The Beautiful and the Damned + Midnight in Paris

[osprey_archer]

Finally limped to the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned, which chronicles Anthony Patch’s long, slow descent into alcoholism and penury (otherwise known as “a middle-class lifestyle”), and is super depressing. Even the parties are depressing. I’m actually not sure that anything un-depressing ever happens in this book, which is rather impressive in a way.

No, wait! There is the moment when Bloeckman the Jewish movie impresario punches Anthony in the face and knocks one of his teeth out! I really enjoyed that. It was the next best thing to being able to reach into the book and clobber Anthony myself.

I think I’m more interested in Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as people than in Scott’s writing, because other than The Great Gatsby, which is comparatively hopeful, his work seems to be pretty soul-crushingly cynical.

And speaking of Fitzgeraldian fun! I recently saw Midnight in Paris, which is about a guy who goes to Paris with his fiancee - they’re stunningly ill-matched; I can only assume they were blinded by the vision of the adorable blonde children they would produce - only for him to wander back through time to Paris in the twenties when the clock strikes midnight.

It’s a rather slight movie, but it’s a ton of fun, not least because it features the Fitzgeralds being, well, themselves. (Although actually the Fitzgeralds are pretty minor, so probably you shouldn’t watch this just to get your Fitzgerald on.) Hemingway is rather flat; he’s just reciting his lines, he never sounds like he quite means them.

But Paris is beautiful and the twenties are beautiful and the brief bit where they slide back to the Belle Epoque is beautiful, and it’s a light and cheerful antidote to the misery that is true Fitzgerald.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It was a pretty movie, but I found it very hard to deal with the clueless hero--yeah, why *were* he and his fiancée together? Seemed like very bad decision making on both their parts.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I suspect the best time to watch Midnight in Paris is while suffering from a mild illness or exhaustion, so the pretty takes up all available brain cycles and drowns out minor questions like "Why on earth are these people together?"

Maybe being in the same place as her parents accentuated their differences? Maybe under normal circumstances they were able to compromise enough to paper over their fundamental incompatibility. The trip to Paris was clearly a blessing in disguise.

[artemis_wandering]

I've never read this one - isn't it the unfinished novel? Or am I thinking of another one? Crap. Anyway, I love that his books are cynical. This Side of Paradise is so ridiculously me, I can't even. My favorite line, actually, "I was born one...a cynical idealist." Something about a lot of his writing speaks deep to my soul. And then a lot of it is like whaaat? Like Benjamin Button.

I still haven't seen Midnight in Paris, yet, either. I can't actually tell if you liked it or not.lol

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I feel ambivalent about the movie. It is extremely pretty, and I enjoyed watching the main character wander around Paris in different time periods and meet all the most famous people. But at the same time, there's not a lot of plot and I have no idea why the main character and his fiancee got together - so I wouldn't recommend that anyone rush out to watch it unless "Paris being pretty in lots of time periods" sounds awesome to them.

[artemis_wandering]

LOL, ok, good to know. It'll go on my long backlist.