Why Is Midnight In Paris So Special?
Paris is an undefeatable city, It lives; It lasts; It loves. And many love it back. Woody Allen begins his film Midnight in Paris with an ode to the modern Paris. As the scenes of the city dwellers and monuments roll, Allen plays “Si Tu Vois Ma Mère" by Sidney Bechet. The song is a dip into the journey many artists have taken: Bechet, an American Jazz musician who moved to Paris, found success and inspiration in the city during the 1950s. As Professor Stoltzfus points out, “The sax calls the tune, and the clarinets follow in step. But midway through, the order is reversed.” It is the perfect lead to a question that floats through the mind during Midnight in Paris: did the American artists whom Allen features make Paris so special? Or did the
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city transform them? Gil Pender finds himself traveling through time at the stroke of midnight to the Paris of the Lost Generation. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein all greeted him and introduced him to their world. Pender learns that the past is unattainable and he must return to his time, but not before he became popular in certain social circles. In the spirit of a millennial, I want to know the minutia: How does one become popular in the 1920s Paris Allen creates in his film, and does it hold up to the true personas of our favorite Lost Generation.
You Must Enjoy Parties.
Gil Pender’s first ride in the Peugeot deposits him at a soirée featuring the live music of Cole Porter as well as an adventure with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. When Zelda proclaims, “We’re Bored!” and Scott extends an invitation to Gil for a journey the next party with them, he bewilderedly accepts the offer. At “Bricktop,” Gil enjoys watching the dancing of a young Frenchwoman with the Fitzgeralds, and then later goes to a smokey establishment to have drinks and meet his idol, Hemingway. On another midnight excursion, Gils receives an invitation from Archibald Macleish to go to a party, where he dances with Djuna Barnes and Hemingway proclaims, “Isn’t this little Parisian dream a moveable feast?” Pender makes connections that forge into deeper relationships at these parties. The parties, wild social experiences for Pender, are the antithesis to his experiences with his fiancée in modernity: stuffy trips to museums and fancy dinners galore. They aide the creation of his novel, which he convinces Hemingway, whom he met on his first night out, to read and edit. Pender’s rise to popularity with the Lost Generation came from his agreeability at parties. The parties of the 1920s were just as frequent as the ones in Allen’s film. F. Scott Fitzgerald called 1925 “the summer of 1,000 parties and no work.” One of the most famous parties of the summer was Hemingway’s and a caravan of his friends’ trip to Pamplona, from which he drew the inspiration for his first novel The Sun Also Rises. Noel Fitch, in her book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, explains that while 1925 may have been full of partying for some visiting Americans, it was also a year of productivity for the expatriates. Beach, who does not have a mention in Midnight in Paris (because god forbid Woody Allen have more than one influential woman who is untied to the emotional affairs of the men) but was integral in expatriate Paris for her bookstore Shakespeare and Company, managed to get Ulysses published in several new languages and secured publication for pieces of Joyce’s Work in Progress. Meanwhile, Hemingway found a new boxing foe but literary ally in Jean Prévost, who would popularize his publications to the French. Hemingway would also begin his work on his novel during the summer of 1925. Fitzgerald came to Paris already flush with success. The Great Gatsby, just published and already receiving accolades, as well as the continued success of This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned propelled him and Zelda to enjoy Paris with the wind at their backs. Many expatriates enjoyed the “riotous” concerts of George Antheil, an American modernist composer, wined and dined at intimate dinner parties, and attended events hosted by the Murphys, a wealthy American couple made connections with the artists of Paris, from the Hemingways to Picasso. The Lost Generation would often be found partying indeed, Hemingway once writing,
“The Age demanded that we dance.
And Jammed us into iron pants.”
To give his perspective on the wildness of Paris and his fellow artists. Just as Allen explains in his film, as these parties unfold connections are built. Fitzgerald gets Hemingway his contract with Scribners, for instance. Allen matches the spirit of the Lost Generation with his scenes of follie.
2. You Must Love Alcohol or, at least, drunken conversation. Alcohol is the companion of many artists in Midnight in Paris. It is a source of humor: when Hemingway screams for a fight while carrying around a bottle, and despair: when Zelda, drunk and upset, tries to hurl herself into the Seine, which is also an overture of her mental illness. Gil drinks his first trip into the 1920s with the Fitzgeralds and once later with Adrienne but more often than not he converses with people who are drinking, rather than himself drinking with them. It implies that alcohol is a crutch for many he talks to in the 1920s. Gil has serious conversations with Hemingway and Gertrude Stein over his novel with alcohol present. Hemingway explains to Gil over a glass of wine, “No subject is terrible if the story is true, and if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.” Later, Gertrude advises Gil to not write about the fear of the death but instead “not succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” She reprimands him, “don’t be such a defeatist.” This not only affects Gil’s novel, but also eventually helps him see why he must leave Inez because she discourages his artistry and defeats him. However, the causal drinking Allen portrays has serious consequences for the Lost Generation. Robin Room, in an analysis of the Lost Generation’s effect on Alcohol in American culture, mentions the belief of Marcus Grant: “The presumption of a positive correlation between heavy drinking and high creative achievement has long been a feature both of the mythology of alcoholism and the mythology of creativity.” Room uses this as a starting point to explain why the Lost Generation became such heavy drinkers. Room notes that over half of the writers born in 1888-1900 became alcoholics (see chart 1).
Some of this data can be explained by other trends of alcohol in the early twentieth century.
The generation of writers Room speaks of grew up with a resurgence of the temperance movement as a conservative political belief, especially during their college years. Room explains that writers, often political liberals, would see drinking as an act of political dissent during this time. These male authors also lived through World War I at the prime age for military service, and many had trouble adapting to peacetime. Unable to adjust they fled to France, the country with the highest recorded per capita alcohol consumption. There, The Lost Generation became fascinated by alcohol representing the sacred cause, a part of the cafés where revolutionaries would meet to express their independence from the state and societal norms. Their obsession with alcohol spread to their work, none more notoriously than Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Matt Djob, an english professor that specializes in the relation of literature and addiction, argues that almost every significant character in the novel matches the definition of an alcoholic. They all display, “a remarkable degree of moodiness, impulsivity, hostility, and distrust” and “an intense need for personal power.” Every character in the novel was based on the companions Hemingway travelled with on a vacation to Pamplona. Alcoholism was a bigger problem in the 1920s than Allen deigned to include in his
film.
3. If you are a man—you must be a man. “You’re too self-effacing, it’s not manly. If you are a writer, declare yourself the best writer!” Hemingway tells Gil the first time he meets him. Hemingway continues to inform Gil on the ways of manhood. When Gil asks Hemingway if he was frightened by death during his time serving in World War I, Hemingway scoffs and tells him he’ll never write well if he fears dying. “It is something all men before you have done, all men will do.” He also explains that, “All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well.” The truly brave men he knows, rhino hunters and Belmonte, do not fear death because they love with sufficient passion. Gil discovers through Hemingway that his love for Inez is not enough to cure him of his cowardice. Hemingway also criticizes the acts of other men, especially F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, Hemingway explains to Gil, is taking him away from his writing and impeding his talents because she sees him as a competitor. Hemingway doesn’t say, though he implies, that Scott would be more successful if he left her, exciting or not. Hemingway also criticizes Picasso for not loving Adriana properly, and he successfully steals her from the artist during the film. Hemingway tries to impart on Gil that in order to be successful he must embrace his fear of death, find a woman to make passionate love with, and be a true man. It is absolutely true that Ernest Hemingway hated Zelda Fitzgerald. The man once told Arthur Mizener, “Zelda was crazy all the time I knew them but not yet net-able…Zelda ruined Scott.” Hemingway also was not afraid to give other unasked opinions, which is why he had such frank conversations with Gil in the film. In the spring of 1925, he ruined his friendship with Ernest Walsh by tastelessly criticizing the hiring practices of the magazine This Quarter. Passionate and sensitive, when his publisher, Liverwright, edited his short story, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” for censorship purposes, Hemingway believed that they had, “cut his heart out of the story.” Many men of the Lost Generation struggled with their identities after the war. Hemingway began enforcing the idea of his superior manhood over Fitzgerald because he served on the front lines while F. Scott did not from the time they met. Hemingway also reigned over Harold Loeb in the summer of 1925, torturing him because he slept with the object of Earnest’s affections: Duff Twysden. Hemingway would do anything to be seen as courageous as Belamonte or Niño de la Palma, when he truly suffered from depressive episodes that would leave him unable to write. Allen captures the man Hemingway wanted to be and perhaps is the perfect example as to how we romanticize him today, but not who he was and not who men were during the Lost Generation’s reign in Paris. At the End of the Film, though Gil has successfully cultivated the identity of a man who loves parties, alcohol, and masculinity, he realizes he must return to his own time. He explains to Adriana, “I’m having an insight now…that’s what the present it. It’s a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying…If I ever want to write something worthwhile I need to get rid of my illusions and that I’d be happier in the past is probably one of them.” He finds that he needs to make concrete choices to change his life rather than focus on what is unclear to him. His midnight excursions, the relationships he builds with men at parties with alcohol while there, help him break from the monotony of Inez and America and keeps him in modern Paris.
city transform them? Gil Pender finds himself traveling through time at the stroke of midnight to the Paris of the Lost Generation. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein all greeted him and introduced him to their world. Pender learns that the past is unattainable and he must return to his time, but not before he became popular in certain social circles. In the spirit of a millennial, I want to know the minutia: How does one become popular in the 1920s Paris Allen creates in his film, and does it hold up to the true personas of our favorite Lost Generation.
You Must Enjoy Parties.
Gil Pender’s first ride in the Peugeot deposits him at a soirée featuring the live music of Cole Porter as well as an adventure with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. When Zelda proclaims, “We’re Bored!” and Scott extends an invitation to Gil for a journey the next party with them, he bewilderedly accepts the offer. At “Bricktop,” Gil enjoys watching the dancing of a young Frenchwoman with the Fitzgeralds, and then later goes to a smokey establishment to have drinks and meet his idol, Hemingway. On another midnight excursion, Gils receives an invitation from Archibald Macleish to go to a party, where he dances with Djuna Barnes and Hemingway proclaims, “Isn’t this little Parisian dream a moveable feast?” Pender makes connections that forge into deeper relationships at these parties. The parties, wild social experiences for Pender, are the antithesis to his experiences with his fiancée in modernity: stuffy trips to museums and fancy dinners galore. They aide the creation of his novel, which he convinces Hemingway, whom he met on his first night out, to read and edit. Pender’s rise to popularity with the Lost Generation came from his agreeability at parties. The parties of the 1920s were just as frequent as the ones in Allen’s film. F. Scott Fitzgerald called 1925 “the summer of 1,000 parties and no work.” One of the most famous parties of the summer was Hemingway’s and a caravan of his friends’ trip to Pamplona, from which he drew the inspiration for his first novel The Sun Also Rises. Noel Fitch, in her book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, explains that while 1925 may have been full of partying for some visiting Americans, it was also a year of productivity for the expatriates. Beach, who does not have a mention in Midnight in Paris (because god forbid Woody Allen have more than one influential woman who is untied to the emotional affairs of the men) but was integral in expatriate Paris for her bookstore Shakespeare and Company, managed to get Ulysses published in several new languages and secured publication for pieces of Joyce’s Work in Progress. Meanwhile, Hemingway found a new boxing foe but literary ally in Jean Prévost, who would popularize his publications to the French. Hemingway would also begin his work on his novel during the summer of 1925. Fitzgerald came to Paris already flush with success. The Great Gatsby, just published and already receiving accolades, as well as the continued success of This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned propelled him and Zelda to enjoy Paris with the wind at their backs. Many expatriates enjoyed the “riotous” concerts of George Antheil, an American modernist composer, wined and dined at intimate dinner parties, and attended events hosted by the Murphys, a wealthy American couple made connections with the artists of Paris, from the Hemingways to Picasso. The Lost Generation would often be found partying indeed, Hemingway once writing,
“The Age demanded that we dance.
And Jammed us into iron pants.”
To give his perspective on the wildness of Paris and his fellow artists. Just as Allen explains in his film, as these parties unfold connections are built. Fitzgerald gets Hemingway his contract with Scribners, for instance. Allen matches the spirit of the Lost Generation with his scenes of follie.
2. You Must Love Alcohol or, at least, drunken conversation. Alcohol is the companion of many artists in Midnight in Paris. It is a source of humor: when Hemingway screams for a fight while carrying around a bottle, and despair: when Zelda, drunk and upset, tries to hurl herself into the Seine, which is also an overture of her mental illness. Gil drinks his first trip into the 1920s with the Fitzgeralds and once later with Adrienne but more often than not he converses with people who are drinking, rather than himself drinking with them. It implies that alcohol is a crutch for many he talks to in the 1920s. Gil has serious conversations with Hemingway and Gertrude Stein over his novel with alcohol present. Hemingway explains to Gil over a glass of wine, “No subject is terrible if the story is true, and if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.” Later, Gertrude advises Gil to not write about the fear of the death but instead “not succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” She reprimands him, “don’t be such a defeatist.” This not only affects Gil’s novel, but also eventually helps him see why he must leave Inez because she discourages his artistry and defeats him. However, the causal drinking Allen portrays has serious consequences for the Lost Generation. Robin Room, in an analysis of the Lost Generation’s effect on Alcohol in American culture, mentions the belief of Marcus Grant: “The presumption of a positive correlation between heavy drinking and high creative achievement has long been a feature both of the mythology of alcoholism and the mythology of creativity.” Room uses this as a starting point to explain why the Lost Generation became such heavy drinkers. Room notes that over half of the writers born in 1888-1900 became alcoholics (see chart 1).
Some of this data can be explained by other trends of alcohol in the early twentieth century.
The generation of writers Room speaks of grew up with a resurgence of the temperance movement as a conservative political belief, especially during their college years. Room explains that writers, often political liberals, would see drinking as an act of political dissent during this time. These male authors also lived through World War I at the prime age for military service, and many had trouble adapting to peacetime. Unable to adjust they fled to France, the country with the highest recorded per capita alcohol consumption. There, The Lost Generation became fascinated by alcohol representing the sacred cause, a part of the cafés where revolutionaries would meet to express their independence from the state and societal norms. Their obsession with alcohol spread to their work, none more notoriously than Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Matt Djob, an english professor that specializes in the relation of literature and addiction, argues that almost every significant character in the novel matches the definition of an alcoholic. They all display, “a remarkable degree of moodiness, impulsivity, hostility, and distrust” and “an intense need for personal power.” Every character in the novel was based on the companions Hemingway travelled with on a vacation to Pamplona. Alcoholism was a bigger problem in the 1920s than Allen deigned to include in his
film.
3. If you are a man—you must be a man. “You’re too self-effacing, it’s not manly. If you are a writer, declare yourself the best writer!” Hemingway tells Gil the first time he meets him. Hemingway continues to inform Gil on the ways of manhood. When Gil asks Hemingway if he was frightened by death during his time serving in World War I, Hemingway scoffs and tells him he’ll never write well if he fears dying. “It is something all men before you have done, all men will do.” He also explains that, “All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well.” The truly brave men he knows, rhino hunters and Belmonte, do not fear death because they love with sufficient passion. Gil discovers through Hemingway that his love for Inez is not enough to cure him of his cowardice. Hemingway also criticizes the acts of other men, especially F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, Hemingway explains to Gil, is taking him away from his writing and impeding his talents because she sees him as a competitor. Hemingway doesn’t say, though he implies, that Scott would be more successful if he left her, exciting or not. Hemingway also criticizes Picasso for not loving Adriana properly, and he successfully steals her from the artist during the film. Hemingway tries to impart on Gil that in order to be successful he must embrace his fear of death, find a woman to make passionate love with, and be a true man. It is absolutely true that Ernest Hemingway hated Zelda Fitzgerald. The man once told Arthur Mizener, “Zelda was crazy all the time I knew them but not yet net-able…Zelda ruined Scott.” Hemingway also was not afraid to give other unasked opinions, which is why he had such frank conversations with Gil in the film. In the spring of 1925, he ruined his friendship with Ernest Walsh by tastelessly criticizing the hiring practices of the magazine This Quarter. Passionate and sensitive, when his publisher, Liverwright, edited his short story, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” for censorship purposes, Hemingway believed that they had, “cut his heart out of the story.” Many men of the Lost Generation struggled with their identities after the war. Hemingway began enforcing the idea of his superior manhood over Fitzgerald because he served on the front lines while F. Scott did not from the time they met. Hemingway also reigned over Harold Loeb in the summer of 1925, torturing him because he slept with the object of Earnest’s affections: Duff Twysden. Hemingway would do anything to be seen as courageous as Belamonte or Niño de la Palma, when he truly suffered from depressive episodes that would leave him unable to write. Allen captures the man Hemingway wanted to be and perhaps is the perfect example as to how we romanticize him today, but not who he was and not who men were during the Lost Generation’s reign in Paris. At the End of the Film, though Gil has successfully cultivated the identity of a man who loves parties, alcohol, and masculinity, he realizes he must return to his own time. He explains to Adriana, “I’m having an insight now…that’s what the present it. It’s a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying…If I ever want to write something worthwhile I need to get rid of my illusions and that I’d be happier in the past is probably one of them.” He finds that he needs to make concrete choices to change his life rather than focus on what is unclear to him. His midnight excursions, the relationships he builds with men at parties with alcohol while there, help him break from the monotony of Inez and America and keeps him in modern Paris.