Midnight in Paris Lessons

In Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, The Exterminating Angel, a group of guests cannot bring themselves to leave an elegant dinner party. Film critic Roger Ebert summarized the movie this way: take a group of prosperous dinner guests and pen them up long enough and they'll turn on one another like rats in an overpopulation study.

Okay, that’s a bit flippant. Ebert offers more detail here:

Obviously, the dinner guests represent the ruling class in Franco's Spain. Having set a banquet table for themselves by defeating the workers in the Spanish Civil War, they sit down for a feast, only to find it never ends. They're trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac. Increasingly resentful at being shut off from the world outside, they grow mean and restless; their worst tendencies are revealed.

Now, let’s switch to Woody Allen’s movie, Midnight in Paris. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a successful but distracted Hollywood screenwriter in Paris with his fiancée, Inez, and her conservative parents. Gil takes to wandering the city at night, and each night somehow slips through time into the Paris of the 1920’s, where he parties with one writer and artist after another. After hanging with Hemingway, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, he bumps into—you guessed it—a young Luis Buñuel. They have this exchange:

I love this exchange because it reveals a fundamental truth about many of our lives. Again and again, we come face-to-face with the direction we should go in, or with an idea that has the potential to transform our lives in a magical and truly wonderful manner. And we ignore it. Or trivialize it.

Or don’t even notice it.

To cite a personal example, I spent a full year resisting the idea of becoming a social media ghostwriter, a career transition that eventually enriched my life tremendously.

We don’t get to look ahead and see for certain which job we should accept or which book we should write. All we can do is to be a little less resistant to new ideas and a little more enthusiastic about the possibility of approaching life differently.