To Live and Die in Europe

In August, 2020, I was sitting on a sunny beach in Mallorca reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises on my phone. The bay where I sat felt very artificial. A few jetties shot out from the groomed shore at a bunch of bright boats and slides and rafts, all towering over each other like a Bosch painting set in a Walmart. I was also surrounded by northern Europeans, who have shaped Mallorca into the tourist colony it remains today. For most of them, Mallorca is a momentary escape from the drudgery of life. It’s not supposed to reveal anything about yourself, as a journey to Thailand or Peru might, a journey most of these Germans and Swedes had already taken on a gap year or Erasmus-funded trip. In Mallorca, there is no spirituality to keep it afloat, nothing that authenticates it as a place even worth considering apart from its tourist industry. It seemed everyone around me accepted this, or just didn’t care.

I read about Jake Barnes, the protagonist of Hemingway’s book, about his own trip to Spain, his own confrontation with Spanish spirituality, or the lack thereof. Jake is an American expat writer living in Paris. He doesn’t have a penis and so he’s autistically obsessed with bullfighting, the animal icon of virility. That’s why he goes to Spain. The book begins and ends with a general hopelessness: Jake doesn’t learn anything, it’s all very pathetic there, his trust fund-funded friends are braindead and get into a number of toxic relationships with bullfighters and bankers alike. Apart from the siestas, Pamplona, we realize, is not far off from the Paris of the 20s—at least by Jake’s standards as a bored American, castrated both physically and spiritually. If I were him, I thought, I would consider killing myself. (This is not a cry for help).

I don’t mean to say that The Sun Also Rises is a bad book—it’s great, in fact. And I don’t mean to pore over Spanish spirituality either, absent then as it seems now. Rather that the idea of Americans attempting to discover themselves in Europe has been a trope at least since the book’s publication, a trope that finds its apotheosis and its destruction in a slew of films and series from the last twenty or so years. More importantly, it's a trope that has completely dominated my imagination of Europe, and, I imagine, yours too.

Take, for example, Eli Roth’s Hostel franchise. These were released in the early 2000s and shocked the international film world with their gratuitous depictions of torture. Part 2 in particular follows a group of young American women who take a trip to Rome but are lured to Slovakia. In this second installment, a couple of American businessmen, after winning an online bid, carry out their repressed male desires to the unsuspecting girls. The film finishes with a castration and escape scene, but rather than returning to her middle American McMansion, the heroine of this story ends up joining the Slovakian sex traffickers. She beheads her torturer as an initiation rite and exits the scene with the sole discovery that she too is capable of unadalterated violence. The man’s head falls into some leaves; a group of Gypsy children use it as a football. Fade to black.

Eli Roth played on a certain post-9/11 sentiment that depicts travel in the Schengen zone as dangerous and as hellish as covering ISIS in the Middle East. The futile ignorance of young Americans abroad, per Roth, is best depicted by taking its logical conclusion to its extreme: the literal separation of the irrational self from its body, the splaying out of a dumb college kid’s innards on both an Eastern European operating table and on the American silver screen.

Hostel is interesting because the narrative tension arises out of the inherent friction of American expectations in Europe, the expectation of some foundational revelation about yourself and your own national identity. Roth resolves this conflict by violently exterminating it. Whether you’re a scared mom apprehensive of sending off Jenny to her exchange program or you’re just a gore fanatic, Hostel delivers. And there’s a sense that The Sun Also Rises would have been much more satisfying if all those depraved expats looking for a revelation were just killed off by a stampede of bulls.

But they aren’t, and for that reason I like to think of The Sun Also Rises as much more fitting to our time. Woody Allen, for example, certainly read the book in his production of the 2011 film Midnight in Paris, which includes a Hemingway cameo. The message of that movie shores up to the rather inconsequential platitude, “don’t be nostalgic, live in the moment,” as Owen Wilson’s character travels through history, meeting his literary heroes from the 1920s and 1890s alike. His marriage deteriorates in the process. His wife cheats on him with some chad Sorbonne adjunct, who is set in fatal contrast to Owen Wilson’s character, with his insecurities about his writing, his childlike fantasies of Europe, his dumpy J.Crew outfits and his general frailty as a modern man. He chooses to leave her and take on a new life in Paris—the contemporary Paris, that is, not the magical historical one. At first glance, it might seem like this was the grand revelatory moment, until you realize that he ends up meeting this antique-selling French babe played by Léa Seydoux, who, in reality, is the icon of the modern Parisian woman. He walks with her through the rain to a Sidney Bechet clarinet track, expecting rather vainly that she isn't just being polite. It's beautiful, really, but it's hard to say he’s not still sipping the Kool-Aid.

So rather than being crushed by his Americanness, our hero here intoxicates himself on the idea of Europe enough to forget about the distinction altogether. In this way, Woody Allen resolves that inherent tension present in both Hostel and The Sun Also Rises. He constructs an imaginary world where the protagonist is wholly accepted by Europe and its cultural denizens. He keeps the fantasy alive only by ditching his last connection to the real world, i.e., America. This character supposedly achieves a creative breakthrough because an imaginary Gertrude Stein gives him a line of criticism on his manuscript. Are we really to believe that that’s enough of a justification to get up and move to France? Does Owen Wilson’s character really learn about himself in Europe, or does he simply come to accept his fantasies of it? And how the hell is he going to get a visa to do all this anyway? Good luck marrying Léa Seydoux buddy.

Midnight in Paris still leaves us happy and Hostel still leaves us scared. All the while, The Sun Also Rises still leaves us confused, that conflict still never being fully fleshed out, aside from remaining ripe for storytelling and violence and tourism. The problem, in my view, is all the more relevant today, as Europe has shut down its borders to both Americans and Europeans alike. Forced into our hovels, it’s quite literally impossible to embark upon a journey of self-reflection and revelation, putting even more pressure on the consumption of media to aid us in this process.

We receive what we deserve, and by that I mean the 2020 Netflix special Emily in Paris. Emily is a marketing agent—a fake job designed to dupe people into buying fake stuff—who is sent to Paris on a whim to take on a new life for a year. Despite all the mishaps and mistranslations that come along with that, her American business acumen and her good looks get her by, as she navigates through relationships and conflicts with the ease of using Google Maps through the labyrinthine streets of the Latin Quarter.

It’s difficult to say what Emily learns through her time in Paris. It’s difficult to say what we should learn by watching Emily be in Paris. Strangely, while Paris is presented with the classic reverie and glitz to which we’re accustomed from the postcards, the inhabitants there are depicted as generally mean-spirited and sociopathic people. So I’m not sure the tourist industry is a driving force here, nor the cultural elite, nor the xenophobes. Emily in Paris is simply Emily in Paris. An American in Europe. Whatever existential conflict this might once have presented to Americans is here stripped to its most bare mechanics as a plot device. Maybe Emily will learn something about herself in the next season; maybe we will all be able to go to Paris like Emily when that next season comes. But I don’t think that will matter. With Emily, the very act of viewing her life in Paris is enough to fulfill, or rather kill off, our desire for self-revelation, our desire to move to Paris.

Maybe this all goes to show that that fantasy of life in Europe was already broken before coronavirus came and finished it off. I can speak to this. I’m here in Europe, I’m an American, and the pandemic is still going on as of writing this. I went to Spain, I sat on Mallorca’s beaches, I traveled through the countryside, I looked at art and I read Hemingway. And somehow I’m still waiting for my own revelation, or maybe my own murder. I looked around at all those European tourists on that beach in Mallorca, and thought about how this conflict never once crossed their minds; Europe was probably just a pretty normal place for them. Mallorca is fun, Paris is pretty, Amsterdam is crazy. If I accepted this, maybe I'd be able to move on with my life, maybe I'd put down my phone and join the sun-kissed Swedes in the water, maybe after I'd go home, back to work, back to reality, content. Certainly, I'd be able to finally see Europe as it really is.

Then I thought that that sounds like an incredibly boring way to live. That I’d rather prefer to hold onto a fantasy, even as it constantly disappoints, since a fantasy fulfilled is no fantasy at all. I realized then why I enjoyed Hemingway’s book so much. He never resolved his American characters’ conflicts, never allowed them to discover something about themselves apart from the seeming impossibility of doing so. He opted for an indefinite delay over a bloody execution, a cheap cliffhanger, a happy ending. Which is more or less how life is really like.