Forget the Emily in Paris fantasy tour, it’s not a
patch on the life I live here
Pamela
Druckerman
Best-selling American author says the new
Netflix-endorsed city break doesn’t show the best features of her adopted home
– free preschool, university and healthcare
Sun 24 Sep
2023 00.00 EDT
The news
flashed up like a red béret: Netflix has endorsed a real-life Emily in
Paris-themed trip to the French capital, based on its hit TV show. The
four-night visit includes a masterclass on “the art of flirting” (taught by a
woman meant to resemble Emily’s cruel-but-sexy boss); a lesson on baking pain
au chocolat; optional runs along the Seine, like Emily takes in the series; and
many evening apéros.
There is no
shortage of Emily-themed activities in Paris. The tourist office publishes its
own guide to destinations from the show, and there are dozens of unofficial
tours (several warn participants not to attempt their three-hour walks wearing
stilettos). Last autumn I attended an American’s Emily-themed bar mitzvah here;
the party T-shirt had stars of David inserted into the cross-hatches of the
Eiffel Tower.
But
Netflix’s official “Paris by Emily” tour (the first one is scheduled for next
April) reaches a new level of TV-meets-world surreality: the makers of a TV
show about an American fantasy of Paris are trying to deliver that imagined
version of the city to real-life visitors. It’s as if Lewis Carroll sponsored
guided tours of Wonderland, or George Lucas offered to take you into space.
(The tour’s starting rate of £2,928 per person, not including airfare, suggests
organisers have the means to remove any unwanted sights.)
It’s hard
to track all the vectors of meta-weirdness. The inaugural tour guide or
“Emileader”, Ines Tazi, is a French-Moroccan Instagram sensation who has
appeared on Netflix reality TV shows. (“I love creating bridges between online
and offline, fiction and reality,” she says.) Whereas the fictional Emily posts
Paris-themed selfies, the tour operator – a company called Dharma – promises a
trip that’s “designed to be iconic from every angle, ensuring you don’t just
live your best life – you have the pics to prove it”.
At first
glance, the Emily tour seems like another case of media companies trying to
upsell their fanciest subscribers, just as the rich have come to expect
exclusive, highly curated activities where they mingle with each other. Tour
participants can pay extra for a hair and makeup service, or to create their
own perfume. Netflix is American, so they’ll presumably have to arrange any
extramarital affairs on their own.
But I think
the desire to be subsumed in an escapist TV show is a product of our current
cultural moment, too. Americans have dreamed of Paris ever since Benjamin
Franklin marvelled over the city’s stylish inhabitants in the 18th century, and
wrote that he “was once very near making love to my friend’s wife”. But the
Paris fantasy has taken on special resonance in the face of terrifying climate
change; vast and growing political cleavages; eroding rights for American
women; and the possibility of future pandemics.
In a recent
IFOP poll for the website Bonjour New York of 1,113 Americans aged 18 and over,
36% said they’d like to live in France, up from 20% in 2005. There may be an
Emily effect: among those who had watched the series, 54% said they would live
or work in France if they could, compared with 25% of those who had not.
Among
Americans in Paris like me, identifying errors on the show – from the oversized
apartments to the French people speaking English to each other – has become a
kind of sport. But the show’s fans fact check in reverse: they consider the
scripted version of Paris to be the gold standard, and reality a poor
second-best. Tourists have written scathing reviews of a bakery featured in the
series, because its real-life croissants didn’t provide the Emily’s
transcendent experience. “We’re just a neighbourhood boulangerie, we’re not
selling dreams,” one employee said.
Emily fans
seem to crave a place – even an imagined one – without disappointments, where
bad things rarely happen. In the IFOP poll, about half of viewers insisted
Paris has no rats or homeless people and 76% said they believed “most French
people dress elegantly in their every-day lives”. Lily Collins, who plays
Emily, admitted that, after all the prancing on cobblestones in heels, she had
to get orthopaedic inserts.
The series
wants it both ways. When Collins appeared on the French talk show C à vous last
year, an interviewer said the show was a “postcard” that ignores the city’s
reality. “We own every aspect of the show being fantasy based, and also based
in a realism, showing Paris in many different ways,” Collins replied.
The French
want it both ways, too. They groan about the cliches, but they like the
attention and the tourist spending, and French Vogue put Collins on its cover.
(In another boomerang, Collins said she’s starting to dress more like the
character she plays on the show.) And to be fair, it’s sometimes hard to know
where the Parisian stereotypes end and real life begins. A woman in the French
fashion industry recently told me that she once spent an evening trying to keep
her boss’s mistress away from his wife at an office party, just like on the
show.
Perhaps
boosted by the series, the past few months in Paris felt like a full-scale
American invasion. Even at cafes far from the Emily loop, I often heard more
English than French. Visits to the Paris region were up 27% in the first four
months of 2023 on the same period last year (they’re still 2.5% below 2019
levels). Americans and Britons comprise the biggest groups of foreign visitors.
With
Emily’s fourth season approaching I’d suggest another kind of escapist
speciality tour: one that introduces foreigners to France’s free preschools;
its practically free universities; and its universal healthcare. Real-life
Paris is trying to address climate change by installing kilometres of bike
lanes and making Europe’s biggest expansion of its public transit system, with
68 new metro stations in the suburbs.
Instead of
honing the seduction skills of anxious Americans, the social services tour
would show them an encouraging, alternative model for how to run a country.
Perhaps I’ll set it up. I wonder how much I could charge.
Pamela
Druckerman, an American writer based in Paris, is the author of five books
including French Children Don’t Throw Food
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