In Paris?

[dhampyresa]

For the past couple days or so, my Parisian/French friends and I have been playing "tag yourself: which Paris cliché are you?" and other things on the same "could this GET any more cliché" vein about the "Emily In Paris" trailer. And gritting our teeth at the sheer US-ness of it all

And we're not the only ones.

It got dragged by fucking Netflix france!

Si Emily était venue dans ta ville et non pas "in Paris", ce serait quoi les gros clichés de la série ?

— Netflix France (@NetflixFR) October 7, 2020

(If Emily had come to your city and not "in Paris", what would be the big clichés of the show?)

Anyway, I am very interested in knowing how "Emily in [your location/subculture/etc]" would be like. Pleas entertain me.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Sheep
Leeks
Walking into a pub and everyone switching to Welsh (doesn't happen but we get accused of it)
Castles
Dragons
Rugby
Post industrial landscape
Mountains
Harps and choirs
Daffodils
Welsh costume
Slate
"impossible" language
Chapels

[dhampyresa]

Wales!

Dragons playing rugby would be pretty cool, ngl.

[monksandbones]

Let's see, Emily in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada:

"Well, Canada is basically the United States anyway. I can't believe I need a passport to get there! What do you mean I can't pay in American money? Oh wait, you do accept American dollars but only at parity?"

High tea at the Empress Hotel: "It's so charming! So European! So Olde World!"

Instagramming "totem" poles.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in red serge uniforms.

[kore]

LOLLLLL the one time my parents visited they dragged us off to Vancouver Island (indeed very pretty!) on a day trip and we had high tea someplace where my mother insisted on pastry swans because it was her birthday. I don't think it was the Empress, tho.

Do you get Anne of Green Gables questions?

[dhampyresa]

What do you mean I can't pay in American money?

It's funny because it's true

[sovay]

(If Emily had come to your city and not "in Paris", what would be the big clichés of the show?)

We're all Irish and/or gangsters and no one pronounces the letter "R." (spatch adds: "We drink at Cheers. And something about baked beans.")

[dhampyresa]

Iish gangstes dinking at Chees?

[kore]

OMG, are there shots of the Eiffel Tower and Arc d'Triomph and people saying "Bon Joor" and berets and baguettes and a little bit of a museum for Culture and a ride on a scooter?

//watches trailer

Fuck, I was JOKING. Jesus.

[china_shop]

LOL!

[kore]

OMFG and the Yank schools the male Parisian fashion designer on sexism? YOUR ICON IS PURR-FECT

[china_shop]

LOL! I know. I was just thinking that if it was here, she'd get an entry level job at Weta Digital but end up schooling the existing staff on the proper care & treatment of movie stars.

[kore]

If it were set here she'd do some heartwarming presentation on how working from home enables people to spend time with their families PLUS it's so much better for the environment! and the giant companies because then they can insist on your labour all the time you're awake That or she'd make Starbucks pay people minimum wage with healthcare benefits.

[dhampyresa]

*cackles*

[kore]

Oh right the game! GUESS WHERE EMILY IS, I bet it will be a mystery.

- Space Needle
- Space Needle in a completely incongruous location that IRL would put it either in Puget Sound or the middle of I-5
- Geeky guy wearing Birkenstocks, cargo shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt (dated)
- Snottiest record store clerks in the world
- Double short decaf half-pump skinny white mocha free trade with non-GMO soy and a drizzle of salted caramel
- Grunge
- Plaid flannel shirts
- Ferries
- Pouring torrents of rain with thunderstorms
- No sun, never any sun, just pouring rain, moss on everything, including the cat
- A big 2BR condo that would cost you millions of dollars, inhabited by
- Baristas
- Everyone is a Bernie supporter
- Everyone is vaping everywhere (well, this one's true, or it was before the plague hit)
- Just off the ocean (what is a Sound? What is a Bay?)
- In which you can go swimming
- Hippies
- Hipsters
- Thirty-year-old millionaires
- Everyone has a car
- And that car is a Subaru
- Except for the everyone who has a mountain bike that costs thousands of dollars
- Everyone works for Bill Gates
- Or Jeff Bezos
- Or Google
- Or is a barista

[dhampyresa]

- Everyone works for Bill Gates
- Or Jeff Bezos
- Or Google
- Or is a barista

What, no Boeing?

[kore]

OMFG, Seattle has been acting like Dido in the ruins of Carthage because Boeing -- after not paying taxes and getting the biggest billion-with-a-B-dollar tax break in the country -- started moving to South Carolina (no pesky labour unions there!) 5-7 years ago or so and has capped it off by saying they will move the original 787 Dreamliner assembly line to SC and there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth and blaming of Libruls, particularly those violent antifa youths.

-- Altho I think in terms of the cliche, Boeing tends to be seen as more blue-collar? and the factories are places like Everett, so it doesn't fit the cliche, altho it's still the largest employer in the state (Renton and Everett are the big plants) and I think in Seattle too, altho I just tried googling and the results were atrocious ("Top 10 Big Employers To Work For in Seattle!").

[kore]

(Sorry, probably more than you ever wanted to know about the anti-union shitty practices of Boeing)

[dhampyresa]

Never apologise for letting me learn stuff! <3

[ng_moonmoth]

Golden Gate Bridge
Cable cars
Fisherman's Wharf: sea lions and crab takeaways
Alcatraz Island
Coit Tower
Lombard Street
Alamo Square "Painted Lady" Victorians
Hills
Shivering tourists in shorts
Fog
City Hall lit up for Pride Month
Castro District
Gay bar or bathhouse (there are still a few left, although most of the really legendary ones, and pretty much all the lesbian bars, are gone)
Folsom Street Fair
Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
Drag show
(RIP Beach Blanket Babylon)
Grizzled beat poets at North Beach cafe (there are still a few left)
Headliners show up and play at twenty-seat club that doesn't have a sign or a name after their concert
Chinese New Year Parade
Chinatown: Grant Avenue

Yeah, there's a bunch more stuff that could be any major city. And some stuff that says where you are, but you'd need to be a local to get the reference. But these are the ones that immediately give a sense of place.

[dhampyresa]

And some stuff that says where you are, but you'd need to be a local to get the reference

I'd be interested in knowing more about these.

Here are a few

[ng_moonmoth]

Golden Gate Park. Notable landmarks that a local would probably recognize:

de Young Museum
Bison paddock
Model boat sailing lagoon
Dutch windmills near the ocean

A main thoroughfare within the park closes to motorized vehicles on weekends. Bicycles (and some people for whom two wheels is too many on unicycles), skateboards, scooters, roller skaters, just plain walkers.

Other locations:

Palace of Fine Arts
Legion of Honor Museum (complete with a casting of Rodin's Thinker in the courtyard).
Crissy Field
Fort Point (can be shot with or without the Golden Gate Bridge in the background)
Ferry Building
Civic Auditorium (there's a reason it now also honors legendary promoter Bill Graham)
Fort Mason (the historic buildings, and also Fort Mason Center)
Aquatic Park. Popular starting/finishing point for people who swim in the Bay, and don't mind the currents and the low 50F/low 10C temperatures.
Pier 39 (this is where the piers with the sea lions actually are; too many productions would make you think they're at Fisherman's Wharf) -- it's an outdoor tourist shopping mall, so locals don't usually come there unless dragged by visitors.
Rent-by-the-hour mini electric cars
Ghirardelli Square
Hallidie Plaza (Powell Street BART station, south end of Powell/Mason and Powell/Hyde cable car lines, and informal pissoir for those overnighting in the streets in the vicinity)
UN Plaza. When the olive trees get cut back there each year, they look absolutely otherworldly. And if you set up your shot right, you can get them as the only bit of nature in a concrete landscape.

Bits of wtf:
Vaillancourt Fountain
Twin Peaks with Sutro Tower
Filbert Steps (yes, it's an actual city street with actual addresses. It also goes up a hillside for 700ft/200+m at roughly a 30% grade.)

Other oddities:
Baseball stadium. Right on the water. With the SF Opera presenting a production on the field.
Or during an actual baseball game. With dozens of kayakers out on the water (McCovey Cove) hoping for someone to hit a ball far enough to reach the water. (Happens a few times a season.)
The Blue Angels (US Navy precision fighter team) flying over the city during Fleet Week. And the roar waking people up, setting off car alarms, and interrupting conversations citywide as they practice before their show.
Available, legally permissible parking space. Always a hoot for locals to see someone driving around the city and pulling into an available spot just outside their intended destination.

One last bonus:
Microbrewery. Filled with twenty-somethings dressed in some iteration of "business casual". Served by bartenders dressed in some iteration of ripped jeans/T-shirts featuring bands popular 10-20 years previously, and outrageously styled and colored hair.

I can probably dig up a few more if you'd like.

Re: Here are a few

[dhampyresa]

This was interesting, thank you.

[kore]

Aww I grew up near there. The Fillmore Club! The Embarcadero! Rice-a-Roni! fucking LOL.

Meanwhile, where is the epic artwork about BART.

[dolorosa_12]

Emily in my country of origin would be on a beach, full of blonde, tanned people drinking beer, cooking sausages on a barbecue, and saying 'g'day' a lot, and there would be kangaroos roaming the streets. And none of the actors would get our accent right and would instead sound like Americans trying to do a Cockney accent.

Emily in my current home town would cycle the wrong way up King's Parade, somehow end up behind the college for the iconic skyscape that gets featured in every show/film set here, and would somehow stumble into a bunch of academics and students wearing academic gowns. She would then pop up in a completely different part of town with no indication as to how she cycled there (a portal?).

(Basically it's a bit of a cliché in films and TV shows set in Cambridge that characters seem to wander through one part of town and then suddenly step into another, even though in real life the two places are not next to each other. Likewise, they're always filmed cycling the wrong way down a one-way street, which in reality would see them yelled at loudly by irate professors.)

I am so, so fed up with American media treating the rest of the world as a kind of cliché-ridden theme park for Americans.

Cycling the wrong way down a one-way street

[ng_moonmoth]

Similar offense in my area is epitomized by the scene in The Graduate where Benjamin drives his car from San Francisco to Berkeley on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge -- which has never in its history been one-way that direction, and hasn't had any sort of traffic going that direction since the lower deck was repurposed from trucks and transit to eastbound traffic in 1962.

Bonus wrong-way points in the movie for Benjamin riding a bus to the Berkeley campus on Telegraph Avenue -- which, again, was one-way the other direction at the time of the movie, and for several years before then.

"It looks better that way" really shouldn't be an excuse.

Re: Cycling the wrong way down a one-way street

[kore]

LOL remember Bullitt? (showing my age)

https://www.wired.com/2009/08/bullitt-google-map/

Re: Cycling the wrong way down a one-way street

[ng_moonmoth]

Sure do. I'm pre-cable and 24hr television; test patterns were an inevitable part of my youth and early adulthood. And in those days, Bullitt was one of the small set of movies that were frequently shown.

As far as riding one's bike in gross defiance of traffic laws, I did that once -- took it southbound through the MacArthur Tunnel (Hwy 1 under the Presidio). And nobody cared! Reason? All the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge were closed down for the 1987 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the opening of the bridge, so it could be opened to pedestrians. I was one of the estimated 3/4 of a million there. I lived in San Francisco at the time, so I rode my bike to the bridge. Didn't get any further than the south tower before I needed to go home and get to another event that day. But when I saw there was no traffic leaving the area at all, I decided to take the shortest route home.

This stretch of highway is marked "Motor Vehicles Only" -- understandable because the only time it doesn't have three lanes of traffic zooming along at 45mph/75kph is when it has three lanes full of traffic at a dead stop because they don't have any place to go at the other end. But that day, it was blessedly empty.

Re: Cycling the wrong way down a one-way street

[kore]

//old-timer fistbump I remember those! The Million Dollar Movie showing overnight and all that.

That bike ride almost sounds like when they emptied the London bridge for 28 Days Later. Except there was just you!

[dhampyresa]

She would then pop up in a completely different part of town with no indication as to how she cycled there (a portal?).
The adventures of the teleporting tourist!

I am so, so fed up with American media treating the rest of the world as a kind of cliché-ridden theme park for Americans.
As the kids say, MOOD.

[kore]

I am so, so fed up with American media treating the rest of the world as a kind of cliché-ridden theme park for Americans.

And then the Americans get to go to the actual cliche-ridden Disneyland theme parks! (WHY anyone would do that is beyond me.)

[corvidology]

Swamps
Porches
Snakes
Deer hunting
Raccoon hunting
Turkey hunting
Hunting lodges
Church on every corner
Magnolia trees as far as the eye can see
Spanish moss hanging from every tree
Barbecue... well, on everything and everyone has a big one on wheels made out of an old gas tank
Everyone is carrying a gun or a shotgun AND a bible at all times
Everyone is wearing a baseball cap with a trucking logo or a bad taste joke on it
Men all called 'Bubba'
Everyone has visible sweat stains
Women all have Big Hair and dress like they're in Gone with the Wind with shorter dresses

[dhampyresa]

No snake hunting?

[corvidology]

Actually, a friend of one of MG's cousins catches snakes for zoos. :D

[dhampyresa]

That's really cool!

[eller]

What an excellent question! If Emily came to Hamburg, she'd

- arrive in an ugly but very expensive Dirndl dress (which is Bavarian Tracht, but never mind; Germany is Germany) and a tote bag with 'I <3 Hamburg' printed on it
- eat nothing but fish, every day
- teach the uncivilised North Germans how to cook said fish properly, because people in a harbor town that's been there since the middle ages need someone from Chicago to help them figure out the correct philosophy of cooking fish
- make every male who meets her fall in insta-love with her (admittedly, this is not location-specific)
- become a social media star posting videos of her harbor boat trips
- explain the Germans what boats are really supposed to be like
- .... ugh.