Pop goes the easel: The many Fridas in film, TV, comics, ads

Universally recognisable symbols are crucial to pop culture. In the 70 years since her death, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has become one of these. She is an instant signal of defiance, art for art’s sake, anti-capitalism, vibrancy, the powerful feminine, 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, endearingly, in that film. It never is. Take a look.

An ad for ad-makers (2024)In March, a video released by the US Association of Independent Commercial Producers went viral. Titled Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo Deal With Corporate Clients, it imagines conversations between executives at an ad agency, and the two master artists.
The clients “found the tone to be just… a touch dark,” van Gogh is told, of Starry Night.
They found the forehead area “confrontational and distracting,” Kahlo is told, of Self-Portrait with Monkey. The monkey is also deemed “unrelatable”. Could she replace it with puppies? “People trust puppies…” “It’s proven,” two executives echo each other.
Kahlo continues to grimly water her plants; presumably she is done with this deal.
Starry Night is eventually greenlit, in cropped, vertical format. “I don’t miss… the stuff on the sides,” the ad executive says.
“I swear to God, if you release that,” van Gogh responds, “I’m going to cut off my goddamn ear.”
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Coco (2017)
The skeletal Frida from Land of the Dead lights up the screen in this Disney-Pixar animated film, as she guides the 12-year-old Miguel through her studio, and asks if she has perhaps gone overboard with the self-portraits.
Voiced by the actress Natalia Cordova-Buckley, the character confesses that she would put her face on almost everything she made, if she could. She then shows Miguel an installation in which dancing Fridas crawl out of papaya seeds and climb a giant cactus, which also bears her face. “Is it too obvious?” she asks.
“I think it is just the right amount of obvious,” Miguel says.
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Clone High (2023-24)
The animated series from 2002 was revived by HBO Max, for two seasons, in 2023. It is set in a fictional American high school attended by the clones of historical figures such as Gandhi and Lincoln, Joan of Arc and Kahlo. The future artist is depicted as a laidback skateboarder who doesn’t care about much besides her girlfriend, Cleopatra. She is portrayed as a bit of a paradox; she cares about people, for instance, but not their opinions.
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Triple G (2021): The viral video for Say Mo’s song, Triple G, sees the Kazakh rapper cosplay as various famous women from history: Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo. In the lyrics, she sings about women being “shown their place”, and suggests that even the most famous of them, even those who occupied thrones, did not get a fair deal.
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Strange Like Me (2015): Illustrator Gavin Aung Than’s popular online comic series uses characters from history to tell stories with a moral. In the Frida Kahlo strip, a schoolgirl hates her unibrow. She is ridiculed for it by classmates. She tries to hide it, tries to shave it off. She finally pleads with her mother to take her to a hair-removal clinic. Her mother agrees, but takes her instead to a museum, where a self-portrait by Kahlo hangs. The child, Aung Than suggests, has made a friend for life.