Romanticising Past to Escape Present: Midnight in Paris

A time that once was…...the people that once were…….and that past era has now been swept by the tide of linear time that marches forward. I often see people romanticising the past: its purity, cultural integrity and the human spirit. People my age (the millennials), we romanticise about a time when there were no smartphones and people didn’t need to check their hands every five minutes. The generation that raised millennials seems to be complaining even about the time that we romanticise about. This human condition of looking at the good old days is something that plagues everyone and anyone. This feeling of finding comfort in an era that you might have been acquainted through books, tele or movies tells a skewed narrative, yet we fell for it. We want to escape present, and our best bet in this escapist pursuit is romanticising the past. Future is too uncertain to predict, but the past is laid in front of us to pick and choose from.

A still from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011)

Midnight in Paris is a wonderful film talking about its protagonist's journey exploring the nature of past and present. An American screenplay writer feels that his artistic soul is being trampled by working in a formulaic Hollywood environment. He dreams about rubbing shoulders with his literary icons that once existed in what he believed was the golden era. 1920’s Paris was the time when Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Picasso and many other artists worked, partied and thrived. As an artist, he tries to find the semblance of the time that once was and looks for his motivation to complete his novel that is in fact about selling artefacts in a nostalgia shop. Woody Allen’s way of communicating this human latching of past to escape the present is through this American writer and his journey to gain what he calls in this film as the ‘mini insight’. This means that even the ones that lived and breathed the supposed ‘golden generation’ of 1920’s Paris wished that they were born during what they feel is the golden generation. This supposed ‘golden generation’ is an unicorn which exists in imagination.

Past has been sealed away and can serve as a lesson to live in what is the moment that is present. A man stuck in a time that wasn’t his or worse stuck in a moment that he once lived will always try to weasel out of the present. We complain about how smartphones are ruining the way things were done in the past that but instead of complaining we can learn from the ways of the past and instead of fighting the inevitable technological, social and moral changes that society will go through, we can embrace it by using the lessons that our personal or the collective past of our world has to offer.

If humans condition of disliking the present is evident that there is another condition that I am sure all of us are pretty familiar with: the idea of the place that we are in, people we interact with and the moments that we are experiencing right now pales in comparison to the other uncountable ones that the world has to or is offering other people. There is no doubt that people travel or move to better places in order to find the work that they love or meet people who inhabit mindsets that might match theirs. Commonly, people just love to complain and feel dissatisfied of their current bearings. There is always a better party or a better city or a better crowd or a better lifestyle; and if not there are collective hubs of metropolises, getaways and collective human gatherings that may merit our insatiable search for happiness. To find happiness, we as a human might move to a new country or city or province, but somehow this emptiness that might come out of loneliness, lack of meaning and your usual existential ideas should urge that human condition of believing that moving somewhere fancier is the answer.

Midnight in Paris speaks of this desire for our confused American writer to move to Paris in order to find happiness. Maybe his move to Paris was just an escapist dream but as the film progressed, we sense that his main motivation stems from his deeper appreciation of past, and the artistic inspiration that this city gives him. If moving to a new place or making a new friend instigates this feeling of inspiration, motivation and doing something meaningful, then it merits to such ideas. The human mind is fickle because you have apparently trained it to find excitement every day and that can be only found in the swanking metropolises of the world or the exciting parties or the people with interesting stories, but what will you do in the morning when the shine of the city fades away? Or the people with interesting stories run out of new interesting ones to narrate?

Midnight in Paris first introduces these two human conditions: one which is romanticising past to such extent that present is demonised and second which is about moving to a new place in order to be happy. The film does provides us with this solution, which asks us to appreciate the past to make sense of the present, and subsequently it’s not about the new city or the new exciting people, but rather your intrinsic motivation to embrace this new situation that the old one may have failed to provide. Our American writer never criticised America but rather felt a disconnection with Hollywood’s interpretation of art which made him develop a deep connection with the beautiful city of Paris that once inspired his literary heroes. Instead of criticising the place we inhabit, we might want to explore that new supposed better place that may inspire us in ways that our present bearings has failed to do so. Rather looking for vain attempts of finding happiness in new places, experiences and peoples…..because frankly over time they’ll be same, old, repetitive and uninteresting as the previous ones.