A Moment of Paradise

Eden. One word. You know the rest, don’t you? No! You want more…. Is Mia Hansen-Løve enough for you?…. Greedy, I'd say. I’m not sure I like this. Sorry, friend. There will be no more. You’ll have to make to do with God’s own garden and a modern day Eve.

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The film ends beautifully, with Robert Creeley. The balance of the poem is perfect: the death of one life, the possibility of another rising up to replace it; though the birth will be difficult, the baby delicate. We are left with a few words of melancholy hope; but suspect Paul has left it too late. A natural talent for literature has laid fallow too long. Success, its own attention deficit disorder, not to mention the drugs, drink and women, has destroyed this artist’s mentality. The Zone, into which the artist can retreat and create, long stripped of its quietness and peace. Can it be grown again? Creeley says yes. However, as we watch those happy memories roll down the credits, we pity Paul, and suspect he’s had his one chance. Kicked out of Eden can we really return….

This film brilliantly creates the atmosphere of being young and hip. The excitement of finding new things - here, electronic dance music - and the making of them our own. Then there’s the coterie, its mix of barely compatible characters; the real creative types - Daft Punk, Cyril -; those with talent, but of a second order - Paul and Herve: aka Cheers -; and the posse of friends and hangers-on. It’s a scene and you’re at the centre of it. Feel the buzz. Share the ecstasy.

No, no my friend, no class A drugs where taken in the watching of this movie.

Even before it falls apart, as it must, we notice the rapid exhaustion of the resources that fuelled this rise to celebrity. After that first beautiful countryside scene; a clever decoy - this is not Eden - we are thrust helter-skelter into the Parisian bourgeoisie. Everywhere there are records, magazines, books. Thousands of books…. These characters are intellectuals. A rich culture feeds their interest in the music. Success eats it all up. The books start to disappear, until only a few are left. This is a trajectory we have seen many times before; there’s the pop and rock of the sixties and seventies. Smart adolescents, brought up in a cultivated environment, overflow with intellectual excitement; they have a natural curiosity; there is the joy in ideas, words, images and music; together with the need to express that joy. All is new. Everything is exciting. This store of mental energy is burnt up on the musical road. There is no time for anything else but success.1 Very soon there is nothing left. Herve and Paul’s cultural resources as empty as the houseboat they rent for a new year’s eve party. Stuck in a groove they can’t get out of. Of course they’re passed over by the next craze: that ‘Salsa shit’. They have not grown. They have become stiff and staid. Skittles to be knocked down by the straights of fashion.

This happens even to creative originals - the pop stars who stop producing anything original after their thirties, the rest of their life a recycling centre for old material. I have discussed this before. The difference between the artist and the popular entertainer, is that the artist is sustained by ideas, which he continually cultivates, and which feed off the emotions, the juice of the work. Not so pop. It lives on feelings alone, and they fade away in early middle-age. Enthusiasm gets you just through your twenties.

DJing is an odd activity, and I don’t pretend to understand it. You need a good ear, taste - at least for what is on the fringes of the popular - technical skill, and a feel for a venue and an event. Paul certainly has these. And yet, DJing music is not quite the same as creating it…. This compounds the problem of pop: creative sterility is built into this kind of activity. Cheers quickly becomes stuck in a musical genre, they don’t want to leave. A collector never willingly gives up his collection.

Of the intimates of the group Cyril seems the most talented: he is an original comic artist. It is noticeable that he doesn't fit in. Not only does the posturing of Arnaud annoy, but the social activities that enmesh Cheers get in the way of his own creative work. The tension between scene and art is breaking him down. An artist is always going to find the popular music world difficult: all the peripheral stuff - essential to an entertainment industry - is forever trying to break into the Zone. Cyril refuses to go to America with the group. But this self-inclusion from Eden produces a heavy cost in emotional and psychological isolation. No surprise he commits suicide. 

Eden is a dangerous place, not only to artists. It offers too much. Much too much. It delights overwhelm our mental discipline, one’s intelligence, and our intellectual curiosity. Very quickly these DJs are living off a rapidly diminishing cultural capital. Soon Cheers will be musically bankrupt.

It had to fall apart. Come our mid-thirties we find it increasingly difficult to live the life of a young adult. The money is running - or run out. Living with your mother doesn't feel right. The fashions are changing. You’re not as sharp and as intellectually adventurous as you once were. Your new ideas worryingly look like old ideas, from twenty years ago. You’re getting older, but the girlfriends are growing younger; they no longer understand you, which further seals you off from a changing world. Melancholia is setting in. Your great loves are in the past; and they are creating new lives for themselves; both Julia and Louise are reborn as mothers and responsible adults. Paul is starting to find that kind of life very attractive. Yet the addiction still holds. He can’t give up the scene. There has to be crisis, and usually it is cataclysmic. Here the debts are huge and the bank cuts off credit. Then Louise - they have got back together - tells Paul that she’s aborted his baby. To top it all: there’s a massive drug habit. Breakdown. It is over.

But still he dreams of the old days. He has cleaned himself up - no drugs; no drink - and works at dead-end jobs in order to live independently. Can he escape these dreams? The question remains open when we leave this film. Though we know from our own experience that such an escape is almost impossible. Genesis tells a horrible truth. Once kicked out of Eden we’ll have only nostalgia and despair for company. Life stops around age 34….for the wannabe and pop-star. They are the lucky ones. Everybody else has to do with 22.

Then there are the artists….

Paul may be different - he once had a natural talent for literature - and he is trying to start again - these writing classes. However, it will be a long time before his pages bear ripe paragraphs. He will be unlikely to win the quick success of his DJing days. Literature is a different world to the music scene, even though he’s once again part of a group, attractive to good-looking women. He had talent once. Can it be reborn? Creeley’s poem is tonally perfect. It took a brilliant DJ to select and mix it with that beautiful closing scene: Paul on a white bed dreaming of his technicolour past, while looking into the long black night of the future. I know it’s over. I know I can start again….

(Review: Eden)

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1.  For a sardonic view of life on the road: Joan Didion, On The Road  in The White Album.