We see Netflix's name in enough places. Netflix's name was even in the Ben & Jerry's ice cream I ate last night ... while I was watching Netflix. That's right, the flavor is called Netflix & Chill'd, a play on a phrase that I guess has come to describe a good evening at home among the millennial set. (I don't usually buy Ben & Jerry's -- it costs $13 here -- but what can I say, you do different things during coronavirus. Besides, this flavor includes things other flavors that have made it to Australia have not, like brownies and swirled pretzel mush.)But I don't know, I draw the line at Netflix mentioning Netflix in their own movies.
I saw it for at least the second time last night while watching the brand spanking new Netflix original film Coffee & Kareem, whose title could probably also be a Ben & Jerry's flavor. (But is otherwise quite a struggle; in order for the play on words to work, they had to give one of the characters the last name Coffee. Not even Coffey, but Coffee.)
There's a part near the start where the young kid, Kareem, tells Coffee, the cop, that there are "documentaries on Netflix" about a certain phenomenon -- I don't remember what the phenomenon was, but it was probably pedophilia, since a full half the jokes in this movie are about pedophilia.
It annoyed the hell out of me, but I didn't hold it against Coffee & Kareem at that point, because the jury was still out on the movie. As it moved along and I decided I hated it, it became emblematic of everything that's wrong with the movie.
It's not the first time I've seen it, but I only concretely remember one other instance. That was in High Flying Bird, which I also did not like, in which the characters talk about negotating with Netflix for the airing of some basketball-related content during an NBA lockout.
Is Netflix so intent on world domination that they simply can't resist this childish antic?
It would be like if Black Widow and Captain America saw something weird -- weird for their world, anyway -- and said "Wow, that's like something you would see in a Marvel comic!"
You might argue that acknowledging their own existence serves two purposes for Netflix: 1) It purports to be more realistic, as indeed, Netflix is a daily part of many people's lives. 2) It continues to normalize them into the mainstream fabric by suggesting they've become so eponymous, you can't make a movie without organically having reason to refer to them. I guess those might be variations on the same thing. In any case, Netflix wants to reach the same level as Xerox, Kleenex and (remember them?) Tivo, where they are so obviously the leader in the thing they do that people start to refer to their specific brand when referring to a generic phenomenon. Like, they want people to say "Let's watch Netflix" and have it refer to an activity itself, even if they are watching Hulu. Or even better, they want it to become a verb.
Me, it just takes me out of it.
Can't the characters in a Netflix movie live in a world where Netflix doesn't exist? Would that be so bad?
Other movies effortlessly make that stretch. As I discussed in one of my first posts ever for this blog, which is so old I will not even link it here, the characters in a zombie movie almost always exist in a world where zombies are not even a concept in literature or popular culture. When the first zombie appears, they don't call it a zombie because they don't even know that word. Compared to something like that, the convenient erasure of a streaming service is pretty simple. Really, in most instances it doesn't even come up unless you force it into the dialogue, as they did in Coffee & Kareem.
Of course, Netflix appears to think it's funny to do this. Maybe we'll start seeing it more. Maybe it's the one thing Netflix will start to require of their filmmakers, becoming a signature equivalent to the Alfred Hitchcock cameo. Maybe even in movies about knights and dragons they will require a reference in a line of dialogue. "Dost thou have Netflix?"
I suggested earlier that Disney, via Marvel, would never do something like this, but I guess that's not exactly correct. I can't remember if the word "Disney" was ever uttered here, but one of the things I disliked most about Ralph Breaks the Internet was its self-referential nature. Not only did we have to see stormtroopers and other Star Wars stuff, but we had to sit through that unendurable sequence involving the Disney princesses.
Look, there's a certain kind of winking self-awareness that works in a movie, particularly a movie conceived as a parody. Most other times, it's just obnoxious. And when a film is as hopeless as Coffee & Kareem, it can help sink it.
But that Netflix & Chill'd ice cream ... that was pretty good. I'll be getting that again, even though it cost $13.
And thereby doing my bit to further the Netflix agenda toward world domination.
Damn you Netflix.
No comments:
Post a Comment