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Emilia Perez and “Sacredness” of Concepts
I follow the film industry pretty closely, but like most other film buffs, I had never heard of the movie, Emilia Perez, until a few weeks ago when it was nominated for 13 Oscars, the most of any movie this year. For comparison, the Godfather got 11 Oscar nominations. For that, and many other reasons, it’s easily the most culture war controversial film of the year, and IMO, for pretty interesting reasons. If you want a truly unexpected Culture War punch in the face, then go watch it on Netflix. Otherwise, full plot SPOILERS ahead.
Emilia Perez is about a Mexican drug lord who undergoes a MTF gender transition. She fakes her death, leaves her wife and two kids behind, lives as a woman alone for a few years, but then tries to get them back in a somewhat Mrs. Doubtfire manner. Also, the film is a musical. Most infamously, there’s a song about getting gender reassignment surgery - https://youtube.com/watch?v=VHyPL2fBTHs.
I watched it and thought it was bad. I don’t like musicals to begin with, but I thought the musical sections in particular were terrible, boring, and didn’t further the plot. I thought the characterization was confusing and the plot really wacky and dumb. But in its favor, I admire the film’s ambition, and I think it has some occasionally interesting visuals and character dynamics. It’s not mindless streaming slop, it’s stupid auteur bullshit. 3/10.
The interesting culture war aspect is that Emilia Perez perfectly wedges itself between two broad factions on the left. Left-leaning liberals seem to love this movie. The Academy Award voters are mostly very old Hollywood lefties, and their 13 Oscar nominations seem to indicate that Emilia Perez says something culturally important and meaningful. But left wing progressives hate Emilia Perez. Just search for it on Reddit and you’ll find a million hate threads highly upvoted about how terrible and offensive it is.
The best comparison I’ve seen is to the film, Crash, which one the best picture Oscar in 2006. The same left wing cultural split applied, with the moderates thinking it was a brilliant film about the complexity of race relations and the progressives thinking it was nothing more than racial stereotypes and white savior narratives.
In Emilia Perez’s case, progressives think the film’s portrayals of transness and Mexico are offensive. A lot of the blame is put on the writer/director Jacques Audiard, a cis-gender white Frenchman, who in an interview I haven’t seen, admitted that he did almost no research into transness or Mexico for the film. He seems to be interested in the setting and ideas of the film in a generalized and aesthetic manner, not in any deep “I have to say something important about society” way.
Having watched Emilia Perez, I genuinely don’t get the claims that it’s offensive toward trans people. If anything, the film is way too nice to trans people. The movie expects us to immediately sympathize with Emilia Perez after her gender transition even though she has lived a life of carnage and mayhem and is implied to have killed tons of people. It’s not impossible to make a sympathetic character there, but IMO the film really doesn’t sell it. Her personality basically transforms from “crazy murderous psycho” into “standard Western educated progressive” overnight without justification. The Mexico complaints have a little more justification and are more complicated:
I think some of these complaints are legit and some are typical progressive culture warring. I think a huge does of the criticism of Emilia Perez is that a white guy made a movie about a “Brown” country without being excessively apologetic, and if the nationalities were reversed (ie. a Mexican made a movie about France), no one would care. The best counter-example is Moulin Rouge. It’s a 2001 musical about a real French landmark in the French capital that deals with French culture (burlesque, bohemian lifestyles, etc.), but it was written and directed by Aussies, all the actors are from the Anglosphere, and all the music is American or British. Yet no one gave a shit about misrepresentation of French culture or thought it was offensive to French people.
What I find more interesting is that much of the criticism of Emilia Perez seems to come down to what I would call the “sacredness” of topics in popular culture. The progressive left tends to hold non-white cultures to be more sacred than white cultures, therefore Emilia Perez is offensive and Moulin Rouge is not. Similarly, Emilia Perez (a goofy musical soap opera) is offensive for not portraying Mexican cartels in a super serious way, but that same criticism isn’t applied toward movies that portray the American Italian Mafia as cool or goofy, like Goodfellas, Analyze This, Mickey Blue Eyes, Corky Romano, that episode in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc.
The phrase I've seen a lot in the criticisms is that Emilia Perez "uses Mexico and its culture as an aesthetic," to which I think the the director would YESChad. He doesn't think Mexico and its culture are so incredibly important and sacred that they are above being an aesthetic. The director also made a weird movie that used the Wild West as an aesthetic (The Sisters Brothers). I believe the progressive critics are fine with using France and its culture as an aesthetic. It all comes down to what people consider sacred or not.
Likewise, transness is such an intense and sacred topic on the left that many consider it offensive to put it in any film that doesn’t treat it with the utmost seriousness and deference. I’m pretty sure that’s the basis of the anti-trans claims against Emilia Perez. It doesn’t actually say anything bad about transness or trans women, it’s just inherently offensive to make a goofy movie that doesn’t take transness serious enough.
Prompt: what is a rational approach to assigning sacredness in society, especially when it comes to comedy? Is it ok to joke about the holocaust? Is it ok to joke about 9/11? Is it ok to joke about Muslims? If my best friend’s son dies in a horrible freak accident, is it ok to make a joke about that the very next day? Where should the lines be drawn? How do we distinguish between personal lines and broader societal lines? My sense is that the progressive left has conquered this space in the popular culture, but I haven’t seen a coherent alternative beyond 4chan “make fun of everything” culture. Are there better models out there?
Didn't Emily in Paris get shit for its unrealistic portrayal of Paris? And that was just a random show. It didn't get 13 Oscar nominations which naturally puts more of a spotlight on things. As I said on reddit on the same topic: people hate Crash, a movie about fighting racism, more than worse movies because it won Best Picture.
My general impression is that the backlash from Mexico is organic and this gave people in America something to rally behind (the lead actress being incredibly unwoke, hilariously so, didn't help*). You've given good reasons for Mexicans to consider this film absurd and, frankly, I don't really have much sympathy. This movie is probably only being rewarded because it's seen as a moral milestone for white libs, so it is fair to note that it violates those standards.
When called on not casting Egyptians in Exodus: Gods and Kings Ridley Scott just said "nobody is going to go watch Mohammed Whogivesafuck" and went about his day. The attack is working on this movie because it's seen in a different light than a purely commercial project.
I hate sounding even a bit like Kulak but these discussions seem utterly pointless to me. A lot of norms around sacrality are basically arbitrary. The group that cares more, that is more intolerant and more willing to fight decides. In the absence of an already unifying set of beliefs you're just gonna have to fight it out.
Roman norms around sacrifice and emperor worship were sacred until they weren't. European countries have free speech norms (a non-arbitrary example) yet the fact that psychos will semi-reliably kill you for drawing Mohammed has set a new taboo. Meanwhile, other groups that theoretically have more power have allowed the statues of their great men and icons of their people to get torn down and tabooed even when it makes no sense.
I don't see any coherent throughline in a lot of the things that happen, but they happen anyway because one party imposes its will.
Things are sacred if you'll pay a price for violating them. This is why warring tribes smashed the idols of their opponents. It was a theological argument: either your god doesn't care about you, or he cannot do anything.
* Although, ironically, she's unwoke in a progressive sense: her hatred of religion seems to universal, it's just her bad luck that she's not capable of managing the cognitive dissonance that comes with pretending brown religions from manifestly more conservative backgrounds are somehow not worse than her native faith. That's a middle class Anglo superpower.
I think these examples misunderstand who actually has power and what they want. The will being imposed here is not that of Muslims in Europe (who would have no recourse if TPTB told them to pack this shit in and actually enforced this) but that of the urban/political elite who gain status by openly deferring to the wishes of violent third-worldists. Broadly speaking, they don't identify with the great men of their history and people.
That just pushes it one step back. How did the patriots lose control of their institutions to self-hating people with a totally different religion? Why can't they be claimed back?
The US is showing that some people are willing to fight back against inverted patriotism but a lot of this stuff happens cause one group of people just seem to care more. Their enemies would be perfectly happy going home and not worrying about the curriculum or other details that much. In fact, they may be so disconnected that the people they'd agree with the most seem insane to them
And, sure , let's grant that high capacity states could, if they marshalled all of their willpower and resources, rid themselves of all of the problems of political Islam. I think the idea that because it started relatively harmless and easy to uproot that it'll stay so is very naive though. At a certain point you're not using them. It's just how life is.
Cowardice is self-reinforcing.
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Emily in Paris is not a random (terrible) show. It is a worldwide phenomenon, to the point that the actual French president complained that they were moving it to Rome for the next season. By comparison, Emilia Perez is an oscarbait movie that everyone will forget in a couple years.
I stand corrected then. I tried to watch it but didn't stick with it personally.
Also: does Macron always do this, take such a direct, visible hand in cultural products like that? IIRC he interfered in Mbappe's transfer saga too.
Maybe. But right now it jumped into the public's view and it's in the way of some very competitive people getting Oscars.
Don't worry, it is, by all accounts, not a good show.
Not being French, I can't tell for sure, but he's 100% an attention whore drama queen: look no further than whatever is going on in French politics right now: He tried to make a 350 IQ 5D chess move, and ended up furthering the crisis.
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