Midnight In Paris
The upcoming month of September, 2011 marks the ten year anniversary of a tragic event that forever upended life in America, leaving our reality forever and irrevocably altered. I’m speaking, of course, of the now infamous fracas between Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey over her selection of his novel The Corrections for the Oprah Book Club. A cursory summary of the events: On September 5, 2001, Franzen’s publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux released an initial print run of 90,000 copies of The Corrections. In no way similar to sprawling, difficult work such as William Gaddis’ The Recognitions to which its title bears superficial resemblance, the book is a highly readable affair, an ensemble family drama dealing with rough but ultimately redeemed contours of mid-thirties male consciousness. With generally favorable reviews, blurbs by notables like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, and early appearances on some bestseller lists, Franzen appeared poised to become the latest entry to the genial canon of “postmodern fiction” established on college campuses in the late 80s and 90s when he came of age. After spotty sales of Franzen’s first two novels, The Corrections was shaping up to be a success. It would free him to continue his preferred mode of writing while earning a living doing so (he has publicly stated that he dislikes teaching), and allow him to consolidate the respect of his publishing world associates and literary peers.
All of this changed one fateful day in September. After reading the novel, Oprah Winfrey concluded that it would resonate with her audience. Plus, a little literary prestige wouldn’t hurt her either, especially since the novel was so, well, readable. The September 24th announcement that The Corrections would be included in the Book Club was a boon for book sales projections. New York magazine reported on November 5, 2001 that after the Oprah-announcement “publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux called for another 680,000 copies, 500,000 of which Jeff Seroy, FSG’s publicist, attributes directly to Oprah.” Remarkably, this staggering figure left little impression on the cold, conflicted Franzen. On October 12, The Oregonian published some of Franzen’s remarks:
“The first weekend after I heard, I considered turning it down…I feel like I’m solidly in the high art literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood.”
No longer anxious about economic survival, and perhaps slightly worried about being “misunderstood”, interviews reveal that Franzen’s overriding concern was whether the British literary establishment would take his latest novel seriously upon publication in the United Kingdom. Would the reviews say anything beyond the perfunctory pleasantries issued for his first two books? Oprah’s stamp of approval, which Franzen on several occasions referred to as a “corporate logo”, might help his bottom line, but it would be disastrous for his reputation as a purveyor of serious intellectual writing, particularly across the pond. In the series of now legendary foot-in-mouth episodes for which he only last year enacted a public reconciliation, Franzen insulted Oprah’s taste and previous picks, alienating and offending both her and her viewers in the process. On October 22, Oprah rescinded her invitation to have Franzen appear on the show, diplomatically claiming that she never wished to make Franzen feel “uncomfortable.”
In November 2001, the book was published in the UK and met with generally favorable reviews that failed to consider the work outside the context of this debacle.
Ten years later, Jonathan Franzen’s cavalier dismissal of Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, its implied preoccupation with a specific, target audience’s reception, and disregard for what promised to be a not-marginal increase in sales strikes us mostly as quaint. In his earnest pantomime of the familiar antagonism between the “high-literary tradition” and commerce, the gesture we witnessed was really the last dying gasp of disinterest in monetary success and disdain for mass acceptance as a key signifiers of qualification for any so-called “high aesthetic” realm, the literary appendix of which Franzen so fervently wished to join. Or to put it another way, in most cases it is no longer a meaningful, or even decipherable social gesture to snub a revenue stream. Given our current economic conditions, the refusal of compensation for one’s work appears inscrutable, not principled. This is a significant shift in the prevailing attitude of the 1990s, which I argue reached its conclusion with the Franzen episode of 2001.
In 2011, a typical work of contemporary fiction sells a fraction of the 90,000 copies slated for unloading by FSG in 2001. For recording artists getting a start, a pressing of 200 records isn’t quite a “limited edition” the way privately pressed record from the 60s or 70s were. Musicians with steady incomes either churn out innocuous tracks featuring fifth generation copy Karen Dalton inspired vocals to sell domestic goods and automobiles, slavishly make the rounds of corporate parties and festivals, or if all else fails, revive their 90s bands. There are exceptions of course, but as a wise man somewhere once said, these are the exceptions that prove the rule. For the former individuals, one can safely assume that existential quandaries are not present whilst depositing that check from Subaru, Jack Daniel’s or wherever at their local bank. Yes, the economic landscape has changed for most of us, and it seems everyone is all too aware of the attendant struggle. At least everyone except one charming seventy-something filmmaker from Brooklyn.
In his latest film, Woody Allen takes us back in time, but not exclusively to the 1920s as promised. Echoes of the less economically dire but more philosophically confused, ethically conflicted 1990s lurk everywhere beneath the surface of Midnight In Paris. Mr. Allen has been hard at work for 40+ years cranking out intelligent mass entertainment (to distract himself from imminent death he often claims), so we can excuse him for not getting the memo that in the past decade, the game has changed so to speak. Instead, we get the same pop-Kierkegaardian existential dilemmas Woody Allen has been proffering for decades, and indeed continues to, despite material conditions changing mostly for the worse.
This time we have Owen Wilson as Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter with ambiguous, insecure feelings regarding his own literary aspirations. The drama turns on two central tropes of Kierkegaardian philosophy that should be familiar even to those only casually acquainted with Woody Allen’s films: Does Gil possess the courage to sacrifice security in pursuit of a higher aim? And as a subset of this question, will his engagement to the square, status-oriented Inez (portrayed by Rachel McAdams), like Kierkegaard’s to his beloved Regina Olsen, be broken in the process?
On the surface, Gil is a romantic given to wander the streets of Paris, which he finds “most beautiful in the rain.” But Gil’s romantic impulses are fraught with anxiety. He’s worried he’s a “Hollywood hack”, but his wish to change course and chuck security for his writerly dream is in desperate need of validation. Gil’s fiancee and in-laws can’t provide this: they think he’s a little off, but as long as he’s earning a comfortable living they do not care a wit about the quality or content of his work. This rankles Gil, sending him into an old-school Woody Allen style crisis, which Owen Wilson portrays with the affable, disarmingly light touch that has become his calling card. The cartoonish set of 1920s ex-pat writers and artists emerge as a device through which Allen represents a locus of Authority capable of bestowing a stamp of artistic approval upon Gil. Bolstered by Hemmingway’s caricatured machismo (played with aplomb by Cory Stoll) and a hilarious discussion with a the Surrealists, Gil works up the nerve to transgress social convention the way “artists” are expected to, culminating with a bungled attempt at an illicit affair with Picasso’s former mistress Adriana. Gil finds an old book that mentions the earrings she had worn when they consummated the affair, and attempts unsuccessfully to steal his fiancee’s earrings to bring about this end. With his desires frustrated and his morals lapsed, Gil’s courtship of Adriana is left unfulfilled: the two share a kiss before she goes permanently to dwell in her own Golden Age at Maxim’s of the Belle Époque.
Melancholic, Gil returns to Gertrude Stein’s and receives from her a moderately favorable review of his book, and is triumphantly assured of his status as a real writer. However, in a strange trick that defies narrative logic, Stein also mentions that she does not find it plausible that one character in the book can’t see that the female character (this supposedly in a book that Gil wrote) is having an affair with a friend. Gil confronts Inez and it is revealed to be true: she has spent a couple of nights with her pompous pseudo-intellectual friend Paul while Gil was out time-traveling. The engagement is broken, and Gil is briefly dejected but ultimately consoled by the fact that he is, after all, a serious writer.
Interestingly, it is not through evidence of any foreseeable compensation for his book that Gil enacts the categorical leap from Hollywood hack to real writer (compare this to the more satirical transformation-to-artist narrative Allen offers as a subplot in Whatever Works). Allen rarely depicts becoming an artist as a material transaction. Rather, it is via implied membership to an imaginary aesthetic symbolic realm that the aspiring artist is psychologically freed to carry on with his or her endeavors. The Gil character of Midnight In Paris ends up living in the manner Hemmingway would approve of, free to follow his desires (Id) without any further inhibition or stricture (Superego). Or to put it in Kierkegaard’s terms, the Aesthetic Stage of life has been reconciled with the Ethical, and Gil’s anxieties are temporarily abated. Whereas Kierkegaard wrote poetic, pseudonymous philosophical fragments under the tutelage of the divine, Gil walks around Paris and sits in cafes. The film ends with Gil purchasing a record as a souvenir of his 20s sojourn from Gabrielle, a Parisian street vendor of 78 RPM discs (who, it must be said, appearance-wise is a far cry from your usual lot of 78 dealer/collectors depicted in film and bourn out by experience; as such she would in all likelihood be as rare as the copy of Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman” coveted by Steve Buscemi’s character in Ghost World). The two of them walk together in the rain, and presumably she will become the muse of his next writing project, perhaps a short piece about falling in love to a backdrop of crisp dance records from the 1930s.
The film is well-written and clever enough, but it succeeds despite cultural lag: the source of Gil’s self-doubt is about as anachronistic as the 1920s fashion gleefully rendered in the film. I would hazard a guess that post-2007, those doing well financially in Hollywood and everywhere else are probably quite content with their station- not too worried about “serious writing” and on the verge of chucking it all. However, only ten years ago, the relative cultural value of a lucrative market position was being clumsily called into question by Franzen and others. This pose took a vanishing baseline of material support for granted, assuming that for example, the 90,000 books which once represented modest sales would persist as a stable level for the foreseeable future, a frame error to be sure.
The disturbing conclusion is that in stagnant economic times, revenue seeking as a primary objective for the artist becomes even more necessary, and hence irreproachable, across the board. The result is a mirror image of the shrinking middle-class phenomenon visible elsewhere, whereby access to scarce funding is even less egalitarian ever. Across disciplines and media, adequate compensation for any given individual artist now dovetails nicely into the larger project of wealth redistribution in favor of top earners, and consolidation of cultural influence for powerful institutions, the corporation being the paradigmatic example. It is no wonder that class-conscious art is relegated to marginal status in this country, if it is even able to exist at all. This leaves us with a difficult middle course to chart: accept that one’s work will at times be situated in an unwanted, potentially degraded context, or find refuge in whatever version of the “underground” is available, a kind of destitute microcosm in which competition still rules over any collectivist ethic, only work takes much longer to be completed. For the running time of Midnight In Paris however, no such complications arise. Woody Allen’s construction of an imaginary trans-historical aesthetic pantheon might come to us already a bit out of date, but considering the filmmaker’s body of work, and his singular place as one of the most prolific mediators of serious craft and comedic entertainment in cinema, this can be forgiven.
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