On Julie & Julia & Me – A Review

Feb 21

Sentiment is often the driving force behind personal writing. Catching and collecting moments in a blog is a way to future-proof nostalgia, disseminate memories, and eternalize stories. This might sound self-aggrandizing or poetic or pretentious, but those are part and parcel with “blogs” in general. The whole point of personal writing is to say “look at me, read my thoughts, make my moments important.”

Now—honestly, I think most forms of entertainment are like that. Art, movies, tv shows, YouTube videos, and anything else driven by a personality is, at its core, a showcase for the ego. Its attention-seeking, but usually in a mutually beneficial way. I entertain you, but not without imparting my values. I help you pass the time, but I also make some money advertising.

The relationship between entertainers and their fans has become an increasingly blurred line. There has always been a strange dynamic between the famous and their loyalists, but now, in the age of social media, we can often feel much closer to people who would’ve been distant to us. That is true for friends you haven’t seen in a while and also people you’ve never met at all. Famous people with magnanimous personalities can show up in your twitter feed next to your friend’s tweets. They can be there, and you can type to them, and they might see it.

In this way, it often feels like we can have an intellectually intimate relationship with just about anyone. Before the only person who knew your private thoughts was you. Maybe your immediate family and a few friends, but now, well, the whole world might know your innermost fears, insecurities, and complex medical history.

This becomes dangerous when you realize that any form of expression can be exploited. It can be altered, made up, or even stolen. Before this was a small thing. Your town might know about the boy who wears a military uniform he bought at goodwill and pretends to be a veteran in order to steal valor. Now, that boy could have a following on social media. He could post in forums or in chatrooms and extend that false persona globally. He could then use that false persona to cultivate sympathy or fans, people who trust that his experience is as earnest as theirs. And then cash in that trust for something dangerous. And I’m definitely not using something that actually happened recently to make my point!

I’m not even remotely the first person to start talking about this—there have been studies on relationships with mass communicators for, well, ever. It’s the same concept as “history is written by the victors,” except the victors are charismatic news anchors, makeup gurus with no citations, and anemic bloggers who wear socks in their own home.

Psychologists began studying parasocial interactions in earnest in the early 1970s. Years of radio and TV marketing had made it necessary to take a closer look at how emotionally invested audiences were getting from their highly edited and stylized cable subscription.

The studies continue to this day and are often interested in a term I’m coining now as “stolen homophily.” Homophily is the pysch term for how you tend to become friends with people who are like you. Stolen homophily is my term for how people can often mistake their favorite twitch streamer or vlogger as their friend. When this happens, the audience member is now in a “parasocial relationship.”

Now, I don’t mean friend as in like, when you ask them “who’s your best friend?” they say it’s xx_Ghost_Killa__xx on YouTube. It’s more so that they’ll talk to xx_Ghost_Killa__xx and about xx_Ghost_Killa__xx as if they know them—but they don’t.

This is a subconscious thing that just happens. Even when you know about it. Our brains are just wired to form bonds with people who are like us. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Several studies have linked early parasocial relationships as a more meaningful way to learn. I’ve already gone to great lengths to discuss storytelling and its value to society on this blog, but at the end of the day, if you watch someone you care about learn something, odds are you’re going to learn it too.

That’s actually the whole reason why characters like Elmo or Dora are successful. Kids develop a parasocial relationship with the characters by interacting with them. This means that the kids will have genuine trust in those characters and will give much more weight to whatever it is they’re doing/saying.

These studies also proved that the more “interactive” a character is, the deeper the bond will be and that deeper bonds lead to faster and more retentive learning.

The same goes for book characters. You become Katniss’s friend when you read The Hunger Games, and you’re emotionally invested in what happens to her and which boy she’ll date, #TeamGale.

Now, news anchors don’t exactly call out Rebecca Johnson from Skokie, Illinois or ask them where on the map they should go next. But these relationships still build due to analogs and user-based interactions. Think being able to call into a radio station, or tweeting @ the contestant on a show you like, or the reliability of them being there at specific times, or surrogate “every-man” stand-ins on TV shows that are meant to “represent” someone like you.

There’s also general non-specific pronouns, something I do all the time. I often will use the royal you, as do politicians, beauty vloggers, and advertisers worldwide. Its intentional, you realize that, right?

And that’s the four-letter word of the day. Intentions.

Because, even though I pointed out the good in parasocial interactions, the rabbit hole gets a lot darker.

The obvious problems are stalking, obsession, and other unfounded aggressive attachment behaviors that pose actual physical threats to both entertainer and entertainee. But, there’s a lot of less recognized problems too. Misplaced trust, unrealistic standards, emotional distress, egomania, fetishization, undue social influence, market manipulation, and much more. Do you know how people make a living as an influencer? Some of them get ad revenue or have subscription services, sure. But they also make money through sponsorships. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, except that influencer-based marketing has been proven to induce a sense of FOMO in their audience causing them to make impulse purchases.

This is taken to a new level when you consider the types of relationships these people have with their fans. If they treat fans as though they’re equals, donating to them/buying their sponsored products might be a “way to help a homie out;” if they treat their audience as if they themselves are worth more, the audience might think that by buying these products they could attain the same celebrity-status; or if they sandbag and act like they’re much worse than their fans, the audience might make purchases out of pity. This kind of manipulation can be incidental, since well, it usually happens among friends too. Think about how friend groups all tend to have children around the same time, or tend to wear similar clothes/shop at the same store. Or think about how many times you asked a friend for advice on which laptop or shampoo to buy. You normally never have to worry that your friend has been paid off by Lenovo and Loreal—but with parasocial relationships you do.

And so, what the heck does this have to do with 2009’s Julie & Julia? Starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams?

Well. I’ll get there, but I’ve gotta get a bit more circuitous.

So. I think about this stuff a lot. As a content writer, I create the kind of stuff that’s meant to be shared. I’ve worked in marketing for… well too long now, and the amount of time I’ve put into crafting copy meant to direct your action and attention makes me uncomfortable. Luckily now, I work for a place where I get to put that skillset to a good use—education.

But somewhere before this Edenic crossroads of my life choices, I freelanced for an online recipe and cookware website. They had to overhaul their entire website after they found overnight success because their competitor (who we won’t name) fell apart due to the fact that they weren’t paying their non-white employees a fair wage. Which. Yeah. Yikes.

Now this cool company has way too many eyes on their poorly constructed site just because they pay everyone an equally small amount. In order to deal with that and to keep up with the demand of this rabid fan base of foodies -- they hired me to rewrite product descriptions and create a sales funnel to keep these new buyers interested. Which meant that I had to do a lot of research. What made the previous site successful, what did their fans respond well to, etc.

All of the content on the evil company's site was changed a few years prior to match with the dawn of the “influencer” era, so most of their copy was focused on their YouTube personalities.

“Jennifer, who you know from your favorite YouTube series, loves this cast iron pan, she called it her ‘literal child,’ such a Jennifer thing to say, don’t you think? BUY IT NOW ONLY 5 LEFT.”

This, appropriately, frightened me. I ended up writing really snarky copy for the site, which they liked and ran for 6 months until they rolled it back to a more barebones approach, I’m not bitter or anything.

Anyway, long story short, I had to write product descriptions for pots and pans for like two weeks and there are only so many ways to say “non-stick.” The last set of products I had to write descriptions for were Dutch Ovens. Which, the servantless home chefs among my legion of fans already know, are just big heavy pots with lids.

The site editor told me that these were some of their most popular products and that I should really make them pop. Feedback that meant nothing to me (sorry Alice!). I struggled to come up with anything that popped for two days, which was unlike me.

Eventually I got it done. The editor and I landed on “poppy” descriptions for these big heavy pots with lids and we both got to move on with our lives—well. Almost.

See, during this time I became intimately familiar with Dutch Ovens. So much so that I found myself partially obsessed (this is not a callback to influencer marketing I think Dutch Ovens are neat). I felt like I needed one! But I also knew that I’d be moving soon, and thus should not purchase one, what with them being big heavy pots with lids.

I declared that 2021 would be the year of the Dutch Oven, at first to myself, and then to anyone who would listen. And it is! I bought one a few weeks ago. However, I needed something special in order to christen it. My roommate and I settled on beef bourguignon, presumably because it was the only dish either of us associated with a Dutch Oven. And because of this, my roommate asked if I had seen the movie Julie & Julia, which I hadn’t, and so we decided we’d watch the dish and eat the movie.

Oh, how embarrassing I made a typo.

Anyway, we did it. We cooked the thing, we ate the thing, we watched the thing, and it was a good time. It took like 9 hours (we couldn’t remember the Netflix password), but we did it! It was a success.

Well.

For the most part.

See, the film Julie & Julia is extremely thought provoking. It captured Julie and Julia’s journey so well, while also authentically exploring complex concepts like identity, idolization, sexism, and stress.

As I watched it, I felt disturbingly seen. Julie worked a stressful dead-end job, surrounded by successful friends, as a failed writer. She cooks to escape her problems and then eventually creates a challenge for herself that is accompanied by a blog, and suddenly I’m realizing that I’m in this picture and that, well, I do a lot of the unconscionable things Amy Adams does too.

So here I am, staring at the consequences of my own actions, eating the best meal I’ve ever made in my whole life, sitting next to two people who have put up with my antics for far too long and someone who really has not realized how insane I am yet, and I start feeling heavily impacted. And then, the movie does something—it makes Julie famous.

This led to a complex case of narcissism within Julie. One that she centered on her fans. Something realistic, but not something I related to. The character undergoes massive changes and becomes spiteful and frustrating, and I take it for the cautionary tale that it is.

In one of the film’s denouements Julie is told that Julia hates her blog and Julie doesn’t know how to take it.

Parasocial relationships can be dangerous because we create fake versions of these people in our heads. We twist their words and actions to match with our fantasies until it become impossible to make sense of it. Throughout the film, Julie mimics Julia, several scenes focus on her telling her husband “how she is” and feature her trying to predict what Julia would say or do in the same situation.

But Julie has never met Julia. She’s read her book and presumably watched her show, but she doesn’t know her.

In the movie, when Julie learns that Julia doesn’t like her, she’s heartbroken, but she doesn’t come forward to comment. She just cooks.

While I won’t argue authorial intent (or personal intent based on the real story), in 2021, the year of the Dutch Oven, this moment to me is the most educational.

To me, the movie was echoing the sentiment of “don’t meet your heroes,” while taking it a step deeper and pointing out the dangers of putting someone on a pedestal, especially yourself. This is cemented even farther when Julie’s husband, Chris Messina, continuously asks Julie to “stop calling [him] a saint.”

When Julie realizes this all of her manufactured personas crumble and she legitimately self-actualizes. Her success continues, but the “genuine” good-natured version of her from the beginning of the film returns. She appropriately adjusts her personal relationships, her relationship with Julia, her relationship with her husband, but, most importantly, her relationship with herself.

And here we get the big moral. After everything else the film lays on us about dedication, obsession, bigotry, and what have you, the biggest lesson is on the dangerous traps we create for ourselves in our self-aggrandizing.

You see, art is self-centered. It is inward. Introspective. An internal mirror. And when you start having to put yourself out there for more and more people, well, you start to scrutinize how grimy and gross the mirror might get.

This leads to you having to polish and reduce. Become the smooth clean thing. Not the real human thing. But in doing so, well, now you're lying (in the business we call it editing). And then you're presenting this wrinkle-free version of yourself to the outside world and then... consequences.

People view you as perfect and think that you're so amazing and become obsessed and you (possibly) begin to believe your own lies and hold yourself and those around you to an impossible standard.

The fact is, everyone is a performer. We perform for our audiences constantly. When we're comfortable, the performance is authentic. When we're not? Well. It all goes downhill and people end up on pedestals.

Trust me, I know I’ve done my fair share of pedestalling, and I know that I’ve even been pedestalled. These are real words. But I think the film wants us to even acknowledge that sometimes we even put ourselves on pedestals. Something that, honestly I don’t consider nearly as often as I should.

And, after 5 and a half pages of self-aggrandizing, I should take stock and reconsider what in my life needs editing and what doesn’t. I also should make more beef bourguignon.

Thanks for reading. It’s a long one!

Take care.

Sources:

Cohen – Parasocial Break-Ups from Favorite TV Characters

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0265407504041374

Cole and Leets - Attachment Styles and Intimate Television Viewing

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Attachment-Styles-and-Intimate-Television-Viewing%3A-Cole-Leets/8f9f927f1c563065777773d7180822cff2dec8d8

Gola, Richards, Lauricella, Calvert – Building Meaningful Parasocial Relationships

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Building-Meaningful-Parasocial-Relationships-and-to-Gola-Richards/51296b0e02766956a02f01c56119aed078f2553f

Horton and Wohl - Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049

Lauricella, Gola, Calver – Toddlers’ Learning from Socially Meaningful Video Characters