Midnight In Paris;
A Philosophy For Every Generation.
In 2019, stuck on a cramped twelve-hour flight to Zambia, with all my friends asleep I had one square box in front of me with a range of movies, I dived in. I watched a few which were kind of mediocre starting with Fantastic Beasts Two, if that’s even the proper name, a movie which has been criticised by many but for me was a decent watch. I also watched Walter Mitty which was pretty good but for some weird reason was rather depressing and a bit too surreal for me at the time, but the movie which stood out the most and I have now watched multiple times is the deeply underrated ‘Midnight in Paris’ starring Owen Wilson who for me is one of my favourite actors from childhood to now. Though what stuck with me was not all the “wows” which Owen Wilson always manages to put into his acting but the philosophy behind the movie which feels in the modern day of 2020 so relevant, and is a philosophy which answers the struggles that all generations seem to have no matter the era. This struggle is the feeling that the generation which you were born into was the wrong one, that the music is rubbish, that there are no movements to get behind, that art and writing have lost their way and that if only we could go back just ten years then we would have had a much better childhood, teenage years and twenties. This is a fallacy which my friends and I have engaged in many times, but it indeed is a fallacy and watching midnight in Paris every so often can be the eye-opener that is needed to remember just how precious our generation is.
In Midnight in Paris, we see Gil Pender, a successful screenwriter who feels he has sold out and has become obsessed with writing a book to follow his original aspirations of being a true writer. He is in love with Hemingway and especially Fitzgerald and all those during the roaring twenties of Paris which saw some of the most influential writing which has ever graced the English language, with such writers going on to inspire two of my favourite writers Bukowski and Kerouac, and seemingly Gil spender. We follow Gil as his wife Inez played by Racheal McAdams continues to live a materialistic life as they explore Paris often separately Gil wants to take it all in and experience the wonders of the city as Inez would rather shop and go around with her ex and his wife to dinner and museums. This another great thing about the movie within it it has multiple areas which attack many people’s lives, we have the connection between the wife and husband who have clashing dreams, someone who is trying to fulfil a dream which they have always put back and most importantly the feeling of being in a lost generation.
Though where the story has its excitement and meaning shown so noticeably is when Gil finds a way to go back in time each night to the 1920s by standing on a corner of a street where he is picked up by those of the past generation. On these nights we get to see Gil interact with his idols Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali and Gertrude Stein who reads Gil’s novel and helps him find his voice. Gil each night develops a new life in 1920s Paris, the time in which he has wanted to be his whole life and he loves it. He even begins to develop a relationship with Adrianna, one of Picasso’s mistresses, and we as the viewer even begin to route for their relationship. For me these moments are fantastic, this may be because I feel a connection to Gil as an aspiring writer who loves the legends of 1920s Paris, when I visited Paris I got lost, not in the shops and riches of the city, but in simply wandering around and taking it all in. I watching the movie began to want to have the ability to experience all the great times and generations which appear so much better than mine. But this is not just a thing which happens in 1920s Paris it is a side effect of any good movie, book or photograph which shows me a world which I cannot experience first-hand. It’s the feeling that what I have is not better than what has already been and is one which I feel we all do and so too does Gil but he has been given the gift to actually experience it.
This thought is echoed through many movies and forms of media and is shown fantastically in Richard Linklater’s ‘Dazed and Confused’. Dazed and Confused is a movie which I stumbled upon about a year ago and it happened to be a perfect time. It follows a bunch of school kids as the school year ends, we see those who are going to be seniors next year and the ritual of them going round and beating on those coming in as freshmen reflecting the change in a teenager’s life which goes all so fast. But what’s so brilliant about this movie is that it follows the characters for just one whole day, there is no crazy event which makes you feel that the movie is pure fantasy stead they go out with their friends as the boys try to get the girls and the girls mess with the boys, the young kids try to get in with the older kids and at the end, they end up in a field drinking beers and partying because the house party got shut down before it even started. It follows events which happen in all teenager’s lives no matter what the generation. This gives an underlying message throughout the movie that at the end of the day we are all humans, we all were teenagers and we all did the same stuff just that stuff may have been done with a different haircut, different clothes and varying music but it doesn’t mean it is not the same. And what Linklater does so well to truly showcase this and what Woody Allen does too in ‘Midnight in Paris’ is have the characters reflect the same feeling of nostalgia that was never had but is given to something we believe to be so much better than our own. It is almost as if Linklater is mocking the audience as the characters themselves being teenagers in the late 70s have the dream that people today would kill for but feel that a good generation skips every ten years believing that the ‘60s were the best and perhaps the 80s will be to but for them, they are stuck in the 70s which would end up being remembered as one of the best generations in human history. This is what is so perfect about the movie it creates a self-comment about how we feel about the movie within the movie when I watched I agreed with everything it said about the characters feeling their generation is the wrong one for them not because they believe the 70s was bad but because its how I felt about my own therefore making me sit there wanting to be in the 70s whilst agreeing with people who where in the 70s that wished they weren’t; the perfect commentary on why everyone is a pessimist about there own generation.
Midnight in Paris takes this a step further in a less nuanced way. At the end of the film, Gil shows Adriana that he is from the future and she asks to go back to another generation with him, she chooses the 1890s and Gil is surprised. He asks her why and she says that this is the golden age of Paris and she chooses not to leave which causes Gil to realise the fundamental idea that nostalgia can get to anyone causing them to ignore their time and lose their opportunity. Gil and the audience are taught the lesson that everyone has a golden age and that it is often not the age that they have experienced or have ever truly known.
This is a lesson which has come about in modern times as people have had the ability to reflect on the past more than they ever have before, it’s a philosophical idea that I do not know the name of but the feeling that it embodies is more than true and is one which I have to remind myself constantly. Movies like midnight in Paris do it so perfectly.
Stop looking into the past for experiences and make experiences which people will look back on like you look back on theirs.
