Friends + Money

I love watching Friends, and the series is one of the first examples I thought of when reading about the Marxist perspective when analyzing texts. As Dr. McCaulliff pointed out in class, we see the cast of Friends living in “kick-ass” apartments in New York City; however in reality, people with the jobs that they have would be close to roughing it and would not be able to live like our Friends do. We usually find them with lots of downtime hanging out at Central Perk or in each other’s apartments, whereas in reality, these guys would barely have anytime in between the numerous jobs they would have to hold just to afford their rent. Granted, almost all of the casts’ jobs leave room for advancement. For example, Rachel gets a job as a buyer for Ralph Lauren, and then gets an offer for a job in Paris. Maybe then Rachel would be able to actually afford her Friends lifestyle in real life.

While Friends may enable us as the viewers to assume that their lifestyle is typical, they have acknowledged the Marxist perspective outright. In the fifth episode of Season two, Chandler organizes Ross’ birthday. Part of the celebration includes tickets to a Hootie and the Blowfish concert. Rachel, Joey and Pheobe who don’t make enough money to spend $62 each on Ross’ birthday get frustrated when the rest of the gang wants to go out and spend money on fancy dinners and concerts. I would say that Friends usually follows the preferred Marxist perspective because they rarely talk of class. However, I think that this particular episode could be considered inflected oppositional because it touches upon the issue of money and material possessions, but is still a little off in their portrayal of class. I may be wrong about this classification. 

Embedding was disabled, but this link shows the discussion between Rachel, Pheobe and Joey about being able to afford Ross’ birthday. I apologize for the subtitles. :)