One of this year’s big awards hopefuls just premiered on Netflix – and probably on your social-media feed, too. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez played a bunch of film festivals and a few theaters on its way to Netflix, but you might know it as the gender-reassignment-hospital-song movie, because that’s how it was introduced to literally millions of people via a much-shared tweet and others like it.
In divisive times where we can’t even all agree which social network is the most insufferable of the lot, we take unity where we can get it, and where we can get it is often posting short clips from movies or TV shows with variations on the reaction “lol wtf is this insanity.” It’s how we got Adam Driver back to the cluuuub and discourse on how multimillion dollar companies allow terrible special effects. Hell, I got a million people to look at my dumb joke about whether Chuck Norris was still alive based on his stock-still appearance in a DTV cheapie!
But something always nags at me about this form of movie consumption, not least because it’s not actually movie consumption at all. For all of the ways cinephiles justifiably complain about movies being processed into content – Netflix style guidelines; endless IP recycling; promises about AI putting viewers in charge – there may be no quicker, more efficient method than simply yanking a bit of a movie out of context, posting it to the internet, pointing and/or laughing, and maybe grow your follower count off the back of it. (If you’re a verified user on a certain social network, maybe you can even turn a profit through posting 30 seconds of someone else’s actual work!)
Of course, one reason plenty of cinephiles remain on social media is how much fun it is to share our favorite hobby/obsession/profession/horrible life choice. One way to do that is to post screenshots or clips, and naturally there’s a lot of joy to be derived from sharing images and moments from your favorite movies – and absorbing others’ favorites that you may have forgotten about. Just as naturally, there will be a flipside where clips or stills are used to belittle a movie’s craft, often with good cause. For example: a lot of Marvel movies do look like garbage! And Emilia Pérez really isn’t very good.
But as someone who watched all of Emilia Pérez in an actual movie theater, I would also say that a ridiculous musical number about transitioning is not particularly what’s bad about the movie. In fact, the movie’s musical numbers are the points where, for me, it truly came to life, and I better understood the kind of operatic soapiness it’s aiming for. As a musical, it proceeds in the somewhat jagged, nervous musical footsteps of movies like New York, New York or Dancer in the Dark. Awkwardly speak-sung numbers about gender transition are absolutely a part of that weirdness, and I’ll take that over another Rob Marshall screw-up any day.
In a sense, this just represents a minor, hair-splitting difference of opinion: I don’t like excerpting this scene from Emilia Pérez, but maybe excerpting another scene that makes it more clear that this movie is essentially an unconvincing drug-world trans variation on Mrs. Doubtfire, wouldn’t irritate me quite so much. But that’s the seductive quality of posting 30 seconds of a movie on social media for dunks and likes: It’s all in good fun until it happens to something you like (or even find more interesting than laughable), at which point it suddenly seems smugly anti-art. And it’s hard to think of a genre more delicate and more easy to harm with out-of-context clips than the musical.
Think of it this way: almost nine million people supposedly saw that Emilia Pérez clip. If all of those people paid to see a single movie, it would gross around $70 million domestic. Which is better for film culture: Scrolling mindlessly through a bunch of viral quote-tweet dunks, or spending two hours with a movie where your reaction to the whole of it may, gulp, vary? The culture very much favors, even rewards, the former; Netflix seems to prefer it by default because of how much they hate movie theaters. The latter, though – the thing that involves more time and thought and energy – is what actually makes movies weirdly magical. Mock-sharing movie clips come with a prescribed reaction, snuffing that magic out, and that goes for more appreciative memes, too, whether intended as ironic or not. Not everyone will have the intended reaction automatically, but there’s certainly a thumb on the scale.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
