"The problem with the Timing...
Is That It Is Always Off While It Cannot Be Off at All" (Sianne Ngai)
(Warning, contains Emily in Paris spoilers.)
Central to the plot of Emily in Paris is a tumultuous romantic relationship between Emily (the show’s main character) and Gabriel, the hot French chef who lives one floor below her. At the start, Gabriel has a longterm girlfriend, Camille, who is also hot, as well as cool and catastrophically nice. In spite of this, Gabriel and Emily have feelings for each other, articulated first via omelettes and small favors and ultimately with sex (of course). The two sleep together in the season one finale on the impetus that Gabriel is leaving Paris to open a restaurant in Normandy the following day, also why him and Camille have broken up. It is the perfect finale, this sex that they promise to never speak of or repeat, the impossibility of its being repeated acting as the container in which it can be perfect and unscathed by the otherwise anxious conditions of its having happened at all.
Sex as an event tenders a medium for both escape and privacy, by being necessarily contained (we aren’t fucking all the time, even if we’re thinking about it) and being intimate, shared and fully understood only by those who have participated in it (everything else is secondhand news). The show uses sex as an opportunity for characters to live out imagined realities about themselves and each other, in privacy or secrecy. However, the sex in this show inevitably becomes public, laying bare how incomprehensible the characters who thought they knew and loved one another often are. It is only in the space of intimacy that these characters seem to fully understand and accept each other; anywhere else, they are groping around for the cultural scripts that they had always used to organize their lives and loves, trying to understand why the script stopped working.
The morning after fucking Emily, just as he’s about to leave, Gabriel receives an offer to run a restaurant in Paris as his own. He decides in that moment not to go to Normandy. He gets back with Camille. Gabriel and Emily attempt to keep their sex a secret, but Camille inevitably finds out. Big fight. Camille and Emily then promise not to pursue Gabriel, to preserve their friendship. Camille breaks the promise, gets back with Gabriel. Camille takes a hot Greek lover. Her lover goes back to Greece. Camille gets pregnant, Gabriel proposes, and at the alter, Camille accuses Gabriel and Emily of having been in love the whole time. Camille disappears. In the words of Lauren Berlant, “They fail because it was too hard not to be a formalist in love.”
The love triangle of season one, which becomes more pentagon by season four, consists of a network of messy entanglements, bound by how bad the characters are at saying what they want and how they feel. We can’t blame them, really, because they are limited by what scripts are available to them about what is acceptable or possible or even desirable for/from love. In showcasing the characters’ stubborn adherence to cultural scripts about monogamy, it also blows them apart. Because if the show illustrates anything at all, it’s that whatever the fuck these people are doing is not working.
At times, the show is hard to watch. The watcher wants Gabriel and Emily to get together, sort of, but not to watch Camille get hurt. The watcher wants them to be honest, but also recognizes that in the world constructed by the show, they cannot be. The watcher, like the characters, wants incommensurate things — that everybody should love or fuck whoever they want without it registering as a personal affront to other lovers, that it may actually be possible to love more than one person at once, that the act of loving more than one person at once is not a disqualifying act which renders all the love in question false.
Gabriel and Camille represent the good life to one another, even when practically they have very different ideations of what either’s good life entails. Gabriel and Emily represent different versions of good lives to one another, perhaps a more honest or expansive version because they have yet to project expectations or obligation onto one another. It’s the classic provocation of new love, which may translate then to new life: the expansivity promised by having had a new “first” (first time kissing this new lover). And suddenly there is a stranger with wide eyes looking at you from across their soft bed and smiling. Sex becomes the site where it all becomes possible.
Even as Camille proceeds to fuck Sophia, the hot Greek woman, behind Gabriel’s back, she refuses to communicate her feelings to Gabriel or to let him go. The affair foregrounds the anxiety with which Camille is now attached to Gabriel — she doesn’t want to be with him, yet she can’t let go of him and the good-life-promise he has come to represent for her. The whole ordeal rests on the assertion that love is foregrounded by possession, an aspect of object permanence in which not only is the object real but is grabbable or grabbed. What is love without possession, without claiming or being claimed? (One might wonder, in the context of how we are conditioned to understand love, if that could qualify as love at all?) It’s a form of love that requires participants to transmute lover into love object, even when they are able to see themselves more expansively. Camille holds her many forms of love at the same time — romantic and sexual love for Sophia, enduring platonic love for Gabriel — but can’t believe Gabriel as capable of doing the same (e.g. his sleeping with Emily discredits his feelings for her).
Tale as old as time: love objects change location or form, and the original object is left trying to catch up, make sense of what was lost, when they lost it, where it went, and how they might get it back. Love begets or promises a sort of “object permanence,” in which we feel vindicated to assume that the love object will always be there, where this question of permanence is the qualifying factor determining is it love or is it not: Can it endure? And if it can’t, what’s wrong with me?
Each character’s desires and anxieties bind them to one another, where they are able to live out these desires/anxieties/possibilities through their lived relationships, particularly through sex. It is only towards the middle of season four that finally, the possibility of another way of living and loving becomes legible. Camille reappears and Sophia also appears, both at Gabriel’s restaurant. Camille decides to have the baby and not to marry Gabriel. Gabriel lets her and Sophia stay at his apartment while they search for a place of their own. Camille being pregnant is a physical, material manifestation of her sexual relationship with Gabriel, along with all of the dreams they once shared and attempted to realize (marriage, a family, a “normal” arc of life). It is only once she admits that she doesn’t necessarily want these things, that she was punishing Gabriel for it all along, that she is able to be with Sophia, a relationship that is antithetical to the extreme heteronormativity proffered by Gabriel (American mistress included).
In Sex in the Event of Happiness, Lauren Berlant wrote: “What happens in sex, therefore, is not just a figure for the social at its best and worst extremes, but a training in how simply hard it is to be in the room with another person, even someone you want there: because it is hard to show up fully to sociality in general, and once there, to maintain an openness toward the objects about which one feels aggressive, has variable confidence, few skills, and little trust that the world will be patient for you self-inconstancy.” Humans are inconsistent, which doesn’t make their feelings any less real. What I think is interesting is how we navigate (or don’t) the reality that someone may have feelings for more than one person, that it happens all the time. That liking someone may not mean (or require) laying claim over them, and that the very act of laying claim over someone may be the same thing that ultimately puts a pin in intimacy, deflates it entirely. Emily in Paris illustrates just how hard it can be to be with one another, and to articulate imagined possibilities for love and for life, let alone realize them. It gestures, subtly, to what is possible when we attempt to pursue in public the simplicity of what was previously, only available in private. It makes too much of it — everybody overthinks, miscommunicates, gets anxious and insecure. Yet, they along with the audience are irresistibly drawn to a world where we can all get what we want, even if it is not when we first admitted we wanted it.