The American drama "stereotypes" forcibly explain other cultures, and Emily in Paris angered Ukrainian audiences

Source: Global Times

[Global Times reporter Luc] The second season of the Netflix drama "Emily in Paris" harvested multinational traffic after it began broadcasting in December last year, although the stereotypical plots such as "Ukrainian girls love to steal" in the drama angered Ukrainian audiences, but Netflix still decided to hit the iron while it was hot and renewed the third and fourth seasons of the show in one go. The arrogant prejudice against other races and cultures in Hollywood film and television dramas has not been restrained by the international trend, but has become more obvious because of the high spread of streaming media.

Stereotypes have not disappeared

"Emily in Paris", which began broadcasting in 2020, once set off a boom, climbing the ratings championship of 53 countries and regions that year, and after the second season was launched at the end of last year, the total global broadcast time of the first 5 days exceeded 100 million hours, once again on the top ten of the popularity list of 93 countries, and the popularity accumulated in the first two seasons gave Netflix the confidence to renew its contract. But the stereotypes that are ubiquitous in the show have not disappeared, but have expanded from targeting the French to other countries, and the reputation is not ideal.

The second season of Emily in Paris angered ukrainians. In the fourth episode, Emily's French classmate Petra is a greedy and cheap Ukrainian girl who "likes to shop for free" and steals things in the mall, and Emily also uses allusions from "Les Misérables" to criticize her. The characters and plot immediately sparked resentment among Ukrainians, and Ukrainian Culture Minister Alexander Tkachenko wrote to Netflix to protest the stereotype of the country's people by the show's creators and actors: "'Emily in Paris' presents an unacceptable image of Ukrainian women, which is simply an insult. Is this the image of Ukrainians in the eyes of foreigners? ”

The French were powerless to complain

Just before the start of the second season, actress Lily Collins said in an interview with the media that as a producer, she would correct the obvious cognitive error in the first season, "I want to show diversity and inclusion in front of and behind the camera." However, in the second season, although the proportion of French dialogue has increased, stereotypes and prejudices have not disappeared, and the plot is more childish and pompous, full of clichés, resulting in the show's freshness on rotten tomatoes in the United States is only 46%, and the audience rating on the French website Alllocine is only 2.6 stars (out of five stars).

"Emily in Paris" was originally a series produced for traditional TV channels, sold to CBS and eventually fell under the umbrella of Netflix, originally intended to create a glamorous and fashionable "romantic Paris" scene, but in the eyes of the French, the whole drama is full of stereotypes in American fantasies: the French like to flirt, smoke unscrupulously, lazy and do not go to work on time, unwilling to speak English... Even those students from other countries living in Paris have also been affected, and they have been portrayed as the second generation of the rich who spend a lot of money and the thieves who lead the sheep.

The unable French even tried to upload videos on social media to promote the "real Paris", hoping that everyone would not be "biased" by American film and television dramas: the maid's room on the roof of the French building was actually very small, and if you wore high heels, you would not be able to walk, and if you carried a bag like Emily and took your mobile phone to the street, you would be robbed...

Stereotypes are still on the rise

In fact, it is not uncommon for American film and television production teams to use their strong position in entertainment communication to "forcibly explain" foreign cultural traditions. Hollywood film and television dramas in pursuit of commercial value often need to pile up "clichés" or "play terriers", do not care whether they really offend others, and have a little arrogance towards foreign people and their own ethnic minorities.

2018's "Picking Gold" is full of old imaginations of Asian culture and Asian groups - Asian poor people become depraved and snobbish after they get rich; the plot of the animated film "Dragon Quest" is a "hodgepodge" of Southeast Asian culture, integrating traditional cultural elements of many Southeast Asian countries; the American drama "Catherine the Great" is mostly vulgar ridicule of Russian culture represented by Empress Catherine.

In recent years, for the minorities in the country, American society has been forced by "political correctness" requirements to reduce obvious racial discrimination, but the stereotypes of "Asians are nerds", "Africans only play sports", "Indians speak English with a strong accent", and "Latinos are street thugs" still exist. After a professional organization investigated the image of minorities in American film and television programs, it was found that half of the Latinos and a quarter of the Middle EasternErs in American film and television dramas were engaged in criminal acts, which was obviously misleading discrimination for the new immigrants in the United States.

In addition, there are some image settings that are not "active discrimination", which have been gradually fixed in the pen of Hollywood screenwriters in the past two years: Jews are always shrewd, black women are always strong, Asian women are always successful after dyeing their hair, interracial marriages are always dominated by white husbands, and the lighter the skin color of black families, the better... Although this operation is ostensibly to affirm diversity, it is still difficult to get rid of the long-term imagination, just as the mention of the French is always a character wearing a beret and sandwiching a baguette, which is difficult to change in the short term.