The Take

From shows like Emily in Paris and You to movies like Not Okay and Ingrid Goes West, influencers and content creators of all kinds have begun popping up more and more as they become a larger part of our everyday lives. And just like their real-life counterparts, these on-screen influencers can give us some pretty unrealistic ideas about what it’s like to be a full time content creator. But sometimes they give us a more realistic, deeper look into the darker side of influencing that social media stars often try to hide… So, let’s look at what the media constantly gets wrong about these careers and their associated finances, the ways all creators are portrayed as uber-wealthy, and why they still get so much hate.

She’s smart, beautiful, just Hollywood enough to feel aspirational but also just regular enough to feel relatable: she’s the 90s rom-com heroine! Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts ruled the decade - from Sleepless in Seattle to Pretty Woman to You've Got Mail to My Best Friend's Wedding and beyond - but there were a whole host of iconic heroines that popped up during the rom-com boom of the 1990s. So today, let's unpack what made the 90s rom-com heroine special, where the archetype came from, and how they might have given us some pretty unrealistic expectations about life and love (and why we love them anyways!)

30 Rock’s Jenna Maroney still managed to stand out in a sea of hilarious characters. She was unbelievably vain, shallow, manipulative, unstable, thin-skinned… but instead of being annoying and unlikable, she became one of the most entertaining, iconic characters of modern television. So, how did Jenna manage to capture that ‘beloved star’ status that she was so desperate for on the show in real life? Let’s take a deeper look at Jenna’s character arc, the way she perfectly embodied all of the wild pressures that the industry puts on aging actresses, and how such an outlandish character managed to be so oddly relatable.

Film and TV love to show partly-relatable, partly-aspirational lifestyles that… actually don’t make a whole lot of sense when you really think about them. Of course, we’re not always watching movies and shows just to see real life, and it can sometimes work well when media choses to let go of realism a little bit to have more fun. But this can also lead to some pretty unrealistic ideas about life and money…

Being surrounded by the optimism inspired by a new year can also inspire us to overwhelm ourselves with an excessive number of resolutions and goals in the hopes of becoming a “new and improved” version of ourselves. But if we’re not actually ready to make drastic changes... it’s unlikely that we’ll be successful. So why do we keep setting ourselves up for failure year after year, knowing the anxiety that lies ahead? Let’s unpack this annual tradition, why it often sparks an existential crisis, and how to find ways to stay positive while we reinvent ourselves.

The "Disposable Black Love Interest" functions as an obstacle along the way to the protagonist’s real (white) love. Fundamentally, this trope is a form of tokenism – an attempt to “check the boxes” of diversity, without actually casting people of color in the main roles audiences are encouraged to identify with and care about.

The Quirky Black Character dares to be dorky, imperfect, and most of all, themselves. Their nerdy obsessions and screwball antics are deliberate rejections of the one-dimensional, often offensive Black caricatures that long dominated film and TV. But the history of the Quirky Black Character’s rise is one of having to constantly fend off criticisms of whether or not they’re perceived by audiences as “Black enough.”

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a cautionary tale about toxic perfectionism. In the final moments of the film, Natalie Portman’s Nina thinks she’s destroying her rival ballerina, Mila Kunis’ Lily, but in reality, she’s destroying herself. On stage, we see her at last fully become the black swan, now free from the controlling repression of the “white swan” within herself. So, what are we to make of this ending?