Pop Goes to the Easel: The Many Fridas in Film, TV, Comics, and Advertising

Universally recognizable symbols are essential to popular culture. In the 70 years since her death, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has become one of them. She is an instant signal of rebellion, art for art’s sake, anti-capitalism, vitality, strong femininity, and Mexican culture. She is usually depicted as one of her many self-portraits. Or surrounded by them, as in Coco. “Is it too much?” she asks charmingly in this film. It never is. Look.

Still from 2024 ad titled Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo collaborate with corporate clients.

Advertising for Ad Creators (2024)In March, a video released by the US Association of Independent Commercial Producers went viral. Titled Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo Work with Corporate Clients, it features conversations between ad agency executives and the two masters of art.

Customers “thought the tone of The Starry Night was just… a little dark,” was how van Gogh described it.

They found the forehead area to be “confrontational and distracting,” as Kahlo was told in Self-Portrait with a Monkey. The monkey is also considered “inconsistent with reality.” Could she replace it with puppies? “People trust puppies…” “It’s proven,” the two directors reiterate.

Kahlo continues to water her plants glumly; she is probably done with the matter.

Starry Night has finally been greenlit, in a cropped, vertical format. “I don’t miss… what’s on the sides,” the ad exec says.

“I swear to God, if you put that in circulation,” van Gogh replies, “I’ll cut off my bloody ear.”

Coco (2017)

Bony Frida from the Land of the Dead lights up the screen in this animated Disney-Pixar feature, showing 12-year-old Miguel around her studio and asking if she’s overdone it with her selfies.

The character, voiced by actress Natalia Cordova-Buckley, confesses that she would put her face on almost everything she did if she could. She then shows Miguel an installation in which dancing Fridas emerge from papaya seeds and climb a giant cactus that also bears her face. “Is that too obvious?” she asks.

“I think this is kind of obvious,” Miguel says.

High cloning (2023-24)

Teen versions of Harriet Tubman, Joan of Arc, and Kahlo at Clone High.

The 2002 animated series was renewed by HBO Max for two seasons in 2023. The action is set in a fictional American high school attended by clones of historical figures such as Gandhi and Lincoln, Joan of Arc and Kahlo. The future artist is portrayed as a relaxed skateboarder who doesn’t care about anything except her girlfriend, Cleopatra. She is portrayed as a paradox; she cares about people, for example, but not about their opinions.

Triple G (2021): In the viral video for the song Say Mo, Triple G, the Kazakh rapper dresses up as various famous women from history: Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo. In the lyrics, she sings about women being “shown their place,” suggesting that even the most famous among them, even those who sat on thrones, didn’t receive fair treatment.

Strange Like Me (2015): Illustrator Gavin Aung Than’s popular webcomic series uses historical figures to tell stories with a moral. In Frida Kahlo’s comic, a schoolgirl hates her eyebrows that are fused together. Her classmates make fun of her for it. She tries to hide them, tries to shave them off. Finally, she begs her mother to take her to a hair removal clinic. Her mother agrees, but instead takes her to a museum where Kahlo’s self-portrait hangs. The child, Aung Than suggests, has made a friend for life.