Woody Allen had it partially right with the main characters in “Midnight in Paris.” A lot of us have that desire to live in a historically, culturally relevant place and time. I don’t wish I was alive during the Gold Rush, or the Renaissance, or the Roman Empire. I like living now, but I’m also haunted by the idea that I would be better off somewhere else. That another place would cause me to thrive and use my talents more fully. There are a dozen good reasons to be in Asia right now, some personal, some not. It’s not a “the grass is always greener” feeling, either. It’s that at a certain age you should be living your life in a certain place that’s best for you, for who you are and what you want.

Your 20s are easy to execute. Move a lot. Work different jobs. Meet as many people as you can. Gain rich, diverse experiences. Without the willingness to allow mistakes in your life you’ll live a cautious, and unfulfilled, life. Once you make your mistakes and learn from them it becomes even more difficult. All that learning about the world is supposed to help you figure out where you should go. That’s not how it worked for me. It just showed me that there were more options. Despite that, I’m not looking for my Golden Age. I don’t need to be part of any scene. Even though I’ve heard the rumors, I’m not desperately trying to move to Berlin. If I wanted to feel like I was part of something I would have stayed in Brooklyn. I like living in Korea, but it’s not that culturally relevant to the rest of the world. Maybe China is, but who can stand all that pollution? Do I even need to live somewhere culturally relevant?

This is different from the desire to move. To be in motion, to not let yourself get stuck. That’s just restlessness and an inability or lack of desire to commit to something. I had that for the decade when I didn’t live anywhere for more than a year and a half. When I crossed the big oceans several times and went where I wanted when I felt like it, left when it got boring or hard.

Regardless of how scared any of the big moves made me or the failures that they threatened worried me, I would still always say go rather than stay. But you can’t listen to everything Lou Reed says. Moving some place you’ve never been before isn’t guaranteed to fix things. You might put all your hope and salvation in the idea you have of a place and it might not be what you thought it was at all. Upon arrival, it might seem good and new, then turn bad because it was never the right move to begin with. That might not become apparent for a year or longer. The way we don’t have the foresight to know whether or not our moves are right until long after we make them is what makes it hard to leave. It can make you afraid to abandon a bad choice for another bad choice.

We fear that with all the choices out there we’re spending our lives in the wrong town, or the wrong state, the wrong climate, or country. If you’ve ever lived in the correctly suited place for you at the right time in your life then you know the feeling you’re after. You know its resonance, the feeling of being perfectly fit for your environment. The place you’re in has everything you need. The place, as Philip Larkin says, “mashed you.” Like all good things, it will eventually end, either the place changes or you do, and then you spend the ensuing days, months, years chasing that feeling.

For awhile I swore by the mantra “we’re all exactly where we’re supposed to be.” It’s a comforting idea, and if you repeat it until you believe it you can use it to quiet down your restlessness. But it only really works when you’re actually satisfied. I don’t believe it consistently. We don’t always make the best choices for ourselves.

If you can find the right place for you it can make you whole in ways that nothing else can. People like to say a place is what you make of it. That has a lot of truth to it, and the people in whatever place you’re in matter as much as anything. It’s just that no matter how much you love the openness of Nebraska it will never have an ocean. No matter how easy life is in Korea it will always be crowded. No matter how much fun New York is it will always feel indifferent.

You have to know what you want, who you are before you can choose to build a life. I’m still looking for the right place to stay for a while. I’ve had plenty of trouble, done my share of living, and I’ve seen a few things. Now I’m looking for some peace. Does anyone know where I can find it? Is it even out there?

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Last week, the thrift-hound Brooklyn blog Brokelyn released a video called “Brokelandia” that I helped write and acted in. Someone suggested the spin-off as a fun idea and before we knew it, the video had over 30,000 views (thank you!), receiving coverage in some big news outlets as well as recognition from Portlandia and IFC themselves. We were overwhelmed by the positive response, but then the negative comments started coming in, which I suppose was inevitable.

Aside from the comments about the quality of the video and the ways people enjoy spending otherwise productive time and energy putting down others for doing something, I noticed another trend: many responded, “This is why I don’t want to move to Brooklyn,” citing broadly outlined “hipster” behavior. As a Brooklyn native who was born and lived two thirds of my life here, I found this comment more disturbing than any of the negative feedback about my acting skills. Did people honestly think we encapsulated Brooklyn in under four minutes?

Portlandia seems to have gotten a similar reaction from people, as though IFC green-lit a travel show, and people are meant to get a sense of Portland, Oregon without having to actually go there. At the Portlandia Tour show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, during a Q & A, Fred and Carrie were getting requests for sketches about other aspects of the city that they hadn’t touched on yet. “You should write about all the sex shops!” an audience member told them. It was a bizarre moment, almost a sketch in itself, to watch people throwing out sketch topics as though they were requesting a song from the DJ. Fred had to awkwardly explain that they’ll only write sketches about topics that they think they can make funny, which probably isn’t something comedy writers often feel driven to clarify.

Yet there seems to be this need to make sure that Portlandia gets the story right, that they cover all the bases. I’m sure there are people in or from Portland who watch the show and constantly say, “That’s not what Portland is like! What are they talking about?” I haven’t spent any time in Portland, but I have a strong feeling that what I would have to say to anyone expressing their hatred for Brooklyn based on “Brokelandia” is probably equally applicable to Portlandia, or any creative work that situates itself in a geographical location.

It’s not hard to understand the backlash that Brooklyn faces lately, with Williamsburg at the center of it all. We have shows like Two Broke Girls trafficking in “Brooklyn Cool,” and daily, there’s a new artisanal store, coffee shop, or toy store throwing Brooklyn in their name to get in on that sweet cash cow that comes from being seen as a “neighborhood store.” This might be something unique to Brooklyn, as I have never heard of an “Austin Cheeses” or “Boulder Meats.” It’s easy to make Brooklyn a target of stereotypes like this within media, but all it takes is a 15 minute subway ride to shatter whatever you think you know about Brooklyn. Believe it or not, there are entire areas of Brooklyn where hipster is not the prevailing fashion. There are neighborhoods where you’re more likely to get by speaking Russian than English, and much like the galaxy we live in, our commentary-filled lives and arguments about how Portland and Brooklyn are different or similar aren’t even on their radar. While Brooklyn is a perfect example of diversity that defies classification, I don’t think it stands alone in that respect.

So what is it that a show like Portlandia is trying to do when it situates itself in Portland? What was “Brokelandia” trying to do, aside from a tribute to the IFC show? Well the first goal is to make people laugh. It’s observational comedy, and yes, it observes its surroundings, but that doesn’t mean it seeks to fully represent its subject. The writers of Portlandia are commenting on trends they see in general, not just in Portland, and the sketches represent their perspective on what they are witnessing. Sketches like “Did You Read” and Brokelandia’s “Did You Eat It” aren’t about hipsters, despite what people would like you to believe. They’re about an outlook toward life — that all experiences are some sort of checklist one must tick off to reach a higher status, that it’s not important that you read, ate, or saw something unless you can brag about it, that one-upmanship in general is insufferable. It’s a universal phenomenon, and I’m sorry to say that hipsters don’t hold the trademark to it, though they may be the most famous for it. People from all walks have the innate ability to be pretentious, name-dropping assholes. Sure, you might easily see this in Brooklyn or Portland, but you can probably find it in Buffalo, NY or Yucaipa, CA.

People make art about the places they live; that’s never going to stop. And sure, they’re looking to reflect what they see, but to expect anything holistic and all-encompassing is unfair and kind of ridiculous, unless we should take Woody Allen down a peg for calling a movie exclusively about the New York intelligentsia Manhattan. Just as we never expected Boston to be full of bars like Cheers or New York apartments to look like Monica’s in Friends, it might be time to remind people that comedy is not meant to be realism, and that a show like Portlandia achieved its current success by producing comedy that transcends geography. To visit the city expecting to see anything close to the half hour you watch every Friday night is kind of missing the joke. Speaking of missing the joke — to the people out there saying, “This is why I won’t move to Brooklyn,” I’m not looking to convince them otherwise. Brooklyn’s been doing fine without them.

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I don’t know what you and your friends talk about when it’s serious conversation time (I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s global warming/ the possible European Federation and its impacts on the world economy), but when we really get into it — we talk about Divas. Capital D. And no, not Beyonce or Lady Gaga or whatever other pitiful facsimile of a Diva our generation has managed to scrounge up, I’m talking about real ones. Tina, Whitney, Barbra, Cher, and — in my opinion, most importantly, Celine. We’ve gone back and forth on what really makes a Diva, and we’ve generally come up with a three-pronged set of criteria.

1. Overcame some kind of struggle
2. Has A Phenomenal, Life-Changing Voice
3. Goes balls-to-the-wall on every song, no exceptions

Miss Dion clearly has all of these three in spades. She dealt gracefully with her incredibly public, early-teenage awkward phase in which she looked like a less delicate Sarah Jessica Parker (and, did she ever turn into the swan!), not to mention all that public stigma of marrying her (let’s be honest, incredibly creepy and so much older) manager who mortgaged his house when she was 12 to launch her career. That is, by all standards, almost Woody Allen unacceptable — but she didn’t let our wrinkled noses and furrowed brows get her down. Struggles=overcome. Let’s not even discuss her Hope Diamond of a voice, as we are frankly not even worthy to talk about it. And no one goes all out like Celine does. You hand her the sheet music to the Eensy Weensy Spider, she sings that thing like it’s her last five minutes on Earth and those will be her last words to the human race. Celine knows what it means to be a singer.

Listening to her songs is like God blowing you kisses and winking at you. I often consider breaking up with my boyfriend (whom I love dearly) simply to, two weeks later, passionately reunite with him as “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” blasts at full volume out of the enormous speakers I’ve suddenly installed in my apartment. Her music is such that you create moments to appreciate it, to absorb it, to try in vain to rise up to its level. There is absolutely no song that Celine Dion has touched that she hasn’t made infinitely better — no exceptions. She drove all night, she’s alive, she has the power of love, she knows the way it is. What have you done with your live? Nothing. If Celine is the yardstick against which to measure yourself, consider your mere existence a perpetual failure.

If there could be one thing that could possibly enhance Dion’s God-like prowess, it would be when her work is combined with that of another Diva. Her work on VH1′s Divas spectacle makes your face melt off into a tiny puddle of admiration, and her cover of Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” is like a thousand tiny orgasms going off in your ears. Dion needs no wall of sound; she is the wall of sound.

Not to mention that Celine is French-Canadian, God’s chosen people.

It’s time we all gave a little more thought to the deity in human form we’ve been graced with, it’s time we show more appreciation. With her dulcet tones beneath our wings, there is truly nothing we can’t accomplish in life — so long as we give the occasional human sacrifice and pray five times a day facing Montreal. It’s high time our Celine love go back to Titanic-era insanity, and she gets the attention she truly deserves. It’s the least we can do.

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James Franco: Finish triple masters’ degrees in the following ultra-exclusive mini-programs offered by, respectively, Stanford, Arizona State, and Kenyon College: Post-Post-Modern Feminist Francoism Theory In The Digital Age, Why People Are Obsessed With James Franco, and Melodrama And Gentricity In Cinema As It Relates To James Franco With A Minor In Alternative Theories About Why People Are Obsessed With James Franco.

Kim Kardashian: Commit to a long-term relationship that lasts at least four months.

Ryan Gosling: Induce a paradigm-shift in “Top Sexiest Men” lists wherein instead of relatively “insignificant” write-ups in “puny ass” (his words) magazines, “Top Sexiest Men” lists become, simply “Top Sexiest Ryan Goslings” such that all “Top Sexiest Men” lists are composed only of ratings and analyses of myriad Ryan Gosling photos and internet memes.

Kanye West: Maintain a Twitter account for over six months without having a catastrophic meltdown before 10 AM.

Skrillex: Stay relevant.

Zooey Deschannel: Perfect the Manic Pixie Dream Woman image: an iteration of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who feels comfortable shopping at Ann Taylor Loft and driving a minivan, on occasion, as needed. Look into cost of commissioning a concept artist to create ‘life-size,’ fully-functional pixie wings out of the wings of a thousand dead dragonflies and the additional finances necessary for fully-functional surgical implantation of said wings.

Jesse Eisenberg: Submit to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency under a pen name, “just to be sure.”

Michael Cera: Kill Jesse Eisenberg.

Beyonce: Successfully derail Jay-Z and Kanye’s relationship by a combination of withholding sex, frequently demanding that Jay-Z “Facetime” with in-laws when in the studio with Kanye, and instilling in Jay-Z a Pavlovian response to Kanye’s ring on Jay-Z’s iPhone such that whenever Jay-Z hears the ring he immediately, subconsciously desires a “sh-t ton” (this is the word Beyonce used, to her nutritionist) of fried, “cheesy ass” (again, Beyonce’s words) foods and so instead of picking up the phone is compelled to “gobble” the closest approximation to a fried, cheesy food in sight.

Ashton Kutcher: Co-star in Dude Where’s My Car, The Sequel opposite Seann William Scott and more barely-legal breasts than a poultry slaughter plant.

Chris Brown: Let go and let god.

Leonardo DiCaprio: “Finally” overcome the “f-cking” (his words) baby-face image with a series of roles predominately directed by Clint Eastwood, Terrance Malick, and Woody Allen portraying, for the most part, “musty” 80-somethings struggling with identity, masculinity, sexuality, and successive layers of dream-sleep.

Drake: Connect with Amanda Bynes on Twitter, who followed Drake prior to deleting her first account but has since abstained from refollowing him, despite Drake feeling certain that, as child stars, the two are kindered spirits with an unspoken bond that could potentially grow into something more.

Woody Allen: Divorce wife, propose to great-great-great-great-great-great-adopted-grandaughter.

Tim Tebow: Convince Broncos management to shoot fireworks from the top of Mile High Stadium everytime he performs his signature move.

Lana Del Rey: Via surgical processes and an intense botox regime, transcend existing corporeal form as pop-hipster-millenial-faux-underground goddess to become the first-ever identity to exist as brainwaves designed to elicit response in pleasure centers of 18 to 25 year-old urban males.

Brangelina: Adopt at least 20 more children from 3rd-world nations; begin a process of educating them in high-powered business management and political indoctrination for the express purpose of creating a “bunch of little Hitlers that’ll overthrow the governments of the world’s wealthiest nations… Just putting our pawns into place for the takeover. Viva la revolución, babe,” as Brad put it, secretly, to Angelina, at the peak of a two-day coke bender this September in Dubai.

Tom Hanks: Punch out the next “asshole” on the sidewalk who yells “Run, Forrest, Run!” at him.

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Part 1: Enjoying the New Normal (1/3)

Dear Daniel,

I’m starting this project from my local library. The Woodstock library opened 11 years ago, at the very outset of this new millennium, and I’m sitting here under a skylight at an oversized table, and listening to the Art of Noise on my iPod touch. When I first sat down I spent time fiddling with the various Apps on it as a stalling tactic because I was reluctant to really face how we go about enjoying ourselves during this second round of what’s been dubbed “the new normal,” and just moments ago, before I clicked open my pen and opened my composition notebook I decided to try out an App called Instagram.

Instagram is a photosharing program that features various digital filters designed to give digital photographs an analog look. The aim is to transform cell phone ephemera into simulated artifacts, but more than giving your digital images the appearance of Polaroid photos, Instagram lightens and blurs each image so that it appears to have been lifted from one of your parents’ old photo albums. Instagram artificially ages the present allowing you to decorate your Facebook page or Twitter stream with screen equivalents of pre-faded jeans.

Before I began writing this I captured the aisle of mystery novels to my left with my iPod and then transformed the bookshelves, yellowed the image of them with an Instagram filter labeled “Sunset,” and then tweeted the picture to my followers with the caption “Woodstock library circa 1982.” I turned around again and captured the frieze above the periodicals section on my iPod. The painting entitled “Scriptorium” was created by Margot Voorhies Thompson. It is a long rectangular painting that spans the east wall above an enclave of computer terminals, graphic novels, and magazines. “Scriptorium” is actually four panels joined together.

The first panel features a rendering of a bull done in the style of a cave painting. The Woodstock library website says that this panel was “inspired by …the Lascaux cave paintings that are believed to date back to 35,000 BC.” My digital photo of the reproduction of the bull’s head was backlit, but using my Instagram filter I corrected this problem. Aging the photograph made it more legible, and now it appears like a document of a grade school field trip.

So that’s what I did before I started in writing and now that I’ve plunged in I want to mention this idea of Frederic Jameson’s, this idea of a nostalgia for the present, or Instant Nostalgia because the Instagram App is an such an obvious instantiation of Jameson’s idea, but it’s not the only instantiation. I want to claim that Instant Nostalgia is ubiquitous. I’ve always had a Nostalgia for the Present, even before the iPhone was invented. In fact, I can’t really remember any other way of being in the world.

For example, in the Spring of 1989 my friend Jerry drove a his brand new maroon Ford Taurus to the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings outside of Durango, Colorado and he brought me and my girlfriend Greta along. We were to help him with his Senior Thesis at the Colorado Springs High School. Greta and I were students at Palmer, a public high school, but Jerry attended a private school on what they called the block plan. His schedule was different than ours.

Jerry took one thing at a time. The block plan allowed him to work deeply, to really embrace each subject, and his final course at CSHS was “Seeing Through a Camera.” All the courses at CSHS had similar titles. That same year Jerry took a course called “Existentialism and Addiction.”

In the late spring of 1989 I was already nostalgic for my youth. Riding in the back seat of Jerry’s Taurus, inhaling the new car smell as I cuddled up to Greta on the bench seat, I stared out automatic windows at the glare of sunlight on I-5. I watched the shoulders along the highway, the tumbleweeds and barbed wire fences, and kept my eye out for the exit.

I was in a memory, stuck in a moment that had already passed even before it had begun. The end of the Reagan era, the death of morning in America, coincided with this feeling that I was already complete. The feeling of being whole, of fully enjoying the moment, created a sense of melancholy. Jerry popped in a cassette tape by the Art of Noise. The song “Close to the Edit” sounded retro even then. I remember remembering being 13 from my 18-year-old perspective and how I pined for simpler days.

What we did when we arrived at the cliff dwellings was situate ourselves into a collaged photograph of the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. Jerry took multiple shots of the structure from the bridge that led to dwellings inscribed into the sandstone cliff, and Greta and I wrapped our arms around each other, looked into each other’s eyes, and otherwise posed as lovers in the kivas and under the frames of small doors. In Jerry’s photograph we appeared as ghosts, permeating the whole structure. We reenacted our high school fling for him. We presented romance as a code of glances and bodily position inside a space built by aboriginal Puebloans in 750 AD, a space that was to be rebuilt out of photographs.

What was this Nostalgia that I lived through back in 1989?  What is it now?

Experience seems to require an audience. In order to enjoy my last summer road trip before college I had to imagine some version of myself from the future, the middle aged me of today who would be able to look back on the me of the moment, the me in the Ford Taurus. In order to enjoy putting my arm around my girlfriend’s waist as we stood next to an adobe fire pit, I had to imagine Jerry developing the photograph, or Jerry’s classmates at CSHS evaluating our visages, our attractiveness.

My family has just arrived at the library. Noah and his older brother Simon just interrupted me, showing me picture books: one about a delinquent mouse, another about a giraffe who hates his little sister, and a third describing the heroism of Barack Obama. Noah is sitting next to me at the table and I’m going to take a photograph of him with my Instagram App. I’m blurring the image with a filter labeled 1977. Via the magic of Instagram my son and I can be appear to be of the same era.

A PHD student named Nathan Jurgenson wrote his dissertation on the subject of the Instagram App and this idea of a Nostalgia for the Present. He wrote:

“What I want to argue is that the rise of the faux-vintage photo is an attempt to create a sort of ‘nostalgia for the present,’ an attempt to make our photos seem more important, substantial and real. The phrase ‘nostalgia for the present’ is borrowed from the great philosopher of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, who states that ‘we draw back from our immersion in the here and now [...] and grasp it as a kind of thing.’”

Nathan submits that these Apps provide us with a way to grasp our lived experience. We seem to perceive the past as more solid than the present precisely because the past has gone.

“We draw back from our immersion in the here and now [...] and grasp it as a kind of thing.” — Frederic Jameson

As we approach the problem of how we might or must enjoy our lives in this late Capitalist epoch we might start with this difficulty, this tendency toward a Nostalgia for the Present. Our own time overwhelms us, sends us spinning, and we seek an image, sometimes from the past, to make life manageable, substantial, and real.

Solidarity,

Doug

P.S.  While I enjoy getting your letters, hold off writing back for the moment. There is a second idea, something in enjoyment itself that I want to sketch out before this turns from a monologue into a conversation.

____

Part 2: Enjoying the New Normal (2/3)

Dear Daniel,

In Slavoj Zizek’s book How to Read Lacan, the Slovenian philosopher uses the example of Dostoevsky’s short story “Bobok” to explain Lacan’s aphorism:

“The true formula of atheism is not God is dead… the true formula of atheism is ‘God is unconscious.’”

Zizek quotes a section from Dostoevsky’s story wherein the main character, upon visiting a funeral, is confronted by a hallucination of zombies. The dead, realizing that they are free from life, rise from their graves and promise to tell the truth:

“I don’t want us to be telling lies. That’s all I care about, for that is one thing that matters. One cannot exist on the surface without lying, for life and lying are synonymous, but here we will amuse ourselves by not lying. Hang it all, the grave has some value after all!”

But, before the corpses reveal their horrible truths, before they divulge their horrible secrets, Dostoevsky’s protagonist sneezes and sends his hallucinated zombies back into the void.

Luckily, Woody Allen’s 1996 comedy Everyone Says I Love You follows up on Dostoevsky’s story. In his movie the dead rise up and then follow through on the promise.

About halfway through the picture the character known as Grandpa unexpectedly dies and the movie’s characters sit around at the funeral home discussing, arguing, and generally trying to wring out some meaning from Grandpa’s death. Goldie Hawn’s character suggests that the take away might be that people should cherish each other and never smoke. Alan Alda’s character objects to this by pointing out that Grandpa had smoked for 70 years and that he’d made it to a ripe old age without exercise and while smoking like a chimney. This inspires another mourner to complain that it’s impossible to figure out what is actually healthy because the experts keep changing their minds — one day coffee will be proclaimed bad for you and the next experts report drinking six cups a day helps stave off colon cancer.

Finally the conversation turns to religious matters. Everyone agrees that there is no God and they collectively worry that without God life itself might not have any meaning. They kick around a couple of different political solutions to the problem. The liberal Alda suggesting that protecting the “dignity of man” is what gives life meaning, while his conservative son says that the fight for a flat tax rate, the right to bear arms, and prayer in schools is what gives life meaning. However, out of respect for Grandpa, father and son agree to put their ideological differences aside. After all, Grandpa was neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but an apolitical sort of fellow. He was a simple foot fetish.

And it is at this point that Grandpa’s ghost sits up in the coffin and delivers the secret, the perverse truth, to his family:

“You work and work for years and years, you’re always on the go
You never take a minute off, too busy makin’ dough
Someday, you say, you’ll have your fun, when you’re a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you’ll have in your old rockin’ chair…”

These are the opening lyrics from Carl Sigman’s 1949 pop song “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think),” and the song contains what Lacan points to as the obscene superego injunction to “Enjoy!”

The message delivered through song is that life is meaningless and our task is to enjoy it anyhow. Toward the end of the musical number the various cadaverous ghosts dance out of the funeral home and onto the streets of New York City. Once these specters are out in the sunlight, once they leave the more theatrical space of the funeral parlor, their revelry seems forced, even a bit pathetic.

What Zizek wrote as a description of Dostoevsky’s story “Bobok” applies equally well to this scene from Allen’s film:

“…their impulse is sustained by a cruel superego imperative: the specters have to do it. If, however, what the undead hide from the narrator is the compulsive nature of their obscene enjoyment, and if we are dealing with a religious fantasy, then there is one more conclusion to be made: that the undead are under the compulsive spell of an evil God.”

If this is true then just what is motivating this cruel and evil God? What is he after? Just what is this injunction to enjoy covering up?

According to Wikipedia, Sigman’s hit “Enjoy Yourself” was also “sung briefly by Anne Dudek in Season 5, Episode 23 of the television series House, ‘Under My Skin’.” In episode 23 Hugh Laurie’s character discovers that his awesome powers of observation, his clinical skills as an MD, were not always enough. Dr. House discovers that while he’d managed to diagnose the illness correctly, his reasons were faulty. The symptoms he’d used as the basis for his diagnosis were not caused by the disease.

“I just got lucky,” Dr. House sputtered. And then the deceased character Anne Dudek took the stage at the front of the bar and sang like Guy Lombardo.  She sang “Enjoy Yourself” in order to mock Hugh Laurie rather than to instruct or command.

Daniel, if you hang in here with me I’ll get around to divulging my secret.

Ernest Becker argued in his 1973 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death that our fear of death is innate, and that civilization itself is a heroic project created as an attempt to stave off the full realization of the dreaded fact of our transient nature. Even worse, according to Becker, is this claim: Along with a fear of death there is an attendant innate fear of life. Existence itself, as well as the threat of termination, brings anxiety.

When I last wrote to you before I mentioned that my Instagram App seemed to be a symptom of what Fredric Jameson called a “Nostalgia for the Present.”  I believe that this kind of nostalgia is a flawed attempt to ward off the anxiety that animal existence represents for us humans. We are the kinds of beings that require a collective narrative, a way of living, that will shelter us from the conscious realization of our finitude. We also need to be protected from the bewildering strangeness of this improbable world.

Anyhow, this need to create a heroic project, even if it is only a symptom of our anxiety, is what I want to discuss. I’ll send one more letter and then the ball will be firmly in your court.

Cheers,

Doug

____

Part 3: Enjoying the New Normal (3/3)

Dear Daniel,

Today everyone seems to believe that it is impossible to believe anything. We live in a disenchanted world, a world that is nothing but a series of exceptions to nonexistent rules. Everything presents itself a challenge, and this is why today’s popular blogs and magazines tell us “How to Watch Television” or “Why Flirting is Fun.” We just don’t know what’s expected of us anymore. The only basis for our lives, the only meaning we might be able to squeeze out of this world, is our individual and unique desire.  Today we’re all existentialists; we’re all of us charged with the task of creating our essences, and under such conditions the most trivial details vex us and require explanation.

In this disenchanted world the minutia of our selves dominates us. The body, the personality, the demographic category become the commanding essences of otherwise pointless lives. Today’s existentialist or nihilist masses cling to an essence based on the self. This means that they cling to all or most of the conventional narratives that define the self.

Consider this: In the long running BBC science fiction program Doctor Who there are rules. Even though the main character, a Time Lord, can visit the past or the future on a whim, he is not allowed to travel in his own personal timeline. As long as he travels outside of his own narrative, the Doctor will avoid paradoxes and strange loops. However, in the final episode for the 10th Doctor the rule is violated.

What occasions the violation? Nothing other than the Doctor’s own anxiety unto death. The 10th Doctor is irradiated in a moment of self-sacrifice and only has a short while, perhaps 20 minutes, to live. As a Time Lord, the Doctor’s death represents a transformation and not a termination. (In a clever procedure new actors can come on board in the lead role as Time Lords regenerate rather than die.) The Doctor’s face will change, his personality will be altered, his body will be transformed, but his adventure, his life, will continue.

Despite the promise of a kind of immortality the Doctor resists. Doctor Who does not go gently into that good night, but races for the Tardis, his time machine, and sets off on one last mission. In the half hour he has left the Doctor cheats and sets off downstream in his own timeline. His goal is to visit all of his previous companions, to stop in on all the people and places that mattered to him, and in the last moments of his life to set things right. He’ll say goodbye to a young woman before he originally met her, and peek in on a wedding that his Time Travelling shenanigans originally delayed. The Doctor makes himself whole before he allows himself to die.

I can tell a similar story from real life. A friend of mine had a lover who died from AIDS back in the early ‘90s. This man lived in great pain, just barely hanging on to life from his hospital bed. On his good days he spoke on the phone and made arrangements. The man had to make sure that his divorced parents saw each other again and that they forgave each other. The dying man held on long enough to see to it that his younger sister was accepted back into the family again after years of being ostracized and estranged.

In the end, this gay man who had prided himself as a person set apart from and against the mentality of the straight world found himself compelled to make the story of his own nuclear family cohere. This man could not die until that project was completed.

Neither Time Lords nor queers are immune from the normative stories of the modern world. There is no identity outside whatever space we find ourselves in. The choice lay before us is a seemingly eternal anxiety on the one hand or a false or hypocritical closure on the other.

“Well I think I may be able to help you. You see … (he goes over to armchair, puts on spectacles, sits, crosses legs and puts finger tips together)… your cat is suffering from what we vets haven’t found a word for. His condition is typified by total physical inertia, absence of interest in its ambiance — what we Vets call environment — failure to respond to the conventional external stimuli — a ball of string, a nice juicy mouse, a bird. To be blunt, your cat is in a rut. It’s the old stockbroker syndrome, the suburban fin de siËcle ennui, angst, weltschmertz, call it what you will…” — Graham Chapman, Monty Python Episode 5: Man’s Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the 20th Century.”

In the Monty Python Sketch I quoted above Graham Chapman plays a vet who diagnoses a lethargic pet cat, a Calico possibly, as suffering from angst.  He refers the cat’s owners to a company called Confuse-a-Cat Ltd. and assures them that, if their cat can be made to be confused, the cat will be restored to his previous level of vigorous and kittenish health.

Now you may well wonder, “How does one confuse a cat?” It is not as simple as hiding his ball of yarn or replacing his rubber mouse with a tarantula or a bat. What is required, what must be created, in order to break an angsty cat from his or her rut, is the creation of a recursively illusionary space.

The employees of Confuse-a-Cat Ltd. build a stage in the cat’s backyard, and then proceed to put on a bizarre and magical Punch and Judy show without puppets. A giant Penguin, Napoleon, a nude man wrapped in a towel, and a Drill Sergeant all go about popping in and out of existence.  And this trick, the illusion of a dislocated space, is enough to shake the cat from his rut.

This is what we need. We don’t need to enjoy ourselves or to make sure that our predetermined projects come off just right, but rather we need to get a sense of how our world is uncanny and unreal. We need to find or manufacture a new kind of space, a new gaze, and a new normative principle that will allow us to live with our anxiety.

As Graham Chapman said, “I hope to God it works.”

Solidarity,

Douglas Lain

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Just to mention how the word has been debased is for sure to risk appearing less than clever, and to dwell on the problem is to confess to some kind of personal failure. To write about love rather than sex and its risks, to consider (or worse champion) the sacrifice that love involves, the limits and inconveniences love imposes, to suggest that love should be sought precisely because it has nothing to do with squirting orgasms, romantic walks down wet city streets, nor the warm feeling that creeps up your spine when you hear a pop song that was a hit when you were six-years-old, is to come across like a member of the clergy maybe, or even like a hallmark card. After all, defining love as something that does not equal these other things makes love into something purely negative.

Love is not the same thing as doing it on silk sheets or on soft wet grass under a butterfly bush in your neighbor’s backyard.

Love is a word that has been debased to the point of it appearing incomprehensible except as a kind of pleasure, perhaps shared. Love is a hedonistic thrill, or it is a grey nightmare, an economic arrangement, a biological necessity, or just a lie. It’s so far from us now that in order to understand what’s gone wrong with the word we should consider another lost word in its place: “revolution.”

In the 2007 film Examined Life Michael Hardt discussed the word revolution with director Astra Taylor while rowing a canoe across Central Park Lake. He explained that in the 80s he was an activist working in solidarity with rebels in El Salvador until the rebels asked him and his friends to stop. They told him that he should go back to the US and make revolution there rather than trying to help a struggle that was not his own.

“I said to him that Reagan was in the White House and I have no idea what it would mean to make revolution in the US.  And he said, ‘Don’t you have mountains in the US?’” Michael Hardt, Examined Life, 2007

The El Salvadoran rebel told him that revolution is easy, just go to the mountains, start an armed cell, and make revolution.

Today Hardt is stuck between the idea of a coup (an insurgent movement to replace the elites) and a revolution that would be the removal of all the barriers that stop socialism from happening. However, it’s likely that a revolution wouldn’t involve either the seizure of the current State nor the perfection of what we know as democracy.  Or, to put it another way, Socialism would be both the removal of elites and the replacing of the power structures that currently appear to hinder democracy.

Returning to love for a moment, we might ask what it is that blocks us from it? Do the institutions of love, like those of representative democracy, merely need to be toppled? Should our slogans of love be: “No more romance! No more marriage! No more honeymoons! No more staining the bedsheets!” Or is romantic love inexorably entwined with romance, sex, pleasure, and domesticity? Maybe love really is already expressed in our stupid and debased everyday lives.

Think of it this way. A marriage with love is a love that risks marriage and attempts to bends it to its will.  And love, in the end, cares nothing for marriage. Love in a singles bar or dance club, is the same. Love does not exist between two hipsters working out how their outfits go together and hoping that their affair might work to their mutual advantage in some or other scene, but rather two lovers throw themselves against whatever scene they find themselves in, each in his or her own way as love demands. Finally, love between silk sheets is not the working out of one’s pleasure on the other’s body, nor is it some perfect merging of two people into one, but is maybe some kind of sacrifice.

Or maybe I’ve gone off the rails.

Let’s stick with revolution. At the end of Michael Hardt’s interview he says that the location they picked for the conversation was all wrong. Central Park Lake is too aristocratic a location to stage a talk of revolution, but he rejects other possible locations as clichéd. He rejects the background of the slums as perhaps maudlin, and claims that a factory, or the point of production, would also be clichéd. “We would see the ones who benefit from it and even the subjects and the actors who would conduct it.”

And this is where Hardt’s difficulty lies. Hardt imagines the factory floor as a site of pleasure, of the site where squirting orgasms are made while the world’s poor suffer imposed abstinence. But that’s not how it is on the shop floor.

Let’s bring revolution and love together with Woody Allen’s movie Bananas. In this film Allen’s nebbish character is kidnapped by Latin American revolutionaries and transformed, through the course of the film, into Fidel Castro. At the end of the movie, after Allen has escapes back to America, he seduces his former lover by revealing how politically engaged and transformed he has become. They get married and, on their Honeymoon, Woody Allen and Louise Lasser are featured on Howard Cosell’s ABC sports.

Cosell covers their Honeymoon consummation for his audience of sports fans. Cosell covers their antics in bed as he would a boxing match:

The two are working together closely, the action growing more rigorous. It is swift, rhythmic, coordinated. What’s that? A cut over Mellish’s right eye. The doctor comes in to examine the cut.

The site of production is currently a struggle, a daily fight where one class seeks to exploit the other, and while maybe both classes have their own moments of enjoyment this process has nothing to do with love. Love isn’t the elimination of exploitation, but perhaps the working out of this exploitation under the banner of love. Both partners are subordinated to love in some kind of revolution.

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1. Lost in Translation (2003)

Sofia Coppola has a knack for putting affluent, pretty, naive young female characters in depressing/ alienated/ against the world situations, and Lost in Translation is no exception. The movie’s so quiet and subtle that it might just be second to its soundtrack, which is just as pretty. Whatever the case, Coppola’s sophomore film definitely makes you want to look out over the Tokyo skyline in a lavish hotel at 5 a.m. while feeling melancholy and lost.

Score: 9.7/10

2. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Everyone’s totally rich in The Royal Tenenbaums, but, basically, everyone in the film is also deeply melancholy, in one sense or another. Richie loves Margot. Margot’s totally depressed. Richie tries to kill himself. I think Eli tries to kill himself. Royal fakes stomach cancer. Chas is estranged. Etc. Despite all the suffering, though, Wes Anderson manages to sustain a sense of beauty and security through affluence, and by the end of it all, you wish you were a lovesick Tenenbaum with emotional problems.

Score: 9.2/10

3. As Good As It Gets (1997)

This 1997 romantic comedy starring Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear is full of affluence and pretty intense life difficulties. Regardless, James L. Brooks – the film’s director – does a pretty good job of coating the film with a perhaps pre-twee, life-affirming sheen, if you will, wherein viewing the central characters sort of makes you wish you lived such a wealthy and affected, albeit meaningful life.

Score: 8.3/10

4. American Beauty (1999)

Now that the American middle class is crumbling, the suburbs are on their way to becoming ghettos, and 90s nostalgia has quickly taken over 80s nostalgia as the predominant emotional callback for people in their mid- to late-20s, I think it’s reasonable to say that well-off (in terms of money) suburban families like the central characters in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty are at least somewhat ‘rich.’ Admittedly, American Beauty is a little less lighthearted than the films so far mentioned, but there are some pretty tweeningful moments in American Beauty that make you want to go back to being a young, messed up 90s suburbanite.

Score: 6.3/10

5. Marie Antoinette (2006)

Maybe the seminal rich/ depressed white person movie, Sofia Coppola appears on this list yet again via her penchant for pretty female characters who have everything but are so misunderstood and repressed by adult-ish characters/ roles that they’re lacking in the most important intangible something. Obviously there’s a pattern here, and it’s difficult not to assume such characters are influenced by Coppola’s own childhood, which I assume was both opulent and alienating. Regardless, watching this beautifully quiet film, while the audience isn’t quite sure if the focus is on the film itself or, again, its melancholy soundtrack, there’s something about it that makes you wish you lived in a mansion and had nothing better to do with your time than to demand a fake farm be constructed on your property.

Score: 10/10

As with most of what is written, this essay began with a furious thought and some scribbles that tried to capture a bizarre alacrity that had come over me, and also the profound notion—which is also pompous—that I had spiked into a cosmic vein full of truth, but the worst part was that I left the place where I wrote in a notebook confident… well, humble that I had just splayed across a few lined pages some truth.

It’s an urge many of us get from time to time. I took up the pages a few hours later to transcribe. I remember my face tightened, and I turned my head to a side, and debated whether to gently take out the few pages I’d written, or to take the entire notebook outside, get the Ronson fluid out of my desk with some firecrackers, and make the day a little hotter with a small fire and some pops.

But I thought that a waste and probably would put me in a destructive and pessimistic mood for the rest of the afternoon. The other option, which is usually the better of the two, but often the harder to agree with, was to rewrite it all, and pull out the mildly useful ideas.

I wanted to write about nostalgia, about the fact that for a good portion of childhood I felt behind and in a sprint against an unstoppable current triggered by nostalgia. I felt behind because I would drift into a daydream full of people I respected, most often dead ones. The process had a kind of inferiority-like effect. I can remember it bothering friends that their idols or icons had published a book or recorded an album by a certain age, and despite a complete difference in time, they actually belittled, criticized—and worst of all—stymied a lot of their potential when they would wish to be in another time when they would have been better off concentrating on their now.

I never was behind. And that sucks to think about now, the wasted time. I should note that I was not ahead of my time, or anybody. In my case, I drifted in weird mental states that were the process for my progress as an observer. But I was not behind, as I had felt.

Nostalgia is a weird bitch of a thing, which is why I want to write this. I can see many long-time friends who I think are caught up in something like it. Stuck in times and aiming for successes that logically can’t be reached, and shouldn’t be aimed at. An example that kept paralyzing friends in the 1990s was the Beat period. For whatever reason, that period prevailed as an example of lifestyles and work ethics to aim for.

The trick is that nostalgia has an important place in our lives. The adventures we slip into that involve longing for the past inspire dreams and generate the same ancient energy and dust that made up the characters and ideas of the first stories, that brightened cave walls, and patterned Mammoth hides. But nostalgia, if unchecked, can drag a person down, can gain unreasonable control of a person’s emotions, and can make them miserable.

Some feel nostalgia for high school, for college, for camps, for first loves or second houses or third spouses. Some wistfully want to go back to an era of protest and meaningful discourse, like the 1960s. And some even feel nostalgia for eras that haven’t ever existed—The Lord of the Rings is a good example.

Nostalgia is threaded into the same kinds of emotion that send young men, and now women as well, to war. The curious condition men fell into during wartime, the yearning for glory and fame that Wilfred Owen countered and bleakly revealed as the ridiculous horror of war with his poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. “The old lie; it is good and sweet to die for one’s country.” Men went to war, slaves to the manipulant fingers of honor, running into bullets and leaving widows, lovers, and fatherless children to maintain their realities ruined by fantastic notions. Nostalgia is as powerfully felt an emotion as honor, or valor, or glory, or fame. And just as dangerous.

I experienced a bout of nostalgia last weekend when I saw the Woody Allen film, Midnight In Paris. The feeling was odd, a kind of kick that my heart walloped against my brain. I felt the pangs of regret and intense self-critical thought that accompany such moods, and caught myself criticizing past decisions that led me to the apparent “spot” I’d trapped myself in. Again, counterproductive.

I wanted to be a part of a creative hub like Paris in the 1920s. That period in Paris was a time of wild creativity, much of it a natural reaction to the terror and emotional drain of The Great War, as it was known before the Second World War. It was a central hub for conversation and philosophy and creation, in general. That part of the world, at that time, hosted people who changed how the Western world thought. It seemed a place that a wild thinker could go and hone ideas and share work and compete.

I began to feel that most people do not live in an environment that fosters people of creative ilk. And, that the fact was an axiom for however long humanity will lope around. I felt nostalgia for the excitement of those times, an entire decade that seemed to take place just before nightfall and just before dawn. This, of course, ignores the fact that their time was probably not much more exciting than now. We just prefer to look back through history, pick a period of time that appeals to us, and then compare that time with the now.

This was wrong. The effect of nostalgia taken too seriously, allowed too much emotional control. If I thought all the time that I could not live now with the vivid energy of the people I had in mind, denizens of Paris in the 1920s, then I would act as a miserabalist, and fail to recognize the brilliant people and places around. There are creative hubs everywhere. Producing the same energies that artists in Paris in the 1920s painted and wrote and thought with.

Nostalgia reduces smart men and women to defeatists that end up making life that much harder for their friends, family, and acquaintances.

So, cherish bizarre alacrity. It exists everywhere when you stop juxtaposing your life with icons. Slipping into nostalgia is good and healthy, and reminds us of our laurels, that seems true. To get stuck in a dream for a little too long is not shameful, because when it passes you have the wonderful chance to iconoclast and restructure how you look at the world around. With nostalgia checked you think of more, and flow through life along something of a sine curve, let’s say, rather than a straight axis. The ups and downs, when moderate, define the width of one’s capacity for thought. For instance, you see more of a crowd of people if you wander it in curved paths, rather than just straight through.

The movie isn’t really necessary to explain, because like any other Woody Allen movie, it was wistful, mildly more provocative than eating an avocado, and yet somehow funny while never really reaching any definitive point.

Like many, I spent a good deal of youthful time dreaming. Once I grew to a sexual age, the dreaming subsided slightly, and then more and more with the bitter realities of adulthood. I would never give up what I have learned: that strife and fear and a twisted heart are all feelings worth understanding and worth knowing how to control. That last sentence I would not be able to write, were I enveloped in nostalgia for my childhood. Yes, the innocence of children is endearing, but they will grow, and we need to know how to help them do that.

I’ll leave off with this thought: one day, people my age will have to take the place of the current creators and teachers. This is important for several reasons. Nostalgia keeps people from paying attention to the present. And having groups of people interested in teaching and creation—such as the artistic circles of 1920s Paris—makes life a lot more interesting, and fun in spite of the shit and grime.

The artistic circles back then were the centers of the Western world. Our population exploded outward like a firecracker puffing a blowfish. But we have the same kinds of circles, perhaps with less impact, because they seem about as jarringly ineffective as watered whisky, or half-decaf café.

I spent a long time wallowing in a myopic mood that focused only on the thought that there will be no Dubliners or Gatsby or Stein, or groups of excitedly limber minds in our time that will delve through life and figure parts of it out… an ignorant and dumb mood, but important to recognize. I lacked a counter mood in my mind. I have not yet been able to put it better than Scott Fitzgerald in his essay, The Crack Up, so here it is:

… let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

With the bit of luck I have, I’m no longer dumb enough to think that I can end this essay with some line that will inspire. Crave understanding of weird moments, opposed ideas, and nostalgia. And, try to be a friend and family to family and friends… and an artist to everyone else.

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He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not (À la folie… pas du tout) (2002, dir. Laetitia Colombani)

Watch Angelique’s (Audrey Tautou) obsessive tendencies. Relate. Once the film’s point of view shifts and presents Angelique’s lover’s outlook, reevaluate crushing behavior. Walk away considering the possibility that there’s a reason you get too infatuated with people. It’s okay, you might just be crazy. Now go see a psychiatrist.

Anything Else (2003, dir. Woody Allen)

Despite Amanda Chase’s (Christina Ricci) baggage (an eating disorder and a mother who crashes at her apartment), boyfriend Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs) sees past these idiosyncrasies and sincerely tries to make things work. Why’d I put this on the list and not Annie Hall or Manhattan? Because although this isn’t Allen’s best, it’s one of his few recent films that features an actress like Christina Ricci who, unlike Scarlett Johansson, isn’t the conventional Hollywood babe. Refreshing.

Closer (2004, dir. Mike Nichols)

As much as you think you love someone, overcoming sexual desire is often the true test of commitment. Lust and temptation interfere with two couples’ relationships when Dan (Jude Law), Anna (Julia Roberts), Alice (Natalie Portman) and Larry’s (Clive Owen) lives intertwine. This film hardly focuses on the lovey-dovey; it’s instead concerned with innate carnality and forbidden sex and its aftermath.

Shopgirl (2005, dir. Anand Tucker)

Mirabelle (Claire Danes), moves to Los Angeles with artistic aspirations but instead becomes a sales girl. She falls for both an older businessman, Ray Porter (Steve Martin), and an unsuccessful musician, Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman). Shots of Mirabelle in her apartment capture the mundane, bleak feeling of not only living alone but of being alone. It’s nice to be reminded that life can be really boring without having someone to share it with.

Broken English (2007, dir. Zoe R. Cassavetes)

Resist making an OK Cupid account. Nora (Parker Posey), proves there’s hope for the anxious, self deprecating, and old. After terrible luck with men, Nora unexpectedly meets a younger, sexy, French man, Julien (Melvil Poupad) who she’s skeptical to open up to. Nora’s several breakdowns suggest it’s hard to maintain a stable relationship if you can’t accept yourself or the possibility of someone else accepting you. Broken English is the kick in the butt you need to stop being so down on yourself.

It’s midnight and all the ghosts of the (over-)satiated partakers of a moveable feast haunt the streets of Paris. A romantic roams the rainy corridors in search of a séance. Unhappily stuck in a rigid engagement with a consumerist zombie and a vampire as a soon-to-be father-in-law, Gil seeks to parley with spirits and channel the atmosphere of Paris in the ‘20s.  He finds himself enamored with Fitzgerald (F and Z), Hemingway, Stein, Eliot, Barnes, Picasso, Dali, Buñuel, etc., which, in the film, is chalked up to his romanticization of the time period and deep nostalgia for an age in which his life would make sense, be meaningful. But perhaps this reading of the film is a bit too easy.

Of course in some ways the film is about accepting the “modern” condition and giving up romantic notions of eras past. Isn’t that indicative though of something larger than waking from a children’s fairy tale? That waking implies a shaking off of the paralysis of slumber, a compulsion to act, to exert “free will,” to make choices. And what exactly is the nature of the fairy tale of the moveable feast? Is it not only a petty bourgeois fantasy, but also a place in which every figure’s choice to pursue the path of art is facilitated by society and nearly always successful? I would posit that the throwing off of romanticization is only a secondary effect of the fundamental moment of the film, which is the chance.

Midnight in Paris revolves around this chance, the opportunity presented to a person to exercise free will in the only true sense of the term, to become something other than the self that they have crystallized (read: rigidified, or petrified) into. Gil has been captured, stratified, subjugated, and written over. His life has become so rigid, so habitual, predictable, and systematized that he is only really living in the technical (and organic) sense of the word. Gil’s world and actions are dictated to him. He must delight in 18,000 euro lawn chairs; he must sip his wine and disdain the fruity, rather than smoky, flavor playing across his palate; he must know and care deeply about the mistresses of Rodin and the underappreciated ways that Monet serves as progenitor to abstract expressionism; he must dress, dine, shop, converse, dance, repeat ad inf. And none of these actions are truly chosen. He doesn’t freely will himself to fall into these habits. They overcode him, are prescribed to him, he is subjugated by them, they are his dictators. It is possible that at some distant point in the past he has exercised free will once here or twice there, when the chance presented itself to him to escape, to take a line of flight, but that’s it.

As Sartre spent a lifetime explaining, the chance is terrifying. The affirmation of free will and the subsequent necessity to act (rather than simply react) is a near unbearable pressure and can create a profound sense of dread. It is difficult to take the chance, and this is precisely why the artists of the 1920’s are so romanticized in Gil’s imagination. Each of them successfully takes the chance, follows a line of flight and escapes from the daily routines and habits of a zombified life. Each of them chooses to make art and does so successfully (for one of the scariest possibilities is leaving behind a rigid shell of a life only to have another one grow on your back and pin you down once more, and possibly more firmly than before). Each of these artists forgoes the prescriptions and stratifications of their time, sacrifices habit and cliché, and begins to truly act rather than simply react to the things the world throws their way.

In the end, Gil makes a freely willed choice to live art. Or, in other words, to follow lines of flight, initiate becoming after becoming, pass from rigid shell to rigid shell (never becoming too attached or pinned down), bringing a force of deterritorialization to every reterritorialization that ensues. Gil chooses to become-painter, become-writer, become-romantic, become-foreign, become-modern, become-woman, become-child, become-animal, become-molecular, become-intense. In short, instead of wedding the single and rigid life presented to himself in the form of a zombie wife and kids in Malibu with a tea-sucking vampire of a father-in-law, Gil chooses plural lives, many of them, all of different shapes, sizes, sorts, speeds and varieties, all with different prescriptions, paths, feelings and affects, thoughts and opinions. Gil will remain vitally alive, on his toes, becoming a woman when he takes Djuna Barnes’ hand to dance, becoming a child when he hears Cole Porter’s voice on vinyl, becoming an artist when he takes up his pen, and becoming an intense and sensual lover when he beds Parisian men and women. In a way, Gil becomes Baudelaire’s dazzling soul.

And this theme is in no way confined to Midnight in Paris. The chance is a common element of Woody Allen’s oeuvre. A large swath of his films might be considered different repetitions of the chance presenting itself (and subsequently a person either exercising free will and following a line of flight or hitting the snooze button and returning to a “dogmatic slumber”). The chance presents itself (rather explicitly) and free will is affirmed in Anything Else, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Cassandra’s Dream, Whatever Works, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Bullets over Broadway, and Shadows and Fog; it is to large extents denied in Vicky Christina Barcelona, Match Point, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. And while the chance may not figure prominently into other Allen films, the consequences of letting oneself slip into a stratified life, of giving oneself over to habitual bondage, is a near constant figure in his works. All of this should come as no surprise since Allen draws so heavily on the post-theistic and self-proclaimed existentialist works of Ingmar Bergman, but for me, Allen has always stood alone in his probings of existentialist dread and free will. These themes give themselves over to tragedy quite well, but to work through some of the deepest and most painful thoughts of the human condition in comedy is, for me, always a grander task.

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