(500) Days of Summer -- a digression

L.A. as filtered by love in '(500) Days of Summer' -- latimes.com

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I spontaneously saw "(500) Days of Summer" this past Sunday and subsequently found this article in the LA Times. It is a view of the movie from an architectural point of view. Tom is a budding architect and loves the architecture of Los Angeles. But the city in this movie, as the article points out, is free of contemporary buildings, like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, dwelling instead on an architectural style - of Corinthian columns and stucco decorations - more easily identified with Paris than LA and with the last century than this one.

But it's not just the architecture - everything seems to be "dated". Until the scene of Tom playing Wii with his sister, I wasn't quite sure that the film was set in present day. Summer's dresses in the flashback scenes are all so very vintage-looking. The Smiths, the band which Summer commented on the first time she talked to Tom, was formed in 1982. The books that they speak of, apart from Architecture of Happiness, are all classics: Tom enthused that they had a great conversation about "bananafish", which I take to mean "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, and Summer reads The Picture of Dorian Gray when she meets her future husband. Neither Tom or Summer seem to have any interest in contemporary fashions, they are bored by the exhibit of contemporary art that they go to - in fact, they are both set in their decidedly dated tastes.

In the movie, this out-of-dated-ness gives a loveliness to the movie, but is it really ideal to live in an idea world so far from the present world?

I just recently finished reading Main Street by Sinclair Lewis and, even though I didn't enjoy reading it, I found it very thought-provoking. In Main Street, a woman of good education and intellect, who loves to read, is thrust into a little village and finds herself suffocated by a place where most of conversation to be had is about village gossip (and not usually the juicy kind, but about how much money so-and-so spent on their curtains and so-and-so's income), the doctors have a petty rivalry that extends to their wives, people spy on passerbys from their windows, and no progress is ever to be had. The people who do read only read classics - books written by people long dead. They know nothing of their contemporaries, like Shaw or Romain Rolland. One of the more literary villagers tried reading Balzac and, shocked by the blatant display of adultery, had the book removed from the library shelves.

The main adjective to describe this village is "backwards". They have no interest in new things; they want their houses to look the exact same as the existing houses, they have no interest in new ideas (dangerous things, those), and they are so conservative that the sheriff led a (surely illegal) beating and driving out of a suspected socialist sympathetic to farmer's unions. The readers - people of education who read books in this sleepy village - read old books; their minds are trapped in yesteryear. They read books which bring to them worlds just as sleepy as their village - books which brought novel ideas at the time in which they were written, but which had become quite stale and old by that time. And this is the only influx of new ideas into people's minds.

I admit, I also have had little interest in reading new books. For one thing, they're hard to get hold of; the libraries are slow in acquiring them if they're not by a well-known author and the waiting lines are long if they are. I am like Tom and Summer, only my tastes are not so firmly set and defended. I like Tolstoy, Flaubert and Hugo and would be perfectly content if my reading list comprised solely of the entire work of Thomas Hardy and Zola's 20-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle. I love Nemirovsky's books because they are good books but also because they are written in a style that I love - and which I am very familiar with. Is this something of a fault? It seems a bit narrow-minded if the only books I can accept are the ones that I'm already familiar with from my previous days of reading. Isn't that is definition of backward, this acceptance only of familiar concepts?

I decided that it is rather something not to be in touch with the current world. It's no wonder that Tom crosses out so many potential jobs on his blackboard when his own taste in architecture is so antiquated. I think there needs to be a balance, temperance in the enclosure of oneself in a past world. Armed with this idea, today, I'm adding Doris Lessing to my reading list and I bought my first New Yorker.