Braudy's "Illusion of Reality" and Midnight in Paris

Owen Wilson stars in Woody Allen's Midnight in paris (2011) as a troubled screenwriter looking for inspiration on his novel. Wilson, ironically, isn't someone we would call an "intellectual," yet his character strives to become enlightened. Woody Allen sprinkles little ironies throughout the film, like Owen Wilson's casting, potentially to call attention to the viewer. Out of the many situations throughout the film that have ironic and subtle humor, I would like to talk about one scene in particular that, I would imagine, gets overlooked repeatedly. In one scene, Owen Wilson realizes that he is in 1920s Paris with the Fitzgerald's and Hemingway, and he decides to follow them to a club/cafe with stylized music and dancing. While everyone celebrates and has a good time, he sits motionless, jaw agape. It looks like he is either having some sort of epiphany or he's lost all control of his muscular functions. All it takes for the "illusion of reality" to work is the viewer's belief in the reality created by the filmmaker. And all the filmmaker has to do is turn on the projector. Gil (Owen Wilson) represents this "infantile state" that we undergo when watching film when he sees his idols before his own eyes. Other moments throughout the film support this argument, such as moments in which different characters state how pictures cannot capture experience like experience itself, including when Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Gil talk about Picasso's painting of Adriana. This could be a representation of how Woody Allen thinks of film goers--sort of like the theme of Good Will Hunting (1997) and Dead Poet's Society (1989), which emphasize the notion of 'carpe diem,' Woody Allen could be saying that, instead of watching films and thinking about the past, we should be outside and living life to the fullest. The opening montage sequence of Paris-in-a-day also implies this view, showing people that Paris isn't everything the movies make it out to be.