Midnight in Paris- An Affair with Schizophrenia

Woody allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ has an utterly charming prose and a story line. I watched the movie ten years back and thought it was pretty romantic. Watching it again now, after becoming more of a realist and rationalist, I think ‘Quite not’.

Gil, the protagonist is engaged to be married to a beautiful, rich girl and is unhappy with his menial job at California. He falls in love with Paris in first sight- suggests he will leave everything at Beverly hills at the drop of a hat. His fiance rightly says ‘You are in love with a fantasy’. He lives in a delusional world thinking he can make it big if he writes this amazing novel which will become a huge success. He convinces himself that the only thing standing between his mediocre life and this awesome dream of his is him not moving to Paris.

He is hesitant to talk about his book to anyone- doesn’t want anyone’s opinion on it, doesn't want anyone to proofread it and he isn’t open to criticism. This isn’t a sign of someone who wants to get a good piece of work out. He doesn’t tell anything more than the fact that the protagonist works at a nostalgia shop.

He also tells that the problem with his life is that he is born in a wrong era. He should have been born in the 1920s alongside great authors like Fitzgeralds. Paul (The one he considers a pseudo intellectual) rightly identifies this is the Golden Age Fallacy, “the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the Romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope in the present.”

Clearly, Gil, our hero has a problem of coping with the present, isn’t able to accept that he does have a mediocre job and the book he is writing will need rewrites, corrections and will undergo rejections if he needs to make it big. He doesn’t consider the fact that he could take a sabbatical to write his book, or write it in USA in his free time.

His mind escapes reality through schizophrenia. At midnight he is transported to a mythical era where everything he wants happens- he meets a girl who is eloquently romantic, agrees that whatever he says is poetic and has an affair with all famous authors. He meets Hemingway, and other big shot authors and gets his novel corrected by them. He is so elusive to proofreading that he wants only Hemingway to read it and he gets the approval he wants in his dream.

They never show how he comes back to the present after getting in the carriage. He picks up a diary during his walk and convinces himself its the diary of the girl crush from the past. He goes insane to the point where he steals his fiance’s pearl earrings to gift a girl based on a diary he reads at a roadside.

The girl in the past is clearly unhappy with her present at well. She is in an abusive relationship and has a history of associating with men as a mistress. She sees no way out in the war era and wants to live in the belle epoch. Towards the end he has a bit of an epiphany that we will always want to live at our golden era no matter what we are in and he decides to live in the present.

He comes back to reality and breaks up with his fiance. In the end he meets a girl, who is a stranger, coming back from a party utters something he wants to hear ‘I like Paris in rain’, which is a cliche and his brain thinks ‘Whoa I have met the one, I have met the love of my life’ and he decides to live in Paris with her.He walks along the streets with her. What they do not show is how he makes a living, what employment opportunities will he pursue, if he finishes the book or not and if it becomes a success.

Yes the story gives a ‘high on weed’ feel to all the literature majors and fiction fanatics. What no one sees is a guy who is refusing to accept his present, gives up trying to fight reality and decides to stay inside the fairy tale world he has built for himself and calls it romanticism.