by
Christopher Barr
“What I hate is ignorance, smallness of imagination,
the eye that sees no farther than its own lashes. All things are
possible. Who you are is limited only by who you think you are.”
– Egyptian Book of
the Dead
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
– Goethe
Nostalgia is denial,
denial of the painful present.
Midnight in Paris is an inspiring
film, a film filled with joy and wonder during a time in the canon where
there’s been very little of that.
Gil Pender is a dreamer that fanaticizes about living
in the past, specifically 1920’s Paris. His fiancée, Inez and her
Republican parents are in Paris with him. Everyone around Gil is
superficial and pretentious and he, a pacifist, lets them didactically walk all
over him. Gil wants to explore the fine city of Paris but his fiancée and
her mother want to just blindly shop.
They don’t see the beauty in Paris that Gil sees. Gil’s fiancée and her parents are out of their
element in Paris, they want the comforts of America and they find the culture
in Paris more annoying than anything, because how unAmerican it truly is. 
Gil is treated like a child for the most part while
with his fiancée, who orders him around and tells him to be quiet when her
pompous friend Paul spews pedantic discernments about Rodin, Monet or his
so-called insights on wine. Gil is alone among the people in his life
that are all drowning in self-interest and ego.
Out walking by himself, inebriated, along the romantic back streets of Paris, Gil is invited into an old car filled with jovial Parisians for drinks and laughter. Gil goes along but after meeting F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and listening to the live piano playing of Cole Porter at a bar, he begins to realize, to his disbelief, that he is in fact in 1920’s Paris. Understandably Gil is in shock but soon just goes with it and enjoys himself.
At a café he meets Ernest Hemingway, another one of
his idols, and discusses his novel that he is writing. Gil’s been
reluctant to show his novel to anyone in his present, likely because he feels
they won’t get it and thus they won’t get him, and quite frankly, most of them
are idiots. His desire to live in the past stems from him not being taken
seriously in his present. This type of thinking comes from
the fantasy of the mind; we begin to romanticize a sort of success for
ourselves when no one in the real world cares.
Gil asks Hemingway to read his novel, leaves the café and is suddenly transported back to the present. While back with his bossy fiancée, Gil thinks about the night before, likely working out the reality of such a fantastical happening.
Back in the 1920’s, Gil meets a girlfriend of Pablo
Picasso named Adriana and instantly and understandably falls for her. After talking to
her he discovers that she wishes she lived in 1890’s Paris. She is a
dreamer of good times long past, just like Gil, and wishes to live in the past
and discard the present as prosaic.
As the reality of his fantasy of living in 1920’s
Paris expands, Gil runs into surrealist painter Salvador Dali and has a
wonderful talk about love and Rhinoceros. Visual artistic photographer Man
Ray and Spanish filmmaker Luis Banuel joins the table as Gil tells them that he’s
from the future travelling through time.
Gil also deals with his fear of death. 
“Some people enter your life in a whirlwind and no
matter how hard you try you can’t stop thinking about them, even after they
leave…especially after they leave.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald to Gil about his wife Zelda
– F. Scott Fitzgerald to Gil about his wife Zelda
Gil goes back to the Rodin female tour guide in his
present, standing by the infamous ‘Thinking Man’ and asks her about whether it’s
possible to love two women at the same time, sort of like Rodin did. Can you love them both in different ways? Gil immediately realizes that she is far more
open to the idea than he, an American, is.
Not that she is condoning it but she simply recognizes the complexity of
it as a way of life. She is right to
think this; there is a complexity to it.
Love in not exclusive, love is complex and often one sided, meaning that
one gives off love like an aerosolized fragrance, not toward something that is tactile.
“I believe that love that is true and real creates a
respite from death. All cowardice comes
from not loving, or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks
death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know, or Belmonte, who’s
truly brave. It is because they love
with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds, until it returns as
it does to all men. And then you must
make really good love again. Think about
it.”
– Ernest Hemingway
while sitting in the old car with Gil
Gil travels back to the Parisian street at midnight
and climbs into the old car and is met by Tom Eliot, Thomas Stearns Eliot,
otherwise known to the world as T.S. Eliot.
Gil is star-struck claiming that, ‘Prufrock
is his mantra.’ This is pertaining
to a poem written by T.S. Eliot called “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, a poem structurally based heavily on the
poetic writings of Dante Alighieri and is a social poem described as ‘a drama of literary anguish’. Parts of the poem that Gil calls his mantra
are the interior dramatic monologues of a city dweller, an urban man, conveyed
by Eliot through the stream of consciousness technique. The poem’s narrator is stricken with feelings
of isolation and incapability for decisive action that is said, “to epitomize frustration and impotence of
the modern individual” and “represent
thwarted desires and modern disillusionment.”
Gil back in the 1920’s again goes to Gertrude Stein’s
and asks her thoughts on the novel he is writing. Pablo Picasso is there as well as listening
in. She tells Gil that, “we all fear death and question our place in
the universe. The artist’s job is not to
succumb to despair but find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” The artist must create a coping mechanism of
sorts to allow the reader to figure out for themselves, what it means to be
alive for them, using these ‘antidotes’
to achieve this level of awareness. The
artist needs to sacrifice themselves for the goodwill of humanity. The artist needs to kill themselves with
their art so that many can learn from, or be shaken by the end result, thus
knocking them out of the hypnotizing nature of conformity and banality.
Back in the present, Gil walks along the beautiful
cobblestone streets of Paris. He goes to
an antique shop and talks to a young naturally beautiful woman about the great
musical pianist Cole Porter, who wrote many stories about Paris and about how
love is part of the essence of this wonderful city. Gil buys a Cole Porter record and then
strolls along the banks of the Seine River and buys a book from the many book
havens along these river banks. The book
is written by his 1920’s love, Adriana.
He then gets a lovely Parisian woman to translate the French for him on
a park bench. Here, through the lovely voice
of this woman, Gil finds out that Adriana loved him, she writes of a dream she
has about receiving a gift from Gil. She
writes that Gil has bought her a pair of earrings and then they made passionate
love.
Naturally being a man with blood pumping through his
veins, Gil rushes home and puts together a present for Adrianna, sort of
fulfilling his perceived manifest destiny.
Gil’s fiancée Inez, notices she has earrings missing, the ones that Gil
just giftwrapped for his 1920’s love, she reports that they have been stolen by
the housekeeping staff. For a moment Inez
questions what Gil is up to but then blows the whole thing off when Gil puts
the earrings back and claims he found them.
Gil goes back to 1920 and gives Gertrude Stein a revised
draft of the first few chapters of his novel to read. Henri Matisse is there selling some of his
paintings to Gertrude at the same time Gil meets up with Adriana so they can discuss
their feelings for each other. They go
for a walk on yet another majestic, beautiful, picturesque street in
Paris, with street lamps illuminating and scintillating light flickering off the
cobblestone brick street. Sitting on a
bench, Gil leans over and kisses Adriana because quite frankly, he has no
choice. Like Cole Porter sang, “You just do it, you just fall in love.” Gil gives her the earrings, Adriana, loving
them, puts them on as a stagecoach being pulled by two horses stops in front of
them. They are offered to join the coach
for some company and entertainment. Gil
and Adriana are transported to 1890’s Paris and go and sit in a dining room
hall, and then dance becoming mesmerized by their surroundings, Adriana
especially.
Gil and Adriana go and sit with none other than French
painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, while painters Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin moments
later join them. Their discourse centers
on the 1890’s generation and how it is empty with no imagination or with no surprises.
Adriana laments that the 1920’s is
itself a generation with no imagination.
Here we are presented with our problem of the ‘present’ and that those
that often occupy it are discouraged about its potentiality but have no problem
praising a point in the past as being…perfect.
This scene, quite unique, displays how this particular concept, one that
Woody Allen himself would have once purported, is flawed. Gauguin thinks that the renaissance would
have been a better place to have been born into, where Adriana thinks it’s the
1890’s and Gil thinks it was the 1920’s that was the best time. Gil begins to realize that his present
calamity is that it’s filled with unimaginable people and thus he, a creative
man, is simply uninspired by his experience.
Adriana, sadly, admits that she wants the illusion thus
freeing Gil of the unrealistic hold he had on his own illusion. They say their good-byes, she’s staying and
he’s going but for Gil, at this point, he wouldn’t want any other way. Gil goes to the 1920’s to Gertrude Stein’s
house to get his book, where she plants the seed that like Hemmingway, maybe
his fiancée might be cheating on him.
When Gil goes back to the present he finds out that she was in fact
cheating. Inez naturally denies having
an affair with pedantic Paul.
Gil confronts his own level of cognitive dissonance as
he explains to Inez that they shouldn’t be together and should in fact be a
part. Inez admits that she did cheat on
him with Paul. Gil decides to stay in
Paris while his cheating ex-fiancée Inez and her Tea Party Republican parents
go home. Gil then meets with the girl from
the antique shop and they walk together in the rain along a bridge, enjoying
being in the present in this moment in time.
The past has always had a romantic aura about it.
The present we are responsible for, the future we can change but the past
is written, its pages are full of stories with interesting people and places
that are antiquated with big cars and cigarette smoke filled jazz clubs.
The past, not specifically our own, allows us to forget about our present
and future, it allows us to enjoy what's great about humanity guilt free.
“Maybe the present is a little unsatisfying because
life is a little unsatisfying.”
– Gil
A great moment at the end is it ends happy. Woody Allen realizes that once one sees the
reality of their existence, this doesn’t mean death. He wants his audience to know that happiness
can be found on the other side of illusion. Midnight in Paris does want us to get over ourselves as most Woody Allen films
do, but here it’s a philosopher’s journey about realizing the past without
letting it define your present.
“Nostalgia is denial – denial of the painful present…
the name for this denial is ‘golden age
thinking’, the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than
the one ones living in – it’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those
people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”
– From Midnight in
Paris
“Peace can only
come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment.”
- Nikola Tesla
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