February 10, 2014 [The Grand Budapest Hotel]

When Jane Eyre hides in her window-seat from those horrible step-siblings, the dark heavy curtain on one side, the winter outside the glass on the other, a book in her hand (or for a brief time her own thoughts in her head), I knew I had been there, done that: the best nostalgia, the remembrance of a past I'd never lived through—or maybe some version of it found hiding under my grandparents' dining-room table or standing alone in the back yard. Book or no book, I know what Jane wants and remember how to be there and do that.

The Grand Budapest Hotel drops us like exploring children down the dumbwaiter of a hotel not in ruins—no, hiding beneath the ruins: the hotel under the hotel, like Freud's reminder that when we wander around on the surface of Rome, downstairs the other Romes pile like hollow bricks, a miles-deep foundation for the one whose sidewalks we wear down—until a new one grows above us, after us. And the old ones, Freud insists, whisper in dreams to our city, speaking in tongues until we think we've learned a new language—but it's the mystery-talk, the-I-don't-know, then the Now (and all the languages in between), explaining the rules of the Society of the Crossed Keys, turning me over in my sleep like a snoring Lobby Boy—sweets crammed in my mouth and heroes shot like dogs outside the train that refuses to stay, that denies the chance to let me hop on and make that imaginary past real, as real as Gustave H. managed it, bullshit fake memory and all, golden and venerable.