Midnight In Paris - The Part Critics Missed

Midnight In Paris

Don't worry, I'm not getting in the movie review business and technically this is not a review. However, there is a relevant point involved with being an artist/creative that Midnight In Paris touches on quite well. It's a point that I didn't see a single movie review on went I went looking for it so I felt the need to blog about it to my friends.

What I'm referring to is about nostalgia, what it says about you and how we use it as a coping mechanism amongst other things. In the film the character played by Owen Wilson is a writer who loves Paris and has a bunch of literary heroes with associations to Paris. As a result, he has nostalgia for the circa 1920's time period that he's teleported into. He's taken by how amazing it is to hang out with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a horde of other famous characters he has admiration for. As the meetings continue night after night he's able to discover things about himself that he had been avoiding or having trouble coping with back in his own time. You start to get the idea but the point gets driven home when he begins to fall in love with Adriana a character played by Marion Cotillard. On their first date in 1920's Paris they get transported an additional 50 years back to a time that Adriana had a deep nostalgia for. In a brief exchange they argued over which time period was better 1870's Paris or 1920's Paris. She hated her time period and insisted life was better and more interesting before. He argued the same point but coming from the present to the 20's. At last the epiphany revealed . . .

"Life sucks. We just sometimes choose not acknowledge it sucked before."

Born in the wrong time we say. For example, the romantic notion some women I know have about the Victorian Era or even Medieval Europe. Gorgeous dresses, grand balls, proper Gentlemen, etc. We are all aware this is a very slender view of the total picture and highly romanticized by modern media. Regardless of that knowledge we still like to imagine ourselves happier if only we lived in that time. We do this without regard for the fact that women were subjugated, more likely to be born poor and might very well contract a host of horrible disease because there wasn't any penicillin around.

I'm guilty. I've blogged before about my heroes and frequently pressure myself to live up to their standards. I've even attempted to use modern day challenges as an excuse for why I'm not further ahead when the reality is that my heroes struggled too. In some cases, they died unfulfilled and unaware of the real impact they had on the field or future generations.

So what the movie had me thinking about was nostalgia can be a good thing provided it doesn't hold you back. In the movie he had to come to this realization in order to move forward in his own time and reach his full potential. Secondarily, it had me thinking that perhaps I standing shoulder to shoulder with tomorrow's hero's. Many of my talented colleagues and friends may very well be in design tomes 50 years in the future but you can never imagine it. You just get caught up in the work. I can already picture future designers talking about how awesome it must have been to be a designer during the digital revolution. Things were probably a lot cooler then they they are now. Perhaps but we were all so busy working, climbing, struggling and living life in general to notice. Same as every generation before us.

Midnight In Paris made me think about it. And I'm better off for it.