The well-worn truism that Woody Allen films are all about Woody has long shaped scholarly accounts of Allen’s work. The sense that we know Allen well accounts for his popularity among cinephiles as well as critics. As Maurice Yacowar explains, “Allen’s distinctive persona is an invention based on the pretense that he is openly confessing his private fears and failures. His remarkable success may be due to the intimacy that his audiences have felt with this persona” (1991: 9). For the last few decades, this habit of attending to the biographical Allen has meant that scholars and critics have grappled with the more uncomfortable aspects of the director’s persona, notably his ugly break from Mia Farrow and relationship with adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. Allen scholar Sam B. Girgus opens the second edition of his comprehensive The Films of Woody Allen (2002) with an introduction titled “The Prisoner of Aura: The Lost World of Woody Allen,” in which he helpfully glosses the phenomenon:

For many, Allen’s personal life has overshadowed the ongoing documentary of his achievements. The unique aura that emanated from Allen’s cinematic image of a self-embodied blend of character, oddity, integrity, and genius became confused and somber while remaining ambiguous (16).

Allen’s films, particularly his output in the 1990s, provide their own meditations on celebrity and fame. In films like Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity, and even Mighty Aphrodite, Allen appears critical of celebrity and the way his image has circulated publicly. But there is also a gentler Allen, who appreciates bygone eras in Sweet and Lowdown, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Radio Days. In Midnight in Paris, a meditation on fame and nostalgia, the two Allens come together through the director’s expression of love for modernist Paris and the expatriate artists who populated the city. Critics have embraced the film as Allen’s comeback, not only from the murky moral unpleasantness Girgus (2002) addresses, but also from a string of dark and misanthropic films in the 2000s. Given this acclaim, Allen’s citations of modernism in the film are surprisingly flat. Played by Owen Wilson, the protagonist Gil travels back in time and meets a Cole Porter who sings “Let’s Do It,” a Hemingway who wants to drink, and a Picasso who collects mistresses.

In my examination of Midnight, I ask, what is the value of citation when that citation is depthless? Through an analysis of the film’s historical attitudes, its participation in modernist practices of citation, and its critical reception, I argue that citing modernism depthlessly serves multiple functions in Midnight in Paris. First, Midnight’s citation of modernist figures places the Allen character among the ranks of the twentieth century’s most important artists. The exemplary figure of modernist difficulty, T.S. Eliot, argued in his 1921 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that artistic value emerges when a contemporary art work is placed in relation to great work and “fits in” coherently (Eliot 2002a: 101). In Midnight in Paris, Allen, through Gil Pender, quite literally joins the company of the greats, including some, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked in the movie business. Second, by citing the modernists in a shallow way, the film simplifies modernist authors’ biographies and “forgets” the more unpleasant aspects of their lives. While it is true that the film’s Zelda seems edgy, and Hemingway a bit combative, Midnight’s look back at the expatriate community is a rosy one, and darker aspects of figures like Gertrude Stein, for example, go unremarked. If the first function of Midnight’s peculiar citation places Allen in the company of American writers undervalued by their time and culture, and the second works to encourage historical forgetfulness, it is the third function that explains the perplexing popularity of this seemingly depthless film: within the film’s diegesis and also the reviews that surround the film, Midnight in Paris’s depthless citation offers a model for appreciating artistic lives.

A frequent chronicler of ages gone by, Allen presumably knows the depthlessness of his citations, and reviewers acknowledge the triviality of the film. However, it is difficult to determine precisely how well Allen knows the period because, in typically self-effacing fashion, Allen has described his repeated filmic returns to the 1920s as mere set dressing. In “Interview with Woody Allen: ‘My Heroes Don’t Come from Life but from Their Mythology,’ ” Allen describes his choice of setting for Bullets Over Broadway:

It could have happened just as well against the background of the movies, but the period I chose – the twenties – and the place – New York – seemed to me to be suited to the theater of the period, to Broadway, with its mix of gangsters, chorus girls, nightclubs. I liked the ambience (Ciment and Tobin 2006: 130).

When pressed about the accuracy of the film’s style, Allen responds, “For my part, all I know about the twenties comes from photos of the era and the movies that evoke the period” (131). While promoting Midnight at Cannes, Allen made similar remarks: “I wanted to show the city emotionally. The way I felt about it. It didn’t matter to me how real it was or what it reflected. I just wanted it to be the way I saw Paris. Paris through my eyes” (Bagnetto 2011). Allen’s comments predict the teasing shallowness of the film, which simultaneously presents the depth of Allen’s feelings about Paris and withholds a depth of knowledge of these artistic lives.

As a comic homage to Paris’s glories past and present, Midnight does not concern itself with serious historical issues. Instead, the film takes its place among Allen’s “early, funny films” (Stardust Memories), eschewing more serious political or historical comments. It is in this gap – between emotional appreciation for Paris and a factually “real” Paris – that I will explore Midnight in Paris’s account of artistic appreciation. Though it is clear that Allen’s intention with Midnight is not to reckon with the personal and political failings of modernist artists, the film’s avoidance of this material nonetheless produces a very particular model for understanding the relationship among artistic reputations, artworks, and biographies.

By discussing a film that Allen never made, this chapter produces its own speculative fiction out of historical fact. Outlining the biographical details and historical connections Midnight in Paris leaves unilluminated by its nostalgic glow, I argue that through its citation of modernist artists and their works, Midnight in Paris builds a model for remembering artistic lives – Allen’s in particular. By first placing Allen, through Gil, in the modernist pantheon, and then encouraging a Vaseline-lensed gaze at the modernist artists, the film demonstrates the final function of shallow citation is to create recuperative nostalgia. Thus, while Allen’s account of Stein ignores her literary output, it also ignores her admiration for fascism. The film manages to ignore the anti-Semitism of several of its figures, thereby recuperating the good names of important artists whose bad views have rendered them politically and morally suspect. But beyond recuperating the reputations of long-dead modernist anti-Semites, the superficiality of these citations serves a pedagogical function for Allen’s viewers, who use the film as an opportunity to take a similarly rosy, if shallow, account of the director’s celebrity persona.

Film critics appear to have taken up the film’s light approach to artistic lives. Reviews of Midnight in Paris are remarkably consistent: the reviewer begins by acknowledging the too-favorable account that he or she will offer and then proceeds to speak in glowing but qualified terms. Dana Stevens’s (2011) review opens in exemplary fashion:

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (Sony Pictures Classics) is a trifle in both senses of the word: a feather-light, disposable thing, and a rich dessert appealingly layered with cake, jam, and cream. It’s the first Woody Allen movie in a long time that feels good going down, even if it doesn’t stay in your stomach for long afterward.

Like Gil and Allen, who remember the avant-garde as charmingly bohemian, Stevens and other critics find a respite in Allen’s latest from the darkness that has characterized Allen’s personal life and his artistic output of late. Nostalgia, then, functions for Allen and his spectators as the opposite of cynicism. In reviews of the film, critics express a desire to stay with the Allen they see in Gil as well as relief that the biographical Allen is no longer getting in the way of their desire to view him nostalgically.

With each instance of citation – Allen’s citation of modernist artists and reviewers’ citation of other Allen films – the film viewer, whether watching Midnight in Paris or reading any number of reviews, is asked to forgive an analytical light touch. The excuse offered in each case is love. In Midnight in Paris, Allen’s modernist fantasy is indeed sweet, causing viewers to resurrect a softer image of the director. Through Allen’s citational practice, love for bygone Paris transforms into love for the director, and the nostalgia the film generates for modernism morphs into nostalgia for Allen.

Shoring up Fragments: Allen, Eliot, and Modernist Citation

The modernists Allen cites in Midnight in Paris relied upon citation within their own works as well. Modernist citation thus has two prongs in Midnight in Paris: first, the film cites modernist artists and their works, and, second, its citational practice draws from the tradition of modernist referentiality, which built meaning through citation of other works, from high culture and low. The modernist figure most famous for his citations appears only briefly in the film when Gil greets a man who introduces himself as Tom Eliot. Though Eliot receives less screen time, it is his theory of artistry that most significantly resonates with Allen’s own artistic practice. In particular, Eliot’s use of the past both within his poetry and his literary criticism resonates with Allen’s citation of individuals ranging from Gertrude Stein to Cole Porter and art works ranging from Rodin’s “The Thinker” to Eliot’s own “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Like Eliot, who crafted lines such as “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag” (Eliot 2002b: 42), Allen here refers to both avant-garde art and popular culture, as he has done throughout his career – as with Marshall McLuhan and The Sorrow and the Pity in Annie Hall and the homage to the musical comedy, Everyone Says I Love You. Midnight in Paris retains this mixture of high and low, but with a difference. While Eliot’s use of closing-time songs in The Waste Land invokes the grittiness of 1920s pub culture, Gil finds all culture he encounters in the film elevated through its relationship to modernist art. Though he finds the current-day laundromat in the film disappointing because it replaces his 1920s dream café, Gil, we might imagine, would be thrilled with a laundromat, so long as it was a 1920s Parisian laundromat.

All aspects of the Parisian 1920s are part of a beautiful and interesting past. Perhaps invoking Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” the first line of Gil’s novel explains and even excuses this attitude towards the past: “Out of the Past was the name of the store and its products consisted of memories. What was prosaic and even vulgar to one generation had been transmuted by mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp.” And though some references, like Hemingway bellowing “Who wants to fight?” take on the status of camp, the film also reveals a deeper knowledge with less stereotyped images of Parisian modernity. Not content with the kind of heavy-handed historical citation that marks middlebrow cinema – as an example, we might take Forrest Gump – Allen peppers his film with references to works that the lay-viewer will not recognize. Though most will know Fitzgerald, not all Allen viewers will be familiar with lesbian novelist Djuna Barnes. And even if viewers are familiar with Un Chien Andalou, only true film buffs or modernist aficionados will likely recognize Gil’s passing reference to Buñuel’s El Ángel Exterminador.

Because the film both showcases Allen’s deep knowledge of modernist artworks and privileges naive artistic appreciation as authentic love, Owen Wilson must breathe with incredulity the name of each figure he meets to ensure the audience is in on the joke. When Gil takes his first midnight ride in the Peugeot, he first stops at a crowded party where strains of “Let’s Do It” fill the air before Allen reveals Porter himself at the piano. With a marked departure from the relatively fixed camera positions of the present day scenes, the camera pans the room, following Gil’s confused scanning of tuxedoed and drop-waist-dressed party goers. Finally, Allen’s camera comes back to rest on Gil’s face, which the approaching Zelda Fitzgerald notes looks “lost,” “stupefied,” and “stunned.” This look characterizes Wilson’s performance: when the Fitzgeralds whisk Gil off to Brick Top’s, he again has that stupefied look as he watches the sashaying dance of a black woman with feathers in her hair, thus cuing spectators to recognize Josephine Baker as an important someone, even though she goes unnamed in this scene. Repetitive naming accompanies this pattern of stunned recognition. When Gil meets Zelda and Scott, the author of Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby shakes Gil’s hand, introducing himself as “Scott Fitzgerald.” Gil says, “You have the same names as . . .” Yes, Fitzgerald confirms, “Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds.” Acts of naming and renaming recur throughout the film – the modernists, it seems, are forever introducing themselves. And Gil is remarkably good at picking up on clues and translating them for the film’s audience. When Gil boards the Peugeot for the last time, the cab’s other passenger introduces himself as Tom Eliot. What follows is something like a declension of Latin nouns as Gil runs through various permutations of the poet’s name: “Tom Eliot. Tom Stearns Eliot. T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot.” Then, in a laugh line, he exclaims “Prufrock’s like my mantra,” clarifying that these days life in Beverly Hills is measured out in coke spoons, rather than coffee spoons. Through this multiplicity of citations and Wilson’s enthusiastic performance, Midnight makes the pleasure of recognition accessible to all the films viewers, creating the experience, if a bit disingenuously, of democratic access to artistic appreciation.

But in addition to citing modernist poetry, Gil, whom his fiancée Inez accuses of thinking his life “would be happier if [he] lived in another time,” very nearly enacts T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as he makes his midnight sojourns. Gil, like Eliot, sees the past as alive. Repeating Hemingway’s declaration that the city is “a moveable feast,” Gil expresses that the loveliness that characterized Paris at other times is still alive, enriching his present. At one point in the film, Gil quotes Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951), explaining that the past isn’t “even past,” but Gil’s relationship to the past is more in line with what Eliot describes when he writes,

Tradition . . . cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet past his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence (Eliot 2002a: 100).

While Eliot’s proclamations may be ponderous, they are nonetheless resonant for a director whose representation of art, scholars have argued, “is somber, even when he deals with good art” (Hösle 2007: 77). Though Midnight in Paris’s engagement with the past is not somber, it nonetheless takes seriously the matter of appreciating past art works.

Against Gil’s authentic but untrained appreciation of Paris and modernism, the film offers two counterexamples. As Midnight establishes Gil’s fit with the artistic 1920s, it also distances Gil from his American companions, his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams), her professor friend Paul (Michael Sheen), and her parents John (Kurt Fuller) and Helen (Mimi Kennedy). While Paul takes an academic approach to appreciating artworks which renders them lifeless, Inez and her family appreciate the past and art in economic terms, a form of aesthetic valuation that the film shows to be equally deadly to artistic life. A series of shopping trips are illustrative. The morning after Gil’s first visit to the 1920s, he attempts to explain his fantastical journey to Inez, but she has no patience for such chatter because she wants to go shopping for antiques using her mother’s decorators’ discount. Though Gil wants to discuss the lively past he has just encountered, the only encounter with the past in which Inez and her mother are interested is one of consuming reified antiques, like the very expensive chair Helen announces would be perfect for “a Malibu beach house.” This is a far cry from the nostalgia shop of Gil’s novel, where objects become more magical and beloved as they age. Instead, for Inez and Helen, Paris’s past becomes mere decor, wrested from its context and transportable to sunny CA.

Midnight makes clear that the consequences of Inez and Helen’s lack of historical appreciation are artistic. On another shopping trip, Helen tells Gil and Inez that she saw a “wonderfully funny American film.” When asked who was in the film, Helen cannot remember. “Wonderful but forgettable,” Gil responds, “sounds like a picture I’ve seen. I probably wrote it.” Helen defends the film, saying that she knows that it was “Moronic and infantile and utterly lacking in any wit . . . but John and I laughed in spite of ourselves.” In the context of modernist citation, we can understand one of the flaws of the forgettable American films and of the audiences that consume them is a lack of historical perspective. The ugly Americans’ treatment of historical artifacts as interior decor prepares audiences to understand Inez’s family as poor artistic appreciators, who consume the type of inane Hollywood blockbusters Gil has been churning out. In contrast, to make work that is good, Gil feels as though he needs to get back in touch with the Parisian past that he abandoned as a young man – perhaps as a 25-year-old. Building from the past, the process of artistic accretion, holds for Eliot and for Gil a promise of stability in the face of worlds that consume arts frivolously, quickly, and vulgarly. Engagement with the canon gives work weight, as we see in Gil’s enthusiastic work on his novel that follows his midnight rambles.

But in addition to adding seriousness and permanence to artistic work, citation shows one’s relationship to the canon. As Eliot argues, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists” (2002a: 101). When Allen invites Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Dali, and Picasso to the same party, he reveals the relation of the dead artists, one to another, in the way a textbook of modernism might. Into this scene, Gil arrives, bringing with him not only the novel of which we hear only a few lines, but also the weight of Allen’s artistic output. Although Owen Wilson’s Gil shares little of Allen’s physiognomy, several clues announce him as the Allen figure in the film. In recent years, Allen’s lessening ability to cast himself in his films as he ages has led the director to cast new actors as the Allen character. In addition to Allen’s interview comments that the film is his own fantasy of Paris, as well as Gil’s, Gil wears the characteristic Allen uniform of khaki pants. Resemblances on the level of plot include Gil’s involvement in Hollywood as a comedy writer, his self-effacing style, and regrets over not moving to Paris in his twenties. During Allen’s early Paris experiences, he enjoyed encounters with similarly significant artistic figures, including Beckett and Bardot (Lax 2000: 209). Given audiences’ habit of reading Allen into his protagonists, and the film’s narrative style of creating parallels between past and present, the film allows audiences a model for thinking about Allen in relation to modernist art work.

By introducing, like an alien from space, a new artist into the modernist world, Allen hyperbolizes Eliot’s idea about the reciprocal structure of influence between artworks past and present. The film’s play with influence is a dual one, operating through science fiction plotting in which an aspiring novelist plants seeds for art works to come as well as audiences’ extradiegetic sense that one of America’s most distinctive filmmakers is also having a time travel adventure with his idols. In an interview with Ken Kelley, Allen lists Buñuel with Bergman, Renoir, and Antonioni as one of the only directors he has “any interest in at all” (Kelley 2006: 12). Thus when Gil gives Buñuel the throwaway suggestion to make a film about bourgeois guests who deteriorate into primal animalistic states when they discover they cannot leave a dinner party, Allen puns on modernist accounts of artistic influence. While Gil gets credit for a time travel joke, Allen acknowledges his filmic predecessors while also putting himself into their company through his film’s use of modernist practices of citing, playing with time, and bringing to life painterly recreations of modernist artworks. The canon of past works is central to making artistic judgment, as Eliot explains:

The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is the conformity between the old and the new (2002a: 101).

For Eliot, this matter of conforming relates to the new work’s value: “we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value” (101). This matter of artistic fit plays out on the level of plot when Gil visits a present day bookstall, purchases a copy of Adriana’s diary, and learns that the muse and lover of Picasso, Modigliani, and Hemingway has now fallen for him. The film establishes Adriana’s track record for selecting artistic greats early on. In a scene set in Gertrude Stein’s parlor, Adriana rehearses for Gil her Paris career of bedding the vanguard of modernist visual artists. When Adriana chooses Gil as her newest beau, the beautiful art groupie puts Gil into the good company of her previous lovers.

At the same time the film signals the importance of artistic appreciation, its insistence on naïve or untrained appreciation as authentic love means that Midnight hollows out much of the complexity of modernist artworks that make them worthy of appreciation in the first place. Gil’s ability to fit into his artistic surroundings requires Midnight in Paris to take a simplistic view of the arts and their history. Given Gil’s backstory and his companions in the present day scenes, it is nearly impossible to believe that our protagonist would be familiar with the figures he meets unless we read him as a Woody Allen stand-in. After his second trip through time, Gil retires to his present day hotel bed. Wondering over his luck, he thinks about what a magical circumstance it is for someone as undeserving as the little Gil Pender from Pasadena who “failed freshman English” to meet these literary greats. The film’s conceit that Gil, a hack film writer, is a talented novelist waiting to break through is almost as make believe as his ability to travel through time. The strain on credulity is not that Gil is a fine writer – he’s just getting started, after all – but that he is a fine modernist writer. Or, put the other way, that being a fine modernist writer would make Gil any good in the present day. Stein’s writing style, which would eventually evolve into her experiments with language poetry, exemplifies modernist experiments with nonreferential artworks. In contrast, it is hard to say whether Gil’s novel about a curiosity shop owner illustrates the tenets of any modernist manifesto.

The film’s only attempt to account for this stylistic anachronism comes when Gertrude Stein tells Gil that his novel is good, but reads “like science fiction.” We can assume the joke is a superficial one, likely referring to the presence of twenty-first-century technologies or patterns of speech in Gil’s novel, but not, for example, the influence of postmodern literature on the budding novelist. Rather than writing like a Don DeLillo or a David Foster Wallace, Gil writes like someone about whom Stein can claim: “you have a clear and lively voice.” Rather than treating writers as artists with serious commitments to their styles, Midnight in Paris offers a romantic account of artists who transcend their times to such a degree that a postmodern fellow fits in quite comfortably among modernists who notice nothing strange about his writing style. After all, it is hard to imagine any strong writer for whom Stein’s comment would not be applicable. Importantly, because Stein’s compliment concerns personal voice, rather than stylistic experiment, we can understand Gil’s work fitting in not just in terms of Eliot’s canon-test, but in also terms of Stein’s strange sense of eternal personalities.

Gil’s writing, which he carries with him back in time to show his idols Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and which Stein edits, fits in with modernists less literally than merely measuring up as stylistically comprehensible to readers of the 1920s. As Kirk Curnutt has argued, the matter of being true to one’s artistic soul was something that very much occupied Stein, particularly in the wake of the writer’s block she experienced after publishing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “Claiming that her popularity momentarily distracted her from her literary program, she inoculates herself against the self-deceptive dangers of publicity by dedicating herself to her craft, thus remaining true to her inner essence” (Curnutt 1999: 293). This is the true expression of self that Stein encourages Gil to let forth: personal and also free of whatever twenty-first-century literary trends might disguise what Stein might call his “bottom nature” (Stein 1995: 152). Stein’s indifference to historical specificity is perhaps what saves Midnight’s eschewal of time travel’s typical philosophical problems. Allen has explored the conundrum of changing the past in both Zelig and Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Tom Baxter’s escape from the silver screen wreaks tremendous havoc in the Depression-afflicted real world. Gil’s journey back through time does not produce the time travel paradox – the only art works he inspires are those that are to happen anyway, as when he plants the seed for El Ángel Exterminador. As it sets more complicated issues of artistic influence aside, Midnight in Paris relays the moral that being a modernist artist is really just a matter of being yourself. But the eternal and authentic artistic value that modernist artists Stein and Eliot championed, and which allows Gil to slip seamlessly back through time, also served as a cover for the modernists’ ugly and historically rooted commitments – a cover that Gil and Midnight leave undisturbed.

No Warts, Not At All: Historical Blindness and Modernist Biographies

Near the end of the film, Midnight in Paris’s Gil delivers a message that seems rather banal and, given the loving depictions of 1920s Paris that precede it, a bit insincere. When Gil accompanies Adriana back to her ideal time period, Paris’s belle epoque, he realizes that each culture idealizes the bygone past. He lectures her that he is having the insight, “a minor one,” that everyone wants to live in the past because the present, like life, is “a little unsatisfying.” This lesson serves to return Gil back to the present day, back to where he belongs. But in the context of modernist citation, the question of belonging in Midnight in Paris is a bit more complicated than Gil’s second-act musings would have it.

In truth, not even modernist artists belong in Midnight in Paris’s thin historical world. Their time was more complex and frequently much darker – a history to which Midnight in Paris turns a blind eye. In the past, Allen’s films have taken up modernism’s darker aspects, with references to the Shoah, death, and existential dread. One of Allen’s earlier historical films, Zelig, offers a remarkable account of modernity’s ugly side, even as it shares jazzy Charleston scenes with Midnight. Additionally, some of Midnight in Paris’s modernists show up in Zelig’s tale of the human chameleon Leonard Zelig’s travails from the 1920s through World War II. The actual Brick Top is featured during one of the present day interviews, and she recalls a tale of Cole Porter trying to include the line “You’re Leonard Zelig” in his “You’re the Top” and eventually cutting the phrase because it doesn’t rhyme. Additionally, the narrator invokes both Fitzgerald and Hemingway, claiming that Fitzgerald modeled Gatsby after Zelig’s changeable nature. Finally, the film ends abruptly and happily with Zelig’s upside-down stunt flight over the Atlantic, a spectacle which endears him to the US public.

The conflict that Zelig’s spectacular flight solves is a sinister one. At the film’s midpoint, the US populace has turned against Zelig in the wake of his scandalous polygamy, and the problem of mob mentality and faddishness run connected together throughout the film. Zelig thus casts American mob behavior in uncomfortably close proximity to the groupthink of the Nazis, whom Leonard joins during a particularly low moment in his chameleon career. The American populace that welcomes Leonard back from his German adventure is the very same one that had chased him abroad. One of the artifacts Zelig’s “archival” footage showcases is a political cartoon of a many-headed Leonard Zelig about to meet the gallows. The necks that are to be hung are ethnically marked – a black Zelig, a Chinese Zelig, and a Jewish Zelig. Even without this cartoon, one of the film’s various warnings is that to be Jewish in America is to internalize racial violence: the most consistent theory about why Leonard changes is that he wants to fit in. Failure to fit in results in physical or psychical danger. Recalling his childhood during one of his therapy sessions, Leonard remembers beatings at the hands of his family as well as neighborhood anti-Semites. Confused by the hatred he experiences, Leonard seeks a lesson on the meaning of life from a rabbi, but it is in Hebrew and he cannot understand it. His parents also fail Leonard; when he complains about the beatings he receives from neighborhood bullies, little Leonard learns from his father that “life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering.” In Zelig, traditional sources of wisdom are not powerful enough to inoculate against the dangers of a Jewish boyhood in early twentieth-century America. Later, the nightmare of suffering and the film’s nightmare scenario of changeable public opinion come together in the voice of an old woman on the radio, who tells her listeners that Americans do not tolerate the kind of scandals Zelig has wrought. She offers her audience this advice: “Lynch the little Hebe.” Zelig’s lessons of terror and unfairness are a far cry from Gil’s statement that “Life’s a little unsatisfying.” The nightmare options of either self-effacing conformity or dangling at the end of a rope are totally absent from any discussions in Midnight in Paris.

Perhaps the historical blindness to 1920s nativism and clannishness can be explained by casting. As played by Owen Wilson, Gil is a physical departure from the typical Allen figure. With his athletic build, blond hair, and blue eyes, Owen’s Gil can perhaps better assimilate with the modernist expatriates than an Allen-played Gil. One can speculate that to have an explicitly Jewish protagonist competing with the other modernists for Adriana’s affections would have produced a very different film. More specifically, such a speculative film would be titled The Sun Also Rises. Featuring Jewish boxer Robert Cohn’s pursuit of the shiksa Lady Brett Ashley, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) epitomizes a strand of anti-Semitism omnipresent in the modernist works Gil so admires. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued, Hemingway demonstrates the inappropriateness of Cohn’s place among the American expatriates by showing the untranslatable nature of his name (Michaels 1995: 74). Because Cohn, as a Jew, is from nowhere, he cannot give up his status as American as can the Anglo expatriates Jake Barnes and friends. Even as an expatriate, Cohn doesn’t fit. In the uncomfortable scenes at the bullfights, Hemingway suggests that Cohn lacks the necessary aficion (appreciation) for native cultures, and therefore cannot assimilate into the European artists’ scene. In Hemingway’s novel, only the white characters are free to sample French and Spanish culture with authenticity and ease. Nor is Hemingway’s racism restricted to Jewish Americans. Given the white modernist’s representation of black speech as blank speech – “ ‘. . . .’ the drummer shouted and grinned at Brett” (Hemingway 1926: 71) – perhaps it is just as well that Midnight’s Hemingway does not accompany the Fitzgeralds and Gil to Brick Top’s. Although we might expect, even then, that any potential racial discomfort could simply be sidestepped by the film’s revisionist tact.

Just as Hemingway’s novel reveals the author’s investment in demarcating racial difference, even in the accepting world of Paris between the wars, so too did the friendly college boy Scott Fitzgerald share in the era’s casual racism and anti-Semitism. In his most famous work, Fitzgerald clearly delineates visual difference between races. In Gatsby’s fourth chapter, Nick Carraway encounters a limousine containing “three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl.” Nick narrates that he “laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry” (Fitzgerald 2004: 69). This stereotyped description of racial conflict on the Queensboro bridge sets the stage for Nick’s coming encounter with the shady character Wolfsheim, whose “nose flashed . . . indignantly” (70) and who eats with “ferocious delicacy” (71), and gazes at “the Presbyterian nymphs” on the restaurant ceiling. Wolfsheim is, of course, the novel’s figure of corruption, having fixed the 1919 World’s Series and entangled Gatsby in a gangster’s world. Given Allen’s well-documented (even by himself) obsession with anti-Semitism, and his casual quotation of Fitzgerald in Zelig, Midnight in Paris’s muteness on the subject of modernism’s representational ugliness is striking. As Sander Lee has argued, existentialism based in the horrors of the Holocaust shapes the attitudes of Allen’s most important films (Lee 2001: 60). One way of accounting for Midnight’s silence in the face of its characters’ anti-Semitic writings is that Midnight is a film, like Celebrity, Purple Rose of Cairo, or Sweet and Low Down, more interested in exploring the lives and the myths around celebrity personas than their works.

Though it might be possible to overlook the racism and anti-Semitism of modernist artworks in favor of their aesthetic achievements and larger-than-life personas, the biographical creators of modernist artworks had nasty fights and ugly allegiances in their lives off the page as well. Though Hemingway’s hatred for Zelda Fitzgerald rears its ugly head briefly, and though Zelda, in her turn, threatens to drown herself, there are few signs of rancor in the modernist community, which circulates, in satellite fashion, around Gertrude Stein’s parlor. The New York Times’s Joseph Berger (2011) notes, for example, that the film’s casual conversation between Stein and Picasso about the work of Matisse belies the rancorous relationship between the two painters. As Yve-Alain Bois has demonstrated, the artists had a tense relationship early in the century, from the time Picasso mocked Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre with his Les Demoiselles D’Avignon to the painters’ jealousies over having to share the pages of Cahiers d’Art, which fed their rivalry by pushing the two “toward each other” (Bois 1998: 29, 37). The film, however, doesn’t take this bait; instead, Gil merely gives the laugh line that he’d like to order six or seven of Matisse’s works.

In particular, Stein, the mistress of ceremonies has been sanded down until she appears as a kind of earth-mother artists’ doula as played by Kathy Bates. The generosity Stein shows her fellow artists and writers in the film remains untainted by any account of her investment in her own work and celebrity. After all, Stein’s relationship with Picasso went two ways. Earlier in the century, the same year that Picasso painted Stein, the author’s Three Lives attempted to render the painting styles of her friends in language. In the portrait “Melanctha,” Stein drew on Picasso’s example to narrate the subjective and repetitive tale of a sensual woman who “did not know how to tell a story wholly” (Stein 1990: 70). Moreover, at the time Gil shows up in Stein’s life, she would have finally been reaping the fruits of The Making of Americans, her massive tome written over a decade earlier. In the 1925 novel, Stein gives an experimental account of temporal relations, collapsing past and present into “existence . . . everlasting” (1995: 103). It is possible that Allen has not read Making, but its temporal play aligns Stein with Gil and the film more generally. Stein’s concept of personalities “everlasting” resonates with the film’s portrait of the modernists, which collapses the known details of their entire lives into its mythologized characters. The Stein “everlasting” aside, the 1920s mark a particular shift in the author’s career and artistic attitudes. Having finally found a publisher for The Making of Americans, having backed Picasso, and having made her home with Alice Toklas a center for artistic activity, Stein had established herself as an important light of the modernist avant-garde. However, Making would never be widely read and Stein was concerned with maintaining her reputation as the one-woman modernist vanguard. It was in this context that Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the work that cemented her reputation as artistic genius and most strongly demonstrated her commitment to preserving her own celebrity, competitively if need be. One of the implications of Stein’s self-promotion was that she often downplayed other artists’ participation in shaping her work and the culture more largely. Recent studies of modernism and celebrity have focused on Stein because of her paradoxical investment in cultivating her fame and her insistence on being famous for being difficult. Timothy Galow, for example, cites one of Stein’s letters in which she had “given the literary agent William Aspinwell Bradley the explicit directive to make her rich and famous” (Galow 2010: 324). In this context, Stein’s “to thine own self be true” advice to Gil may ring hollow. Although she built her reputation as a promoter of the new, Stein was as savvy a reader of the market – both in promoting herself, and in building her art collection – as she was a Macleishian promoter of art for art’s sake.

More problematic, however, than the Stein of the 1920s, with her ambitious egotism, is the Stein “everlasting.” In our speculative account, shifting the film’s setting 10 or 20 years ahead in time reveals a very different Paris, and different modernists as well. Like Pound and Eliot, Stein supported Franco. And though she and Alice Toklas were Jewish, they did not speak out against the Nazis and indeed maintained relationships with Nazi collaborators during the period of German occupation. Wanda Van Dusen’s “Portrait of a National Fetish” documents Stein’s relationship with the German occupiers as well as the novelist’s ugly racial attitudes. In her article, Van Dusen analyzes Stein’s 1942 introduction to the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy government, executed after the war for his collaboration with the Germans. Pétain’s collaboration included passing laws against Jews and imprisoning members of the Resistance. Van Dusen understands Stein’s work with Pétain as a new lens for interpreting debates over whether Stein should be understood as a bohemian feminist or as a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite and misogynist. Among the claims Van Dusen makes in her essay are the two important arguments that Stein’s valuing of “literature over history and politics” led her to aestheticize and trope figures of the regime and that her commitment to pacifism led her to express the perspective that “history in the form of political defeat can be forgotten, but death cannot be reversed” (Van Dusen 1996: 81). These, among other commitments, allowed Stein to turn a blind eye to history even as she was also serving as a propagandist for Pétain.

Stein’s problems with historical truth resonate throughout Midnight in Paris as it turns its own blind eye to Stein’s history. When Stein describes Pétain and Allen describes Stein, the resulting portraits privilege aesthetic values over historical truths. Stein’s 1926 essay “Composition as Explanation,” in which she explains “[n]othing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition” (Stein 1993: 497), is exemplary. Stein here expresses her sense that truths are unchanged by historical events and places importance on the artist, who, looking at the world, holds out new details, produces new compositions and new ways of seeing. In interviews, Allen has spoken about his disinterest in politics. In a 1976 conversation with Ken Kelley, Allen describes his lukewarm engagement with the anti-war movement and also explains that his “heroes are all pure heroes. They’re not diluted with the problem of politics” (Kelley 2006: 18). Elsewhere, Allen has noted that his “heroes don’t come from life, but from their mythology” (Ciment and Tobin 2006: 131). In light of Allen’s preference to stay out of politics, the historical blindness of Midnight may be understood as protecting the reputations of the film’s modernist heroes by keeping their politics out of the way of their mythologies and as consistent with the modernists’ own preferences for aesthetics over politics. Midnight extends Allen’s preference for “pure heroes” as he imagines a naive protagonist who peoples his fantasy world with inspiring, if flat, artistic models. Historical blindness thus acts as a style as well as a method for keeping one’s artistic heroes “pure.” As exemplified by Stein as well as Gil, commitments to artistic purity run the risk of transforming historical and political naivety, or blindness, into an admirable mode of artistic appreciation – modernist New Criticism at its most problematic extreme.

It’s Delovely: Depthless Citation

With their troublesome politics and difficult artistic styles removed, the denizens of 1920s Paris become lovely company to keep. Warm, welcoming, and offering generous feedback to their compatriots, Stein et al. make up an ideal artist’s community. Hemingway enthuses about Stein’s helpful feedback, and when Gil first arrives at her home, she pauses to greet him and then returns to offering Picasso a critique. In other scenes, Allen places his viewers at the scene of the collaborations that lead to great works. In a cafe, the charmingly bizarre surrealists plan their film: Dali, his rhinoceros sculpture, and the beginnings of a film collaboration. The only sense one gets of any competition among these artists comes from tension between Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald – it is interesting to note that when Gil reports back to present day, he takes Hemingway’s side in the matter. But on the whole, the characters are bohemians in the best sense, sharing their wine and their lovers, and defying social convention to party the night away with Josephine Baker in Paris’s black clubs, where black proprietors like Brick Top are most welcoming to their white customers, even if these African American cultural arbiters never appear on screen. With its emphasis on rich cafe culture as the birthplace of the twentieth century’s most important artworks, Midnight in Paris produces a near causal relationship between the environment and artistic output.

Through this rosy, if superficial, citational practice, Midnight in Paris becomes a kind of modernism’s greatest hits album: all the film reveals about Fitzgerald is that he is married to Zelda. Viewers learn that Zelda is crazy; she tries to commit suicide and Gil gives her a Valium. The Surrealists are nutty and Djuna Barnes leads. Gertrude Stein helps other artists, sits in her salon, and lives with a woman named Alice who opens the door. Most caricatured is Hemingway, whose dialogue, when not in the form of bellowing challenges to drink or to fight, seems lifted from the pages of A Farewell to Arms. One particularly over-the-top scene invokes every familiar Hemingway cliché as the author stumbles up to Gil and Adriana, clearly drunk, with one arm around a bullfighter named Belmonte. He looks Adriana over, calls her a “moveable feast,” and then asks whether she has “ever shot a charging lion.” Apparently dissatisfied with this relatively mundane chitchat, he shouts, “Who wants to fight?”

As the film goes on, the historical references and jokes grow broader and sillier. During Gil’s final journey through time, he experiences double time travel, accompanying Adriana to Maxim’s and the Moulin Rouge during the belle epoque. In this last trip through time, and before dumping viewers back into the present, the film explores new shallows of artistic citation. A compliment that doubles as a flip joke frames the episode: alighting from a carriage in front of Maxim’s, Gil comments, in his typical “gee whiz” fashion, “I don’t know what it is about this city. I gotta write a note to the chamber of commerce.” At the Moulin Rouge, Adriana spies Toulouse Lautrec sitting alone, and she chides Gil into approaching him, explaining, “We know he’s a lonely man.” As the two time travelers sit with Lautrec, two additional artists approach, introducing themselves as Degas and Gauguin. The artists explain that they have been discussing their opinion that it would have been “better to have lived during the Renaissance.” This is, of course, not a co-equal jump in time: Degas and Gauguin skip the Romantic period and Enlightenment in favor of the more recognizable Renaissance. Adriana refuses to accept that the belle epoque is not the most wonderful time, and insists that she wants to stay. Delivering the lesson of the film, Gil attempts to explain to her that everyone idealizes another era: “the present is a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying.” Gil’s insight here is somewhat sophisticated, but the evidence he provides is not: “To them, their golden age was the Renaissance. They’d trade the belle epoque to be painting alongside Titian and Michelangelo. And those guys probably imagine life was a lot better when Kublai Khan was around.” At this moment, Gil’s dialogue merely signals historicity, deploying a shallowness of reference more akin to postmodernism as Frederic Jameson describes it than to modernism’s recuperative engagement with past artworks (Jameson 2003: 281). One might object that such scenes reflect Gil’s nostalgia for a past that never was, and that the increasingly superficial knowledge the film communicates as it moves backwards through time mirrors Gil’s incrementally decreasing lack of knowledge, such that he imagines Renaissance painters fantasizing about Genghis Khan’s fabulous empire. But, as Allen indicates in his Cannes interview, Gil’s fantasy is the director’s too (Bagnetto 2011). And, to use Hemingway as an example, Allen hints at his knowledge even in inane depictions. With his declarations about manliness, boxing, and being pure and true, Hemingway is, as Boston Globe critic Ty Burr (2011) puts it, “a ripe, macho, adverb-free punch line of a young Papa.” But it is equally the case that his dialogue reveals Allen to be a close reader of modernism’s macho man. To be sure, Hemingway sweeps Adriana off on a trip to Africa (“Mt. Kilimanjaro’s no Paris,” Stein observes), but he also speaks in a remarkably accurate depiction of Hemingway’s coordinating sentence structure: “The assignment was to take the hill, there were four of us, five if you counted Vicente, but he had lost his hand when a grenade went off, and he couldn’t fight as he could when I first met him, but he was young and brave and the hill was soggy from days of rain, and it sloped down toward a road, and there were many German soldiers on the road, and the idea was to aim for the first group, and if our aim was true we could delay them.” Midnight thus has it both ways, giving audiences a pleasurable encounter with some of literature’s most difficult figures by hinting at Allen’s deep knowledge of his modernist heroes while simultaneously producing a world in which they are encountered in their most familiar and accessible forms.

The film’s superficial engagement with culture and politics extends to Gil’s present day as well. In Midnight in Paris’s contemporary scenes, shallowness functions in a different fashion, producing clichéd images of ugly American tourists and professors. Indeed, the only pleasant characters Gil encounters in his twenty-first-century world are beautiful French women. Allen thus recreates the modernist writer’s journey abroad, away from a mercenary American culture that neither understands nor appreciates his work. This is a journey Allen himself has taken, both through his long-term allegiance with European audiences – in an interview with Stig Björkman, Allen explains that “Europe has saved [his] life. . . . If it wasn’t for Europe, I’d probably not be making films” (Björkman 2004: 82) – and by shooting on location in films such as Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. By positioning Gil against Inez’s father, and by characterizing Gil as the one who “side[s] with the help,” Allen casts his own flight to Europe, as the same type of refusal of American capitalistic concerns that the bohemian modernists embraced.

In contrast to the romantic Americans abroad in the 1920s, the version of American travel culture Gil encounters in the twenty-first century is dry, “pedantic.” Wine is appreciated, rather than swilled, and pieces of the past are snapped up in antique markets. Instead of appreciating art, Inez, Carol, and Paul breeze efficiently through the sun-dappled gardens at Versailles, and ignore the views of the Eiffel Tower at night. In the Versailles scene, Allen begins with a long shot, which presents a beautiful view of the gardens’ landscaping. When the four tourists enter the frame, the camera begins to move, tracking to follow them until they stop, with their backs turned to the beautiful landscapes behind them. Two scenes later, Allen again frames Paul and Carol so that their backs are turned to a beautiful Paris sunset. As they enjoy a rooftop wine tasting, during which Paul criticizes the wine – “I prefer a smoky feeling to a fruity feeling” – Allen positions the Eiffel Tower between the two, as the tip of the pyramid shape formed by the three figures. Though the characters ignore the beauty of their environments, the film’s spectators do take in the views to which the characters turn their backs. Because much of this beauty is also due to Allen’s presentation of it – his framing and his blue and gold color palette – spectators come to simultaneously appreciate Paris’s beauty and Allen’s skill and also to distance themselves from the film’s ugly Americans.

Played by Michael Sheen, professor Paul is characteristic and the worst of the bunch. Arguing with the lovely French docent, played by Carla Bruni, he renders artistic life in dry-as-dust academese. He also, importantly, gets it wrong when the topic is passion, arguing with the docent about Rodin’s lovers. Paul is also the character who makes the most pointed critique of Gil’s nostalgia, but the people of the present day have a bad relationship to the past, criticizing, rather than enjoying, wine, and collecting past artifacts without engaging. When Gil first sees the Peugeot, for example, he says, “I have a friend who collects these in Beverly Hills.” It is in this context of an artistically struggling but materially successful screenwriter that the film elaborates a desire for protection from the present through the talismanic powers of great artists past. The twenty-first century’s culture of one-upmanship and materiality appears to have poisoned even Gil’s creativity: having left Paris as a young man to write sequels to sequels, he has lost touch with passionate creation – as he notes to Inez from behind his novel’s pages, “I’m missing some chances to let my imagination to kinda go crazy.” Even if Gil can’t go live in another time, he can, as Allen does, inoculate himself against an ugly world through artistic immersion.

Midnight in Paris echoes a common theme in Allen’s work: that there is nothing new under the sun, and that citation and quotation are the best methods for dealing with the pressures of the present moment. In the famous monologue that opens Annie Hall, Allen faces directly into the camera and rehearses his view on life as both too short and also “full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness.” He then goes on to imagine three possible visions of himself in old age: guessing he won’t be “distinguished gray,” he hopes he’ll be the “balding virile” type, but also admits to a fear that he’ll be “one of those guys with saliva driveling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag, screaming about socialism.” With his anxieties about the future, it is this Allen, who shares with Eliot a desire to shore up cultural fragments against his ruin. When walking through the Paris streets with Adriana, Gil gives a neat gloss on this view, which says as much about Allen’s perspective on the rest of the world as it does about Paris. Gil tells Adriana that it’s a “cold, violent, meaningless universe,” but he goes on to describe the way the city compensates for such existential darkness: “the cafes, people drinking and singing. I mean, for all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.” The idea of a cold world to which art may bring warmth is an old modernist one; Eliot sees the Waste Land of London as a spiritual and cultural desert that needs renewal through revitalized religious practice and meaningful cultural production. Allen, who looks back throughout his films to the richer days of radio, of Broadway, and the early cinema, likewise sees art – particularly the art of the past – as a way of dealing with the emptiness of contemporary life.

While Allen has lingered in the dark abysses of modernism in other films, Midnight in Paris hints at those murky depths only briefly. Building a vast star network of modernist figures in order to trip only lightly across its surface may seem a strange project. To return to this chapter’s opening question, if the modernists are only set pieces for a meditation on the ugly Americans of the present, why go to so much trouble citing artworks both obscure and familiar? Further, given Allen’s career-long interest in the first half of the twentieth century and knowledge of the period (as demonstrated by Sweet and Low Down’s homage to Django Reinhardt, Zelig’s Fitzgerald quotations, and The Purple Rose of Cairo’s references to Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr.), what purpose does it serve to give a very flip account of very complex artists?

The answer is that historical blindness serves an important pedagogical function in the film. A kind of new critical impulse – by way of Cleanth Brooks – informs Midnight in Paris, as it encourages audiences to let go of historical and biographical details that might interfere with artistic appreciation. Appropriately, then, Midnight attributes a too intense focus on detail to the pedantic university professor, for whom the recitation of facts substitutes for aficion. Thus while Paul’s purview is the fact, Gil’s is the feeling. And, ironically, because of his immersive experience in the moment of modernist artistic creation, Gil is able to better appreciate modernist art works as they are; he approaches them without the cynical attitude of an expert who has the benefit of hindsight. In this way, both within and without its diegesis, Midnight eschews academic accuracy, critique, and detailed knowledge in favor of authentic, enthusiastic, and first-hand artistic appreciation.

“Very Pretty Lyrics”: Midnight in Paris’s Modernist Tour Book

If Midnight in Paris’s Americans abroad have turned ugly, France remains a place of beauty. Allen has fetishized France before, as in Deconstructing Harry, in which Harry declares that in France he could “run for office” on the slogan, “Nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm – and win.” While Allen’s invocation of France is sarcastic in Deconstructing Harry, France features prominently in Hollywood Ending (2002) as well. In this recent film, Allen plays the filmmaker Val Waxman, whose films get rough reviews in the United States but are much beloved by French film critics and audiences. A moment of life imitating art, in an interview with Eric Lax about the film, Allen expresses dissatisfaction with audiences who “didn’t show up,” while also acknowledging that “it was successful but nothing big – in France” (Lax 2007: 56). Though Midnight is a far less cynical film than Harry, and less self-referential than Hollywood Ending, Allen’s idea of France as the artist and intellectual’s last best place remains. Ironically, this is the kind of fondness for a place that only someone who doesn’t live there can experience. At one moment, Adriana casually remarks that she “keep[s] forgetting [Gil is] just a tourist.” But the tourist’s view is the view of the entire film. For spectators, seeing contemporary Paris through Allen’s lens is much the same as seeing 1920s Paris – Allen portrays the city as an extravagantly beautiful fantasy. The beautiful, postcard-like views of Paris come from the impossible perspectives only technology can provide; crane shots and wide angle lenses show more of Paris than the naked eye could ever take in. In this way, the film’s lovely cinematography mirrors the admiring and monumentalizing gaze of the appreciative tourist.

Nostalgia and tourism are thus two sides of the same coin, as Allen’s film participates in what Jameson describes as the postmodern project of producing nostalgia for the present (2003: 288). The growing Paris suburbs, for example, with their immigrant presence threatening French commitments to liberté, égalité, and fraternité, and whose presence the lovely Ms. Bruni’s increasingly unpopular husband chooses to ignore, do not appear. Not even in background, as chez Brick Top does in the 1920s scenes. Nor does the presence of tourists, or the increased crowding of Paris as a twenty-first-century city, disturb Allen’s mise-en-scène. Even at midnight, one might be surprised to find Gil able to take his night walks undisturbed by traffic or other pedestrians, but the film’s contemporary Paris streets are clean and clear. When the old Peugeot arrives, the 1920s car does not jar the viewer’s sense of place and time; it is right at home, another quaint detail. In this way, Gil’s Paris and Hemingway’s Paris are indistinguishable. The continuity in setting allows for Allen’s movie magic, which portrays modern day Paris as surprisingly unmarked by change or development.

Although Allen could not have known this during production, the summer of Midnight in Paris’s release saw a very public demonstration of one of France’s less admirable characteristics. While Midnight played in theaters, a reminder of controversial French attitudes towards women, sexuality, and misogyny playing out across an international stage as the international news media made hay over France’s ambivalent reaction to hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo’s allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn (then managing director of the International Monetary Fund). In this context, much analysis of the case reminded readers that France has played host to other important men with controversial sexual histories: “Is Polanski haunting the Strauss-Kahn case?” one BBC story asked (2011). With its light treatment of morally complex artists, these are not the types of comparisons Midnight in Paris invites. Instead, by encouraging viewers to think about modernist figures as icons, rather than as biographical persons, Midnight provides a lesson on how to view Allen’s career. This is a lesson that reflects a preference for ways of viewing celebrities in the 1920s as opposed to in the contemporary era. Aesthetician Daniel Herwitz has outlined this difference, explaining:

The star in the old sense was about unapproachability. . . . Craving anecdote, scandal, images of ordinariness, the public, given free reign, consumed the star, got closer and closer to her. What the studios grasped was that, unchecked, too much closeness would be a failure through victory, since the aura of her distance, which prompted the desire for intimacy, would be lessened, reducing her star value and producing ultimate disappointment (2008: 15).

In this way, we can understand Allen’s treatment of the modernists as similarly protective and as offering a model for understanding artistic careers.

Léa Seydoux, a young French actress making a career of starring in historical mash-ups (Inglorious Basterds, The Mysteries of Lisbon, and even Robin Hood), plays a shop girl named Gabrielle who gets the closing word in the film and shows the way that remembering, like tourism, gives a depthless if magisterial encounter with cultural artifacts. Like Gil, Gabrielle loves Cole Porter and Paris in the rain. In her day job, Gabrielle works in a vintage market, surrounded by phonographs, fainting couches, and antique rugs that echo the color scheme of Gertrude Stein’s apartment. Unlike pedantic Paul, Gabrielle has an authentic and respectful appreciation of Porter, uncluttered by biographical detail: “Very pretty lyrics,” she comments, before being interrupted by Inez, who swoops Gil up to “get some culture” from Paul who is “an expert in Monet.” Allen’s casting of Seydoux, who is the young relative of French cinematic royalty, is its own artifactual reference; the actress’s grandfather Jérôme Seydoux is Pathe’s chairman and her granduncle Nicolas Seydoux is Gaumont’s chairman and CEO. It is no wonder that Gabrielle understands Gil. Through Seydoux’s lineage, Gabrielle carries film history in her very blood. As she joins Midnight’s Allen figure for a stroll, Seydoux’s ancestry gives the film’s final scene of Paris in the rain art historical significance as well as narrative closure.

From its postcard beginning to its watercolor close, Midnight in Paris reminds viewers not just of Allen’s other nostalgia or historical films, but also of his best films. In particular, Midnight in Paris recalls his homage to another city, Manhattan. With Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue overlaying a series of short-take shots of Manhattan, which Allen renders in aestheticizing and distancing black and white, the 1979 film provides a model for Midnight’s golden Paris vignettes. Indeed, on Midnight in Paris’s official website, the Sony Classics write-up points viewers to the old Allen: “It’s about a young man’s great love for a city, Paris, and the illusion people have that a life different from theirs would be much better” (Sony Classics 2011). This excessive and romantic love for a city is the way viewers think of Allen’s relationship to New York. Touring Paris thus becomes a way of touring Allen’s Manhattan; put another way, touring Paris of the 1920s becomes a way of touring the Allen of the 1970s. On a tour, of course, travelers visit monuments, the greatest works a culture has to offer. Engaging Allen’s biography only shallowly, like a tourist or a time traveler, thus allows viewers to solve seeming contradictions about the auteur, who encourages audiences to identify him with his protagonists, but also asks audiences to see the protagonists as loveable innocents bumbling their way through a world of middlebrow barbarism.

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Shoring up Fragments: Allen, Eliot, and Modernist Citation

No Warts, Not At All: Historical Blindness and Modernist Biographies

It’s Delovely: Depthless Citation

“Very Pretty Lyrics”: Midnight in Paris’s Modernist Tour Book

Just Desserts: Upon Midnight, Recalling Woody