Oh, that these unhappy times should be ours. Would that we could escape them to a better time and dwell in its embrace instead.
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I would venture to guess that these kind of thoughts aren’t only on my mind lately. Everybody is feeling it, we are living through chaotic times in both our immediate spheres and the world at large. From the climate crisis to democratic backsliding, human rights in danger all over the world to unchecked capitalism reaching its dystopian zenith, it seems like everything is bad and is on track to only get worse. And all of it bears down and suffocates, the pressures of the world are inescapable in a way that seems so much more pronounced than for generations past. Certainly it’s harder in a practical sense too –everything costs more, more is expected, the everyday comforts of life are out of reach for younger people. And nobody currently with the power to do so has any desire to fix it.
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Living in the present is hard, looking to the past is easy. Though not as grave as some of these other issues, yet one that is nonetheless severe and serious in a cultural sense, is the current iteration of the movie business, the sorry state of which I’ve gone into again and again. I’m not the only one to feel the pessimism of course, to share the view that the current tech-business conglomerate-dominant landscape of mainstream American cinema –the biggest cinema system in terms of exportation worldwide- is extremely bad for art and society. And I’ve seen several in the critical and film enthusiast spaces yearn for the halcyon days of cinema past: New Hollywood, the auteur era, or simply any period that had a more healthy and versatile movie economy in Hollywood. I’ve been in that boat too, looking back at how many movies and artists were allowed to flourish in decades past, as opposed to the same select group of franchises often pumped out on a conveyor belt. Wouldn’t it be nice, we posit, for corporate Hollywood to be brought down -and for artists to be the driving force of the industry again?
For those who appreciate art, it is an ideal, a fantasy perhaps, to return to that world and its seemingly perfect environment of creativity and spontaneity. As a critic I really think fondly of those days where film criticism was still deemed a culturally significant form of literature -when engaging with movies on an intellectual level was not seen as highbrow. Was it all so much better then?
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Well, not really. Any romantic impression of another age always has its dark or dismaying drawbacks. There may have been greater diversity in genre and style in mainstream American cinema of the 1970s and 80s, but not so much in terms of the people making it. Elaine May was virtually the only woman filmmaker in the industry during that time who could sustain a career -racialized creatives were marginalized, LGBTQ creatives closeted (excepting of course in the underground scenes of John Waters or Derek Jarman), and there were no shortage of corrupt executives and unhealthy business practices keeping that the status quo. That era came with its own shortcomings in cinematic trends -watching old Siskel & Ebert episodes has really alerted me to them- and the behaviours of specific figures insulated by that system and their own prestige. And speaking of…
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It is ironic and a little bit depressing that one of the most potent movies to me about the harm in idolizing a romanticized past came courtesy of one once idol of the past, Woody Allen. His 2011 film Midnight in Paris is quite literally about a man who escapes to the past from an unfulfilling present -albeit a present where he is still well-off and successful as a Hollywood screenwriter, but is creatively and emotionally unsatisfied enough to dream longingly of the Golden Age of American literature, specifically the émigré scene in Paris of the 1920s. The movie isn’t the neatest, thematically-speaking. It’s guilty of romanticizing the past as much as its protagonist, and fairly uncritically too -very much Woody Allen’s ode to that place in time and its artistic reputation, one that is mostly dominated by white American figures like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Josephine Baker has a cameo appearance, but virtually nothing is said of her or the rest of the expatriate community of black American artists who made Paris their home during the Jim Crow age). The image he draws of 1920s Paris is sanitized and idyllic, as has been the case of much of the art made about that world of the Lost Generation; and never does the movie really subvert that in a meaningful way. And yet it still gets across this message about the pitfalls of dwelling in the past, not focusing on one’s life in the present -and in a strikingly literal way.
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Midnight in Paris is a time travel movie, and like Richard Curtis’ About Time is not so much concerned with the mechanics of time travel so much as the fantasy of it. And it is in fairness a charming fantasy, involving a car at midnight gracefully conveying its passenger to another time. There they get to meet all their idols, engage in the rich, living culture and history around them, and even find romance with someone whom they can relate to on a level they can’t with anyone in their own time. It’s a figment that resonates, and that is experienced in the film by Owen Wilson’s Gil, a self-described ‘hack’ Hollywood writer with aspirations to be a novelist. Chunks of the movie are devoted to illustrating his inconvenient present -namely an impending marriage to Rachel McAdams’ Inez, with whom he shares few interests and a general dissatisfaction with his career. It is a little more than these personal things though, as evidenced through partisan political conversations with Inez’s highly conservative parents -but Gil, like Allen, is very much a Hollywood liberal about these things so any overhanging pessimism comes from simply a world-weary distaste for the issues of the time. Like for many, Gil’s nostalgia overlooks the counterpart political issues of past times. Coming to Paris puts a spring in his step, his joy and passion for the city immediately at odds with Inez’s apathy towards it or the mere clinical fascination of her “pseudo-intellectual” friend Paul, played by Michael Sheen in one of his more loathsome performances.
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However Allen grants a certain credence to Paul through one scene openly discussing the movie’s theme of what he calls “Golden Age Thinking” -the idea that a previous era is inherently superior to the one we’re living through. “Nostalgia is denial” he says. “Denial of the painful present” -and as throughout the movie we’re not meant to take him seriously, this is mere posturing. But it’s curious watching in 2023 how that statement has come to be more meaningful. Certainly on a general scale, the problems of 2011 seem pittance to the problems of 2023, even if you don’t have a fiancé who rejects or belittles your every sentiment. Retreating into nostalgia has become more commonplace, openly so from some who will admit they find the state of the world too distressing. Returning to my field of interest, it accounts in not infinitesimal terms for the popularity of media franchise properties fuelled by childhood nostalgia for two or three decades ago.
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In any case, Gil is ultimately made to test Paul’s assertion. As Inez conspicuously spends more and more time with the pompous windbag, Gil discovers the city’s innocuous portal to the past –a street corner in a historic end of Paris where at midnight a car from the past comes around to spirit away whomever awaits it. Here the fantasy indulgence starts, as he meets Cole Porter, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill and a pre-Marvel Tom Hiddleston), Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway (a particularly excellent Corey Stoll) –with whom he engages in a spirited literary discussion which ends with Hemingway offering to take the manuscript of Gil’s novel (a manuscript he’s let no one in the twenty-first century see) to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). All the while everything more or less conforms to Gil’s idealized image of the time and place, even things like Hemingway’s casual toxic masculinity and Zelda’s bipolar disorder are romanticized by the context and atmosphere –cinematography legend Darius Khondji really makes 1920s Paris look like the lushest place on earth. It is palpably intoxicating –since first seeing this movie I too have been in love with this image of Paris, drawn from those little beauties that the modernists immortalized in their art. And it’s not an image Allen works hard to dispel, in spite of what the overarching theme of the film states. He’d rather playfully have Gil take details from this period to show-up Paul in the present or have Gil pitch The Exterminating Angel to Luis Buñuel ‘Marvin Barry’-style.
Because Woody Allen doesn’t have anything to critique about the 1920s –for him it’s thematic function is merely as a vessel for the idea that nostalgia and living in the past is fruitless. But it’s an idea undercut somewhat by his refusing to break from his idyllic interpretation of this particular era –reliant instead on the mere innate philosophical rightness of such a conclusion. Well that, and a character who by the film’s judgement, just can’t appreciate the virtues of her own time –a semi-conscious reflection of Gil, if the film never treats his era with the same reverence as hers.
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On his second visit, Gil meets Adriana, the key character of the piece played by a radiant Marion Cotillard. She certainly fulfils an aspect of the fantasy, as the profoundly compatible and beautiful love interest –a sweet romantic, bohemian contrast to the horribly vain, ignorant, and dismissive Inez (full credit to Rachel McAdams by the way, playing the manifestation of all of Allen’s issues with women, and coming out of it okay). But Adriana gushes about the Belle Époque (the Paris artistic scene of the late nineteenth century) as much as Gil in the present gushes about the ‘20s. She has all the Golden Age romantic inclinations he does, but directed at a different time. There is a mirror to how she fits in in her time and how he does in his -Picasso, even Hemingway, are in some way her Inez. Though of course we don’t see in detail the dissatisfaction of these relationships for her the way we do of Gil’s -Allen seemingly concerned with maintaining the more charismatic reputations of these important men. As charmingly as Gil and Adriana’s romance plays out in the 1920s -with her writing sweetly about him in her diary that he finds access to in his present- it’s when they finally journey to the Belle Époque themselves and she gets swept up in that world to the point of wanting to leave hers for it, that the fallacy in the fantasy is made apparent to Gil and the audience. Allen doesn’t have time for subtlety so he has Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec bemoan their own time to Gil and Adriana whilst romanticizing the Renaissance. “This generation is empty and has no imagination,” says Gauguin -a remark that Adriana could apply to the lost generation, that Gil could apply to Gen-X, that even I could apply to Millennials or Gen-Z; while simultaneously it is a previous generation that had it best. Much as a lot of cineastes crave that 1970s New Hollywood atmosphere, it’s curious to say, watch Siskel & Ebert reviews from the time or read Pauline Kael, and see their various hang-ups with the cinematic era they were covering -and sometimes even make unfavourable comparisons to decades past. It never changes, and Midnight in Paris in this moment ceases its idyll.
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Gil is faced with the very real possibility of leaving his world behind and realizes why he can’t make that leap that Adriana evidently can. “These people don’t have any antibiotics”, he exclaims. But the epiphany more than the mere absence of common comforts -it is the realization of that truth in Paul’s statement. Escaping to a nostalgic time is simply that: an escape and a never-ending one. If he were to stay with Adriana in the 1920s or even the 1890s, after a time that era would look “dull” to him as well. “The present is a little unsatisfying because life’s a little unsatisfying.” And the idea that being happier in the past is an illusion. Midnight in Paris expresses this openly in relation to the concept of living in a past era, but it applies just as well to psychologically living in the past on a personal level. We like to think if we lived in the world we grew up in that we would feel more content there, but it’s not true. It’s simply the allure of childhood -something that marketing companies across industries have done well to exploit. It’s that desire for an idealized, simplified state of mind, as unattainable to recapture as another era, yet just as tempting.
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The movie ends with Gil parting ways from Adriana -still under the spell of nostalgia, to concentrate on taking renewed stock in his present, live his life in a way that perhaps could bring him that delight he felt in the 1920s. The movie argues that the romance of Paris is still there -it opens on a series of beautifully photographed still shots of the city. He can still walk in the rain by lamplight on the cobblestone pavement if he likes, with a mystifying, pretty French woman (Léa Seydoux is not a bad trade-off for Marion Cotillard). He’s a better person for refusing to live in the past. But in the end the movie begs the question of how relevant its message is. After all the lesson Gil takes comes about through an entirely fantastical circumstance. Literally living in the past is not possible, so it’s easy for us to understand why it would be a bad thing. What exactly does he learn that can be applicable in a real-world sense? Furthermore, how much of it does Allen take seriously; as the film does still take a romantic view of his era of choice, contrasted with a generally poor alternative in the present -coloured mostly by subjective interactions with a bunch of awful people, but still. You can get into the weeds of it and find the movie doesn’t say much about having a Golden Age mindset, or the ills of either immersing oneself in nostalgia or not living enough in, engaging with, or appreciating the present. There are cracks in comparing Gil’s longing for the cultural 1920s from 2011 to longing for the cultural 1970s or 1990s from 2023. It’s a flawed movie and its’ themes reflect a kind of convoluted thread of ideas that Allen is never able to coherently resolve -certainly not without going deeper and disrupting his specific vision.
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And yet Midnight in Paris still rings strongly for me on its moral, even as it contradictorily also resonates for me with its beautiful image of a dreamlike time and place. I feel like Gil at both ends of his journey honestly, which it disturbs me to think is also where Allen identifies on that scale: pining for the past while also keenly aware of the importance of living in the present. I think the urge expressed in this movie for another time, whether in history or personal nostalgia is incredibly easy to relate to in such difficult times as these. Why can’t we all just sit around Parisian clubs or cafés talking literature, philosophy, art, with inspired minds, and not having to worry about the ambivalence to climate catastrophe, the end of democracy, the decline of living conditions in ultra-capitalist society, and yes even the loss of dignity in and the corporatization of art. We desperately want that escape, to retreat into the reality and the fixations so comfortable to us. Midnight in Paris, though it’s circumstances seem so much less dire, connects to that feeling deeply. It understands so well that allure of escapism and how it can be overpowering. For Gil, even his novel is subsumed by that obsession with nostalgia (for the record, off of what we hear I don’t think he’s that good a novelist).
In the end I think the movie is about responsibility, and not merely to one’s relationships or the sanctity of the timeline, but to oneself. Gil realizes it is completely within his power to live the better more satisfying life in the present that he thought was only available to him in the past. And even when the problems of the day are so much bigger and more imposing now, we owe it to ourselves to engage with the world as it is -maybe give over to nostalgia now and again, but not in any kind of committed way. Because we exist as products of it, it shapes and informs us in critical ways just as it did those heroes of Gil’s. You want the opportunity to live like them, experience their world as you imagine it? Perhaps it begins by accepting your place in the one that made you, and striving however you can to fashion it into that Belle Époque, that beautiful present, it deserves to be.
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