Watching JULIE & JULIA in the Swiftie Era
Was Nora Ephron clairvoyant?
I’ve been watching a lot of Nora Ephron movies, both movies made from her screenplays and movies she directed. I’ve noticed something really interesting about these movies. Nora Ephron tapped into themes that are amazingly relevant today. Through her work, which largely consists of comedies, romances, and relationship dramas, she found big truths and explored serious sociopolitical themes. BEWITCHED, her unfairly maligned take on the 1960s sitcom, plays differently when we have countless Disney+ streaming shows mining any property for an ounce of nostalgia. Her directorial debut THIS IS MY LIFE tackles the line between real life events and material for standup, something Hasan Minhaj has come under fire for recently. YOU’VE GOT MAIL will forever be relevant as a movie about capitalism and how to survive it.
Her final movie, 2009’s JULIE & JULIA really stood out to me on this level. Based on Julie Powell’s memoir, the film is about Powell’s attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blog about it. Alongside that, the film shows Child’s own tireless efforts to get the book published. I’ve come to love JULIE & JULIA a lot since I first saw it in 2009, and it hits even harder in 2023. I’ve come to see it as a final masterpiece, a film that takes a lot of risks in its depiction of influencer culture, parasocial relationships, and what a content creator really is. All before any of those terms entered the mainstream! As the kids say, “her mind!!!”
In the last act of the JULIE & JULIA, Ephron shows us a montage of Julie and Julia with their husbands, showing us how, hey maybe these two women were alike after all! It’s a cute montage set to “A Bushel and a Peck” from Guys and Dolls, with lots of mirrored shots and snappy editing. It almost makes you believe that Julie and Julia had this connection that crossed borders and decades. And then Ephron pulls the rug out from under Julie and us: not only has Julia Child heard about Julie’s blog but she hates it. She says Julie curses too much and completely missed the point of the book. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was supposed to be a way for French cooking to become accessible to Americans. Blogging about it as a mammoth project however turns it back into an insurmountable Mt. Everest. And we realize that the Julia that Julie imagined—and perhaps the one depicted in the film—was not the real Julia, could not have been.
Julie created a parasocial relationship with Julia Child, and turned her life’s work into content. I believe that Julie had a genuine love for cooking, and for Julia Child. But at the end of the day, Julia Child worked on this book across different countries and for years; she delivered something of her own creation to the world. Julie mined it for clicks and shares, and because she needed something - anything - to give her life meaning. That’s something we see all time on TikTok and Instagram. Influencers build on previous influencers for content all hoping to be the one dancing on Jimmy Fallon’s late night show. Nothing is original—”everything is material” a line goes from THIS IS MY LIFE.
It’s hard to blame Julie for concocting a relationship with Julia in her mind, especially after spending so much time with her. I’ve been guilty of it with Nora Ephron herself. Art means a lot, and as humans we seek to build connections with creators we admire. Look at the countless Taylor Swift subreddits and TikTok fan pages. There’s even a subreddit dedicated to queer subtext in her work and appearances. Fans flock to her concerts and concert movies, they buy merch related to her boyfriends, and they vilify anyone who isn’t a diehard fan. Her songs, which are powerful, mundane, and relatable, speak to people the way that Julia Child spoke to Julie Powell. Swift’s life is content and meant to be devoured, examined, and interpreted according to the Swifties. Unfortunately, Swift doesn’t have the same luxury that Julia had in hating her stans. Julia was old, and most likely not terminally online. Look what happened when Ana de Armas blocked her own stan account—it became a whole thing. But Swift has to love her fans and embrace all that comes with her star power to stay on their good side. Maybe she loves it! Who knows.
The main criticism of JULIE & JULIA at the time was that it should have just been a Julia Child biopic. But that to me misses the point of the film, just as Julie missed the point of the cookbook. Ephron is looking at the deification of celebrity, and the contentification of art. Julie learns to live with not being besties with Julia; maybe in 2023 she would dig through old tweets to find something problematic. JULIE & JULIA is a brave movie that doesn’t give us the dream ending where Julia writes Julie a sweet letter thanking Julie for bringing her recipes to the 21st century. Instead it’s a prescient, prickly film that hits hard in this content-as-art era.