Midnight Wherever You Are

It’s been quite a summer for movies: I was hijacked to Bangkok by Hangover II, thankful for the bad bosses I haven’t had in Horrible Bosses, reminded that women can be just as flat-out stupid-crazy as men in Bridesmaids, and glad I’m not anyone but me in The Changeup.

But my favorite film of the summer is one that catapulted me back in time to another era, a golden age. Is there any such thing as a golden age, an age marked by prosperity, happiness, creativity, and achievement? Most of us have a personal golden age---perhaps it’s an earlier day in our life or another age in history altogether. What if you could actually go back to that time in your life or that period in history?

That question is explored in Woody’s Allen’s wistfully charming and at times hilarious, Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a disenchanted Hollywood screen writer who visits Paris with his materialistic fiancé and her boorish parents. No one appreciates Gil’s enchantment with Paris or his desire to write a significant novel. “I'm having trouble because I'm a Hollywood hack who never gave real literature a shot,” he admits.

Mostly to escape his company, Gil wanders the streets of his beloved Paris. And that’s when the magic begins. At midnight he tumbles back in time to the Paris of the 1920s, escaping to his personal golden age, the City of Lights that was in that prolific decade of the 1920s the center of the artitistic universe.

Gil encounters a magnificent array of authors and artists and even manages to develop a crush on Pablo Picasso’s mistress. But alas, she mirrors Gil’s own ennui, is dissatisfied with the Paris of the 1920s, and wants to time travel to the Belle Époque, her golden age.

It’s then that it comes to Gil: he realizes the truth in Peter De Vries observation, “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”

It never was.

It’s in the present moment that we live the life given us. The past is never what we think it was or remember it as. Escaping the present by retreating to the past cheats us of the only time we have: now.

Those who lived in what we think was a golden age rarely recognized it as one. And we ourselves lose today anticipating tomorrow, waiting for a better day, never realizing, as Carly Simon crooned, that “these are the good old days.” The adage, “Wherever you are, be there,” is a good reminder for us to wake up and smell the present moment in all its aroma.

But wait a minute, that’s not entirely right either.

We can gain inspiration for the present moment by returning to the past. That’s one reason why people go to the Holy Land, make Renaissance tours of Europe, and visit Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. There is something about being there in that place where something significant happened, if only in our minds, that place and time that beckons us back in hopes of returning to the present with some of that past surging through our veins.

That’s what happened to Gil, who like a fish out of water, was suffocating on the shore (recall his name, Gil), of the wrong era, dying a slow death in fear of a meaningless existence, confused about his role in life, doubting his capabilities as a writer and authenticity as a person. It took someone from the past, Gertrude Stein, to remind Gil of his purpose in writing: “The job of the artist is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.”

But that was only Woody Allen speaking, not Gertrude Stein, right?

Right, but what does it matter? It’s still a magical thinking that returns us to the past, giving us strength and courage for today and hope for tomorrow.

Yes, I believe in that magical thinking: By embracing the past we can return to the present more fit and ready to live the life we were always meant to live now.

And that, in my opinion, is a golden age in any age.


Contact David B.Whitlock, Ph.D. at drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com or visit his website, www.davidbwhitlock.com