I'm anything but a film scholar. Nor am I even a very consistent watcher of movies (frequently I skip forward to juicier bits; often I am glazed with sweat and exertion while viewing from the stationary bike or, even worse, the bobble-head torment of the "dreadmill"). There are torrents of reviews gushing (and a few not so gush-y) about Midnight, and I have zero pretension of adding to that deluge. It's personal: lately I've been very sad at the state of the world, both in the earthly sense (solar explosions, terrifying climatic changes) and in the more abstract and man-made ones (poisonous interracial and interfaith hatred, murder, the continuing, incomprehensible absurdities of global finance). All my doom-and-gloom made watching this movie a genuinely memorable experience, my thoughts on which I'd just like to record for my future self.
I've always found Woody Allen movies kind of...creepy. No doubt part of that is an (unfair?) overlap between his screen explorations of his psychic issues, especially regarding women and sex, and how he's chosen to live those issues out. Sure, I enjoyed Hannah and Her Sisters and Love and Death, but The Purple Rose of Cairo, for instance, just made me so uncomfortable that I'd had to stop a quarter-hour into things.
Midnight has a lot of the familiar Woody Allen elements. It's a movie that, in the space of less than ten minutes, unleashes doppelgangers of Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and Cole Porter on the audience in a frantic onslaught that, for some reason, makes me think of dueling Pokemon.*
Don't pretend you didn't see it coming.
In other words, folks, the forecast is for a veritable hailstorm of name-dropping. Moreover, there's a good dose of the same je ne sais quoi neurosis that has so irked me. Actually, no, I do know what that neurosis is--a panting, sweaty-palmed lust for beautiful, mysteriously charismatic women who for some reason or other always seem to fall for the typical Allen protagonist: brilliant, hopelessly romantic doofuses. I mean, I'm all for panting lust and beautiful women and all, but what starts getting weird about the Allen brand of this lies in, I think , two factors:
(1) Woody Allen playing "Mary Sue"** and using his film as art-therapy for his Issues...as himself
(2) Disguising the deeply earthy core of those sexually charged Issues with a heavy varnish of romanticism and jokey self-deprecation, a vast Freudian bonbon
And Midnight was so much more appealing than Allen's preceding variations on this theme precisely for its revision of these elements. For one, Owen Wilson does a great job replacing the Allen Marty Stu, especially with the way he produces his lines, speaking as if with marbles in his cheeks, lumpily and artlessly. Seeing Allen hit the replay button for his own benefit again and again, living out his erotic fantasies, an eternal (though not ever-youthful) interloper--why buy a movie ticket (or more likely, waste bandwidth streaming a movie) when one can get more than enough of that kind of psychological masturbation in the Fanfic-verse?
Second, Midnight turns the chocolate bonbon inside-out: it's all about, ultimately, the need to recognize and deal first with the thick, difficult, and disturbing outer shell of earthy, physical desire before hitting the core of idealism, higher purpose, and spiritual love that is--and should, and must be-- at the center of everything.
**Spoilers!**
In breaking off his relationship with his fianceé, in his "minor revelation" that there is always a more halcyon past to imagine returning to (then bidding the woman of his love/lust farewell), and in choosing at last to reside in and make do with the present world first, instead of giving priority to fantasy, this is a perfect movie for dark days.
**/Spoilers!**
In a world of fleshly desires doomed to remain forever unsatisfied, of pain, of fear and regret and guilt, Midnight tells us that more fulfilling choice is to refuse to give these things up for a fantasy of perfection. We have to put the world, if only slightly, ahead of our dreams--because without the world, what can dreams really mean? It would be a self-satisfied illusion, a perennial quest for a golden age that never was. There's nothing really wrong with that quest, because that is what being human is about, but we can't afford to forget that we have edged the past in gilt and glamor ourselves.
And that's where the historians come in. (cue heavy metal anthem)
*"I choose you, T.S. Eliot! Use your Mystical Oriental Allusions Attack!" Oh what I would not give to see such a thing.
**Or rather, a Marty Stu (as the diabolically delightful TV Tropes sinkhole-of-productivity explains, there's considerable controversy about the term, but poor Mary/Marty is basically an authorial avatar injected for purposes of wish fulfillment, most frequently in the black, bleak depths of the Fan-verse).
