Memory and Nostalgia in Woody Allens "Midnight in Paris"

Abstract

Abstract: Woody Allen´s recent "Midnight in Paris" describes a Paris that has as many identities as there are observers to ascribe them. Indeed, there is no one, true Paris that everyone objectively shares; Paris, in Allen´s film, exists only in the phenomenology of the observers perception, a perception often marred and made unreliable by an escapist need to withdraw from the present in order to take shelter in a glorified, utopian past. Allen thus criticizes the nostalgic impulse, the "Golden-Age thinking" (as it is called in the film) that forces various characters simultaneously to inhabit two worlds, that of a prelapsarian past and that of the fallen present. His protagonist´s journey back and forth between the present and the idealized Roaring Twenties is everyman´s journey, the sometimes surreal voyage between reality and imagination, between the world actually inhabited and the world artificially constructed for oneself. Yet it is when Allen´s protagonist finally discovers nostalgia within his nostalgia, a longing within his longing, that he recognizes the flawed thinking behind his almost mythologized perception of the past, reflecting everyman´s realization that the past is ultimately the expression of our present needs.