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Essay on Midnight in Paris

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The star-studded romantic comedy Midnight in Paris is one of Woody Allen’s most recent films which he did both, wrote and directed. It is a film about a man named Gil (Owen Wilson) who travels to Paris with his fiancée’s parents in order to expand his imagination and he ends up embarking on a journey to the 1920s while walking the streets of Paris at night. Not only is this film engaging and witty, but it also manages to provide both, overt and covert examples of postmodernism in film. By analyzing Woody Allen’s 2011film Midnight in Paris, we can identify the presence of many underlying motifs in both the narrative and the characterization of the film when using some of Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard’s concepts on postmodernism. …show more content…

In Midnight in Paris, Gil tags along with her fiancées family to a trip in Paris in order to become more inspired by the ambiance of the beautiful city, by having Gil experience the golden age without any help of technology, he is deliberately opposing the idea of postmodernism and how people tend to connect to people and places. According to Jameson, everything we experience is mediated by technology or capitalism, so we no longer experience things as “natural” unmediated. It is inferred that Gil understands this, and therefore decides to get out of Los Angeles in order to experience Paris for himself, instead of through the use of technology. We see how his fiancées opposes his views in the scene in which it is raining, and she attempts to avoid the rain while Gil is happily enjoying walking in the rain. In this film, we can see how Inez’s character represents popular culture which does not bother experiencing things without being mediated, while Gil attempts to accomplish the opposite. He attempts to have a fell for the mood and ambient of the city in order to regain the inspiration and motivation he had lost while in the city, where mostly everything is mediated by modern items.
In the film, there tends to be a constant, and sometimes excessive schizophrenic tendency in the characterization of Gil, he has a tendency to look backwards. When looking at Frederic Jameson’s concept on postmodernism, he suggests that according to Jacques Lacan, schizophrenia

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