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.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure (Tim Burton, starring Paul Reubens,1985)

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure

Disclaimer: I can’t promise I’m not going to talk about “I know you are, but what am I?”  in a serious and somewhat over-analytical fashion. The best I can do is promise I won’t leave it as a rhetorical tag that wraps up the post in a neat little circle, the equivalent of “isn’t this deep? Connections.”  Getting it out of the way: “I know you are, but what am I,” gets into a rhythm. Pee-wee's victims respond even when it makes no sense, as one would with a little brother or big brother or best friend from childhood just trying to get under your skin.  If we let it make sense for a moment, though, it’s like he’s throwing all our assertions about ourselves as responsible logical adults back in our faces, mocking us for being so sure of ourselves, and for believing that we understand the world that way. The question remains open-ended: we have no idea what the hell Pee-wee Herman is.

What I liked about it:

·      It surprised me

·      Man-children are weird and interesting

·      It featured athletic, impressive, and distinctive physical comedy

·      It walked some boundaries between the skin of reality and fiction. Ew?

·      It teaches kids useful lessons about cinema

·      I’m a sucker for a movie-within-a-movie

·      It’s an early collaboration of Elfman and Burton

·      The door-knocking scene

·      How it made me interact with my childhood and childlike tendencies

·      Awesome Larry

·      Reality=adulthood, Pee-wee=childhood?

·      It reclaimed Pee-wee for me from his Michael-Jackson-flavored-Neverland-status (I just realized if you cross Peter Pan and Michael Jackson you get Peter Jackson.     NAILED IT.)

Pee-wee is a man-child. As an adult, it’s kind of weird that this thin man with a

combination flaccid-taut face wears the same outfit every day (and what an outfit it is!), has toys and a fireman’s pole in his home, etc. But what kind of man is he? What kind of child is he? I don’t tend to think often about man-children, but doing so made me reflect on

the things I’ve reclaimed from my own childhood as an adult, about the ways I decided “growing up” was no fun. Note: feel free to substitute “sober” for “serious” in the list below.

No-fun ways to approach adulthood include:

·   Being serious all the time. I could never work with kids if I was serious all the time

·      Being serious when it’s probably appropriate to be serious, like in seminar

·      Being serious when it’s definitely appropriate to be serious, like at funerals, wakes, and       professional engagements

I don’t actually advocate being drunk for class and for babysitting. But it’s so obviously some of the appeal of drunkenness: to return to a time when you just didn’t give a shit about anything other than how cool your shoes were and what new items were in the magic shop this week. The removal of inhibitions is an oft-cited advocacy for getting sloshed, therefore dancing in your underwear in the middle of the street is partially reclaiming your childhood, plus some weird sex stuff.

So Pee-wee is a man-child who defies personal inhibitions without substance

abuse. And everyone loves him for it.  And I recognized enough of the real world in the film to reassure me about my own relation with it, or at least to temporarily relieve me of anxiety about it. With all the whimsy of Pee-wee, there was still a line of realism that wasn’t crossed. Live, “real” dinosaurs could only appear in a stop-action dream, for example, not in the actual diegesis of Pee-wee’s life. Yes, the amazing coincidence of finding his bike on TV at the exact right time was incredible, but coincidences like that are possible, if implausible.  It’s the kind of magic that results from the world being a complicated, incredible place, not from imagination.

 Most of the realistic oddities in the movie can be accounted for if you think of Pee-wee as an adult who treats his world, and whom the world treats, as a child with mental faculties intact. It’s Pee-wee’s fantastical self situated in the “real world” that makes him wonderful, because when he’s around the “real world” becomes fantastical. Instead of being annoyed or freaked out by Pee-wee, people choose to love him and indulge his desires, much as people do with children. No one does that for adults—a little boy has been battling cancer like a boss? OK, let’s build an entire universe for him to fight crime in.  That’s awesome. But as adults, we’re on our own. No one caters to your fantasies, even if you’re lucky enough to still have some. We’re supposed to figure it out and make it work ourselves (strangely enough, another message of Pee-wee, communicated through dialogue). To see the world bend around the offbeat desires of an adult man who gets his way not through power grabs or money but through sheer lovability and force of his desires is heartwarming and hopeful.

The sequence that drives this point home to me is the bar scene where Paul Reuben’s physical comedy takes center-stage: the dance scene oh my god. In adulthood, bars are places that are supposed to be fun, where we attempt to relinquish our inhibitions and feel reciprocal affection for the world,  but that are in fact often depressing, and the experience ends in disappointment. Pee-Wee takes back the bar, reclaiming the territory usually reserved for young women with either low or extremely high self-esteem. His dance is high-stakes, as he’s due to be trounced by bikers after this last request.  By sheer charisma, weirdness, and joie-de-vivre, he triumphs.  He’s evidence for how artists always justify their work: that no, we may not be surgeons, but we can make people feel good.

I also have to give a shout out to the scene where he’s knocking on the door along with the rhythm of the underscoring. It’s one thing to do it at the same time as the score—that’s basic Mickey-mousing. It’s another to repeat the process, without the power of the score and thus the authority of the gesture, and have it fail. It’s both a humorous reflexive gesture about the nature of cinema and, if you choose, a moment where we glimpse that Pee-wee is aware of how fantastical and awesome his world is.

Watch this scene here. If you want. It's good. Also, yes, I hear the Stravinsky.

Pee-wee reflects on cinema in other ways, most notably through the creation of a Hollywood film about his adventure, the movie-within-a-movie.  I like those reflections especially when you think about what ideas they make accessible to kids.  

Lessons learned:

·      To be successful a film does not need to reflect reality

·      Movies aren’t real

·      Being creative sometimes means bending the truth

·      Movies are silly and weird and fun and who cares

·      Movies sexualize relationships

·      Hollywood is a company

·      Drive-ins were cool

·      Eat snacks while watching movies

There’s more to say, but I’m trying not to edit this post too much (see the first post of this blog), and I don’t want these to be interminably long. So, in conclusion, it was fun and it made me laugh and think about myself.  I give it two turkeys and a Scrabble board.

Awesome Larry,

Kate

Why This is Happening Right Now

Note: Due to its introductory role, this post is longer and way more self-indulgent than I plan others to be.  Thank you for being interested, and please leave any comments you would like! 

I have written a thing about Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that I’m going to post after the ensuing reflective paragraphs. Actually, I sort of wrote a thing about Pee-wee’s Big Adventure a month ago that I filed away but have continued to think about but be afraid of, and that I’m going to continue to fiddle with and then post after the ensuing reflective paragraphs, which themselves are the product of a month of scared thinking, and with which I am going to fiddle after writing this paragraph and before I fiddle with Pee-wee. And this addiction to revision and careful self-censorship is why I have started Down in the Jungle Room.  I’m going to test myself to see if I can leave this paragraph alone.  As soon as I wrote that sentence I changed “anxiety-filled paragraphs” to “reflective paragraphs,” and then had to change the phrase again later, and  I did that without even thinking about it until after it was done. 

I, like many people, fear putting ideas, especially in written form, in front of others, though we almost always benefit most from input outside our own brains. When words are on the page it’s somehow evidence of how you think, of what you know, of what you can do.  When words are in your head they’re safe because they’re yours because they’re secret.

When I was in early years of college, I was told that my work wasn’t about me, that the subject was the most important thing, though simultaneously my voice was important. There is, however, no easy directive for balancing voice and work. At the time, I needed to hear this lesson to keep my own ego and carelessness from getting in the way of learning skills and of producing a good product. It was an excellent message, especially for a young person. It was very true that these works or ideas were bigger than me, more impressive and powerful than me, and it was liberating to understand that I was subservient to them, that I was a vessel to share them with other people. However, in the spirit of all overachieving students, I have taken it too far, to the point at which I am afraid to reveal myself in my words or my actions, a step that was never the point of the lesson.  The lesson is not the source of my current anxieties, but rather a tool caught up in their machinations. I’ve twisted this approach into a crutch, my excuse for not producing, for not putting myself out into the world for others to critique and engage with.  I don’t write enough, I don’t talk enough, but rather just read more, watch more, listen to others more, or give up and play games on my iPad more, hoping that if I absorb enough one day I’ll speak and these lovely thoughts, perfectly assimilated, will dance from my mouth and everybody will join in a floppy orgy of happy beautiful conversation.  Exercising my brain and my spirit without fear and with joy is a fantasy I have sometimes at night before I go to sleep. The fantasy is itself an exercise in fearlessness and joy.

Also, um, I need to be successful, because I’ve chosen this path and I need to make a living doing it. I worry every day about the future of the field of musicology and my role in it. Will I be able to make enough money to support myself? How do people have families on these salaries? Every time I walk into a house that someone owns, no matter how large or small or clean, I marvel.  HOW DO PEOPLE OWN HOUSES? Really. How does this belong to you? So, I need to practice my writing and thinking and synthesizing and communicating, and maybe something helpful and lucrative will come of it, even if it’s just the habit of sitting down to reflect in external verbiage every day.

There’s also the fear of professionalism to consider. Academia of the arts has too much stuff, to the point at which it’s overwhelming to try to either engage with it or contribute to it. There is so much information available—and yes, yet so little, I know, I know, I know—that I feel the next wave needs to embrace writers’ voices. People have so many options to choose from that they don’t always choose what they read or listen to or watch based on subject but rather because of who was involved in its production. Most people don’t see the next Tim Burton movie just because it’s about stop-motion Emo dinosaurs with big eyes—they also go because it was made by Tim Burton and because Johnny Depp is playing a sad pterodactyl.

This is my attempt to simultaneously do something for myself and to practice doing something for other people, and for the objects that I love. Constant fear of being unoriginal, reductive, and poorly read is paralyzing and makes me not even want to try. I want to be rigorous. I want to be well-informed. But I can’t just keep absorbing information and keeping it to myself and my small circle of friends and cats and boyfriend willing to listen to me and then occasionally to my professors in term papers that don't really sound like me. Repeat to self: who CARES if someone has had the thought before? Yes, innovative thoughts are important, but in the history of the world, it’s the communal thoughts that have made the most impact.  A new thought is only important if it has the potential for others to share in it.  Not everything about every post is going to be good.  In fact, an entire post may be kind of crappy. I might—gasp—say something that’s just outright wrong. But it’ll be better than keeping the thoughts to myself and not receiving a corrective, or of having that crappy post exist in some floating unrealized form in the folds of my brain.

And one final thing: I want to be able to write about objects I love, and I don’t want to apologize for it.  This blog is designed around the premise of talking about what I LIKE about art objects.  That’s my voice. My initial response to lots of stuff—Maroon 5, Disney movies, Francis Bacon, Annie Clark, Umberto Eco—is almost always positive. I look for what I like, and sometimes I forget to compare objects to other objects to see which one accomplishes something better.  

I don’t remember the first time I felt the need to hide, or at least downplay, my enjoyment of an art object due to others’ judgment of it to be tacky, empty, shoddy, shameless, derivative, commercial, boring, cannibalistic, mainstream, not the best example of something, poorly scored, manipulative, whatever. I don’t remember why I decided my response was less critical, less important, less cultured. I don’t remember why I felt that even if my response was less critical, important, and cultured that it was an indicator of my inferiority, some depth of misunderstanding or lack of that elusive ability to “get it.” I don’t remember that pivotal inevitable first interaction, but I’m trying to own it, and I’m trying out the reverse impulse. 

There are plenty of people out there happy to cast judgment and rank and aesthetically order products.  We need them. But that doesn’t have to be what I do. If my typical responses mean I get more pleasure out of the world, then why not explore what is agreeable to me? It might mean that others are able to find pleasure in an object when previously for them there was none.  That’s a lot of what artists do anyway, and I miss being an artist.

So, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure  is a good place to start both because I really enjoyed it and because it navigates between adult and child worlds, especially humor.  In so doing the film reminded me of what was awesome about not only being a kid but being a kid watching movies. I didn’t have to care about what was good or well-done or comparative.  All I had to care about was how I responded to it, which I suppose was in a somewhat helpless way that usually privileged things that made me laugh, animals, pretty women, gentle voices, and music I could sing along to. Burton is also a good figure to muse on these ideas with, because people often dismiss his films as too cute, whimsical, and commercial to have value. This movie also is a great place to start my blog because it’s just like, “do what you want. Jesus.” 

And who knows, maybe I’ll start experimenting with cartoons.

High-proof and Fiddle Faddle,

Kate

P.S. No one read this before I posted it.  Also, I’ve revised it a lot more since that initial idea, and a lot more than I want to for a blog, and I still think it sucks.  Onward and upward!

P.P.S. I fiddled with the first paragraph again after settling on the title of the blog. 

P.P.P.S. Here's a list of what I'm trying to doooooo:

What this is for me:

A motivator to write frequently and quickly

A motivator for honesty

A celebration of individual and collective thought

A celebration of things that I love, and a place to indulge in an exploration of why  I love them

A place to work through my desire to apologize for guilty pleasures

An attempt to reclaim my sense of artistry

Freedom from the scholastic responsibility to read everything that's already been said on a subject before saying something about it myself

A repository for ideas I don’t want to lose (and probably some that I do)

A means of organizing my thoughts

A celebration of randomness

A therapeutic ego trip

An exploration of alternative modes of thinking

An alternative to taking pictures of my perfectly normal cats and anthropomorphizing them until they’re weird and funny 

Something I’m ok with only me reading if it works out that way

For you:

All of the above, if you wish, and anything you want it to be for yourself

An invitation to engage with me and others, despite my fear of confrontation and exposing my ignorance

What this is not:

A blog to learn about the comprehensive history, most important aspects, or truth of an object

A demonstration of my mastery of secondary literature

A demonstration of my mastery of anything

A blog for deconstructing the problems with an object

A blog where every post is perfect, or even good, or even eh

A banana

Something that will look pretty, unless somebody else wants to take charge of that

A closed conversation