By Brooke Blower
Thanks to Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris and David McCullough’s book The Greater Journey, summer crowds are again satisfying their appetite for that guilty pleasure: the Americans-in-Paris romp. Such celebrations of the adventures of Americans in the City of Lights are certainly fun. But they evoke a version of the city that’s rooted as much in fantasy as fact. Like many guilty pleasures, they actually tell us a lot more about who we are, and about our yearning for an elusive American innocence, than they do about the gritty realities of the French capital.
In his chronicle of artists and apprentices who journeyed to France during the 19th century, McCullough gives us his trademark vignettes, so richly descriptive that you can feel the tight clothing and smell the candles going out. The Americans are well-meaning and hard-working. In turn, Paris is obliging, with picturesque rather than menacing poverty, and where, the author tell us, no drunks stagger through the streets.
With Allen we also get postcard Paris and a parade of illustrious expatriates ripped from history as we follow Owen Wilson’s character on his fantastical journey back to the 1920s. The film’s opening montage sets the tone: shots of Fouquet’s café on the Champs Elysées; the wind-milled Moulin Rouge; squares magically empty of traffic jams; and alleys mercifully free of noise, drug deals, or urine. While Wilson plays the incredulous but enthusiastic initiate, the French serve as scene shifters and helpful guides.
Allen and McCullough may look to different golden ages, but both essentially give us old-timey Paris with mirrored brasseries, obligatory homages to the Eiffel Tower, mustaches, and just a dash of prostitution so things don’t seem too sanitized. It’s the same airbrushed city that wowed moviegoers in An American in Paris and Funny Face. It’s the same depoliticized place that armchair time travelers look for when they pick up Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Here, Americans are bystanders to war and civil unrest, and, in peacetime, the only bad guys around are Englishmen, snooty waiters, or maybe a few fussy bureaucrats.
In this mythical Paris, no one rolls their eyes at your American accent or asks you to defend U.S. foreign policy. No one rubs up against you in line. No one gets arrested. Can’t you see the lights dancing on the Seine? Can’t you hear the accordions? Americans eat this stuff up — but not simply because Allen and McCullough do it so well.
Such a romanticized Paris provides the perfect backdrop for depicting Americans abroad as wide-eyed newcomers exploring foreign lands with only the best intentions, as reluctant heroes who never intended to throw their weight around. The Americans-in-Paris romp allows us to imagine ourselves out in the world, but removed from political quagmires, the burdens of world leadership, anti-American blowback, and other problems, which have, in fact, long plagued tourists and policy-makers alike. Going to Paris was imagined as novel and chic by those coming from a nation with few French immigrants. It wasn’t like a homecoming, which is how many experienced London, Berlin, or Rome. But at the same time, it didn’t seem too threatening. It promised to be only delightfully exotic.
In truth, Paris back then, like today, teemed with conflicts that Americans never fully escaped. In addition to its revolutions and failed insurrections, the city attracted anarchist assassins, angry exiles, and anti-Semites who waged their battles in the streets (not to mention plenty of unruly absinthe drinkers). While Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent painted their portraits, distrustful national leaders and a far-right municipal council ruled the capital with an iron fist.