Midnight in Paris and The Great Gatsby on nostalgia
You can’t turn the clock back... or can you?
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I don’t know why, but I wasn’t expecting Midnight in Paris and The Great Gatsby to share much thematic tissue, other than the general feel of the Jazz Age. I’ve seen both movies several times before and read the book a few times to boot. The themes are identical. I should probably feel stupider than I do for not recognising it as soon as my girlfriend suggested Gatsby after Midnight to keep the Twenties theme going. I was going to write an essay on nostalgia in Midnight in Paris. Now, I’m going to write an essay on nostalgia in Midnight in Paris and The Great Gatsby.
The characters for whom this love of the past is so primary are Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby and Owen Wilson’s Gil Pender. Nick Carraway (played by Tobey Maguire) is ostensibly the main character of Gatsby but, though Gatsby himself is presented as the mystery, it’s Nick who is the true cipher. We learn almost nothing about him, except that he is “inclined to reserve all judgements,” meaning that he keeps his disgust bottled up for most of the movie.
Exploring Gatsby, on the other hand, is the film’s primary mission. It’s easy to see why, and why Carraway becomes so enchanted by him. He has amassed a great (illicit) fortune in order to impress the one that got away: Carey Mulligan’s Daisy Buchanan. He thought he was too poor when they met (and he may have been right, given Daisy’s status and the standards of the time); he thinks that if he is rich, he can go back and pick up where they left off.
There’s only one problem. Daisy is married to Joel Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan, who is, as they say, old money. Jay Gatsby is new money. New money isn’t respectable; it hasn’t proved its staying power. Old money has. It has stayed long enough to be inherited, maybe multiple times, and that is something Gatsby can’t get out from underneath. He can’t accelerate time to the point where he and Tom are on equal ground, just as he can’t reverse time to the point where he and Daisy met. He’s caught in the valley between what he had and what he wants, and he can’t get to either.
“I’ve got just as much as you,” Gatsby naively tells Tom, “That means we’re equal.” Tom just smiles at him, amused by the notion. “Oh, no. No. We’re different... We were born different... And nothing that you do or say or steal or dream up can ever change that.”
And he’s right. And Gatsby knows he’s right. In that moment, he’s confronted with the fact that the mission of his life has been in vain. Deep down, maybe he always knew it. It was a long shot, a fool’s hope. But his delusions are too strong. He’s invested too much in this to back out now. It has to work out. It has to. He doubles down. He dies thinking Daisy is going to call, but she’s not going to call. She never was. She’s with Tom now. She’s been with Tom for years. She’s loved Tom, despite his mistreatment of her, and this is the one thing Gatsby can’t accept.
In order to fully undo the last five years, she has to say she never loved Tom, and this, of course, is the one thing she can’t do. Because it’s a lie. She tells Gatsby she loves him “too.” And this “too” is what really stings. In Gatsby’s time-travelling imagination, if he and Daisy had gotten together when they first met, she never would have met Tom and never fallen in love with him, so it only makes sense that she would renounce ever having loved him. Naturally, no one else shares Gatsby’s delusions, even Daisy (who is inclined to), and she tells him, “You want too much!”
She’s right. But Gatsby doesn’t know she’s right. He thinks he’s right. He thinks he can, by a magnificent exercise of the will, turn back time. Repeat the past. Do it over. There are things we would all like to do over, and we see in Gatsby what might happen if we took that desire to its extreme conclusion. And yet, even in the greatest attempt, such a desire is bound to fail. It’s bound to fail the same way the Jazz Age, bloated with its many excesses, is bound to fail. The same way Nick Carraway, poisoned by his many reserved judgements, is bound to fail. The Great Gatsby talks a lot about hope, but it is a deeply pessimistic story. Its hope is false hope. Its future is in the past. Like a wild, drunken night, it’s a lot of fun while it’s happening, but it has to be paid for, and no one else is around when the bill comes due. Then you’re alone and hungover and wondering if it was all worth it. Gatsby dies, and Carraway lives on, and we wonder if Gatsby, who died in his delusions (with all but a smile on his face), got the better end of the stick.
Midnight in Paris explores what might have happened if Gatsby lived and dealt with his delusions. Wilson’s Gil isn’t quite as steeped in fantasy as Gatsby (to put it mildly), but there is a lot of overlap between the characters that’s worth exploring. They each get the chance to, in some sense, live out their fantasies. Gatsby becomes rich and manages to lure Daisy back into his arms. Gil goes back in time to meet his literary idols in Paris in the 1920s, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald (author of The Great Gatsby). His life isn’t what he wants it to be – he’s married to the wrong woman, embarked upon the wrong career – and he thinks if he could just get back to when he first came to Paris and give proper writing a real shot, he would be happy. As it turns out, it might be, but first he has to rid himself of his misconceptions.
By some unexplained magic, he travels back in time to see Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (played by Tom Hiddleston, Corey Stoll and Kathy Bates, respectively). They help him with his writing, give him life advice, and gradually he comes to see that – though the past is pretty much as good as he imagined it – he doesn’t belong there. It’s not real. He’s cheating somehow, hiding, running away. He’s in “denial of the painful present.” Even his dalliance with Marion Cotillard’s Adriana cannot last, despite their similarities. As it turns out, they are too similar, in one very obvious way. It is so obvious that it just about slaps Gil in the face and wakes him up to what is happening.
The same way Gil is travelling back to the 1920s, he and Adriana end up back in the 1890s. This is the period she has so often romanticised, as Gil romanticised the 1920s. To really drive the point home, they meet a famous trio of artists (Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas) who explain to Adriana that they consider the Renaissance to be the “Golden Age.” Adriana is confused by this, but Gil is not. “I’m having an insight,” he declares, before going on to suggest that the Renaissance-era Michelangelo would have been more at home “when Kublai Khan was around.”
It is a fundamental part of the human condition that we wish we were somewhere else, somehow else, somewhen else, someone else. We’re not comfortable in our own skin, at least not for very long. As Hemingway informs Gil, “I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face... It is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds, until it returns as it does to all men. And then you must make really good love again.”
Our time is finite. We’re restless. We’re afraid. It’s no wonder we look around frantically for some other way to be, worried that we’re wasting our lives. It makes us desperate, frantic. It makes us despair. We seek a balm to soothe the burn, a tonic to numb the feeling. After reading one of Gil’s drafts, Gertrude Stein senses this. “The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair,” she gently chides him, “but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” In the moment, Gil doesn’t want to hear it – “It’s called denial,” he later remarks – but he comes to see the wisdom of her words.
By the time of his big revelation, we get the idea that Gil and Adriana could keep sliding back through time all the way to the Stone Age if they wanted. Those cave-painting troglodytes were the idealised ancestors of someone, after all; perhaps the early farmer, who was himself the romantic image of the first Egyptian to chisel out the first hieroglyph. The way Gil responds to the revelation and the way Adriana does speaks volumes, not only about the power of denial but also about our ability to overcome it.
She stays in the “Golden Age.” He returns to the “painful present.”
We don’t know what’ll happen to Adriana. Maybe she’ll be happy for a while. Who knows, she might even stay there forever. Or maybe, once the novelty wears off and none of her problems are solved, she’ll return to the Twenties like Gil returns to the modern day. Once here, he is in some sense cured. He is free from delusion, but that is only half the battle. One cannot simply be free from something, but for something, otherwise you’re just wandering in the desert. Moses led the Israelites from slavery to worship God; not just to be free but to dedicate themselves completely to something. As Hemingway tells Gil with characteristic bluntness, “If you’re a writer, declare yourself the best writer.” And so it goes.
Gil hasn’t been disabused of romantic notions (he stays in Paris to write his novel) but he has attained clarity (he leaves his unfaithful, ill-fitting wife and her horrible family). He is free from delusion to pursue his calling with crystalline clarity. What more could a man ask for? Well, in this case, a beautiful French girl (Léa Seydoux) he has encountered once or twice. She has seen him before under the thumb of his tyrannical wife, and they connected over Cole Porter (another artist Gil ran into in the Twenties). Now, she sees him fully liberated and fully purposeful and, as it turns out, she likes Paris in the rain as much as he does. When we act in accordance with our destiny, sometimes (just sometimes) we’re rewarded.
We only wish Gatsby was able to achieve such clarity. The things he could have done.
There is an addendum to this essay that concerns myself. It just so happens that, as I watched these movies over the weekend, I have been knee-deep in research for a project with a friend. I’ll not go into too many details just yet, but suffice it to say I’m required to do a lot of historical reading on the place I grew up and still live. In this research, naturally, I’ve discovered a lot I didn’t know about this place I call home, and I’ve often caught myself thinking that things were better then.
This isn’t something I’m prone to; my natural disposition isn’t looking back on the glory days, but rather thinking that whatever days are going on now are the glory days. Still, I’m admiring this era (late 1800s, early 1900s; what Adriana would call “La Belle Époque”) with its grand steamships and hotels and trams and trains and sea-baths and horse-and-carriages and people in fine dress and none of that exists anymore. The buildings they build now are concrete-and-glass eyesores. People dress down, not up. A lot of the infrastructure that used to exist doesn’t, and nothing has replaced it, or what has replaced it is inferior. We seem, in some sense, to be going backwards, even as we thunder forward with gathering velocity. We are travelling too fast and we are forgetting. We are sufficiently civilised to be capable of such speeds and yet moving so fast that the vehicle is wobbling and the civilisation is coming off us like old paint. What’s underneath isn’t pretty.
And yet, for all that, improvements have undoubtedly been made. Advances in material comfort undreamt of by my ancestors. Adjustments to culture that have sanded back its rougher edges. I wonder if it’s worth it. I wonder if it wasn’t better before we all had cars and could travel privately and holiday privately, when we had to take boats and trams and trains together, and dress for the occasion. When life was hard enough that we didn’t take it for granted, and yet grand enough that we could admire the achievements of our species.
Perhaps I’ve fallen victim to the same “golden age thinking” that corrupted Gatsby and threatened to corrupt Gil. Still, I can’t get away from the fact that there was something inherently better about the era of grand, public travel. Something inherently better about reading a novel, or even a newspaper, over scrolling on a smartphone. Call me a romantic, even a conservative, but a man in a suit is simply more impressive than a man in a singlet, shorts and thongs. A woman in a huge frilly dress and a hat is more impressive than a woman in a hoodie, tracksuit pants and Ugg boots. We have lost something. I can’t escape the feeling that there was some level of sophistication that was reached and passed, and we have been slowly diminishing since. Would a return to that be worth sacrificing running water, a sewerage system, consistent or even existent electricity? Would it be worth returning to the level of medical care available at the time? Perhaps not. And yet, perhaps.
I think there is a general awareness that the culture is sick. It might not be dying, but it is diseased. At the risk of sounding like a one-trick pony, I’ll dare to quote C.S. Lewis once more. It’s a long quote, but bear with me, because it gets to the heart of what I mean. He begins by referencing the erroneous notion that you can’t “put the clock back.”
As to putting the clock back, would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We have all seen this when we do arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
I’ll end with this. There is a ferry that runs between opposing headlands at the outlet of the bay I call home. This is in some way the last remnant of that old era of steamships and public travel. There is, and has been, a proposal to build a bridge across these headlands. Lord knows if it will ever go through, but the construction of this bridge would mean the immediate cessation of the ferry. If it were to continue, it would be propped up artificially, by government subsidy or by the dollars of tourists who want to do things “the old-fashioned way”. It would be fun, not serious – frivolous, not realistic – in an era when we are all of the former and none of the latter.
Operating a ship is no doubt an expensive business. Would enough people use it to make it profitable, when there is a perfectly good road they could drive across in their cars free of charge? The ferry wasn’t cheap, last I checked, but it was necessary. I’m not saying we impede progress and by so doing stagnate in the present, but nor am I saying we adopt new things without due consideration. We seem to be in a kind of trap whereby we adopt every new thing we can think of and destroy every old thing, simply because we can’t see the reason why not, or that there should be any reason why not.
Here I’ll quote another writer from the previous century, G.K. Chesterton. He has a little thought experiment (now known as Chesterton’s Fence) that goes like this:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
If we go on demolishing and adopting without an eye to the culture we are subjecting to these experiments, we may well find ourselves in alien territory sooner than we think; some faster than others, some already there. Will we like this new world we are creating? Will we be able to recover the old one once it has passed from all living memory? What will we be able to do about it if we don’t?
I am reminded of a passage from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, where he describes the transition from hunter-gatherer existence to settled agriculture: the dependence on one or two crops that could mean starvation if they failed or there was a drought, the backbreaking labour required to prepare and tend fields, the loss of nutritional diversity, of adventure, of freedom. He puts himself (and us) in the mind of these early farmers, suffering the unprecedented effects of unprecedented change, wondering if perhaps things weren’t better when they hunted and gathered. By that point, however, the generational knowledge had been lost to them. The grandfathers who hunted in their youth were old or dead. They couldn’t pass along the knowledge of tracking, of seasonal migrations, and all that goes along with killing wild animals for food. They had made their deal with the devil and the way back was shut. No doubt these farmers also reaped the benefits of the harvest and all that it entails: a more sedentary life, regular food, a fixed home. But was it worth it? Was it worth it for us to leave that prewar “paradise” and commit ourselves wholly to the mission of technological progress, the removal of all limits on the human animal, in an attempt to become gods?
As always, I am torn. I know if I were transported back to 1900 I would find a good many things I didn’t like. The novelty would wear off and I would no doubt soon be just as dissatisfied as I am now. But as Gil says, “That’s what the present is. Maybe it’s a little unsatisfying because life’s a little unsatisfying.” As soon as we get what we want, the goalposts shift. As soon as we crest the hill we have been climbing, our eyes find the next, higher hill and we do not realise we have summitted. As Gatsby says, tracing the rising arc of a shooting star with his finger, “My life has to be like this. It’s got to keep going up.” Happiness is fleeting. Necessarily so, according to evolutionary psychologists. If we found lasting happiness, we would cease to act. If food kept us eternally satiated, we wouldn’t hunt. If an argument convinced us once and for all, we would never need to quarrel. If an orgasm lasted forever, we would never do anything else. We seem to require an absence of joy in order to realise what we are missing and so seek it.
Returning to the past, if possible, would be like even the best food or fight or sex. The peak would be crested, the novelty would fade, the moment would pass, and we would think, “What next?”
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