A Rainy Day In New York

A small window on identity problems

It is a matter of fact that we all have some problems with our identity, today more than ever. Probably because of social media and that we are always connected, inside a loop — in which incessantism is the key to success.

It is exactly in this modern loop where we usually tend to lose ourselves, and “A rainy day in New York”, a marvelous piece of art directed by Woody Allen, could be an interesting key to enter this topic.

A hint of the plot

This movie tells the romantic story between Gatsby (Timothée Chalamet) and Ashleigh (Elle Fanning).

Gatsby comes from a wealthy family, he decided to transfer from college to another because it didn’t feel like the right place in which to be for him. In this new college, he met Ashleigh, a beautiful girl that immediately got all his attention.

Here they met and fell in love in a completely normal way (like all teenagers do). Ashleigh got the opportunity to go to New York to interview an important movie director, not in the shiniest moment of his career.

Gatsby decided to go with her, so he could show her the city where he grew up. When they arrived everything seemed to be perfect, but this illusion is soon denied by various vicissitudes.

There’s a little Gatsby inside each of us

Like a lot of young people today, Gatsby hasn’t found his way yet and he has no idea about what to do with his life. The fact is that he is probably trying to avoid life with all its events and consequences. He doesn’t listen to himself and instead he keeps believing in some self-convictions like that he is deeply in love with Ashleigh or that he went to this anonymous college to find peace outside of the big cities.

Luckily, after a day of (un)fortunate events, just before leaving, Gatsby has a sort of Epiphany, as in the best of James Joyce’s stories - with a very courageous gesture full of self-love he decided to leave Ashleigh and to stay, instead, in New York, his hometown. Gatsby, up to that moment, had not fully realized that he was on the wrong track.

We are strangers for ourselves but in the meantime, we are the person we’ve always known.

Being the “good (un)intellectual girl”

This character is really interesting as it is the trigger to discuss the selfishness that is present in human relationships.

In the beginning, Ashleigh is presented as the archetypal of the good person (interesting, nice to everyone). The kind of friend you would like to want in your life, but as things happen in the movie we realize how this belief was completely false.

The big plan of her trip was to make a good interview and to spend some time with his lover in his city. But everything gets messed up as she gets asked to attend a private premiere of the new movie (and then a bunch of other things…). As she is presented with the opportunity of making a career and to gain a little bit of success, she is ready to grab it without even thinking about the consequences those choices may have on her relationships with Gatsby.

Allen wants to say to us that a lot of time, if not always, people are moved by their egoism and the desire for success for themselves, without any kind of empathy for the people near to us. This egoism may take place for a career purpose, sexual or even the egoism for desiring to be with someone only to escape from the loneliness they would live in.

Ashleigh is a bit like the prototype of the psycho-queen. She is a very naïve person who tries to look very smart.
This behavior is reflected in all her actions, from the first scene to the last in which she appears. Like when she has to interview the director she says a lot of things that she doesn’t even know. She does a mess by mixing notions taken here and there.

Listening to ourselves. The most difficult skill of our time

I put beforehand that knowing really and definitively who you are is impossible because every day we change. Materialistically the chemical reactions that take place in our brain change slightly. It is as if every day we wake up like another person compared to the previous day, this is certainly an exaggeration, but these are phenomena that should not be overlooked. Eraclito stated the philosophy of Panta Rhei, “everything flows”. He said that you can’t swim in the same river twice because everything changes with time.

However, we must not surrender to the idea that there is no “id”, such an assumption would compromise all the foundations on which our society is founded (even our mental health would suffer a lot…).

The only way out is to get used to constantly learning to know ourselves. It is not easy and it is very tiring. Some activities that have helped me and that I continue to practice for this purpose are: reading, studying, spending time alone (disconnect from everything and everyone, without a mobile phone …).

It is important to keep in mind that these activities will not be the ultimate weapon in solving the “Know yourself” problem, but they will prove to be a little help in the long run rather than the short term. Gatsby does not realize that he was no longer himself thanks to reading but after a series of events that made him wake up.

We are insecure, Cursed be Copernico!

I should not be allowed to talk for someone else if not for myself, but I think we are an insecure society and this insecurity has become one of the cardinal values.

Let’s step back for a moment to try to understand where this insecurity comes from.

I want to focus on Copernico and why he is a bad person(joking). I have no idea about what Copernico was like, but I know for sure that the big problem is us and it is not him.

So: what’s wrong with him? Well, there’s nothing wrong with him, the problem is that he completely changed the perspective of what is the place of humankind. With heliocentrism (the model that replaced the Geocentric model that was precedently used), we stopped being at the center of the universe, instead, he told us that we were the ones who orbit around the sun.

There’s nothing wrong with him saying that. He was a scientist and he helped science to move forward and get closer to the ultimate utopian truth.

On the other hand, this event completely changed the world, the day before we were the masters of the universe, and the day after we were only a little grain of sand lost in the immensity of the universe. We are nothing and we have absolutely no meaning.

This concept a greatly explained in Luigi Pirandello's “Il fu Mattia Pascal”, a modern novel on the crisis of the modern man, but it is also one of the hotspots of Allen philosophy.

Allen meaninglessness of the universe can be summarized by that quote

i quit smoking.

I will live one week longer and that week it’ll rain all the time.

Woody Allen

(spoiler: he quit smoking)