The Reluctant Psychoanalyst: Midnight in Paris as a portal to thinking about Covid-19…

On Friday, I was feeling quite existentially tested by the Corona virus. Yesterday (Saturday) I picked up the Reluctant Son from school. His school, like mine, is going virtual for the rest of the year, so we emptied his dorm room into the car and headed back home to a comfort meal of chicken and dumplings. Then we watched an old favorite movie, Midnight in Paris, as more comfort.

Midnight in Paris is a complicated treat. It is a RomCom dominated by a break up and that has always complicated my emotional reaction to it – I don’t like relationships falling apart. And of course there’s the complication of Woody Allen.

The reluctant stepdaughter helped with both dilemmas. She pointed out that if we boycotted great art by cads, we would have a pretty meager supply of art to draw from. And she noted that the role of the fiancée, Inez, is played as a despicable person by Rachel McAdams, who is, apparently, in real life, a lovely person, and I think I picked up on her loveliness in the early interplay between them. Watching from the perspective of her being a bad apple helped me feel relief for Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) when he is able to give up on the character that she plays.

I won’t recap the film here – I have written about it before – but I think the moral of it is important. Gil Pender – after travelling back to the Paris of the 20s – the Paris of Hemingway and the Surrealists, of Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso – and then travelling further back to the Paris of La Belle Epoque – the Paris of Degas, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec, realizes that our current world – the one we live in now – is the world that we belong in.

Well, that current world is very complicated. We are living under a pall – we don’t know what will come of the Corona Virus. We may already be infected. We may have started to act too late. It may also blow over. Hopefully the actions we are taking to socially distance ourselves from each other will flatten the curve enough that if it continues to be a pandemic we can stay on top of it.

Shutting down air travel, closing schools, and working from home, but also losing work – especially for those among us who are most vulnerable and least likely to be insured, brings to light a paradoxical truth. We need each other to survive. We are more connected than we have ever been. We cannot get along without each other – we even need to count on each other not to have contact with each other in order to help prevent overwhelming the health care system.

Someone commented yesterday that if we had responded as quickly to the climate change threat, we would not be in such deep environmental difficulty as we are now. I think the threat of environmental damage felt (and frankly feels) much less imminent. The imminent threat has overcome our denial – and balanced out our reasonable fears about disrupting life as usual - and allowed us to act. Not surprisingly, those actions have been discombobulating.

We have stopped the planes – as we did in the wake of 911. We have shut down our schools and our sporting events. Of course we are not completely there yet. We checked online this morning, and our hot yoga class is not just still running – the wait list is full. Putting 100 people shoulder to shoulder in a hot damp room to breathe deeply together for an hour is inconsistent with what we need now. So is hoarding toilet paper and Purell. Fortunately, E bay has stopped people from posting hoarded Purell at gouging level prices…

If we are to live in the world of the present, we are going to have to come to grips with the ways that the present is shifting. Covid-19 is an unwanted opportunity to evaluate what we value and how we should go about achieving ends that are consistent with those values. It is an opportunity to connect with each other – in the here and now- across the expanse of social distance – to metaphorically link arms at the present, and to concretely do that in the not too distant future – to work together on building a world that acknowledges our interdependency and the threats that creates.

Living in the present is a primary goal of psychoanalysis. I rarely achieve it, though I think I do it more frequently as a result of having been analyzed. Emergencies are a kind of shock analysis. They drag us into the present moment. When I was in Topeka at the Menninger clinic, there were stories of the most ill patients at the hospital becoming much more organized in the wake of a huge tornado that ripped through town. For two weeks, those patients, who generally needed round the clock care, worked to pick up debris and help restore some semblance of order. After two weeks, and some some normalcy returning, they returned to their wards and needing to be cared for.

We have a lot to traverse in the coming weeks and months. The silver lining is that this emergency may help us wake up. One of the long term questions is whether we can stay woke.

Midnight in Paris ends with a question. The draw to the past - the wish to live in the world that we were never in - is the childlike wish of Gil Pender - and the loveliest woman of the twenties, Ariadne (Marion Cotillard), the woman who had been the lover of Modigiliani, Braque, Picasso and Hemingway. She loved Gil Pender most of all, but she left him for the past. She loved him (and I think we in the audience did as well) because of his naivete. At the end of the film, he is planning to shed it, but is drawn to the woman who runs the nostalgia shop. Can he, but more importantly, can we keep our naivete - our youthful enthusiasm - and confront the challenges of this increasingly complex world? Can we keep from retreating into the comfort of nostalgia?

I wonder.

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