An old acquaintance claimed not to like “Midnight
in Paris” because it was “too cliché.” Were I the sort of person who says
“Hellllloooo-o!” I would have said “Hellllloooo-o! You don’t think maybe that that
was the point?” Or if I had been my
daughter I would have said, “Thanks, Captain Obvious.”
This guy is himself a cliché, a posturing suburbanite
who has to tell you about the little jazz bar that he drove up the Village to
visit last weekend to remind you that he, unlike you, continues to reject the bourgeois
life, that he scorns the dreary pablum of the masses, among which he ranges
Woody Allen films. For his type, anything that people like you like is, by
definition, cliché, which, in his vocabulary is negative. But the problem is that Woody Allen
characters are ALL parodies of various types of people, which means that, yes,
they are clichés; that’s pretty much what parody is. So how does calling a film
“cliché” that is supposed to be “cliché” qualify as a criticism? It’s like calling a romance or an allegory “unrealistic.”
You don’t get to attack a piece by observing that it possesses one of the defining
characteristics of the genre to which it belongs.
Agreed, the characters of “Midnight in
Paris” are clichés. The question is
whether these add up to appropriate and effective parody (does the thing
warrant parody in the first place and is the parody convincing?), which is
another issue completely. But first you have to ask a more fundamental question: what do
the characters parody? In the earlier
films, like Annie Hall, it is too clear for even the most oblivious posturers
to miss that oblivious posturers are being made fun of (“As a matter of fact, I
happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here….”).
"Midnight in Paris" offers the usual cast of ludicrous pontificators, the
ones we go to Woody Allen films to see in their latest manifestation. And it is pretty clear what the Woody Allen
narrator figure is up to. But what type
does the nice slightly bumbling Gil, the Owen Wilson character, embody?
You identify with him initially as the
wandering American in search of la Grande
Culture. You position yourself against
the crass capitalist in-laws, attribute ourselves with real taste, and play
along with the “which dead person would you most like to meet?”game. But as the characters inhabiting the “real
world” as opposed to 1920s Paris become increasingly fleshly and self-absorbed,
as the pedantic Paul becomes even more ridiculous, and Gil increasingly anxious
to live in his fantasy, you begin to notice that you are being made fun of for
having bought into Gil's idea of authenticity, that you have been complicit in peopling the
world that we normally inhabit with soulless victims of false consciousness and
that what seemed like a cute and harmless trip to 1920s Paris was a sinister
prop for your smugness. You have been tricked into the position of my posturing jazz-bar
visiting acquaintance: you are a cliché complaining about clichés.
Gil seems innocuously likeable at first. But he isn’t.
He pretends to cut through the petty distractions of daily life, but it’s
just to enact his credibility as a writer in terms of his authenticity against
the unwholesome phoniness of poseurs of all types, which means everyone but
himself. He is obnoxious because you are
never quite real enough for him, never quite interested enough in the salt of
the earth types that inspire his work, your taste is never quite up to his
austere standards of purity, you are not quite interested enough in real jazz as
opposed to the easily-accessible to the masses version. He is obnoxious because you realize pretty
quickly that his genuineness is just another fiction created to exclude
you. So you start to make fun of him,
too. No matter skillfully he acts out his genuineness, he remains a serious attempt
to embody the Ernest Hemingway prototype and therefore he is impossible to take
completely seriously, always verging into parody. In giving us the myth of
himself, Hemingway pretty much destroyed the possibility that a earnest young
male writer could ever unselfconsciously trace his literary genealogy with a
straight face; the committed young writer, the Stingo, the Henry Miller, all
the Ernest Hemingway proxies out to write one true paragraph are pretty much irredeemably
dumb. You are in trouble now.
There is no place to go to get real culture (as opposed to the debased
bourgeois kind). You can only be ironic.
This is the gimmick of “Midnight in Paris:”
you let yourself be turned into a Hemingway wannabe, but you are split - stupidly
aware that somebody else has the monopoly of the real, the cool, exclusive even
as you claim it for yourself; before you can stop it you have been turned into the plastic other shopping for stupid stuff, saying stuff that show how boring you are. You recognize that you are
just a cliché, an oblivious posturer trapped in the prison house of oblivious
posturing. But if you have been paying
attention you are still one step ahead of my posturing jazz-bar visiting
acquaintance. At least you see yourself
for what you are. And that’s better than
thinking that you do in fact have a monopoly on authenticity.
