The Nostalgic Time Traveler

A few weeks ago I saw Woody Allen's latest film, Midnight in Paris. I'm actually not really a fan of Woody Allen, but the story looked really interesting. Gil (Owen Wilson) is in Paris with his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) who are tagging along with Inez's parents on a business trip. Gil is a writer and convinced that he belongs in the Golden Era of Paris which happens to be the 1920s, a time where he feels he could truly be inspired to write a great novel.



Although I have been (playfully) called a traitor I will admit I enjoyed this movie. It was charming and funny and if you've ever studied the arts in that time period or know classic literature then you'll get the references. Ernest Hemingway's character was hilarious to my friend and I, we agreed he sounded similar to his writings. The cast was pretty good too, and while the actual movie-going experience reminded me of Stuff White People Like (I saw it at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street) I enjoyed myself.

So this movie made me think about how I sometimes hear people say they were born in the wrong time or they are an old soul, waxing poetic about the decade they weren't alive in and how wonderful it was. It could be they liked the music of that particular time period, the movies, the hairstyles, or the culture, because perhaps they feel out of place in their own time; they are misunderstood or their tastes don't align with the popular culture of today. Everyone's always searching for their place in society and some folks create a sort of fake nostalgia of what they imagined their life would be had they been alive at that time. I  know at one point, I felt like I belonged in the Harlem Renaissance. I read my first Langston Hughes poem in Kindergarten because my elementary school had performed "The City" as a song to instill pride in the great city of New York (hums the tune, remembers the paper costumes made in Ms. Lorenzo's class). Anyway by the time I was a teen, I was convinced that I belonged with the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglass, Langston Hughes and others because of how they were free to explore their racial and gender identities through their art. It appeared that someone like me, who did not identify with the "blackness" of my neighborhood (I was mostly identified as "non-black" due to looks, behaviors, speech, etc, but read "black" everywhere else) would have fared well with 1920s and 1930s Harlem. Never mind the rampant racism, sexism, homophobia and general invisibility of colored folks at that time. I hadn't read it like that.

This nostalgia has leaked into media and politics as well. I know I was particularly confused about the culture of the 1950s and 60s in the United States. It appeared that everyone was living well, couples slept in different beds, children were innocent and no one divorced. At the same time I knew that people of color were trying to get basic rights, and that my great-grandmother had divorced her husband. And recently in politics, The Marriage Vow is (falsely) nostalgic about a time when at least in slavery, slave children were able to grow up in two-parent households and was signed by Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann. I mean I supposed that would've been better for me to have been a slave, then to be raised by my grandmother. But I digress...

I think it's fair to say Gil in Midnight in Paris realized what I did about the Harlem Renaissance. At the time it was happening, this was not what it was called. It was just artists writing and making a career. I don't imagine that they thought, in the future many people would've wished they would've been alive given their realities at that time period. Perhaps they would've enjoyed our time now because of what their past labor meant for future generations.

I do wonder though, if any of your have felt (or still feel) that you were born in the wrong time? What decade have you admired and see yourself living in and why?