a woman's life. And it's also just
ridiculously unrealistic from a financial/consumer/career
perspective. We actually, in partnership with
our beloved YouTuber Lindsay Ellis, created a
show here on TFD about how Carrie
Bradshaw, in many ways, sort of kickstarted the entire
concept of an influencer. I highly recommend you
guys check that, I'll link the description. But we are basically 20 years
out from Sex and the City as cultural phenomenon, and it
kind of seems like in many ways Darren Starr is
really just playing the hits in terms of this
particular representation of women. Now, obviously, there's
a lot of critique there from a
financial/lifestyle perspective, but as I mentioned,
I also happen to have had a somewhat
similar trajectory to Emily herself, and so have
a lot of feelings about it from that perspective. I moved to France
at the age of 21, looking for love and life and
success and all of the things that Emily is looking for. I was an au pair like her
best friend in the show. I lived in a chambre de
bonne like she lives in, although our experiences
on that differed wildly as I'll get into later. I ended up meeting my
now husband in France, and I started my
career that ended up becoming my full time
life's work as someone who works in media. So in many ways there
are some overlaps, but as someone who never had
neither the disposable income nor the body mass index of
Emily definitely differed in a lot of ways. Also I should note
having watched this show, if you have not watched
it-- well, first of all, I'm going to spoil the hell
out of it, so turn back now. But if you haven't watched
it I must comment on the fact that my husband and I who
watched the show together, the first night when we
watched the first half we were having drinks and it was
like sort of a party ambiance. Show seem to honestly
kind of good. Last night we finished it, stone
sober five episodes in a row. Not that enjoyable of a show. So take that with
a grain of salt, but you may want to get
in the right headspace when you're watching it. But all of that said, I have
taken away some valuable life and money lessons
from the show in a bit of a tongue in cheek way. And let's go through them
with the seven biggest life and money lessons I learned
from Emily in Paris. Number one, if you're
cute, it doesn't matter if you're qualified. So I feel like the genre of a
hot naive young American woman goes to another country where
she doesn't speak a language to like stumble her
way into success and romance is just one of
the five types of stories we humans have created. It's so ubiquitous and it's
so overdone, but this one even for how common that
sort of storytelling is felt particularly
frustrating. So first of all, the
actual exposition for how Emily gets to
Paris, I'm not exaggerating, takes up about 45
seconds of screen time. And the conceit is a little
bit offensive to say the least. Basically her older,
much more qualified boss who was supposed to be
doing this job in Paris finds out she's pregnant. So she gets the boot. No more fun project for her. We literally never hear from
her again basically in the show. And it's just a great
message of like, well, she's having a child so time
for her to go and wither and die and get
out of our faces so that young beautiful
carefree Emily can come have the adventure
of a lifetime. And because she was never
planning to go to France, didn't prepare for it, wasn't
at all briefed for this job, is probably not qualified
for it in terms of seniority, the sort of entire
premise of the show and her charm in the show
is that she's completely unqualified for the job. And of course, everything
works out perfectly for her because that's the way it
works in rom-com/sitcom land, but it's also kind of even
underscored within the universe of the show that it's working
out so perfectly for her because she is that
young, thin, beautiful, unencumbered woman unlike
her pregnant older boss, who I guess should just go
die because her life is over. Also the other
people in her office, including people who appeared to
have been there for a long time or who are highly
qualified at their jobs, are sort of portrayed to
be obstacles for Emily because her cute, fun,
effervescence is portrayed as this thing that should
just always prevail and that we should automatically
be on the side of even though with any kind of
context she is completely unqualified for her job. While in theory
these shows are meant to have you relate
to the protagonist, you kind of leave
the show feeling like you would just be
one of the uggos who's getting walked over by Emily. Number two is that chambre
de bonne are apparently luxury penthouses when
you open the door. Now, this one is really just
a personal frustration for me because I actually lived
in a chambre de bonne, like Emily does in the show. And for those who may
need clarification, that just basically
means maids' quarters. It's the top floor of all
of those old Haussmannian buildings in Paris
that have the little sloped roofs and everything. It's that top floor
where, unlike all of the other real floors of the
building, it's very truncated and often the apartments
are chopped up into very little tiny
studios because that's where their maids
lived in the building. They even, in many cases,
had a separate elevator that they would take up
and down so they didn't have to go through the
actual lobby, which is how I got into my apartment
whenever I came home. But what frustrated
me in particular about Emily's apartment is
that when she opens the door it's one of those
fantasy doll houses where it would be impossible
for this apartment to fit into that space in real life. But it's overflowing with
beautiful windows, which, fun fact, this window that we
see Emily taking a selfie in would almost certainly not
be in a chambre de bonne because, again, they're on the
top floor under those sloping roofs, so they always
have the world's weirdest, shittiest
windows in practice. But she also has a nice
kitchen, a nice bed area, little library nook, she
has a beautiful shower. Let me explain to you what my
chambre de bonne looks like. And I have been
digging for photos, but I think even
21-year-old Chelsea knew that that space
was not something to memorialize in the image. So I don't have pictures
of it, but to describe it-- so my chambre de bonne
was 90 square feet total, which I don't know if you guys
can relate to that spatially, but it's like half
a room basically. I had a shower in the kitchen,
and that is true and accurate. My shower was in my kitchen. It was like a kitchenette
with a shower in it. My toilet was in the hallway
that was a communal hallway that everyone had to share. So just the experience
of going to the bathroom was highly traumatic. I had lofted bed, which
actually prevented me from opening the one shoe
box sized window that I had more than five inches. So it was constantly
very just moist in the apartment because
of a lack of ventilation, which was a great
textural experience. Also because it was a lofted
bed with a very short ceiling, there was approximately
six inches of space between your head
and the ceiling when you were sleeping in the lofted bed. Which really speaks volumes
to how desperate Mark was when he first met me that he
was willing to frequently come over to that apartment
and hang out with me, because I don't know if you guys
have heard, but Mark's 6' 4", and that was definitely
not adapted to his size. Point being, while basically
all sitcoms and rom-coms really push the limits of what a
young fresh face in the city can expect in terms
of their apartments, this one truly shot
me right in the heart, because it could not
be more misleading. Number three is that
everything is fashion if you're a size double zero. So let's just take a brief tour
through some of Emily's fashion moments. We're loving it,
we're living it, we're just vibing
right along with her. These outfits are insane. Let's be clear, they're insane. No one who is not Lily
Collins wearing this outfit would be perceived
as fashionable. And while they sort of
make allusions to the fact that she's not perceived
as super chic on the show, you're still, as a viewer,
supposed to find her clothing aspirational. Which is a joke. But actually this
exact dynamic is sort of Darren Star's calling card. If we might recall some of
Carrie Bradshaw's outfits, there were many,
many looks that she wore that were just
essentially a flex for being the size that she was, but made
no coherent sense as an outfit and would have looked
absurd on anyone else. See here, here, or here. But what's particularly
disappointing in this dynamic
about Emily in Paris is how much one would have
hoped that in the 20ish years since Sex-- and the City was
the show, that we would have sort of evolved on this front. But it appears that while
our mediums of communication and imagery may have changed,
the fixation on thinness as an arbiter of
chic or fashionable has pretty much
remained the same. And it's interesting that
Emily's stated profession in this show is basically social
media expert, because while we often like to think
of social media as a place that can kind of
democratize image and expose us to a much, much wider range of
body types and ideas of what is considered fashionable
or aspirational. In many cases social
media has only served to homogenize this
aspirational idea of thinness or beauty, leading
to for example, the famous Instagram face
that many Instagram models are working toward. Or the promulgation of
things like "thinspiration" on social media
platforms like TikTok. Weight loss videos are
everywhere on TikTok. Content tagged #weightlosscheck
has nearly 285 million views for just one example. It's essentially never
addressed on the show how Emily's thinness--
and to be clear, the actress Lily Collins
is incredibly thin-- it's never quite addressed how
that dynamic plays into both her perceived
fashion sense as well as her relevance as an
arbiter of social media cool. But it is, essentially,
the teeny tiny elephant in every frame of the show. And given that, like
Carrie Bradshaw, Emily isn't just an
average sized woman, but someone thinner than
quite frankly, many models. It goes to show how little
our idea of aspiration has evolved since Sex and
the City on either front. Number four, when you move to
Europe, money doesn't exist. I feel like the
undercurrent of this show, like any Darren Star
joint, is really just the ambient unawareness of
money in any form or fashion. There are a few moments
here and there in the show where we understand
that money exists in some vague capacity,
like Gabriel's quest to purchase a literal
restaurant, which is always extremely low stakes because
a bunch of random people are constantly just
offering him the startup capital for no reason. But even with those
brief check ins, the overall vibe is
just like, money? Everyone is constantly decked
out in head to toe couture. They're always being whisked
away to various vacations and shopping trips. They're constantly dining
out at nice restaurants, regardless of their
employment status. And frankly in 2020 like all
that thin fashion business, it feels more outdated and
out of touch than ever. In fact, the website The
Dip actually did an episode by episode breakdown
of what Emily had to spend to live her
life in that episode, and the results
are pretty obscene. Here's just one snapshot
of the first episode, which in total cost her over $33,000,
and there's 10 episodes. Don't get me wrong,
there is always an element of the
escapism to these shows that's enjoyable,
because who doesn't want to turn their head
off every now and then and just be in a place where
money doesn't matter and no one has problems. But there's a difference between
being somewhat aspirational given the circumstances
and trotting out yet another show where someone
who seems to be basically at an intern level job is
wearing outfits that routinely cost $20,000 or more. Darren Star definitely
giving us some, OK boomer, vibes with these choices. Number five is that billionaires
just randomly choose to be nannies for the freedom. So I think the most personally
offensive subplot on this show for me was Mindy. This is Emily's
best friend, who is the daughter of the billionaire
zipper king in China who has fled her home despite
her father literally sending her pictures of the
mansions and Rolls-Royces that he's bought her to
entice her to come back. Because she wants
freedom, but also because she wants to escape
the shame that she incurred by doing a bad singing
performance on a singing competition show in
China, which is like, I just really want to be smoking
whatever that writer's room was smoking when they came
up with her backstory because it's like, you
guys could have just picked one route with that. But suffice it to say, they
depict her as this girl who is turning away just endless,
endless amounts of wealth and privilege to be a nanny/
au pair for a French family to live life on her own terms
and experience Paris like, I guess, a real poor person. I don't really know
what the goal was there. And I have been an au pair,
in Paris of all places. And let me tell
you that while it can be a mutually enjoyable
and beneficial experience-- it was for me-- it is also
not billionaire rumspringa. People do it because they need
the money and the stability. I was a student, it provided
me a place to live-- the aforementioned
chambre de bonne-- and it also gave
me a steady income that I could use to spend on
a few things here and there. But I, of course, would
not have done the job if I didn't need to,
because it's hard work. And in fact, the reality
of the au pair world is actually that it is
often quite exploitative, particularly in hypercompetitive
markets like Paris where many, many
people want to go. I happened to have a fairly
wide pick of families when I moved to Paris because
I was already bilingual, and therefore could integrate
much more easily into a wider variety of families. Meaning that I could pick a
home where, for example, I had my own separate
living space rather than living with the family,
which is often very common. But also I could
negotiate a higher rate and just generally could
advocate for myself more because I could move more
freely around my host society. But even in my own
personal experience, I actually, with my at
the time host mother who's now a friend of
mine, freed my friend in the middle of the
night by picking her up in a van from an exploitative
and emotionally abusive host family. My friend was in Paris at the
time as well being an au pair. And while I lucked out
with a great situation, she ended up in a family
that was so toxic for her that she literally had to leave
in the middle of the night. And my host mother
at the time ended up writing an actual legal letter
with attorneys and everything to that family, excoriating
them for what they've done. And basically saying
if they do anything to come after her that they
would be basically defending my friend. And keep in mind,
my friend who was put in this horrible
situation was an American with a master's degree. Imagine how people who do not
have that level of privilege are often treated
in these situations. In fact, au pairs,
most of whom are women, are each charged
as much as $2,500 to participate in what
placement agencies and the State Department describe as a
quote "cultural exchange" program for young people looking
to practice their English and learn about
American culture. Under the J-1 visa program,
au pairs are placed in a home by a sponsor company
and are tasked with caring for the host
family's children, much like a live in nanny. However, unlike live
in nannies, au pairs have no guaranteed sick
days or federal holidays. They earn a flat
wage of $4.35 an hour after sponsor agencies
deduct room and board from their pay, which lands
them at $195.75 a week for 45 hours of work. In 2015, sponsor agencies
received and forwarded to the State Department
more than 3,500 complaints, according to an internal
analysis obtained by Politico. All of this is to
say that portraying being an au pair as just
another frivolous thing that rich people do
to have a little fun is, to say the least, inaccurate
and potentially dangerously misleading. Number six, don't bother to
learn about the company you're entering. As mentioned earlier,
the blatant level of disregard that Emily
shows to her new company that she's entering
from the language, to the office culture,
to even just getting to know her colleagues or
working collaboratively with them goes way past fantasy
fulfillment and straight into insulting. I jokingly tweeted during
a live watch of the show that it's basically
like shitty Madmen, but it really holds true
after finishing the series. Essentially, like
Don Draper, Emily just sort of wills her way into
successful marketing campaigns that don't make sense
on paper and shouldn't have worked in the context
of her office dynamics, but just happen to
all play out perfectly right because of her charm
and/or often sexual appeal to a certain extent. But at least Don Draper actually
put in several years of work at his company before he started
sowing extreme levels of chaos with the client relationships. And lest we forget,
he did actually end up getting fired for his behavior. Plus he actually
spoke the language of all of his
co-workers and clients to be behaving in
such a ridiculous way. It's interesting that only
France's extremely strong labor protection laws
stood between Emily and being rightfully canned. But yet the way
the show is framed is clearly intended to
make us side with Emily and think that her company
should be so lucky to have her, and that her boss was behaving
completely irrationally to have tried to fire her. But even if we go along with
all of the charmed encounters that Emily has with her
various client relationships, we're still left with a
portrait of an employee who, is at minimum, incapable
of collaborating with any other employees,
and seems in certain cases to have just pushed
them out of the company. Like, what happened
to that woman who worked on social media
when Emily first arrived? Did Emily kill her,
what happened there? Unclear. Point being, Emily was
a terrible employee. Lastly, number
seven is that talent matters less than rich friends. I think the ultimate
takeaway of this show is that nothing
really matters when compared to the rich
people who can step in at the last minute
and deus ex machina you out of whatever problem
you might be having. These are people to buy you
a restaurant, rich parents to fall back on, heavy
hitting clients that will save a failing
business, friends whose parents are rich
enough to become clients, and so on and so forth. And maybe this is the
most depressing thing about this show in
the context of 2020. Because even though
Sex and the City was widely and
rightfully derided for being insanely unrealistic
financially-- and again, we did do a video around that
topic, which I highly recommend-- the premise
at the end of the day was that these were four
30-something working women who were largely
supporting themselves and occasionally one another
through their own careers. Whereas this show barely even
pays lip service to the idea that you should be in any
way attempting to stake your own claim in the world. For example, Carrie Bradshaw
had an episode long crisis at the age of roughly
35 when she realized that she had spent
over $40,000 on shoes over the course of
her adult lifetime. Meanwhile, Emily has
apparently spent nearly $34,000 in one episode of
this show at age 25 as a question mark intern
question mark, and no one bats an eyelash. One would have hoped that Darren
Star and the world in general, going through two recessions and
a general feminist awakening, would have come
to the conclusion that a show about
women can still be very aspirational without
completely abandoning the idea of self-sufficiency or
pegging their entire interest to their love lives. With Emily in Paris,
although the setting has changed slightly, that
entire dynamic of a woman being about the bag she has
on her wrist and the man she has on her arm being her
defining characteristics, has been made just as clear. The life lessons you
draw from this show go well past just being rom-com
frivolous into downright offensive. And while the show does provide
a level of escapism that can be enjoyable when
we're all looking down the barrel of
quarantine number two, I find that its
level of confection leaves you with more than
a bit of a toothache. This is my movie critic moment,
I hope everyone liked it. And as I mentioned,
this video is sponsored by Fidelity Investments. And they are here to help
you reach your savings goals. And if you're looking
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you for watching. And do not forget to
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Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday for new and awesome videos. [CHUCKLES] Huh, huh, huh.
