First things first, you need to know of my intense and odd love for Ernest Hemingway. It’s not even that I’m a huge fan of his writing; I’ve never read The Old Man and the Sea, and I much prefer his short stories to any of his novels, but I love teaching him and I love the stylistic elements of his work. One of the classes I taught the past two years was Modern American Literature, and our major works included A Raisin in the Sun, In Our Time, The Catcher in the Rye, The Illustrated Man, as well as a plethora of other similar themed short stories and poetry. There is something engaging, for me, about that period in American history. The Modern era began around 1911 and ended around 1963 – we like to break down our literary periods around wars, generally speaking – so it encompasses the roaring 20’s, the Great Depression, the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and both World Wars. For being only 50 years, it covers a huge shift in American thinking.
I loved teaching that curriculum, even more than Multicultural Literature (which has a decent amount of film units, always a big hit with students). For one, some of my favorite ‘classic’ American authors wrote during this time (Faulkner, Salinger, Bradbury, Williams, Porter, etc.), but I find that these authors work well in a classroom. They lend themselves to a logical teaching pattern. I teach parts of In Our Time and we learn how to look for symbolism and metaphor, work with leading and participating in discussion, so that when we get to Salinger and Holden, my students are professionals at finding symbols. They are all over the ducks. And keeping kings in the back row. And anything that could remotely represent sex, teenagers love finding sexual metaphors and symbolism. Freud was on to something there.
Point is, Hemingway is awesome. He’s got really stripped down writing that’s clear and to-the-point, and once students know a bit about his life, they really get into analyzing why he writes about this and that.
Okay. With that digression aside, here we go. Midnight in Paris is, at the least, a bibliophile’s movie. The main character, Gil, wants to be a writer. Well, he is a writer, but he wants to write a novel. Well, he wrote a novel but he’s not sure what to do now. He also loves 1920’s era Paris, and is clearly an English nerd. When he is actually able to time-travel, he gets to meet some of his literary idols; Scott and Zelda (he’s on a first-name basis with the two of them), Hemingway, Faulkner… hell, Gertrude Stein even reads his book! This was the moment when I realized this movie had captured what it means to love literature. What many of us want is to have an interaction with written word so intense that you actually feel like you know the author. Holden Caulfield says, in Catcher, that “what really knocks [him] out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” And that’s what Woody Allen has done. The author’s don’t pick up the phone, obviously, but they are there, friends and acquaintances of our protagonist.
I want Gil’s life.
My favorite part, though, was how brilliantly Allen captured the voices and personae (personas?) of each author or artist. I – on my own – was laughing out loud, snorting occasionally, at the things and the manner in which the characters spoke. Hemingway challenges Gil to a fight, asks him if he boxes. What else would we expect Hemingway to do? He speaks of the bravery of men and the intricacies of women, his time in the war, and he drinks like a fish throughout the entire film. I was in love as soon as he introduced himself.
I almost wish this was a novel, but I think the beauty of the film is that it is a film. It’s the antithesis of a novel, but the thrill of literature is juxtaposed so seamlessly through the film that I honestly felt like it was the written script that created the visual on the screen, and not just the dialogue. If you are a reader, in any capacity, this is the movie for you. It’s a movie that really takes Holden’s idea about good authors and makes it a reality. Do you think Woody Allen was thinking of that quote when he wrote the script? God, I hope so. What a perfect full-circle moment that would be… I imagine him thumbing through Catcher and going ‘a-ha! That’s it!’
Holden really knows what’s up.
