Politics & Power Quote by Theo Van Gogh

It lands like an offhand daydream, but it’s really a cultural diagnosis: America as the place you run to when you still have the nerve to start over. Theo van Gogh frames the fantasy with a disclaimer - “If I were still twenty” - that doubles as a confession. Youth isn’t just an age here; it’s a permission slip for risk, appetite, and reinvention. By specifying twenty, he invokes the one window when ambition can feel like destiny instead of delusion.

Coming from Van Gogh, the line also carries a sharp European subtext: America as both utopia and provocation. It’s the archetype of bigness - bigger markets, louder arguments, fewer inherited constraints - which can read as liberation or vulgarity depending on your mood. He doesn’t say he wants to be American. He wants to move there, to enter the current, to test himself against a culture that rewards hustle and spectacle, sometimes at the expense of subtlety. For a director known for needling polite consensus, that’s not a random postcard wish; it’s an aesthetic instinct.

The melancholy is doing real work. The conditional tense (“were still”) turns the statement into self-critique: the obstacle isn’t visas or language but time, fatigue, and the accumulating weight of biography. Underneath the bravado is a quieter idea: Europe can feel like living inside footnotes, while America sells you the headline. Van Gogh’s line admires that energy even as it acknowledges he’s no longer built for its speed.