Midnight in Paris: Choosing Now
Have you ever wanted to be born in another time? I don’t mean in the annoying way where you listen to old music and say that you were “born in the wrong generation,” but have you ever actually thought about it? I have, and chances are you probably have as well. Do you sometimes look at the world around you and feel bored with it? I do. For me, I’d much rather homestead out West in the 1880s. That was when I would have loved to live, raise a family, go hunting, ride horses, and truly live out the American individualist fantasy. Our nation was young, and everything was new and untamed. The Statue of Liberty was a brand new sight on the horizon, Robert Ford shot Jesse James, and Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That was really the time, wasn’t it? For me, at least, it is, but maybe you have a different era in mind. Perhaps you would rather live in the Roaring Twenties, in Paris, too! You could dance with the Flappers and meet Hemingway, Picasso, and Fitzgerald. You could go to bars and listen to early Jazz. Wasn’t the past great?
Nostalgia is quite the drug.
Midnight in Paris, a 2011 film directed by Woody Allen, is the first film I’ve seen that has confronted this feeling of nostalgia head-on. The main character Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is currently on a trip to Paris with his fiancée, who, as he puts it, “is pretty sexy.” Unfortunately, that’s about as deep as the relationship goes. Gil is a famous screenplay writer with a house in Beverly Hills, but he is very clearly unsatisfied with his life. He is working on his first novel, and while the details of it are fuzzy, we know that it is about someone who works at an antique shop, selling bits and baubles from a better time. The through-line of his life is dissatisfaction; it ties Gil’s personality all together. He is dissatisfied with his status as a film writer, with his soon-to-be wife whom he has nothing in common with, with the quality of his writing, and finally with where he finds himself. Gil, from his first lines, is discussing how beautiful Paris is, how he’d love to live there, and how amazing Paris was in the twenties. In fact, it seems the only thing Gil is truly passionate about at the beginning of the movie is Paris and his nostalgia for the twenties. As his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams) says, “Gil is a complete romantic. I mean, he would be more than happy living in a complete state of perpetual denial.”
After a somewhat boring day with his fiancée and her annoying friends in Paris, Gil decides he needs to isolate and enjoy the city. He goes out for a walk at night, and while on this midnight stroll, an old twenties-era car pulls up next to him, and the driver tells him to get in. Gil reluctantly accepts and is driven to an old-timey party; he doesn’t know it yet, but Gil has somehow been taken back to 1920s Paris. Gil eventually catches on, and he can be transported to this time for one hour every night, and of course, he takes full advantage of the opportunity. He drinks with Hemingway (Corey Stoll), talks about art with Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), and has his novel reviewed by the great Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates); he even falls in love with an ex-lover of Picasso: Adriana (Marion Cotillard).
While watching this film, I was struck by the idea of Gil having a window to the past, as it represents an opportunity to live out his dream life while not sacrificing his somewhat mediocre current one. I have to admit that I was a little jealous. However, the more I thought about it, Gil’s transportation to the past is just a much more concrete version of the cinematic nostalgic escapism I partake in. When I was young, my first real memories of movies besides Disney or Pixar were Westerns. Whenever I would stay at my grandparents' house, I would inevitably end up watching at least one old cowboy movie while rocking back and forth on a riding horse toy I named Lucky–I was a regular Don Quixote. Of course, back then, I did not have too many problems to want to escape from, and I did not have any real detachment from my life or the time I found myself in–it was just fun. Film, from these early experiences of mine, has become a form of satisfying my nostalgia for better times. I still love Westerns, I love period pieces, and my favorite movie of all time is Lawrence of Arabia—a film that also serves as a nostalgic look back to the world in the early twentieth century. The entertainment industry knows this is a popular feeling. After all, why else does Hollywood make so many biopics and period pieces? Why else would they remake movies from fifty years ago? Why else would a painfully mediocre show about JFK Jr. and the 90s make so much money? To be fair, I enjoy some of these when done right: when the film is not a clear cash-grab or clearly pandering to our sense of nostalgia. As long as it thoroughly immerses the viewer in a different time, I’ll enjoy it. You just cannot beat that feeling.
Back to Midnight in Paris.
At this point in the film, Gil has completely rejected his real life, and he slowly quits going out with Inez and her friends, instead opting to walk around the city by himself, waiting for nighttime. While he feels the best he’s ever felt, this is him at his lowest–he is the most detached and checked out he has been from his real life. To demonstrate this detachment, Gil attempts to steal his wife’s jewelry to give to his technically one-hundred-year-old romantic interest. Interestingly, whenever Gil talks about his love for this time period, Adriana shuts him down and complains about her own longing to live in Paris during ‘La Belle Epoque.’ She, too, is a victim of this ‘Golden Age fallacy.’ One night, while out with Adriana, a horse-drawn carriage arrives and beckons the couple to join them, reminiscent of when Gil was brought to the 1920s. Unsurprisingly, they end up in the 1870s, and Adriana is absolutely smitten with the place. She decides that she never wants to leave, and Gil attempts to talk her into coming back to the 1920s so they can be together. Gil tries to make her understand that the 1920s are the real Golden Age, but she can’t see it: “But I’m from the twenties, and I’m telling you the golden age is La Belle Epoque.” At this point, Gil is forced to leave her there so he can return to his time while she stays in the 1870s.
Now Gil sees things differently; he understands the errors of his thinking and realizes that he needs to live his life in the present, that there is no such thing as a true ‘Golden Age.’ Everyone is just clouded by nostalgia for a time before them because the present to them is just so dull. After this experience, Gil decides that escapism is not the solution to his dissatisfaction, and he decides to truly pursue his own happiness for the first time. He leaves his fiancée and decides to stay in Paris and, following Gertrude Stein’s advice, finally finishes his novel.
If there is any lesson the film is trying to get across, it is this: while it is easy to fall into a rut of despair over the present, we have no choice but to live it; this is what we are called to do. Escapism is no way to live–it’s a way to avoid living. Or, as it is much more eloquently put in the film: “Nostalgia is denial–denial of the painful present.”
Samuel Dameron is a sophomore at Columbia College studying History. He is a staff writer for Double Exposure and in his free time he enjoys biking, yearning, a good book, and working out.