The Artist: More than Just a Valentine to Old Hollywood

Leave it to the French to pen a beautiful cinematic love letter to black and white silent films in The Artist. Have you seen it yet? I've seen it twice, and I have the soundtrack in regular rotation. I'd go see it a third time. I left the theater feeling infinitely better than I did before. For two glorious hours, I forgot about my troubles and stress.



The Artist is set between 1929 and 1932 and the Stock Market crash occurs during the film, yet people still flock in droves to the movies as escapism. I'm in the midst of Amor Towles' debut novel Rules of Civility, set in 1938 in New York City, and something he said in an interview struck a chord with me as I've been very drawn to old Hollywood films in the past year.

"It was a tough time for the country, we all understand that, but one of the interesting things about the thirties was as that was playing out - in that decade - was all of the Fed Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies...If you look at the seven most important Marks Brothers movies, Night at the Opera, and Duck Soup and Day at the Races, they were all from that decade. And swing music. So here's this period where people were losing their wealth and dispossessed and unemployed - very tumultuous timing - yet some of the most glamour sort of happy go lucky aspects of American culture history were happening simultaneously. It turns out there was a great appetite for getting lost in glamour at that time and the artistic community responded in kind. It was very different in Germany where you get German expressionism came out of that crisis and you know they were in crisis. Where we came from outerspace, you'd listen to swing music and you wouldn't guess this was a tough time for the country."

It's interesting to reflect now how the artistic community is responding to the economic turbulence. Hollywood is in a sentimental mood. Michelle Williams' brilliant turn as Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris which wistfully remembers the artistic creativity of Paris in the 1920s with Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald among its players. Even Meryl Streep's role as Margaret Thatcher, who like her politics or not, broke down barriers.

Overall, though, I don't understand our tabloid reality television culture and why amidst the economic woes we've gone down that road. I'll take the glamour highway over reality road myself. How much is shock value disguised as "art?" If aliens landed from outerspace in 2012, what would our culture say about us?

Like Owen Wilson's character in Midnight in Paris, Gil who was a writer who so longed to be in the midst of a thriving arts culture, George Valentin, the silent film actor in The Artist, is overwhelmed, and often depressed, by the fast moving world around him, which is so different than the one he knew and loved. It was a world he took for granted until it so rapidly altered. I think that's why I related to it so much. When he saw what "talkies" were going to look like, he wanted no part of it. If that's the future, you can have it, he told his manager.

When I look around in our new intrusive world of socially rude and addictive behavior with handheld phones with internet, the slow death of real books and book stores, Facebook (sorry, I go with my sister's name for it: Stalkerbook!), I feel the same way: if that's the future, you can have it. I miss going out for a nice meal without everyone having a device by their glass of wine or ignoring the person they went to the movie with. When Borders existed. When having "friends" wasn't a numbers game. A friend and fellow writer said to me, "I don't like the way our society is going." I don't like it either sometimes.

Thank goodness I have films like The Artist to escape to.

A Letter on Paris and the Past

"The old man caught my attention...'Do you know...the single biggest regret of old age...It's nothing to do with making more money or taking better care of the old body...The old folk say their biggest single regret is not having taken more risks.'" - Keith Donohue, Centuries of June.

Dear readers,

I hope this letter finds you well, and that you have wonderful food to nourish your body and soul, books stirring your imagination, and you are taking a slower pace now the summer is in full swing.

I've enjoyed the first sweet corn of the season, a peach sorbet cone on a steamy July night, and I've just started Stephanie Cowell's Marrying Mozart, which I found at a thrift shop for 25 cents and my mother and a coworker already borrowed and devoured. When I see so many people mindlessly scrolling through Facebook statuses on their phones, I think how much more fun it is to be with young Mozart in Mannheim. The modern impulse to project or follow emotions constantly in real time isn't for me. Real time is fast moving, slipping out of our hands, too precious.

I've been thinking a lot about the line about taking more risks. What risks do you wish you had taken? Reflect on them silently, or share them out loud. Is it too late? Famed French singer Edith Piaf sang how she regretted nothing, but I think most people have some regrets.

I wish I had lived in Paris, even for a semester of school or for a year. I've lived in New Jersey my entire life. I slept walked through my twenties through a boring job in suburbia I didn't like and a series of bad relationships (not abusive, just time-wasting relationships). I sadly consider my twenties my lost decade. If I had a life do-over, I would trying something brash like living in Paris. A week's vacation there several years ago wasn't enough time to fully explore her soul.


Owen Wilson's character Gil in the film Midnight in Paris wanted to live there too. Unable to cope with the present, Gil, a writer, keeps time traveling back to Paris of the 1920s, where he encounters F. Scott Fitzgerald and his tormented wife Zelda, Hemingway, and other great writers as well as painters of the era. Of course, many of his heroes have their own demons. Demons transcend time. But who can blame him for wanting to be part of a thriving arts culture and one not focused on Keeping Up with the Joneses or living life for appearance's sake?

I too feel unable to cope with the present sometimes and wish I lived in another time, before reality television, texting and phones out everywhere (including among the Kindergarten set now). I went to hear historian David McCullough talk about Americans who moved to Paris between 1830 to 1900 in The Greater Journey. He spoke of how people went to Paris to excel not for ambition for money or power, but to excel in their fields: medicine, writing, painting, and such. Why don't we want to excel as individuals in our lives even just to better ourselves? He spoke of the idea of people passing on what they learned in Paris back in the states. Why don't we embrace of the idea of cultivating knowledge and passing it on?

In addition to wanting a better arts culture, Wilson's Gil couldn't cope with his materialistic fiancee and her parents, shopping for possessions for a house not even bought yet and Gil worrying about how he'd pay for it all. He'd have to take writing jobs he'd hate to maintain a lifestyle society tells him is required. How many of us do that? How many instead of rejecting what society tells us is needed work excessively to get it? I'd rather work less and make less money and live without things (cable, expensive clothes and bags, upgrading home interiors and electronics, etc.) and have time for my books, my passions, my ideas. Even if I had a lot of money, those things aren't so desirable to me. Gil craved ideas - those can't be bought in a store.

I want a mysterious car to pick me up in the midnight hour and go back in time. Do you?

Perhaps it's human nature to want to go back. A character Gil encounters thinks the era he so idolizes is nothing special - she longs for the era of La Belle Époque. Go back then? Those crave to live among the artistic geniuses of the Renaissance era. We need to make peace with the era we are born with (at least I do). But we can say no to ideas and things society thrusts on us.

Warmly,
Catherine

PS- since it's Bastille Day this week, and Paris is so on my mind, I think I shall do a few French-themed posts.