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Comment by xwolfi | Hacker News Reader

Watching that as a French was for me like watching what an american would fantasize about the country. It was very weird and interesting and completely discordant but not in a bad way. The May 68 protest part was so weird, both insulting and naive, with a sort of truth to it but exagerated like only an american would.

I wonder how Americans feel when playing "Life is strange", a French fantasy about what America is like.

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For reference, I’m American but lived in Paris for awhile. I wouldn’t say The French Dispatch is indicative of American views of France, more a very specific, Brooklyn-based, literary industry one. Which is also what The New Yorker is. A movie like Amélie is probably more in line with the American fantasy version of France.

Oh I see, I guess us French are very heavily exposed to the NYC mirror ourselves so for us that's "american" when for you there s a clear distinction with how a North Carolinian or a Californian would dream up a French fantasy?

Or social classes would fantasise differently ?

I guess it s not too deeply explored, how a bias towards France develop across different layers of foreigners ahah

But it s obvious the reverse is true: coming from Normandy my family accepted Iraq a lot more than the rest of France and felt even more betrayed when it turned out to be a lie for instance.

Sadly the truth is more mundane than all those fantasies: we have an approximately similar distribution of morons, fascist, religious, generous, competent, savant and ignorant people and I guess bar historical deviations we're pretty much the same. I live in China myself and I cant really find a structural difference in people themselves.

The media industry in NYC (and LA) is so dominant as compared to the rest of the country, so when viewed from abroad, the NYC/LA opinion ends up being “the American opinion.”

"Life is strange" (at least the first one about Max & Chloe) did have the odd bits of dialogue that didn't seem like something native English speakers would say, but in terms of setting, it was set at a fancy boarding school, which is a setting most Americans have little familiarity with (except maybe from Harry Potter), so the weirdness of setting even to Americans may have hid a lot of gaps in the authors' knowledge of American culture.

Genius

Yeah i didn’t realize the author behind life is strange but I watched a play through of the first one and I really enjoyed it

It was probably pewdiepie even though he hated it, the plot twists resonated with me and i looked forward to his commentary

Reminded me of the butterfly effect with ashton kutcher

I love foreign fantasy representations of America. My favorite is the Italian music video of a high school class where they sing in made up English.

https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8

The difference of course being that Adriano Celentano intentionally created something that sounds like English to prove a point, while hollywood is primarily based on ignorance.

I got the same feeling about Japan as depicted in Isle of Dogs. it's the Japan as fantasized by Wes Anderson, not real Japan. "Weird and interesting and completely discordant but not in a bad way" is the perfect way to describe it.

"Fantastic Mr Fox" is also strange but charming in its own way, with it's odd mix of 20th century English countryside and very American characters and dialogue. The source material being authentically English probably helps this one.

I'm reading 'An Editor's Burial', which is a collection of essays which inspired the film. There's an interview with Wes as a foreword, and that's exactly what he describes as his intention for the feel of the film.

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