Her (Spike Jonze, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, and Amy Adams, 2013)

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

PSA: Plentiful Spoilers Ahead

What I liked about it:

·                   God help me I never say his name right, but Joaquin Phoenix is damn good at what he does

·                   Wardrobe—how do high-waisted pants and peach button-downs say so much?

·                   AGENCY

·                   The video games are all pretty much just super

·                   Music does some really interesting things, in terms of both structure and plot

·                   I can’t tell if I’m mad that my Bodies Onscreen seminar is still ahead of me this Spring, or thrilled that I have such a perfect film to be thinking about in that seminar all semester.  

·                   There’s a lot to say about women in this film

·                   Theodore’s job at beautifulhandwrittenletters.com is never explained.  He is a writer of heartfelt letters for other people, a sort of surrogate who speaks more movingly than you to the people you love. We never know anything about the job, really, except that it exists and he’s good at it. It's strange, and strangely analogous to the work of operating systems in the film--being very good at simulating emotions and thought, perhaps to the point of actually feeling those emotions and thinking those thoughts

·                   I love Creation stories

·                   Like most good films, it could be read as reflecting on the nature of cinema

I’m sure “agency” is going to be a buzzword for people who write about this

film, so I need to be very clear about what I mean when I say: this movie is a terrific and fascinating example of agency.  There is a trend in filmic scholarship away from auteurism and intent as well as singular hermeneutic readings and toward cinematic autonomy and the creation of an independent film world, or even film mind. This film mind is capable of thinking about itself, about its characters, about everything in its diegesis. (Forgive me, film people—musicology is always just a little bit behind your theorizing.  For now.)  In terms of sound, Ben Winters has said this autonomy means music doesn’t necessarily narrate on a level other than the diegesis of the characters, but if that characters themselves are controlling their world, their diegesis, that it’s possible for them to control the music, as well, even some instances of what has been labeled underscoring, or extra-diegetic music.

It’s super fun to think about this issue then, in a film world in which agency is a central theme, issue, topic, etc.  In fact, before the OS (Operating System) Samantha ever shows up in the film, protagonist Theodore Twombly demonstrates his (or his non-sentient computer’s) control over the diegesis.  In an elevator, he instructs the computer to “play a melancholy song.” Though he is using earbuds, the song takes over the filmic soundscape, illustrating perfectly Theodore’s moodiness. He abruptly says, “play a different melancholy song,” and the computer obeys, again shifting and controlling the soundscape of the film.  This could by certain theorizing be read as metadiegesis, or simply the diegesis of being inside one’s head, but as the song continues, its use shifts to what we would traditionally term underscoring. Theodore, through his computer, has a certain amount of control over what we the audience hear, a point which is accentuated not only by seeing and hearing him tell his computer to play music, but seeing and hearing it twice.

It is important to note that this display of power is impossible without his computer, even the “low-grade” voice-recognition software he used before Samantha. The film universe is already saturated with technology. When Samantha enters the picture, this power grows. Samantha engages in a common trope: as she becomes more complex, she becomes interested in and moved by art, particularly music, to the point of composing herself.  As Theodore lounges comfortably on the beach with Samantha, a Satie-like piano song plays, and when Theodore asks what it is Samantha reveals that she has been composing. She says she was trying to capture the experience of being on the beach with him. Later, Samantha composes another song intended to be a picture of the two of them, since she has no body and therefore cannot be imaged (a fascinating idea I’ll return to in a minute). A third composition is a collaboration between Samantha and Theodore.  I am having an argument about who wrote the song, Theodore or Samantha, because it’s a bit vague in the presentation.  My reading is that she was playing him a wordless song she’d written and then he himself played it later.  With this reading, Samantha is incapable of producing actual acoustic sounds, so for Theodore to create a non-digital version of the song was another way of bringing their relationship into his own world.  The alternate reading (and one I'm thinking now might be right) is that Theodore wrote the song, given that we’d seen him noodling on the ukulele earlier in the film, and asked Samantha to put words to it.  In either interpretation, the point is that they are collaborating on something that has a life both outside and inside the earbud, and it is a unique function of music that such a collaboration could occur.  This question is asked at many points during the film, but for me it was particularly poignant here: is Samantha, and are the products of her mind, still virtual?

It is necessary, I suppose, to at least consider a reading of all of this virtualness and realness as a contemplation on cinema itself. A movie, after all, is itself a type of virtual world, whose physicality exists primarily in the way it is transmitted to us, in the hardware of recording and playback technology, in traces of light and sound. Like Samantha, this film, any film, is not a person. Her does not present to us persons with social security numbers.  And yet is it any less real?  Samantha does not exist in the physical diegesis of Theodore, but she is still a presence in his world.  Film, once it is created, has the capacity to do things its creators didn’t anticipate, to have conversations with humans and with other films.  They can have a very real and physical impact on us without having certain types of corporeality themselves.

One final thought: that Samantha desired to make a picture of the two of them with music is a fascinating idea. It is not without precedent, of course: the history of Western music contains many attempts to evoke images or ideas with music. In some ways, though, this isn’t like that: she is actually making a picture, not just trying to call an image to mind. It’s more like she’s taking/making an ultrasound, a picture out of sound waves, literally turning something you hear into something you see.  The comparison to ultrasound is also apt because it is such a personal experience, using sound to see beyond the boundaries of a person’s flesh, actually viewing, being deep inside of them.  This extraordinarily personal technology, which some might term invasive, involves an openness that ultimately is the key to Theodore's enlightenment. It wouldn’t be hard to make this into a sexual and/or Freudian metaphor, but I want to stop here and think about it some more.  I also need to sort out how this is not just any ultrasound, but a musical ultrasound.  There's got to be something there, yes?

Oh good, I'm funny,

Kate

Mostly Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2004), and Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Since returning from Christmas, I have encountered many wonderful objects new to me, including in no particular order: Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection; Rodney Ascher, Room 237; David Lynch, Inland Empire; Andrew Bujalski, Computer Chess; George Saunders, Tenth of December; and a binge-watching of Allan Cubitt’s The Fall. I list all these not to impress you—A) it’s actually a kind of short list for a person on break who claims to be interested in art, and B) what’s less impressive than trying to impress people with what you’ve read or seen? I list them because I want to show myself the opportunities I’ve had to write. For some I didn’t write down any notes right after listening/viewing/reading, so that’s what I get. I haven’t been completely comatose on break and have actually been far less depressy-sit-on-the-couch-and-stare-at-something than I usually am when I have a lot of time to myself.  But that’s no excuse.  I’m way less busy than I will be when school starts, and one important point of this project is to write quickly that I might write often, making writing part of my day just like eating dinner or going to the gym (ha, ha).

SO, in an attempt to keep myself on track, I’m going to spread across a couple posts an abbreviated list of what I liked about each of these things, and I’ll write a few paragraphs about mute children. I've been wanting to think about sound theory and literature for a while, partially because I think it's inherently interesting, and partially because I know I need to figure out what's applicable and useful if I want to work on sound and music in onscreen adaptations of literature.  

PSA: Plentiful Spoilers Ahead

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

·         I listened to this on an audiobook on an eight-hour car trip, so the fictional parallel to my current reality was fun/oh boy am I lucky. In addition to the obvious differences, this parallel made me think about how journeys with known destinations differ from those with imagined, purported, or no designated destinations; repeated journeys versus novel ones; solo journeys and accompanied ones; being pursued versus being a free agent; fictional journeys, in which everything can be symbolic, and real journeys, in which we try to create symbols where none exist.

·      The two protagonists don’t have names, and people consistently refuse to offer their own names throughout the novel.

·      The consistent repetition of simple phrases and words of the man (“I’m sorry,” “of course you can”) and the boy (“okay”) were both endearing and evocative. It was as if these very common words belonged only to these two people in their private language with one another.

·      The consistent repetition of events and states for the boy and his father (they were starving, the boy was so scared, they came upon a house, they came upon a traveler, they hid the cart) communicated effectively how they—and McCarthy—built a routine out of chaos and moto perpetuo.  I also can’t recall too many stories that so rely on repetition of events.

·      That good ol’ McCarthy horror and gore and tragedy.

·      I hadn’t thought about an apocalyptic universe much since experiencing the Fallout games a few years ago. It’s good to be reminded once in a while that much of global society is little more than agreement and passivity, which if disrupted plunges us into an entirely different set of circumstances, morality, and histories. Yeah, yeah, Walking Dead, I know.

·      The boy’s muteness after tragedy, his flute, and his goodness (more on those later)

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2004)

·      I do love an old crotchety retired police detective who’s good at what he does.

·      Like in The Road:

o   the detective is not named.

o   the novel features a child who has seen adult horrors, in this case, the Holocaust.  

o   two characters are utterly dependent upon one another to the exclusion of the outside world

·      It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes in tone, length of story, timeline (the old man would be the right age to be an old Sherlock), character, and emphasis on reason. And who doesn’t love Sherlock Holmes?  It’s an interesting way to pay tribute to the character, given the recent spewing of remakes.

·      The solution to the bifurcated mysteries would be pretty much impossible for readers to figure out.  The emphasis is thus not on the readers being detectives but on literary, symbolic, and character elements of the work.

·      The boy’s muteness and the parrot as a surrogate voice (more on that later).

·      Unapologetic but weird anthropomorphization in a chapter near the end.  Chabon doesn’t give the bird absurdly human rationality. Rather than trying to give the bird a human-like parrot voice, Chabon gives him a parrot-like human voice.  This trait has implications for the parrot’s relation to the boy.

A theme that is common to some of the objects I listed above is how children express themselves after a trauma.

·      The Road: the boy is living a life of almost constant trauma, but after one particularly gruesome and frightening incident is mute for a while

·      The Final Solution: nine-year-old Jewish refugee Linus Steinman acts mute, “speaking” through his African gray parrot, Bruno.

·      Room 237: OK, not so much in the documentary, but The Shining totally addresses how children deal with trauma

·      The Fall: The killer’s young daughter draws disturbing pictures, perhaps out of intuition of her father’s activities, perhaps after seeing his own grisly picture diary, or perhaps due to an overactive imagination caused by detailed and explicit media coverage

·      Tenth of December: children are commonly featured in the stories, and while “traumatic event” might not be the most accurate description of what happens to them, the similarities and differences between the reactions of children and adults are consistently at play.

In The Final Solution, Linus is mute around other people, but a loquacious parrot named Bruno is constant on his shoulder. We know the boy is capable of speaking, because Linus’s voice, singing softly, is one of the voices the parrot imitates.  A colleague in the musicology program recently pointed out an interesting trend in the BBC’s Sherlock series: Moriarty uses voices of other people to reveal himself before he is seen onscreen, in other words, using the physical voices of others to express himself while remaining hidden. A similar thing is occurring here: Linus uses the voice of Bruno to express himself while remaining hidden in his muteness.

An interesting twist, however, is that, of course a parrot’s imitation of a voice is nothing more; there is no lexical meaning for the parrot when he sings a song or recites a poem. This emptiness makes the imitation all the more eerie and complicates Bruno as a surrogate voice for Linus. Are we to see Bruno and Linus as linked in some spiritual way, as children and their daemons are in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? Does the real nature of the relationship matter less than the symbolism of a displaced voice for a displaced child, or the evocative connection to how real children deal with trauma?

Consider the relationship of McCarthy’s boy to his flute.  After the boy watches the man shoot a cannibal before his young eyes, his father whittles a flute for him. In the mute time after trauma, the flute has some appeal, but later, the boy tells the man that he threw the flute away.

The passage in which the man gives the boy the flute:

“In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.”

Light Googling tells me that common interpretations of this flute as a symbol regard it as evidence of how hopeless or hopeful the man feels about their situation, as music-making is entertainment, luxury, and culture, beyond mere survival, akin to telling one another stories at night. Other interpretations invoke the Pied Piper, and still others regard it as a metaphor for all the culture that got thrown away.   I think all of these are interesting and valid.  My own first thought was that the boy was rejecting the vessel of a false voice.  The flute was given to him in a period of muteness, partly in apology, partly in hopes of catharsis.  It is well-known that traumatized children sometimes requires means of communication other than the voice, through pictures, dolls and puppets, writing, or, less commonly but occasionally, especially in art, music.  The flute was a means for the boy to communicate, to get something outside of himself, that didn’t require words or his physical voice.

If the flute can provide this for him, why throw it away? I think it could be because the boy is rejecting the falseness of it. We see throughout the novel many times the boy’s attention to sincerity, integrity, and veracity in a way that most of us lose as adults (see Saunders’s Eva in “The Semplica Girl Diaries” for a brilliant example of this contrast). He asks his father to stop telling him stories because they were fictions about a world that never did, never could, and never would exist. Perhaps he saw the flute as a voice that wasn’t true, telling lies about the possibility of a civilized existence or speaking a wordless and thus imprecise language. Maybe he didn’t know how to use the flute in a way that was sincere, lacking both a knowledge base and the will to create a new base of knowledge.  External objects weren’t the problem: the boy had a miniature truck and other toys that weren’t objectionable to him, but McCarthy never makes him draw or sing. I think the key is that, if the object wasn’t used for making sound and communicating his thoughts in some way, he wouldn’t have thrown it away. If he was going to speak, he was going to do it with his own voice.

Speaking with another’s voice is all over film. Think of Danny in The Shining (a complicated example, I know), the David Lynch ventriloquist aesthetic, HAL in 2001. Similarly, mute characters also pop up everywhere. One only has to think of the tradition of miming to come up with many famous names: Harpo Marx, The Pink Panther, Mr. Bean. But what happens when mute or mostly silent characters are used for tragic or emotional effects rather than comic ones? Muteness in film and literature has been explored, mostly through the postmodern suspicion of language. But what of the actual lack of sound, not just its hermeneutic value? Michel Chion says that an acousmatic voice, a voice heard but not seen, like a voiceover or narrator, is considered by audiences to be powerful, omniscient, and omnivisual. For my purposes, I want to ask the opposite: what happens when the body is revealed but not the voice?Ventriloquism is creepy because it separates a voice from a body, which certainly affects the voice, à la Chion, but it also affects the body.  I believe the effect is also a sense of omniscience; we are constantly feeling as if the character knows something that we do not, and that his/her silence is a choice rather than a necessity.  Just as a narrator hides his body, a character can hide his voice. Such an ability has implications for the importance of sound not just in film but also in literature. When we have a sense that some mind is deliberately choosing to withhold information, it is an unsettling demonstration of power. In the case of these mute children, though not always with the omission of sound more generally, this power and knowledge belongs to the characters.  Linus embraces it, the boy rejects it, but each choice is equally effective.

Despite this power appearing to be rooted in the characters, oh, right, these aren’t real children. Their minds are perhaps modeled on those of real children, but they were created by adults, specifically adult men.  This technique is thus an especially powerful tool for an author because it feeds off the common trope that children know a deep truth that adults have forgotten. (I suppose it depends on which camp you ascribe to: if you’re an auteurist, this technique gives an insidious power to the author by appearing to give power to the character.  If you’re more in the camp that likes to grant artworks their own worlds and autonomy, this choice is an actual choice of the character, and its power is real.)

A child who is silent as a defense against the world leads us to believe that cruelty planted something in that child, and if it would only speak we could glimpse a secret horror seen only by the traumatized. We want these silent children to speak, both out of basic human compassion but also out of morbid curiosity about the horrible.  This makes any form of communication whatsoever poignant, and when it is distorted, as through the beak of a bird who can replicate voices and words but not mean what it says, the displacement makes that communication doubly grotesque. In the case of a sentimental mute, we find ourselves imagining what the real voice attached to that body might sound like, what its timbral and textural qualities are, how it expresses words. 

(Which leads me to another short thought: I listened to both The Road and The Final Solution as audiobooks, and thus my imagination was functioning differently. A narrator supplied a physical voice for Bruno the parrot, dictating an imagined sound for me.) 

I’m enjoying thinking about this because it’s another way to subvert the visual bias in fiction and film. I like the idea that withholding sound is an acknowledgment of its power, rather than demonstrating the power of sound by emphasizing the chain linking a disembodied voice to a physical source.

Coming soon: Rodney Ascher, Room 237 (2013); David Lynch, Inland Empire (2006); Andrew Bujalski, Computer Chess (2013); possibly a few tidbits on The Fall (2013)

False leads and cold cases,

Kate

P.S. In that list there is no standalone music. My life hasn’t been without music lately—I’ve been playing Bach and Schubert keyboard works and listening to a few other things here and there, but it is just not what my brain wants to think about right now.  I worry sometimes that I am too finicky, that I get bored too easily. It’s not a laziness thing, I hope, but rather the effect of the massive amounts of stuff to know and experience. Maybe I don’t have the patience to examine Beethoven from a million angles, not that I don’t think that’s valuable, because doing so prevents me from examining David Lynch from a couple angles, or Hieronymus Bosch, or whoever. I certainly run the risk of being a “Jack of all trades, master of none,” but surely I can find some way to incorporate this desire into my professional life in a productive way. For teaching, certainly, it’s a good thing, as it allows my brain to easily create metaphors and make connections that will stick, as well as imagine creative projects outside my own discipline. But when it comes to my colleagues, when it comes to being an “expert,” in something, how much do I have to know about my general field, or what do I have to be able to do in my general field, to be a useful member of it?  I am so lucky to do what I do, but I know I can’t do it forever if I don’t feel like I am contributing. Law school?

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, starring Owen Wilson, 2011)

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)
Plot and Astaroth-worthy cast list can be found here.
The 1920s do sound lovely, both because we’re starting to see modern inventions that make life recognizable and comfortable and because the artists living and working there have captured our imaginations as exciting, strange, and beautiful people.  Allen allows his protagonist, Gil Pender, himself, and his audience to romanticize and indulge in Paris of the 1920s.  He never makes us feel guilty for that, and nor does he ever cast aspersions on the time itself, despite affectionate parodies of historical figures. History and fantasy combine: the past arrives in a Cinderella stagecoach at the stroke of midnight.
P.P.S. Time from finishing film to posting: about 25 hours. Ultimate goal: an appropriate and smaller number of hours.
x

PSA: Plentiful Spoils Ahead

What I liked about it:

·      *The cast feels like a Wes Anderson cast: famously whimsical and whimsically stocked with famous people

·     * The time period is perfect because I couldn’t logically imagine being happy before the 1920s, either

·     * Owen Wilson is a California Woody Allen plus a few inches and a crooked nose.  I like this connection too because of Annie Hall and Alvy's disillusionment with California

·     * Where all du French composers at? The diffusion of American music throughout the film is a reminder that just as American artists, musicians, and writers flocked to Paris (paralleled nicely by the American protagonist's pilgrimage there), American jazz was having an equally influential impact on the Parisian soundscape. It was a little sad not to see Alan Arkin do a killer Satie, or Hillary Swank as a young Virgil Thomson, but I guess the point was made.

·     * It’s the ultimate name-dropping cinematic trip, but done with love. It’s Woody Allen.  We all know he knows we know he knows who Modigliani is. He doesn’t need to do it to show off.

·     * It’s purty

·     * The opening montage ode to Paris is just as akin to a city symphony as to the opening sequence of Manhattan

·     *  Time travel movies are awesome, first of all, but especially awesome to think about when placed beside straightforward period pieces. [I'm realizing after writing the post I'm not going to be able to expand this idea much tonight, but someday I will!]

·    *  The gallery scene

·     * It’s Paris x 3 x infinity kind of

·     * It made me think about how adulterous thoughts are legitimized in fiction

·    *  There’s a deliberate ambiguity about whether or not this stuff is in his head until the very end, when it matters even less than it has throughout the whole film

Ah, the Golden Age fallacy, the belief that life was better in a previous time.  This is always a funny one for me, because there are a few things the logical part of my brain can’t get past when imagining myself at any other time before about the early twentieth century.

These include:

·      * I would not be able to see jack nor his beanstalk. My eyesight is so bad I         

           would have had to be homebound or else get picked off by eagles.

·       * I wouldn’t probably have even made it into the world, as the umbilical cord 

           was wrapped around my neck before birth.

·       * Doritos

·       * I’M A WOMAN DUH

These concerns are among the superficial reasons I really like the historic setting of the film. (The ancestor of toilet paper we know and love today was a commercial product of the nineteenth century, and nuchal cords were able to be dealt with by then as well. I would have had bottle caps for glasses, Doritos were just a gleam in the corn industry's eye, and I'd have enjoyed relatively few legal rights, but whatevs.) 

It is very interesting, though, that at the very beginning of Midnight in Paris, Michael Sheen’s character Paul, an acquaintance and intellectual (whom Gil likes to think of as a pseudo-intellectual), cautions Gil against the Golden Age fallacy. Walking through Versailles, Paul says, “Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present … the name for this denial is Golden-Age Thinking … it is a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” Paul is obnoxious: he always has to throw in what he knows, likes to dance with engaged women, and ultimately has an affair with Gil’s fiancée, played by Rachel McAdams. We are conditioned to dislike him, to mistrust his words like those of the jerk in Annie Hall rhapsodizing on Marshall McLuhan for everyone to hear; yet, his caution about Golden-Age Thinking appears to be the conclusion Gil draws by the end of the movie.  Gil himself says to Adriana, his love interest from the 1920s who wants to stay in the Belle-Époque, “if you stay here, though, and this becomes your present, then pretty soon you’ll start imagining another time was really your, you know, was really the golden time.  Yeah, that’s what the present is.  It’s a little unsatisfying because life’s a little unsatisfying.” Gil then chooses to return to his present, and the ending scene, in which he walks with a beautiful young Parisian in the rain, suggests he finds a better match for him in life than either his then-ex-fiancée or Adriana.

But what are we to make of the asshole being right at the very beginning of the movie? I don’t have the answer yet since I first watched it less than twenty-four hours ago (and I’m trying really hard to post quickly after first viewing. Once school starts turnaround's gonna have to happen pronto), but I'm going to muse on it for a bit.  One possibility is, of course, that Paul is not right and they’re both wrong.  After all, Adriana stays in the Belle-Époque, and we don’t know what becomes of her. She could be very happy. At most, though, this movie seems willing to be inconclusive rather than deliberately misleading. 

We could go with some symbolism of where the characters are while being disdainful of those who romanticize the past: one of the most touristy spots near Paris. Versailles is a loaded place, a symbol of failed government even as its opulence continues to dazzle and inspire modern people. 

Another point is of course that assholery doesn’t preclude someone from saying something right that we don’t want to hear.  Even the most airborne of the windbags can have an insight once in a while, as multiple semesters in grad school and many more semesters in life have taught me well. 

Finally (for what my brain comes up with tonight, anyway), it could be that the film celebrates digression, mistakes, place, and mobility. I don’t quite think that Allen is into the tired “it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey” message. His fondness for literal journeys that end in realization—think Alvy’s trip to California in Annie Hall, or the trips to and throughout Spain in Vicky Cristina Barcelona—equally values the epiphany and the journey that generated it.

Midnight isn’t afraid of highlighting journeys or processes.  The whole movie is predicated on Gil's visit to Paris from another location, and the metaphorical distance of history becomes a geographic distance traveled in a stagecoach.  In addition, we see the process of revision as Hemingway and Stein both review Gil’s novel, and we know he works on it between readings. We see our own process of creating history when we see Stein buy a Matisse for 500 francs.

I guess I think that Paul was right, but he didn’t voice the whole point, because he didn’t understand or care about Gil’s situation. The asshole got to say something almost right, but he's not the protagonist, so it was incomplete. Gil was fantasizing about choosing his time because he was dissatisfied with his present, yes, but he was dissatisfied with his present because he felt as if he had no control over his place, both in his relationship with Inez and geographically in America. This lack of placement control also meant an inability to steer his future. While he could not stay on his trip—the spatial metaphor we usually use is “back”—to history, it demonstrated to him that he was perfectly free to stay on his trip “over” to Paris, which meant that he was free to take whatever trip he wanted "forward" into the future. Time and place become intertwined in the film just as they do in individual and collective lives, which is what makes the prospect of time travel so cool.  In many time travel stories (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Dr. Who, A Wrinkle in Time, Time Bandits, hey, even Men in Black III) characters are transported not just through time but also space. 

I'm not about to get into any scientific relationships between time and space, because that's not my bag, but it is interesting to note that when place isn't warped along with time, it becomes a big deal.  In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors is doomed to repeat not only his date, but also his location.  One imagines he would have become far less bored, and also far less motivated to be a decent human being, if his time travel came without the constrictions of place. 

 Throughout Midnight in Paris we have no conclusive evidence of Gil being delusional or sane, and it really doesn't matter. His journey through controlled and uncontrollable circumstances is his own, just as our lives are our own.  I like, though, that the point isn't "is he crazy? is it in his head? is it real?" though I enjoy that ambiguity in other films (A Very Long Engagement being perhaps my favorite until I remember what my actual favorite example is). The analogy I'm feeling right now to this uncertainty about reality versus fantasy is to our uncertainty about what kind of knowledge we have and how useful it is. 

The best demonstration of this latter idea occurs during the scene in an art gallery, in which Gil disagrees with Paul about Picasso’s “Adriana.” (The link shows you both the earlier scene at Stein's as well as the gallery scene.) Paul spouts off knowledgeable facts about "Adriana," but as we have just visited that painting in the 1920s with Gil, we know that his knowledge about it differs from Paul’s.  Gil begins to tell what he knows from firsthand knowledge. Everyone looks at him in disgust both because they assume he knows nothing and because of what he says he knows, specifically, information that isn’t useful or aligned with the historical narrative built around the painting. I’m not always great at knowing the thing that everyone in the room wants to think or talk about, or what the most important thing to know about a subject is. What I know is just kind of this amalgam of things that have stuck for one reason or another, be it emotional attachment, repetition, diligence, sensory memory, embarrassment at not knowing it at one point in time, accident, or chance. While I don't need to empathize with a character to like a movie, I definitely allied myself with Gil at that moment, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

 Midnight in Paris was my favorite Allen film of late.  I give it seven drawers and a key.

Say "hello" to Trotsky,

Kate

P.S. I'd really like to develop methodologies for analyzing period pieces, so if anyone has thoughts on this subject, I'd really love to hear them! Thank you for reading.