Recently I watched Emily the Criminal (John Patton Ford, 2022), starring Aubrey Plaza. Once or twice I’ve seen the film compared to the work of the Dardenne brothers for its hyper-focused precarious laborer’s plight. I don’t know how far the comparison holds up beyond the surface. (Probably it also depends on what you think about the Dardennes in the first place.) But I can see why someone would make that connection. There is at least a veneer of observational verisimilitude. While I liked the film moderately overall, I struggled with a lot of its choices. Specifically I think much of this has to do with the way Ford’s screenplay and direction translate “gig economy precarity” into more conventional, polished dramatic forms.
Emily the Criminal follows its hardscrabble protagonist through a series of workaday indignities, dusted heavily—heavily!—with poetic license. She tries to improve her financial position through legitimate jobs, but gradually moves into the, uh, titular criminality. We open with Emily in medium shot (or was it medium-close?). She’s at a job interview. The interviewer tries a shady trick to see if Emily will divulge her criminal history before they run a background check. Emily tempts fate by downplaying her record. Turns out, the company had already done the background check, and had it in a folder right there on the desk. Emily, understandably, is pissed off by this deception. It’s the first in a string of indignities we’ll witness.
Meanwhile, I am thinking, “this is horrible interview procedure,” and “how many companies still use paper files for background checks?” Throughout the movie, in fact, I thought, “this scene of X doesn’t seem to operate in a way consistent with my own knowledge of X in the real world, or my own understanding of typical ways people would divulge or withhold information.”
Now. I’m not shocked by this! I’m also not usually deterred by implausibilities or divergences from Realism (whatever that might be). You need to provide some slack to let the film/story/etc. stylize the world as it wants to or needs to, and only later do you judge if it trips over all that slack. So let me describe a way that Emily the Criminal seems, indeed, to get tripped up a bit.
Well into the film, Emily’s more affluent friend Liz sets her up with an interview—a different job interview than described above—with the head of the design company where she works. (Gina Gershon is the big cheese!) Only after she’s started the interview and exchanged pleasantries about New Jersey does Emily learn that she’s interviewing for an unpaid, full-time internship. She ends up angrily storming out, and we feel the injustice of it all. The part of me tracking implausibilities, however, wonders why Liz neglected to mention the lack of pay to Emily. And I reason that, in the vast majority of scenarios like this in “reality,” the issue would be resolved—or dissolved—through some other means. For example:
Liz has a difficult convo with Emily sometime before the interview (a week, a day, even ten minutes) to let her know it’s actually not paid.
A deflating phone interview where Emily learns it’s not paid.
An email message informing Emily, upon application through the company’s website, that with regret this is an unpaid position.
An email message informing Emily, with gusto, that this unpaid position is a great opportunity for advancement and carries the possibility of future compensation.
I’m just spitballing. All of those options seem to me like they would be more likely to happen in real life than for someone like Emily to arrive at an in-person interview at a company that isn’t tiny with a CEO or president for an intership that she only then learns won’t pay her. Perhaps I’m badly mistaken; maybe this kind of thing really is common in that industry. But, given what I think I know, the best explanation I can provide for why Liz didn’t say anything about pay, or why this scene was written up as an in-person interview with Gershon, is that it would produce a satisfying confrontational scene (with a recognizable actor, to boot) that would solidify the fun, criminal part of the story. Of course that’s much sexier and more sellable than the quotidian reality of millions of people who experience disappointment through neoliberal precarity via screens, voicemails, endless deferrals, adjusted goalposts, impersonal feedback, and so on.
So “implausibility,” in addition to pointing toward a helpful set of dramatic conventions, can perhaps also serve as a kind of defanged critique.
There are other aspects of Emily the Criminal and its storytelling choices that seem facile. But the performances are strong and there are some nicely textured observations and inspired bits. (I like the bit of reappropriation implied by Emily taking zip ties from her catering gig to aid in one of her criminal endeavors.) But the capitulation to a certain Hollywoodism, overlaid with vaguely Dardenne-ish camerawork and proletarian production design, feels spectral, immaterial …
A literature professor’s recent tweet lamented the growing difficulty she’s had lately with class prep. Many other academics chimed in to commiserate and offer their own examples. The gist? Instructors find themselves explaining assignments and outlining procedures in excruciating detail for students these days, with the reward of diminished engagement and confusion. Covid-related learning disruptions have illuminated or worsened existing problems; meanwhile, those students who seem to be “on top of things” may grow bored and check out when the class session focuses on repetitive procedural minutiae and hand-holding. A lot of instructors will also find themselves showing up to empty, or nearly empty, classrooms and Zoom sessions. It’s not a new problem for teaching, but if reports are to be believed, it is becoming more prevalent.
In classrooms as elsewhere, engagement seems especially scarce. In many environments, you can’t expect people to do the things that you would situationally expect them to do. This can even happen when they’re paying to do those things (like people who attend movie screenings to scroll idly on their phone, or students who show up to classes in order to avoid paying attention: a kind of elongated adolescent revenge against the authority of school). It also happens when they’re being paid to do those things (like people ghosting at work because they’re just bored or they don’t like one of their co-workers, and rather than solve a problem or manage a response to it, it feels easier to avoid). My hunch is that this wider lack of engagement is a modest and perhaps subconscious expression of agency. We resent our prison of plenitude, and on some level intuit that even the plenitude is an illusion.
Over fifty years ago, Ivan Illich put it succinctly when describing the child growing up in New York City: “"Goofing off" becomes the only poetry at hand.”
This is not to say that a lack of engagement is a “good thing.” As far as being an expression of agency goes, this kind of limp refusal is just a shadow of what real autonomy entails. It’s “agency” in a weakened and limited state. And in fact, I worry about the polarization I see around me: hyper-professionalism, grind culture, productivity, antiseptic and bureaucratic inhumanity on one hand, and wishy-washy incompetence, resignation, buck-passing, try-hard infantilism, “adulting is hard” mentalities on the other. These are not competing visions of the world so much as products of the same underlying processes, which seek to recast human agency solely as agency over spectacular appearances.
I’m not outside all this. I’m stuck in here with you all, too.
In our future (an)hedonic equilibrium, we’ll disengage with what we can, and light up a bit when proprietary biofeedback algorithms generate a new quantitative arrangement of hyperstimuli to briefly awaken us again. (“Lol. Lmao.”) We’ll patrol our mediascape like sharks between kills, looking for the fresh one that punctuates routine and keeps us going. Our communication will be a rigid poetry of shibboleths and cliches while drones turn skies into billboards.
This is not solemn and scholarly speculation, I admit. It’s myth-making.