Written at Midnight in Paris

On a whim tonight, some friends and I went to see Woody Allen's latests film, Midnight in Paris. We're in Paris, the film is in Paris. We're studying expatriate writers from the 20s, the film characterizes expatriate writers from the 20s. We are surrounded by beautiful surrealist, impressionist, and cubist artwork, the film portrays these artists. Really, this film could not have been released at a better time.

It was actually quite a metaphysical experience. At one point, there was a screen shot of the very theatre we were sitting in. The Parisians didn't seem as moved by this experience as we were--I assume they are accustomed to seeing their hometown on the silver screen regularly--but to us it was as if all the pieces of the puzzle were finally falling together.

Even though the film was about appreciating your life and the time you live in (because living in the past is a form of escapism that produces nothing) it still romanticized the city. Hemingway would say that it was not true and brave. But then again, Hemingway wasn't as straightforward as he claimed to be. Personally, I think it's fine to romanticize Paris, because the city is glorious. It is passionate, and you can feel it pulsing through you as you walk its streets. It's not the way you feel New York City. There, you see it, you hear it; your senses are overloaded and you are in the center of the collision of American culture. In Paris you smell it, you touch it, it becomes the study beat of your heart, the rise and fall of your breath, the light clip-clop of your heel on the cobblestones.

Maybe I am romanticizing it because that is what I have been trained to do by films and songs and stories. But I doubt that I could do so this strongly if there weren't some truth in it.

If we want the truth--rather, if you want the truth, because I know I want the truth, I just don't know if I can reach it-- I romanticize every foreign place I travel to. As an unknown land, it is full of possibilities. There is no reality to stop me. I can meet a handsome, kind, and funny stranger that will lead me through the city and teach me its secrets. I can become lost in the crevices of the map for hours, seeing things that only surrealists could surmise, before inexplicably encountering my residence. I could become entranced by a painting and stare at it for hours. I could become an artist's muse, live in a cafe, write a novel, learn to bake a croissant. To romanticize here is no different, except that I am not alone in doing so.

I, like Gil in the movie, want to share a kiss along the River Seine, or find someone to walk along with me at night in the rain. I want someone to stare at old paintings imagining quirky stories for the figures with me. I want someone to lie in the garden Tuilleries and share a bottle of wine with, as we watch the others pass by, lost in love or games or their thoughts.

Perhaps, what really makes Paris so romantic is that because so many people have this impression of the city they let their guards down, and then the magical, which they always deemed impossible, can slip out of the box we have labelled "For Dreams Only," and became the truth we desire.