the-eye.eu Companion... · 2020. 1. 17. · Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose work together

A Companion to Woody Allen

Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors

The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose work together constitutes what we refer to as the Hollywood and world cinema canons. Whether Haneke or Hitchcock, Bigelow or Bergmann, Capra or the Coen brothers, each volume, comprised of 25 or more newly commissioned essays written by leading experts, explores a canonical, contemporary and/or controver-sial auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multidimensional capacity. Indi-vidual volumes interrogate any number of subjects – the director’s oeuvre; dominant themes, well-known, worthy, and underrated films; stars, collaborators, and key influences; reception, reputation, and above all, the director’s intellectual currency in the scholarly world.

Published1. A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann2. A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague3. A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker4. A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager5. A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen Vernon6. A Companion to Woody Allen, edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus7. A Companion to Jean Renoir, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau8. A Companion to Francois Truffaut, edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillian9. A Companion to Luis Buñuel, edited by Robert Stone and Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla

A Companion to Woody Allen

Edited by

Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2013© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataA companion to Woody Allen / edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus. pages cm. – (Wiley-Blackwell companions to film directors) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4443-3723-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Allen, Woody–Criticism and interpretation. I. Bailey, Peter J., 1946– editor of compilation. II. Girgus, Sam B., 1941– editor of compilation. PN1998.3.A45C66 2013 791.43092–dc23 2012042384

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Woody Allen, c. 1985. Photo © Terry O’Neill / Getty ImagesCover design by Nicki Averill Design and Illustration

Set in 11/13 pt Dante by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

1 2013

Contents

Notes on Contributors viiiAcknowledgments xii

Introduction 1Peter J. Bailey

Part I Biography/Autobiography/Auteurism 13

1 The Stand-up Auteur 15Cecilia Sayad

2 Which Woody Allen? 35Colleen Glenn

3 Woody Allen and France 53Gilles Menegaldo

4 “Raging in the Dark”: Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films 73Christopher J. Knight

5 A Difficult Redemption: Facing the Other in Woody Allen’s Exilic Period 95John Douglas Macready

6 Comic Faith and Its Discontents: Death and the Late Woody 116Robert M. Polhemus

Part II Movies about the Movies 145

7 Critical Theory and the Cinematic World of Woody Allen 147Stephen Papson

8 Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reflections on Reflexivity 170Gregg Bachman

vi    Contents

9 Play it Again, Woody: Self-Reflexive Critique in Contemporary Woody Allen Films 188Claire Sisco King

10 Jazz Heaven: Woody Allen and the Hollywood Ending 207Christopher Ames

Part III Allen and His Sisters: Cultural Critiques 227

11 “Here . . . It’s Not Their Cup of Tea”: Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies in Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice 229Cynthia Lucia

12 “It’s Complicated, Really”: Women in the Films of Woody Allen 257Joanna E. Rapf

13 Woody Allen’s Grand Scheme: The Whitening of Manhattan, London, and Barcelona 277Renée R. Curry

14 Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris: Remembering Modernism, Remembering Woody 294Katherine Fusco

Part IV Influences/Intertextualities 319

15 Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flâneur 321William Brigham

16 Lurking in Shadows: Kleinman’s Trial and Defense 339Iris Bruce

17 Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 359William Hutchings

18 “Who’s He When He’s at Home?”: A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 381J. Andrew Gothard

19 The Schlemiel in Woody Allen’s Later Films 403Menachem Feuer

20 Barcelona: City of Refuge 424Brian Bergen-Aurand

Part V Philosophy/Religion 441

21 Woody Allen and the (False) Dichotomy of Science and Religion 443Mark T. Conard

Contents    vii

22 The Philosopher as Filmmaker 460David Detmer

23 Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen 481Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler

24 Love, Meaning, and God in the Later Films of Woody Allen 504Sander Lee

25 Hollywood Rabbi: The Never-Ending Questions of Woody Allen 520Monica Osborne

26 Allen’s Random Universe in His European Cycle: Morality, Marriage, Magic 539Richard A. Blake

27 Afterword: The Abyss: Woody Allen on Love, Death, and God 559Sam B. Girgus

Index 573

Christopher Ames is Vice President of Academic Affairs at Shepherd Univer-sity. He is the author of The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction (1991, reprinted 2010) and Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected (1997). He has published articles on literary modernism, the Hollywood novel, and film.

Gregg Bachman teaches cinema studies and screenwriting in the Communica-tion Department at the University of Tampa. In addition to Woody Allen, Dr. Bachman, the co-editor of the volume American Silent Film: Discovering Margin­alized Voices, has written on such diverse topics as westerns and silent movie audiences.

Brian Bergen-Aurand teaches cinema at Nanyang Technological University, where he specializes in film, ethics, and embodiment. His recent work has appeared in Information Ethics, Intercultural Studies, and New Review of Film and Television Studies, including articles on Antonioni, Almodóvar, and Fassbinder. Currently, he is writing on Chaplin and film ethics.

Richard A. Blake, S.J., is Co-director of the film studies program at Boston College. His books include Woody Allen Profane and Sacred and Street Smart: the New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese and Lee. He was the regular film reviewer for America magazine for 35 years.

William Brigham, M.A., M.S.W., has taught film studies at various institutions of higher education in California and is the author of published essays on family in the films of Woody Allen, depictions of homelessness in American films, and the rage of African American filmmakers.

Iris Bruce is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at McMaster University, Canada. Her research interests are Kaf ka in his time and contemporary popular culture, German-Jewish Studies, and Israel Studies: the

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors ix

literature of Israel and Palestine. She is the author of Kaf ka and Cultural Zionism. Dates in Palestine (2007).

Mark T. Conard is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. He is the co-editor of The Simpsons and Philosophy, and Woody Allen and Phi­losophy; he is editor of The Philosophy of Film Noir, The Philosophy of Neo­Noir, The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, and The Philosophy of Spike Lee.

Renée R. Curry, Ph.D., English, is Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at California State University Monterey Bay. She is the editor of Perspectives on Woody Allen; editor of States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change and White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Whiteness.

David Detmer is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University Calumet. He is the author of Phenomenology Explained (forthcoming), Sartre Explained (2008), Chal­lenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth (2003), and Freedom as a Value (1988).

Menachem Feuer currently teaches in the Jewish Studies Department at the Uni-versity of Waterloo. He has published essays and book reviews on philosophy, literature, and Jewish studies in several peer-reviewed journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Shofar, MELUS, German Studies Review, International Studies in Phi­losophy, Comparative Literature and Culture, Ctheory, and Cinemaction.

Katherine Fusco is a Senior Lecturer in English and Assistant Director of the Writing Studio at Vanderbilt University. She has published essays on celebrity and cruelty in contemporary film, D.W. Griffith’s adaptation of Frank Norris, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her book project is tentatively titled “Efficiency Aes-thetics: Time, Narrative, and Modernity in Silent Film and US Naturalist Litera-ture, 1895–1915.”

Colleen Glenn is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Kentucky. Her dissertation deals with Jimmy Stewart’s post-World War II films as representations of war trauma. A portion of her work on Stewart will be pub-lished in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Glenn is currently working on an edited collection with Rebecca Bell-Metereau titled Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering.

J. Andrew Gothard earned his BA and MA in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His most recent publication, “ ‘Your Immediate Superior in Madness’: Orton’s What the Butler Saw and Foucault’s Madness and Civilization,”

x Notes on Contributors

is in Text and Presentation. His research focuses on twentieth-century British and Irish literature with particular interests in modernism, postcolonialism, and working class studies.

William Hutchings is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide (2005), two books about David Storey, and numerous articles on James Joyce, Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Anthony Burgess, Woody Allen, and others.

Claire Sisco King is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University, where she also teaches in the Film Studies Program. She is the author of Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema. Her work has also been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Quar­terly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Christopher J. Knight is a Professor of English at the University of Montana. His most recent book is Omissions Are Not Accidents: Modern Apophaticism from Henry James to Jacques Derrida (2010).

Sander Lee is a Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College Keene, New Hampshire. He is the author of Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism (2002) and numerous additional essays. In 2006, he won the Keene State College Faculty Award for Distinction in Research and Scholarship.

Cynthia Lucia is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Rider University. She is author of Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film and co-editor of the four-volume Wiley­Blackwell History of American Film. Among her recent essays are those appearing in Film and Sexual Politics: A Critical Reader and Authorship in Film Adaptation.

John Douglas Macready is a doctoral student in philosophy and adjunct instructor at the University of Dallas, where he is focusing his research on the concept of human dignity in the work of Hannah Arendt. He has published reviews and articles in Film­Philosophy, Borderlands, Purlieu: A Philosophical Journal, and Ramify: The Journal of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts.

Gilles Menegaldo is a full Professor of American Literature and Film Studies at the University of Poitiers. He has co-written a book on Dracula, published many articles on Hollywood genres and edited collections of essays on Frankenstein, H.P. Lovecraft, R.L. Stevenson, A. Conan Doyle, Jacques Tourneur, film and history, crime fiction, and horror films.

Notes on Contributors xi

Patrick Murray is Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is author of Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (1988) and editor of Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present (1997).

Monica Osborne teaches at Loyola Marymount University and UCLA, where she was also a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish American Literature. She has written for Tikkun, The New Republic, Religion and Literature, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Shofar, Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, and Jewcy.com. She teaches courses on Jewish literature, Holocaust Studies, post-World War II German film, and Midrash in a modern context.

Stephen Papson is a Professor of Sociology teaching in the Film and Representa-tion Studies Program at St. Lawrence University. He has co-authored three books: Sign Wars (1996), Nike Culture (1998), and Landscapes of Capital (2011). He teaches courses in film theory and Australian cinema and has recently written on Baz Luhrmann’s Australia.

Robert M. Polhemus is Joseph Atha Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Stan-ford University. He is the author of The Changing World of Anthony Trollope, Comic Faith, Erotic Faith, Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption and Women’s Quest for Authority, and the editor (with Roger Henkle) of Critical Reconstructions.

Joanna E. Rapf is a Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at the Univer-sity of Oklahoma. Periodically, she also teaches at Dartmouth College. Her books include Buster Keaton: A Bio­Bibliography (1995), On the Waterfront (2003), and Inter­views with Sidney Lumet (2005). With Andrew Horton, she co-edited the Wiley­Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy (2012).

Cecilia Sayad is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK). She is the author of a book on Charlie Kaufman titled O jogo da reinvenção: Charlie Kaufman e o lugar do autor no cinema (2008), published in Brazil, and her essays have appeared in journals such as Framework and the Journal of Film and Video.

Jeanne A. Schuler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. She has authored numerous articles on the history of modern philosophy and critical theory. She is working on a series of articles exploring Hegel’s most fundamental insights; the first of these appeared in History of Philosophy Quarterly.

Frances Weller Bailey supplied a thirty-ninth year of undeviatingly devoted marital support as well as inspired tech assistance without which Peter J. could never have completed his co-editorial tasks.

Sam would like to thank students who have worked with him at Vanderbilt including Evan Blaire Garlock, Stephanie Page Hoskins, Aldea Marine Meary-Miller, Merrill Hendrickson, and Deann Valrae Armstrong. Special thanks goes to Cynthia Lucia for her outstanding advice. Mark L. Schoenfield, chair of the Department of English at Vanderbilt, has been a source of steady support and assistance. Calista Marie Doll of the department also was a great help. As always, the greatest thanks for support and inspiration goes to Scottie Girgus whose help grows even greater as the years grow longer.

Sam B. and Peter J. very gratefully acknowledge the hard work and the collegial, thoroughly companionable efforts of our 26 contributors, and the professionally rewarding relationships we have enjoyed with Wiley executive editor Jayne Fargnoli and copyeditor Helen Kemp. We express our gratitude as well for the many, many films of Woody Allen, without which they and their contributors would have had, quite literally, nothing to say.

Acknowledgments

The July 29, 2011 issue of Entertainment Weekly made it official: Midnight in Paris had surpassed Hannah and Her Sisters as Woody Allen’s top-grossing film. As the contributors to this Companion and many of its readers understand, “top-grossing Woody Allen film” is a term that demands significant contextualizing. (“By my meager standards, [Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah] did very nicely,” Allen told Douglas McGrath, “but certainly not very nicely by Very Nicely standards” (qtd. in McGrath 2006: 118).) Coming in at just over $46 million by September, Midnight accumulated profits a quarter of those claimed by another 2011 summer romantic comedy, Bridesmaids, while being eclipsed by the proceeds of the first week of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hollows Part II by an even larger margin.1 Few of the contributors to this Companion probably saw either of those movies, but many of them (as their chapters attest) watched Midnight in Paris with surprise and delight. They would have watched with surprise, for one reason, because many of them live in places where Woody Allen movies never appear except on DVD rental shelves. During one week that summer, Midnight was appearing on 912 screens in the United States, compared to Allen’s most financially successful recent predeces-sors, each of which earned approximately $23 million: Match Point (maximum 512 screens) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (maximum 776 screens). (More improbable still, at the showing on one of those screens, in Boston on a Saturday night, one of the Companion editors was turned away because Midnight in Paris was sold out. A Woody Allen movie sold out!) The contributors would have been delighted because, arguably at any rate, Allen hadn’t made a film of such substance and charm since Hannah. They would be agreeing with the estimation of Kenneth Turan, who articulated his personal surprise and delight in the Los Angeles Times: “Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write again,” he acknowledged. “Woody

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

IntroductionPeter J. Bailey

2    Peter J. Bailey

Allen has made a wonderful new picture, Midnight in Paris, and it’s his best, most enjoyable work in years.”

“If you’re surprised to be reading that, think how I feel writing it,” Turan added. I’ve been a tough sell on the past dozen or so Allen films, very much including the well-acted but finally wearying Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It seemed that everything he touched in recent years was tainted by misanthropy and sourness. Until now (Turan 2011).

In addition to Vicky Cristina Barcelona (which closes with the two title characters grimly traversing the Barcelona airport, their disconsolate expressions express-ing all that need be said about the psychic residuum of their would-be romantic summers), Turan was very likely thinking of Whatever Works (2009), in which the facile character reversals of the transplanted Southerners do little to clear the viewer’s mind’s ear of Boris Yellnikoff ’s incessant existential kvetching, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, with its unrelenting emphasis on the delusions the human need for love and companionship delivers us mortal fools into desperately embracing. Contributors to the Companion make much more of these three films than I just have, of course, but none of them claims any of the three to be robustly cheerful, nor is any of them likely to find “misanthropic” and “sour” completely inappropriate descriptors of the emotional trajectories of Midnight’s trio of predecessors.

“With Midnight in Paris,” Turan continued,

Allen has lightened up, allowed himself a treat and in the process created a gift for us and him. His new film is simple and fable-like, with a definite “when you wish upon a star” quality, but, bolstered by appealing performers like Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard and Rachel McAdams, it is his warmest, mellowest and funniest venture in far too long. Allen says he’s been enamored of Paris since he wrote and acted in What’s New Pussycat? in 1965. You can sense his continued passion for the city throughout the film, feel the extra pep in his step and pleasure in his heart (Turan 2011).2

Robert M. Polhemus, whose chapter in this Companion, “Comic Faith and Its Discontents: Death and the Late Woody,” treats Midnight in Paris at length, seems to concur with Turan in characterizing the movie as a “gamechanger” for Allen’s oeuvre, which assumes that, before this spring, Allen critics have been exerting themselves on a somewhat different field, and, therefore, one of the purposes of this Introduction, in addition to introducing the essays contained within the Companion, is to offer the reader a highly concentrated view of the pleasures, challenges, and occasional frustrations of being a Woody Allen film critic before – and since – Midnight in Paris.

The pleasures are perhaps best epitomized by the delight so many of the critics take in their essays in moving from one Allen film to another, in critically linking

Introduction    3

films of what is generally agreed upon as his major period (1981–1992: Zelig through Husbands and Wives) with the later movies that have tended to attract more equivocal responses from reviewers and critics (Manhattan Murder Mystery, Celebrity, Hollywood Ending, and Anything Else among them). Co-editor Sam B. Girgus and I encouraged our contributors to keep in mind that, in order that this book not replicate the earlier Allen critical compilations with their concentrations on Zelig, Purple Rose, Hannah, and so on, the majority of Companion chapters would at least touch on Allen’s post-major period films, Accordingly, in his chapter, “ ‘Raging in the Dark’: Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films,” Christopher J. Knight takes issue with the putative decline in Allen’s later films, pointing up the many moviegoer pleasures to be encountered even in his lesser efforts. “So while there is a perception that Allen’s work went into eclipse in the post-Farrow period,” Knight acknowledges,

this period has, in fact, included many fine achievements, and when it is taken into account that the director is responsible for all of a film’s facets, these achievements become more unarguable. Think, for instance, of the brilliant cinematography in Husbands and Wives (Carlo Di Palma, DP), Sweet and Lowdown (Fei Zhao, DP), Match Point (Remi Adefarsasin, DP) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona ( Javier Aguirresarobe, DP). Think of the scintillating performances of Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives; Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Tilly, and Chazz Palminteri in Bullets Over Broadway; Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite; Sean Penn and Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown; Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox, Matthew Goode, and Scarlett Johansson in Match Point; Colin Farrell, Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson, and Hayley Atwell in Cassandra’s Dream; Hugh Jackman in Scoop; Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona; and Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works. Think of the choreography in Mighty Aphrodite and Everybody Says I Love You and of the music that so enhances Everybody Says I Love You, Sweet and Lowdown, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream (Philip Glass, composer), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. And think of Allen’s own script work in Sweet and Lowdown, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There have been definite successes, and not to extend Allen his due should entail a serious misjudgment.

Knight’s inventory of Allen’s post-1992 achievements might be expanded to include the homage to Kaf ka and German Expressionist film techniques in Shadows and Fog (for an illumination of which, see Iris Bruce’s Companion chapter, “Lurking in Shadows: Kleinman’s Trial and Defense”), and the fact that, during an era in which Hollywood film has become increasingly mindless, most of Allen’s movies take viewers (and the critics secreted among them) seriously enough to offer them questions to ponder, to confront them with substantial human problems to con-template. The existential conundrums these films pose are the special province of the philosophically oriented Companion critics, including Richard A. Blake, Mark T. Conard, David Detmer, Sander Lee, Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler, and Monica Osborne. If there is one reflection on his filmmaking career that the

4    Peter J. Bailey

Companion essays seem singularly devoted to confuting, it’s Allen’s contention that, “I never had enough technique or enough depth in my work to make anybody think” (qtd. in Lax 2007: 365). (Part IV, Influences/Intertextualities, of this Companion provides compelling evidence of how much of other writers’ and thinkers’ writings and thoughts have worked their ways into Allen’s films. William Hutchings’ “Woody Allen and the Literary Canon” demonstrates how pervasively Allen’s films invoke canonical authors, and J. Andrew Gothard’s “ ‘Who’s He When He’s at Home?’: A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions” makes an impressive first pass at charting such allusions. William Brigham is surely the only critic ever to view Allen’s protagonists through the prism of the French flâneur, and although Menachem Feuer is far from the first critic to view Allen protagonists as “schlemiels,” his conception of that venerable Jewish comedic figure includes a capacity for growth which hasn’t always been part of that mythos. The section concludes with Brian Bergen-Aurand’s reading of Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a “city of refuge” narrative illuminated by other Barcelona films by Whit Stillman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pedro Almodóvar, and Alejandro González Iñárritu.)

Knight’s inventory of achievements also points up in microcosm the most obvious – and yet hardest to fully appreciate – aspect of Allen’s oeuvre: its mag-nitude. How easy it is to type or say that Allen has made 41 films in 41 years; how difficult it is to grasp fully the consistently indefatigable creative energy that that accomplishment enshrines. Filmmakers get no awards purely for productivity, certainly, but Allen’s ability to produce a screenworthy script annually for four decades puts him in a class of American artists ( Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, and the late John Updike are other members) who constantly outproduced their critics’ capacities to say comprehensive things about their work. Then Allen had to shoot his. To be a critic of Woody Allen films is to feel incessantly surpassed by the amplitude of his production.

In a different sense, it’s a blessing and a challenge for Allen critics that he has been so prolific. We’re never at a loss for texts to write about and compare/con-trast, and, unlike some reviewers who complain that his films tend to run together, we never confuse Broadway Danny Rose, Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, September, Husbands and Wives, Shadows and Fog, Bullets over Broadway, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, Match Point, and Mid-night in Paris. We understand that moviegoers less focused on movies than we are might experience some blurring among their memories of Allen’s movies, but, if the chapters here dramatize one thing, it’s their authors’ cumulative conviction of the remarkable variety that exists within Allen’s immense oeuvre. True enough, many of his films devote themselves to illuminating the human capacity for love, and yet, as Kent Jones argued in his review of Midnight in Paris (2011), Allen’s movies approach the subject from a number of moods and in a variety of tonalities:

Introduction    5

playful (Alice, 90; A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, 82; Manhattan Murder Mystery), tough as nails (Husbands and Wives, 92), sardonic (Match Point, 05; Tall Dark Stranger), celebratory in the face of obsolescence (Radio Days, Broadway Danny Rose, 84), autumnal (Another Woman), or a musically modulated combination thereof (Manhat-tan, Hannah and Her Sisters, 86; Crimes and Misdemeanors, 89).

The challenge with which his productivity confronts Allen’s critics?: Writing about three of the films without trying to incorporate six more into the argument.

Probably the most idiosyncratic element of the relationship between Allen and his critics is that many of them appear to value his movies substantially more than he does. Allen has consistently articulated his sense that The Purple Rose of Cairo, Husbands and Wives, and Match Point are the films in which he came closest to achieving what he set out to do in writing the scripts; he places Stardust Memories and Zelig in his second rank of cinematic achievement (Lax 2007: 255). Nonethe-less, as he in 2000 told Eric Lax (whose voluminous interviews with Allen are quoted in the Companion nearly as often as are his movies),

I don’t see myself as an artist. I see myself as a working filmmaker who chose to go the route of working all the time rather than making my films into some special red carpet event every three years. I’m not cynical and I’m far from an artist. I’m a lucky working stiff (Lax 2007: 97).

Allen has made enough movies critical of the artistic personality (Interiors, Stardust Memories, Shadows and Fog, Bullets over Broadway, and Tall Dark Stranger are a few of them) to establish that “artist” is not necessarily for him an unambiguously commendatory title; nonetheless, the contributors to the Companion are certainly writing as if their subject is very much a creator of artistic films worthy of the most serious critical attention and of the most sophisticated critical techniques developed to illuminate cinematic texts.

The discrepancy in perspectives between filmmaker and critics is attributable partly to Allen’s penchant for comparing his films to Bicycle Thieves, The Seventh Seal, and similar cinematic classics and, consequently, unfailingly finding his wanting; he also regularly acknowledges a modesty of intentions, as in his titling of September: “I want a title that doesn’t promise much. That’s my confidence,” he told Lax in 1987, implying that his confidence wasn’t exactly sky high. “I try to take a soft-sell, nonpretentious approach, like one-word titles” (Lax 2007: 73). That discrepancy is exacerbated further by differences between Allen’s assumptions about responses to films and his own. As we’ll see, he seldom reacts to reviews or critical readings of his films, but in the few cases where he has done so, Allen decided that the movie failed to convey his point sufficiently (e.g., in Stardust Memories he didn’t communicate effectively to the audience that the last two thirds of the plot takes place within Sandy Bates’s unstable imaginings), or that the audi-ence misinterpreted his meaning. Three of the Companion chapters cite Allen’s

6    Peter J. Bailey

extremely illuminating rejoinder to a suggestion that there is something ambigu-ous about the ethics conveyed in Match Point:

What I’m really saying, and it’s not hidden or esoteric – it’s just clear as a bell – is that we have to accept that the universe is godless and life is meaningless, often a terrible and brutal experience with no hope, and that love relationships are very, very hard, and that we still need to find a way to not only cope but lead a decent and moral life (Lax 2007: 123–124).

Where Allen doesn’t locate the problem, interestingly, is in the intricacies of cinematic communication themselves. He very politely disagreed with the conclu-sions drawn by a Catholic priest who wrote about Crimes and Misdemeanors in the New York Times, Allen assuming that the interpretation was predicated on the writer’s knowledge of Allen’s atheism. Allen objected that, “[the writer] made a wrong assumption . . . the film can’t honestly be read to imply I’m saying anything goes and that’s fine with me” (Lax 2007: 124). Many of the Companion critics would wonder, given that Judah asserts that the murderer in his imaginary screenplay only suffers the occasional moment of guilt over his undiscovered crime, why the interpretation that Allen is suggesting that “anything goes and that’s fine with me” isn’t valid, or isn’t at least arguable. In “Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reflections on Reflexivity,” Gregg Bachman argues very compellingly that all the self-conscious elements embedded within Allen’s plot and subplot render unambiguous ethical readings of the text extremely difficult to achieve, while Claire Sisco King’s “Play It Again, Woody: Self-Reflexive Critique in Contemporary Woody Allen Films” contends that

such films as Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) can be read as self-reflexive meditations on Allen’s cinematic oeuvre itself. Through both narrative and stylistic choices, these films call attention to Allen’s characteristic tropes and iconography in order to critique the normative influence of Hollywood conventions and Allen’s complicity in their perpetuation.

In “Jazz Heaven: Woody Allen and the Hollywood Ending,” Christopher Ames maintains that Allen has “become a master of the varied ways of using a film-within-a-film to exploit the self-referentiality of that subgenre and to examine the interaction between filmmaker and audience.” Perhaps topping them all in terms of problematizing the understanding of Allen’s cinema is the argument of Colleen Glenn, who points out in “Which Woody Allen?” that,

As a star persona, therefore, Woody Allen presents a difficult case study because the man we know as Woody Allen comprises so many different real-life and fictional identities that it becomes nearly impossible, despite his iconic public image, to sort out exactly which of the Woody Allens we mean when we say “Woody Allen.”

Introduction    7

However devotedly the filmmaker might soundtrack his films with American Songbook classics, many of Allen’s Companion critics consistently and energetically contest his refusal to enter postmodernity.

Richard A. Blake’s “Allen’s Random Universe in His European Cycle: Morality, Marriage, Magic” addresses later films than Crimes and Misdemeanors, but his general critical approach consists in a concerted, basically formalist effort to explicate “what [Allen is] really saying.” Blake’s thesis statement seems right in line with Allen’s invocation of a “godless universe” and his assertion that “life is meaningless.”

“By any measurement, Allen’s preoccupation with a universe without structure has become more prominent, and more oppressive, as his work developed through the years,” Blake maintains. “By the time he reaches his European cycle – Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), and Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) – his vision of a pointless universe has darkened to its bleakest degree ever.” If Allen ever did read film criticism on his work, it seems certain that he would have to applaud Blake’s essay for gauging accurately the bleak tonalities in Allen’s movies that the director perceives as “clear as a bell.”

On the other hand, Stephen Papson’s chapter, “Critical Theory and the Cine-matic World of Woody Allen,” takes a very different approach to one of Allen’s most admired films. Papson writes,

Allen explores the intersection of meaning, pleasure, and identity in relation to the social and cultural contradictions of modernity. We encounter the most pronounced articulation of this in Zelig. As I will illustrate, the diegesis of Zelig is a direct exten-sion of Fromm’s (1941) analysis of the underlying psychological conditions pro-duced by modernity reflected in the rise of Nazism.

In addition to Erich Fromm, Papson’s essay is pervaded by quotations from theo-rists of the Frankfurt School of Sociology, who provide him with characterizations of the “social and cultural contradictions of modernity” that he also finds perme-ating Zelig. What Papson never explicitly contends – and this is where Allen’s “what I’m really saying” starts to seem inadequate as a critical stance – is that Allen has read Fromm or Adorno or Marcuse. Papson’s essay is artful because of his presiding assumption that Allen’s consciousness was formed amidst the “underly-ing psychological conditions of modernity,” and that he responded artistically through Zelig to the very same cultural tensions that inspired intellectual responses from theorists. “It astonishes me what a lot of intellectualizing goes on over my films,” Allen said in the 1980s, seeming to anticipate Emmet Ray’s self-conscious defensiveness about his art: “They’re just films” (qtd. in Carroll 1994: 93). Papson and other Companion critics would not dispute that Allen’s movies are “just films”; where they would disagree with him is in his implicit assumption that those films’ meanings are restricted to what the screenwriter/director intended them to mean. Many of the Companion critics would concur, alternatively, with a statement Gregg

8    Peter J. Bailey

Bachman makes in the context of his Crimes and Misdemeanors chapter: “my point is that our reads, as critics and scholars, are just as important as the filmmaker’s intention.” Cynthia Lucia makes the same argument in her chapter, “Here . . . It’s Not Their Cup of Tea”: Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies in Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice,” when she distinguishes between Allen’s interview comments about September and the movie she experienced: “Although in Allen’s own view Diane ‘doesn’t act maliciously. She just does what she does because she doesn’t know better’  .  .  .  the film itself adopts a more ambivalent attitude.”

Of course, the films he has produced have given Allen ample opportunity to exact revenge upon film critics for “what a lot of intellectualizing that goes on over [his] films,” which is what he does in, among others, Sweet and Lowdown, a film seldom remarked upon in the Companion essays. Blanche Williams (Uma Thurman), the wife of jazz guitarist Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), is a journalist fixated upon penetrating the secrets of artistic creation, and Allen delights in having her pose unanswerable questions to her husband (“What do you think of when you play? I mean, what goes through your mind? What are your real feelings?”), to which Emmet replies, “I don’t know. That I’m underpaid. Sometimes I think about that.”

Subsequently, Blanche decides that a key to Emmet’s psyche is concealed within his love of trains, and as the couple sits in a switchyard, she recommences her interrogation: “What is this fascination with trains? . . . Are you trying to recapture some feeling from childhood, when you dreamt of glamorous cities just out of reach?”

EMMET: I’m not trying to recapture anything from childhood. It stank.BLANCHE: Then I can only think it must be the power of the locomotive, the sheer,

potent sexual energy of the pistons that arouses your manhood, the pistons pumping.

EMMET: You sound like you want to go to bed with the train.

Happily, Allen’s movies proved to the Companion critics not so intransigent to interpretation as the text of Emmet Ray does to Blanche.

As I have suggested, what we critics need not worry about at all is Allen reading our interpretations of his work and objecting to them. When asked by Lax (2007: 324) whether film critics or reviewers influence his moviemaking, Allen minced no words. Although he would

share many of the severest criticisms of my work if I hear about them, I have a very critical eye for my work, and for other people’s. I used to read about myself, but I completely stopped because talk about unhelpful distractions – the absurdity of reading that you’re a comic genius or in bad faith. Who needs to ponder such out-landish nonsense?

Introduction    9

The chapters in Companion to Woody Allen spend no time on critical binaries like the one Allen dismisses here, of course, and the critics in these pages resolutely foreswore themselves to resist penning “outlandish nonsense.” Sam and I did encourage them, however, to include critical perspectives on Allen’s oeuvre which are anything but “unhelpful distractions” – for instance, Renée R. Curry’s “Woody Allen’s Grand Scheme: The Whitening of Manhattan, London, and Barcelona,” which argues that Allen’s determination to create movies that look like those Hollywood products he happily watched at the Midwood Theater in Brooklyn as a child has left him creating on film major urban centers nearly bereft of people of color, thereby distorting the racial and ethnic realities of those cities. Similarly, in “Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris: Remembering Modernism, Remember-ing Woody,” Katherine Fusco finds a personal agenda working through this “warmest” of recent Allen films in which he simplifies Gil Pender’s modernist heroes in order tacitly to imbue himself with their canonical status. Joanna E. Rapf ’s title reflects gender ambivalences plumbed by her study: “ ‘It’s Compli-cated, Really’ ”: Women in the Films of Woody Allen.” Although creating a Com-panion unsympathetic to our filmmaker subject was never our intention, co-editor Sam and I nonetheless agreed that recognizing and illuminating the contradictions inescapably embedded within Allen’s film art is a necessary element of trying to understand it.

Allen is on record, as well, as asserting another reason for ignoring responses to his films, one that, in juxtaposing his movies against an unconquerable antago-nist, resembles his negative estimation of them compared to Bicycle Thieves.

I don’t really know how people have responded to the film because I gave up check-ing years ago, but if they liked it, great. If they didn’t like it, it doesn’t mean much to me, not because I’m aloof and arrogant, but because I sadly learned that their approbation doesn’t affect my mortality. If I do something I feel is not very good, and the public embraces it, even wildly, that doesn’t make my personal sense of failure feel any better. That’s why the key is to work, enjoy the process, don’t read about yourself, when people bring up the subject of films, deflect the conversation to sports, politics, or sex, and keep your nose to the grindstone (Lax 2007: 106).

Allen’s casual juxtaposition of reactions to his films with the inexorability of his mortality suggests why so many of his movies – Love and Death, Shadows and Fog, Deconstructing Harry – include among their cast lists actors playing the role of Death. (In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Roy [Josh Brolin] turns the title formula for romance deadly, telling his mother-in-law, promised by a psychic that amour is in her future, “I believe, unfortunately, that you will meet the tall dark stranger that we all eventually meet.”) Perhaps the most resonant recent image of Allen’s death-conscious, death-defying art is that of the recently deceased magi-cian Sidney Waterman, Allen’s character in Scoop, continuing to perform card tricks on a boat captained by the Grim Reaper which is ferrying the magician and his deathly audience to the afterworld.

10    Peter J. Bailey

Implicit in this mortality-obsessed stance is another of Allen’s rationales for perpetuating his regimen of making a film per annum – a strategy that has both practical and magical intents. “I make these films to amuse myself, or should I say to distract myself,” Allen told Lax, and he readily admits that it is from the unan-swerable questions and terrible truths of existence that the making of films dis-tracts him. “[Shadows and Fog] fulfilled that desire that keeps me working,” Allen continued, “that keeps me in the film business. I do all my films for my own per-sonal reasons .  .  .” (Lax 2007: 127). Like the characters in Manhattan who buffer themselves against issues of human ultimacy through their preoccupations with their erotic entanglements, and like Steffi (Dianne Wiest) in the closing scene of September, whose best counsel to the griefstricken Lane (Mia Farrow) is, “Soon you’ll leave here [Connecticut], and you’ll start all over again in New York. There’ll be a million things to keep you busy. It’s gonna be all right,” Allen’s interviews suggest that, for him, too, sometimes in life self-distraction is the best that can be done. To this extent, all of his films fulfill their motives of distraction, and his indifference to audience/reviewer responses as well as his lack of enthusiasm about many of them are, arguably, products of his movies having already served their primary personal objective for him before they’re ever released. Small wonder that Sandy Bates looks so demoralized after the screening of his film at the end of Stardust Memories.

Allen put a far more positive slant on his filmmaking regimen in his interview with Richard Schickel, likening it to living 10 months of every year of his life in magic.

[W]hen you see a magic trick, it’s something that defies reality. You know, my way has been movies. I live for a year in the movie. I write the movie. I live with those characters. I cast the movie. I’m on the set. The set is maybe a 1940s nightclub, or maybe it’s a contemporary thing, but I live in a fake world for ten months. And by living in that world I’m defying reality in a way – or at least hiding from reality. But that’s what it’s all about for me . . . To me, that’s the impetus for the work (Schickel 2003: 145).

At the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo, Cecilia (Farrow) is, notwithstanding her recent personal confrontation with the fraudulence within the movie screen, gradually sucked back into the lushly romantic sham of Fred and Ginger’s Swing Time terpsichore magic, her heartbreakingly brightening face evoking the inten-sity of her deepening delusion. She, too, is “defying reality,” but the poignancy of the moment derives from our knowledge that, before long, she will once again have to “choose reality” by leaving the theater and reentering the desolate Depres-sion world lorded over, for her, by her husband, Monk. In one of his more pro-vocative comments to Schickel, Allen asserted that the reason that he had Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) doing magic tricks in Interiors is that, “for me, reliance on magic is the only way out of the mess that we’re in. If we don’t get a magical solution to it we’re not going to get any solution  . . .” (Schickel 2003: 136). Pearl

Introduction    11

does succeed in resuscitating Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) when Eve’s daughter fails to rescue her mother from her suicidal drowning, but, more often in Allen’s films, the magicians are too conscious of the mechanics of their illusions to save anyone – themselves included. Typical of these self-consciously impotent magicians is Scoop’s Sidney Waterman – Splendini – who, before dying, knows all too well that his “agitating molecules” to make subjects disappear in his dematerializer box is all a scam. When Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson) embraces the box’s magical powers because she encounters the spectre of a dead reporter inside, Waterman asks her,

What do you think? There’s spirits? A world of departed people? . . . Not me. I’m a prestidigitator. I do coin tricks and card tricks  .  .  .  This [the mystery Sondra is inspired to begin sleuthing by the reporter] is not for me. I do occasional bar mitz-vahs and children’s parties.

As Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler demonstrate in “Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen,” the tension between the possibility of a “magical solution” and the far greater likelihood that any such solution would only be a trick, an act of prestidigitation, pervades Allen’s films. As Allen told Schickel (2003: 78), “my way [of defying reality] has been movies.” Sometimes the magic works; sometimes not. When Manhattan opened, Allen, as he told Lax, skipped the premiere:

So people think, He doesn’t care, or He’s too aloof, or He’s snooty and arrogant, but, as I said, that’s not it. It’s more like joylessness. It doesn’t thrill me. It just doesn’t really mean anything. [He smiles.]

Then he added, as if anticipating the film that would turn his career around, “But Paris thrilled me” (Lax 2007: 116).

Notes

1 As of January, 2012, the domestic gross of Midnight in Paris was $56.5 million, making it the top grossing independent film of 2011 (Daily Variety, Jan. 27, 2012).

2 At significant risk of deflating Turan’s enthusiasm, it needs to be acknowledged that the Companion essay on Woody Allen and France by Gilles Menegaldo depicts a much more equivocal relationship between Allen and that country – particularly with Jean-Luc Godard – than Midnight so compellingly creates.

Works Cited

Carroll, Tim (1994) Woody and His Women. London: Warner Books.Jones, Kent (2011) “Midnight in Paris.” Film Comment (May/June).

12    Peter J. Bailey

Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New York: Knopf.

McGrath, Douglas (2006) “If you knew Woody like I know Woody.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Films. Chicago: Irving R. Dee.Turan, Kenneth (2011) “Movie review: ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” Los Angeles Times (May 20),

B1.

Biography/Autobiography/Auteurism

PART I

1

Woody Allen’s films have always addressed particular aspects of American culture – Jewish humor, local identities (Brooklyn, Manhattan, California), politics (his aversion to Republicans), and aesthetic tastes (his love of Hollywood classics, art cinema, jazz). But the director’s channeling of cultural identities and debates goes beyond the plots of his films. Allen’s public image, a combination of his screen persona and his public discourse, has invariably embodied a tension that was central to the definition of a film culture in the United States: that between “high” and “low” cultural objects – to put it bluntly, between enduring art and disposable entertainment.

It is a well-known fact that the French-born idea of the auteur became a valuable tool in the ascription of cultural value to films. The term’s designation of stylistic and thematic consistency, as well as of a director’s self-expressive needs, counterbalanced the formulaic and ephemeral aspects of industrial objects produced for mass consumption. We are also aware that Allen’s recurring themes and stylistic tropes have placed the majority of his works in the realm of auteur cinema, especially after Annie Hall (1977), which marks a transition to more complex narrative structures and profound themes – the film was immediately followed by Interiors (1978), Allen’s first incursion into the domain of drama. At the same time, the director’s experiences as a gag writer for columnists and television comedians, and as a stand-up comedian both on stage and on TV, charge his auteur identity with elements of popular culture that for long existed in tension with auteur attributes, and which, as I explain later, largely precipi-tated the skepticism towards Allen as a serious filmmaker among American critics.

It is tempting to detect a transition, in Allen’s career, from the realm of popular comedies to that of auteur cinema; in other words, from the slapstick, the

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Stand-up AuteurCecilia Sayad

16 Cecilia Sayad

burlesque, and the one-liner to more “serious” philosophical themes dealing with death, God, adultery, and the self. Even when avoiding the risks of such clear-cut distinctions, studies of the director’s work tend to draw attention to the artistry or the political and cultural relevance of Allen’s humor. Maurice Yacowar’s intro-duction to Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen (1979) is tellingly titled “The Serious Business of Comedy.” Sam Girgus’s The Films of Woody Allen (1993) and Robert Stam’s study of Stardust Memories (1980) and Zelig (1983) in Subversive Pleasures (1989) bring to light the complexity and theoretical dimensions of his oeuvre. Peter J. Bailey’s The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2001) analyzes the director’s cinematic dramatization of creative processes and anxiety about his place between art and entertainment. Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble’s Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong? (2004) explores the philo-sophical undertones of his movies, thereby stressing their artistic value.

What I here hope to contribute to these and other studies of Woody Allen’s films is the investigation not so much of the artistic merits or the philosophical relevance of his comedy, but the coexistence, in Allen’s image, of the stand-up comedian with the ambitious artist, as he combines fleeting comments on cur-rent affairs with timeless metaphysical questions. This discussion calls for a brief account of the role of the cinematic author in the critical debates about the place of film in American culture, as they imply the interdependency between artistry and individual authorship. This overview will ground my analysis of the ways in which Allen embodies this tension, which in turn destabilizes traditional approaches to the auteur, and indeed adds a new dimension to this figure. I will subsequently look at the director’s topical treatment of cultural debates, the residual traces of his stand-up persona, and its implications for the problematic opposition between auteur and popular cinema.

The Place of the Auteur in American Film Culture

If in its romantic formulation the auteur is defined by the enduring and universal aspects of her work, Allen offers us a different model, defined as much by per-petual themes and elements of style as by the treatment of topical issues – in other words, current events in American culture, from politics to the mores of everyday life. And whereas Allen’s recurring themes and stylistic tropes place the director in the realm of auteur cinema, his exceptional productivity (at least one film per year since 1971), the usually limited budgets of his films and their constant recy-cling of similar material attach to Allen’s productions the seriality that is typical of popular culture. Allen personally articulates some of the tensions that have permeated the designation of the place and value of film in American society: tensions between uniqueness and repetition, universalism and topicality, and auteurism and commercialism.

The Stand-up Auteur 17

The auteur has traditionally embodied notions of individuality, originality, control, stability, and universality. Primarily a tool for Cahiers du cinéma critics to assert the artistic value of supposedly “low” Hollywood genres, the notion of a film auteur was nonetheless at odds with the defining attributes of popular culture, characterized by its repetitive, ephemeral, and consumable qualities. Rather than fully embracing these notions, the defense of Hollywood filmmakers by the Young Turks headed by François Truffaut proceeded by attributing to their works char-acteristics associated with the high arts. One of the clearest articulations of this tendency was Jean-Luc Godard’s assertion that a film by Hitchcock was as impor-tant as a book by Aragon (MacCabe 2003: 74).1 The auteur thus embodies some of the oppositions that have marked the cultural production of the twentieth century at large. After all, the redefinition of art by the avant-garde was contem-porary with, and partly motivated by, the advent of the cinema. The same notions of uniqueness, essence, timelessness, and universalism that defined the romantic artist were put into question when the attention to popular culture led to the vali-dation of seriality, surface, transience, and topicality, especially in the writings of art and film critic Lawrence Alloway, as Peter Stanfield’s study of his work makes very clear (Stanfield 2008). Surrealist automatism, Dadaist ready-mades, and, later, Andy Warhol’s appropriation of rejects of consumerist society, were on a par with the meditations on the cultural value of objects industrially produced, with strong entertainment and mass appeal, and which displayed a so-called distasteful pen-chant for vulgar humor, physicality, and violence.

The earlier romantic vision of the auteur as the artist who survives the system, who is constrained by the industry’s political and commercial interests and yet is able to assert personal vision and style, was soon called into question, and was deeply impacted by the late 1960s structuralist turn in film studies. Untouchable for its transcending genius but challenged on the aforementioned attributes, this figure was quickly redefined as a theoretical construct, especially in the works of British film scholars like Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Stephen Heath, Ben Brewster, and Peter Wollen, who coined the term “auteur structuralism.”2 This new account of auteurism replaced the biographical auteur with a set of “structures” – rather than human beings with specific worldviews, auteurs become “names for certain regularities in textual organization,” as Dudley Andrew explains in “The unauthor-ized auteur today” (2000: 21). “Auteur analysis,” Wollen argues in the foundational Signs and Meanings in the Cinema,

does not consist of retracing a film to its origins, to its creative source. It consists of tracing a structure (not a message) within the work, which can then post factum be assigned to an individual, the director, on empirical grounds (1972: 167–168).

The critic’s mission, in Andrew’s later rendition of Wollen’s theory, is to isolate “the auteur’s voice within the noise of the text” (2000: 21). It follows that, however skeptical about the possibility of locating the source of meaning on a self-expressing

18 Cecilia Sayad

individual, auteur structuralism held on to romantic notions of uniqueness and permanence.

Given the industrial modes of Hollywood productions, it is not surprising that the attribution of traditional artistic values to cinematic texts was deemed either implausible or artificially imposed. Histories of American film criticism by Raymond J. Haberski (It’s Only a Movie! Film and Critics in American Culture, 2001) and Greg Taylor (Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism, 1999), for example, tell us about the movie-loving critics’ resistance to the stand-ards applied to literature, the theater, or the fine arts. The excitement around cinema consisted precisely of the ways it begged the redefinition of cultural values, the novelty of a medium that, in Haberski’s words, was “both an industry and a cultural expression,” or an “art that had mass appeal and was mass pro-duced” (2001: 11). Taylor’s account of the cult and camp criticism respectively practiced by Manny Farber and Parker Tyler since the 1940s shows that film’s col-lective and industrial production modes did not always accommodate a traditional understanding of authorship as identifiable and stable. On the contrary, these approaches privilege the critic’s, rather than the author’s, construction of meaning. Cult critics, Taylor explains, show little concern for the artistic impulse behind the making of films. Instead, these critics stress their own capacity to select objects that were either produced by Hollywood but had little merit or that simply lay outside of the industry. In Taylor’s words,

cult criticism focuses on the identification and isolation of marginal artworks, or aspects and qualities of marginal artworks, that (though sorely neglected by others) meet the critic’s privileged aesthetic criteria. Often the marginal cult object is not a traditional artwork at all but a select product of popular culture (1999: 15).

Cult critics elect obscure objects that escape commoditization, frequently pro-moting an “assault on the conventions and order of taste” (Taylor 1999: 32). Their goal is to reorient audiences’ choices, driving their attention away from traditional artistic standards, and towards “inappropriate objects from a lower taste culture” (32). These objects are to be given meaning and value by the critic, who guides audience’s likings, capacitating them to select and construe their own canons, “to define their own culture in opposition to prevailing standards” (33).

Similarly, camp criticism also seizes film for the critic’s own expressive needs. Where cult emphasizes selective criteria, “the critical camp spectator revels in the interpretation/transformation process while often placing little stake in the initial selection of mass objects” (Taylor 1999: 16). Inclined to investigations of psycho-logical and archetypal manifestations, Tyler’s camp practices placed the critic at the origin of the film’s meaning, “the pleasure of criticism [lying] in forcibly remaking common culture into personal art” (16). Camp appreciation relies on “poorly controlled texts,” which prove “more rewarding than the tightly managed

The Stand-up Auteur 19

artwork” for a critic (and an audience) wishing to appropriate these texts for their own use (52).

The attribution of a subversive quality to cult and camp criticism presupposes an understanding of film as artistic expression that predates auteurism, in a nar-rative that opposes film-as-art and film-as-commerce, deprived of any cultural value. On the film-as-art front, James Agee, for one, privileged the director over screenwriters and actors; he spoke of geniuses, praised the artistic merits of Hollywood films, and advocated that a movie was as serious a cultural object as literature or painting. His review of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite (1933) and Atalante (1934) for The Nation on July 5, 1947, centered on the director’s artistry and, not unlike the politique des auteurs years later, detected a certain consistency in style. Historians call attention to Agee’s understanding of the director as “the deity behind the entire production, the father-progenitor of the film,” or the equivalent of “a symphony conductor, who ‘selects and blends his instruments’ to achieve aesthetic results” (Seib 1968: 123). Agee’s attribution of artistic merits to films often took the form of analogies with the high arts – he wrote, for example, that Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1934) displayed the nihilism of Céline and the humanism of Dickens. Agee praised the film’s shifts between realism and comedy, claiming that, “if you accept that principle in Joyce or Picasso, you will examine with interest how brilliantly it can be applied in moving pictures and how equally promising” (reprinted in Agee 1958: 75).

The import of French auteurism by Andrew Sarris in the early 1960s, famously articulated in “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” blends Agee’s emphasis on directors with a cultist celebration of Hollywood as privileged site for the mani-festation of auteurship. Pauline Kael’s merciless attack on the purportedly “eso-teric” critical criteria proposed by Sarris (namely, technical competence, personal style, and interior meaning) contests, among other things, his biased preference for Hollywood movies. Kael criticizes Sarris for establishing that the director’s personality arises from a tension between artist and modes of production. He proposes, for example, that George Cukor’s “abstract style” is “more developed” than that of Ingmar Bergman, “who is free to develop his own scripts” (Sarris qtd. in Kael 1963: 18). In Kael’s words, Sarris’s ideal auteur

is the man who signs a long-term contract, directs any script that is handed to him, and expresses himself by shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots. If his “style” is in conflict with the story line or subject matter, so much the better – more chance for tension (Kael 1963: 17).

Curiously, the distinction between commercial and art films in the United States led to a territorial division where “art” became the domain of foreign productions – something suggested in the comparison between Cukor and Bergman. Stam also indicates the presence of a territorial component to Sarris’s criticism, claiming that

20 Cecilia Sayad

his open defense of Hollywood productions ultimately evolved to a “surrepti-tiously nationalist instrument for asserting the superiority of American cinema” (Stam 2000: 89).

Allen himself seems to incorporate the binary opposing art to American film-making. While on the one hand his long lasting dismissal of the studio system and love of art cinema have posited him as “foreign” (Baxter 1998: 3), on the other he has stated that, being an American, his films would never be perceived as art in the United States (Lax 1991: 179). This displacement of American cinema within the terrain of the art film is ironic when one takes into consideration that Hol-lywood movies provided the material for the French formulation of the artistry of mise-en-scène – just as it was the attitudes of Orson Welles, Jonas Mekas, or John Cassavetes that legitimized the director as the key creator in spite of the collaboration of other professionals. Concurrently, the European auteurs that came to define the notion of “art cinema” had great impact on American film-makers. The New American Cinema promoted by Mekas, for one, was modeled after European films (Taylor 1999: 87), and the recognizable styles of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma, among others, owe as much to the aesthetic consistency of classical Hollywood auteurs as to the self-reflexive meditations typical of the French New Wave. However, few US directors have so explicitly articulated the split between the admiration for European art cinema and the American commitment to entertainment as Woody Allen.

Though the director’s recurring themes, stylistic tropes, and self-reflexivity define him as an auteur, Allen can just as easily be associated with Charles Chap-lin, Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, or Mel Brooks. The unchanging characteristics of their performances intermittently produce the suspension of the illusion of fiction – rather than blending into the depicted worlds and disappearing into dif-ferent characters, these actor-directors evoke both their roles in previous films and their public personas. Similarly, the parts played by Allen share very similar traits – the Jewish background, the unglamorous Brooklyn childhood, the conflicted relationship with psychoanalysis, the attraction to sexy and neurotic women, the love of jazz and of the movies. His trademark black-rimmed glasses and balding disheveled head lead to the perception of such characters as the same figure inhabiting different scenarios – blending in well in the universe of contem-porary Manhattan writers or filmmakers, but standing out in scenarios such as the year 2173 in Sleeper (1973), nineteenth-century Russia in Love and Death (1975), or medieval England in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex  .  .  . But Were Afraid to Ask (1972).

Allen’s combination of European art cinema’s self-reflexivity and an all- too-New-Yorker avant-gardism epitomizes at once the intertextual patchwork that marks the citational cinema of the French New Wave and the tension between high and low cultures that guided the debate about the artistic status of film in the United States. The coexistence between popular art forms (slapstick, bur-lesque, stand-up) and high culture (Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Bergman), and the

The Stand-up Auteur 21

artistic crisis experienced by some of Allen’s characters articulate and dramatize American cinema’s identity crisis, and the evocation of his stand-up persona allows for a topicality that exists in tension with the traditional conception of the auteur.

The Auteur as Commentator

Articles on Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) often quote Michael Tolkin’s observation that, “If [it] were an Italian film from 1953, we would have every scene memorized” (qtd. in Kim 2003: epigraph). Given that Burnett is an African Ameri-can director, Tolkin’s provocative remark seems to address US racial politics. Yet it also attests to the ghettoization of American art cinema (often equated with auteur cinema), suggesting that art remains the exclusive reserve of foreign pro-ductions. The polarity art/entertainment ingrained in the debates about film in the United States is also a central trope both in Allen’s oeuvre and in his public discourse. Allen has incorporated the territorial marker of this distinction by endorsing the association of art cinema and Europe (heralding Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini) while linking American cinema to entertainment (celebrating the influence of the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope in his work). Hollywood Ending (2002) uses that opposition as a central element of the plot, with Allen’s character (Val Waxman) as a once successful director whose decadence is frequently described in terms of his pretentious insistence on being an “American artist.” The film makes nostalgic references to the long gone respect for the art of filmmaking, when access to foreign movies on New York’s screens was easier. Symptomatically, Waxman wants a foreign cinematographer to bring in some “texture” to the image, and ends up having a picture he directs blind (and which flops badly at the American box office) hailed as a masterpiece in Paris. The fact that the French are in reality more at ease with Allen’s auteur status than are Americans consti-tutes this narrative event as at once redemptive of Allen’s artistic status (however disdained at home) and mocking of the Europeans’ aesthetic tastes – a paradox that seems to haunt Allen’s own cinematic self-perception. Hence Hollywood Ending reworks the opposition between American popular movies and foreign art cinema incorporated in Allen’s public discourse about his work. Speaking to biographer Eric Lax in the late 1980s about the contrast between his early “commercial” comedies and his more dramatic films, Allen said,

There is a problem in self-definition and public perception of me. I’m an art-film maker, but not really. I had years of doing commercial comedies, although they were never really commercial . . . First there was a perception of me as a comedian doing those comic films, and then it changed to someone making upgraded commercial films like Annie Hall and Manhattan. And as I tried to branch off and make more

22 Cecilia Sayad

off beat films, I’ve put myself in the area of kind of doing art films – but they’re not perceived as art films because I’m a local person, I’m an American, and I’ve been known for years as a commercial entity  .  .  .  What I should be doing is either just funny commercial films, comedies and political satires that everybody looks forward to and loves and laughs at, or art films. But I’m sort of in the middle” (Lax 1991: 197).

In 1996, Allen told John Lahr: “The only thing standing between me and great-ness is me . . . I would love to do a great film” (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 176). Similarly, Lax’s biography includes Allen’s statement about a purported inability to dwell on the “serious” and profound themes associated with the art film: “I’m forever struggling to deepen myself and take a more profound path, but what comes easiest to me is light entertainment. I’m more comfortable with the shallower stuff ” (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 177). Allen’s statements, which are indicative of his typically self-deprecating style, echo his Stardust Memories character’s existential crisis – Sandy Bates’s shift from directing comedy to dramatic and artistically ambi-tious films is immediately rejected by critics and audience alike (Stardust comes out two years after Interiors, Allen’s first venture into drama).

The binary art/entertainment provides constant material for conflicts experi-enced by many of the writers and directors Allen plays in his films. As Bailey notes in The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, these characters struggle to maintain some artistic integrity, resisting, when possible, the temptation to compromise their art for financial necessity (2001: 60). Alvy Singer (Annie Hall) and Isaac Davis (Manhat-tan, 1979) abandon television shows for more “serious” writing (theater and litera-ture, respectively). Sandy Bates (Stardust Memories) struggles to have his “ambitious” films accepted by producers and studio executives, and Mickey Sachs (Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986) abandons a stable job as a TV producer when a brain tumor scare makes him reevaluate the meaning of life. Conversely, Cliff Stern (Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1989) undertakes the commission to direct a documentary on his commercially successful brother-in-law (Alan Alda), whose films he despises, in order to fight bankruptcy and artistic isolation, and Hollywood Ending’s Val Waxman reluctantly commits himself to directing a movie for his ex-wife’s husband, a studio tycoon.

The opposition low/high art also offers comic material for couple dynamics in Allen’s plots. Alvy and Isaac initiate Annie (Diane Keaton) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) into intellectual life (philosophy, literature, and classical and/or art cinema). Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and Mighty Aphrodite (1995), on the other hand, show the Allen characters’ enthusiasm about the popular confronted by their wives’ more sophisticated tastes – in Manhattan Murder Mystery, Larry loves basketball while his wife (Keaton) loves the opera, and in Mighty Aphrodite Lenny’s admiration for the Marx Brothers and jazz (he wants to name their adopted kid Groucho, Django, or Thelonious) contrasts with the passion of his gallery-owner wife (Helena Bonham Carter) for the fine arts. The husband/wife

The Stand-up Auteur 23

polarization of low/high art is taken to extremes in Small Time Crooks (2000), where Frenchy (Tracey Ullman) and Ray (Allen) become estranged when he refuses to be educated on high society’s artistic tastes. While Frenchy, accidentally turned into a millionaire, visits museums and reads the classics, Ray eats popcorn and watches old movies on TV.

Whereas on the levels of character and of Allen’s self-definition as an artist the binary high and low comes across as conflicted and hard to reconcile, on the aesthetic level it constitutes the director’s personal signature. Allen’s uniqueness lies obviously not just in the blending of what has conventionally been associated with the popular and the auteurist in film (which for that matter characterizes the works of directors like Godard), but in the components of this mix. Quotes (a trademark of auteurs like Godard, De Palma, or Quentin Tarantino, among others) have always permeated Allen’s career, and reflect his eclectic tastes. Cita-tions include tributes to specific artists (Fellini, Bergman, Kubrick, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky), films (8 ½ in Stardust Memories; Amar-cord in Radio Days, 1987; Autumn Sonata in September, 1987; M in Shadows and Fog, 1991; Rear Window in Manhattan Murder Mystery), literary texts (by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, 1982; by Dostoevsky in Crimes and Misdemeanors), visual imagery (the futuristic scenario of 2001 and the orgasm machine of THX 1138 in Sleeper; the raising lion of Battleship Potemkin in Love and Death; the hanging clothes of M in Shadows and Fog) or specific film scenes (the mirror sequence of Lady from Shanghai in Manhattan Murder Mystery). The coexistence between litera-ture and Freudian psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and slapstick, screwball, and stand-up comedy on the other, is one of the elements attuning the director with the art/entertainment tension that was central in the definition of an American film culture. But it is also through Allen’s signature use of one of these popular modes – namely stand-up comedy – that the director performs sociocultural com-mentary, adding a topical component to his films.

When considering Allen’s combination of the popular with the topical, it is worth remembering that he was once a freelance gag writer for newspaper col-umnists and TV performers, and that before entering the realm of cinema (and soon thereafter of auteur cinema), the director was himself a stand-up comedian on both the stage and television.3 As we know, stand-up comedy is largely a vehicle for sociopolitical and cultural commentary – from jokes about current events, politicians, and celebrities to comments on the mores of everyday life (traffic, public restrooms, eating habits, etc.). In fact, stand-up comics tend to be less con-cerned about constructing an altogether fictional world than telling anecdotes as if they had happened in real life – irrespective of how exaggerated or implausible their stories may be. More often than not, these comics appear under their own public identity (as Woody Allen, Chris Rock, or Jo Brand). However fictive their tales, they are narrated by the artist’s public (and highly performative) persona. Any traditional sense of a psychologically complex and consistent character is blurred with the artist’s autobiography. This is more apparent when the stand-up

24 Cecilia Sayad

comic is also a film or sitcom actor (as with Allen, Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, or Larry David), rather than simply verbally reporting experiences to an audience, either on a stage or on a television screen.

What I am here suggesting is that the topical quality of Allen’s films results largely from the fact that his scripts and screen performances bear traces of his experience as a stand-up comedian. His appearance as a master of ceremonies for the New Year TV special Woody Allen Looks at 1967 provides a clear example. The program was part of NBC’s variety show The Kraft Music Hall, whose radio ver-sions had been hosted by “king of jazz” Paul Whiteman and Bing Crosby, among others. As its title suggests, the program features Allen’s comments on the social, cultural, and political events of that year, both through stand-up routines and sketches. Allen’s overview of 1967 ranges from political satire to lifestyle – Allen and Liza Minnelli share the stage in a sketch about a husband complaining about his wife’s mini-skirt, and the program includes a spoof of Bonnie & Clyde, released that year. But it is in Allen’s stand-up monologues and in a Q&A with newspaper columnist and TV host William F. Buckley Jr. that we find the genesis of the per-sonality and worldviews of his film characters. The aversion to social gatherings we see in Alvy’s distaste for parties in Annie Hall, where he chooses a basketball game over conversation with intellectuals of Commentary magazine, or the skepti-cism towards political action in Sandy’s shocked reaction to his French girlfriend’s account of her militant experience in May 1968 (Stardust Memories), can be traced back to jokes told in the Kraft special opening monologue. In a stand-up routine, Allen conveys his disbelief in the possibility of any group’s self-entitled nonvio-lence, the proof being he was “beaten up by Quakers.” Allen’s strong sense of not belonging is further dramatized in his joke about trying to help a “negro” kid (this is 1967!) from a beating and generating widespread anger – he is accused of being a fake liberal by the kid, a real liberal by the abusers, a fascist by the real liberals, a hippie by the police, and an anti-Semite by his mother. Allen’s typically self-deprecating Jewish humor manifests itself also in the previously mentioned Q&A with Buckley. Asked by a member of the audience if Israel should give their land back to the Palestinians, Allen answers, “No, I think they should sell it back.” It follows that Allen brings to his films the humor, persona, and worldviews he represented on the stages of variety theaters and television – both of which bear the stamp of popular entertainment.

The topicality of Allen’s jokes and sketches brings, in addition, a sense of immediacy to the comedy, which, as Oliver Double (2005) explains in his book on the genre, Tony Allen defines as stand-up’s “now” agenda. Referring to the impor-tance of being attuned to the reactions of an audience in a theater, Double notes that, “straight drama shows events from another place and another time, but with standup the events happen right here in the venue” (2005: 173). This connection with the here-and-now for the audience invites an analogy with the topicality of Allen’s gags in his movies. Annie Hall features jokes about JFK’s assassination, Nazis, Commentary magazine, Poland’s political past (“[my grandmother] was too

The Stand-up Auteur 25

busy being raped by Cossacks”), and contemporary values (“everything your parents said was good is bad: sun, milk, red meat, college”). Topical jokes about the National Rifle Association in Sleeper (“a group that helped criminals get guns so they could shoot citizens; it was a public service”), or the postwar connotations of Wagner’s music in Manhattan Murder Mystery (“I start getting the urge to conquer Poland”) are, likewise, constant reminders of the here-and-now of our existences. The examples of references to elements of contemporary American society are numerous. In Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), Allen’s insurance inves-tigator manifests his insecurity towards a strong female character (Helen Hunt) by observing that “she graduated from Vassar and I went to driving school.” Wax-man’s aforementioned desire for filmic “texture” reflects the digital era nostalgia for the celluloid, and he is given an NYU business student to act as an inter-preter for his Chinese cinematographer. Hollywood Ending’s criticism of current-day Hollywood comes also in the form of an absurd lifetime achievement award to Haley Joel Osmont (who was age 14 when the film came out). In Anything Else (2003), Dobel (Allen) complains that dialing 911 is like trying to get a mortgage. More recently, Allen’s surrogate, Larry David, opens Whatever Works (2009) with a monologue to the camera about the superfluous lives of the socially privileged, with their “nine servings of fruit and vegetables a day,” their “Omega 3, and the treadmill, and the cardiogram, and the mammogram, and the pelvic sonogram, and oh my god, the colonoscopy,” asking, “and what do you do, you read about some massacre in Darfur or some school bus gets blown up and you go, oh my god the horror, and then you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free-range chicken.”

Annie Hall’s famous Marshall McLuhan scene is one of the clearest examples of the narrative’s invasion by the topical: Allen’s character pulls the media theorist from behind a film poster and into the scene to support his argument against an arrogant Columbia University professor pontificating in a movie theater – about none other than Fellini, one of Allen’s art-film heroes (Figure 1.1). McLuhan’s appearance anticipates the more consistent and extreme incorporation of real-life figures into the fiction in Zelig’s mockumentary-fashioned interviews with intel-lectuals like Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Bruno Bettelheim, and John Morton Blum, who elaborate on the fictive Zelig, briefly metamorphosing into imagined versions of themselves – Blum, for example, is credited as the author of Interpreting Zelig.4 Most strikingly, Allen incorporates documentary footage of his own appearance in The Dick Cavett Show into the flashbacks explaining Alvy’s character at the beginning of Annie Hall (Bailey 2001: 59).

The references to topical issues define the characters played by Allen not so much as psychologically consistent beings enclosed within the narrative, but as commentators expressing their views by means of jokes. In relation to the ques-tion of topicality, it is through stand-up that Allen becomes an outsider to the worlds depicted in his narratives, to the classical conception of a self-enclosed diegesis, and to the realm of auteur cinema. The stand-up mode facilitates the

26 Cecilia Sayad

penetration of the film by the extrafilmic, momentarily causing what in Carnal Thoughts Vivian Sobchack, speaking of the presence of documentary elements in fictional narratives, defines as the restructuring of the fiction as the space of the real (Sobchack 2004: 277).5 It is through Allen’s comments on current affairs that his films become topical, complicating the conception of the auteur as transcen-dental – notwithstanding the stylistic sophistication, universals, and profound matters singled out by scholars and critics in their legitimate task of illuminating Allen’s artistry. Allen’s self-conscious articulation of his own auteur identity tends to posit his affinities with popular forms of comedy as obstacles for the consolida-tion of his place in the pantheon of art film directors. The last segment of this chapter explores the fictional treatment given to this issue in Stardust Memories, where Allen voices the mores of American film culture through a fictionalized career examination questioning the director’s own auteur ambitions, as well as a cultural milieu’s response to the idea of artistry in film.

Stardust Memories: The Auteur between Distrust and Desire

At the beginning of this chapter, I argued that Woody Allen’s characters often articulate some of the questions that permeated the American debates about cinematic authorship – the validity of applying criteria such as artistic intention, control, and self-expression to assess the cultural value both of individual films

Figure 1.1 McLuhan’s presence constitutes an invasion of the fictional by the topical in Annie Hall. (Producers: Robert Greenhut, Jack Rollins, Fred T. Gallo, Charles H. Joffe)

The Stand-up Auteur 27

and of cinema as a whole. The dramatization of Sandy Bates’s relations with fans and producers in Stardust Memories opens the way to a career examination that includes Allen’s own artistic anxieties (however fictionalized), meditations about the opposition between high and low arts, and a caricature of American film culture, albeit one inflected by the Fellinian universe of 8½, which Stardust openly parodies in the black and white photography, the grotesque portrayal of cultural types, the childhood flashbacks, and the figure of the estranged and con-flicted cineaste.

Allen’s fictionalized self-evaluation is rendered through the story of a comic filmmaker undergoing artistic and personal crisis. The framework for Sandy’s interior battles is a retrospective of his films, turned into a subjective journey that takes place at a time in which producers, disdainful of Sandy’s artistic ambitions (and fearful to put at risk a profitable and stable cinematic production), reject his first dramatic screenplay. The retrospective exposes the fictional director to confrontations with such producers, studio executives, and critics. Sandy’s desire to make a drama with “meaning” is also undermined by his fans, interested in nothing but good laughs. Standing for “self-expression,” “meaning” is at once dismissed and desired by Sandy, and reflects Allen’s own dubiety about the spiritual benefits of artistic creations – Bailey suggests that the film dramatizes “the rejec-tion of the redemptive power of art” (2001: 89).

Stardust resorts to a series of Q&A sessions, scattered through the narrative, to establish a dialogue opposing Allen’s fictional filmmaker and a caricaturized audi-ence of critics, fans, scholars, and museum curators. In his analysis of the film, Stam calls attention to a dynamics in which “Allen places in the mouths of various characters all the conceivable charges that might be leveled against Allen’s oeuvre in general and against Stardust Memories in particular” (1989: 196). Such a structure grants Allen the opportunity to perform the “anticipatory self-depreciation” found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground – in Stardust, says Stam, such a practice “consists in demonstrating [the director’s] advance knowledge of all possible criti-cisms of himself and his work” (197).

Stardust articulates this anticipated reaction to criticisms through the opposition between the “emptiness” of popular cinema and the “meaningfulness” of art cinema. On the one hand, Sandy contemptuously dismisses the spectators’ inter-rogations about his comedies’ textual meanings during the Q&A sessions: a serious question about what the director was trying to say in his movie is dismissed with a blunt “I was just trying to be funny.” On the other, the protagonist protests the rewriting of his dramatic screenplay by studio executives, showing dismay towards their interference with his artistic processes. Both the sessions and the meetings reveal the impossibility of dialogue between artist and audience, and between artist and studio executives. But most significantly for the implications of Allen’s affinities with popular comedy, Sandy’s comic talent is ambiguously rendered as an obstacle to his development as an artist, but also as a gift. Implying the tradi-tional distinction between entertainment and art, a producer defiantly questions

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the director’s anxieties and ambitions: “What does he have to suffer about,” com-pleting his sentence with a line that, having been written by Allen, works as a form of self-consolation: “Doesn’t the man know he has the greatest gift that anyone can have – the gift of laughter?” Such criticisms of Sandy’s desire to make a per-sonal movie were ironically echoed in the critical reception of Stardust. The titles of the reviews of the film, listed by Stam in his analysis, betray the critics’ dismiss-ive attitude towards the director’s homage to his auteur-cinema “model,” which in turn read as a dismissal of his incursion into the terrain of artistic seriousness associated with European cinema: “Woody doesn’t rhyme with Federico” (Sarris), “Inferiors Woody Allen hides behind Fellini” (Schiff ), and “Woody’s 8 wrongs” (Shalit) (Stam 1989: 197).

Stardust is also a vehicle for Allen to respond to some of the criticism addressed to his work – for example, his allegedly apolitical stance, noted by a fictional audi-ence member who asks where Sandy stands politically. The hero’s answer – “I’m for total honest democracy, and I also believe the American system can work” – perpetuates Allen’s own scattered mode of political commentary. Similarly, Sandy’s contention that Bicycle Thieves is not exclusively a social film equally reveals Allen’s awareness that his movies are perceived as lacking social commentary, often unfairly. After all, he has produced elaborate caricatures of social types, which can be found in the naivety and hypocrisy found in Los Angeles (Annie Hall) and among the New York intelligentsia (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust, Hannah, Husbands and Wives, 1992, Whatever Works, among others); the Italian American who recognizes Alvy Singer in the streets; the lower class, Brooklyn Jewish origin of all of Allen’s characters; and the elite’s extreme measures to secure their social status, as in the killing of lovers by a wealthy doctor (Martin Landau) in Crimes and Misdemeanors and a social-climbing tennis instructor ( Jonathan Rhys Meyers) in Match Point (2005).

Though fighting for the expression of his subjectivity, telling producers one cannot be funny when surrounded by “human suffering” (Figure 1.2), Sandy nonetheless embodies the artist’s contradictory desire to both reveal and hide his soul, to both expose his interiority and seal it to public admission. For in Stardust the access to the artist’s intentions equals the access to his private life. The inter-pretation of the symbolism in Sandy’s films takes the form of psychoanalysis – in a dream sequence depicting a posthumous tribute, Sandy’s psychoanalyst confabu-lates on how the director’s films reflect his incapacity to “block out the terrible truths of existence,” speaking of Sandy’s inability to integrate the world of show business when Hollywood believes that “too much reality is not what the people want.” Similarly, the artist’s expression is repeatedly transformed into a tool for a threateningly obsessed audience to assess Sandy’s personal life, inquiring into his narcissism and sexual practices (“Have you ever had intercourse with any type of animal?”), and speculating about Sandy’s search for the meaning of life.

Further qualifying Stardust as an oblique form of self-examination is the confu-sion between the real artist and his screen persona, something that Allen experi-

The Stand-up Auteur 29

ences in real life. The film offers plenty of material for the conflation between Sandy and Allen. His character’s career move reflects the director’s own desire to incorporate drama into his practices – he had recently directed the Bergmanesque Interiors, which was followed by the dark tones of September, Another Woman, and, much later, Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream (2007), as well as by the blending of the dramatic and the comedic in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, or Melinda and Melinda (2004). John Baxter describes how, after watching The Seventh Seal and Cries and Whispers, Allen said that seeing Bergman’s films made him reevaluate his own work (1998: 278), which echoes in Sandy’s decision to write “meaningful” screenplays.

Examples of the confusion between Allen and his characters proliferate in the critical reception of his movies, and are frequently discussed in the literature on the director (including studies by Nancy Pogel, Girgus, and Bailey, as well as the biographies by Baxter and Lax). A 1992 issue of New York magazine dedicated two articles to pointing out similarities between the plot of Husbands and Wives and Allen’s personal life,6 which at the time was a public scandal. Gabe, Allen’s char-acter in the film – a man who falls out of love with his wife (Farrow) and feels helplessly infatuated with a young student ( Juliette Lewis) – was equated with the real Woody Allen, who at the time was ending his relationship with Farrow. David Denby, for one, read the film as autobiography:

Figure 1.2 Stardust Memories: Sandy’s comical talent shrinks in the face of human suf-fering. (Producers: Robert Greenhut, Jack Rollins, Charles H. Joffe)

30 Cecilia Sayad

When I saw Husbands and Wives, the audience, caught between loyalty and distaste, was clearly uncomfortable. So was I. Parts of the movie are excruciating – the scenes between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, for instance, lack the minimal degree of illusion necessary to fiction . . . I felt like I was snooping (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 183).

Stardust also generated confusion, which according to Bailey much angered the director, who “impatiently rejected the imputation that Sandy Bates [was] himself and that his perceptions [were] unmediated versions of Allen’s values and feelings” (87). The director eventually comments on this kind of confusion in ironic state-ments to the press. In an interview about Deconstructing Harry, Allen told the New Yorker that the film was about a “nasty, shallow, superficial, sexually obsessed guy. I’m sure that everybody will think – I know this going in – that it’s me” (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 3). As Bailey’s book shows, the director also transposes this confusion to the domain of plot by exploring the problems that may arise when real events become material for art. Dianne Wiest’s character in Hannah and Her Sisters writes a script inspired by Hannah’s marriage. In Deconstructing Harry, Judy Davis accuses the protagonist (Allen) of not even bothering to disguise the details of their love affair in his book. Later on, Harry tells a professor about the character of his next novel: “It’s me thinly disguised. In fact, I don’t even think I should disguise it anymore . . . It’s me.” Allen himself had admitted to the autobiographical quality of his works in a 1972 interview:

Almost all my work is autobiographical – exaggerated but true. I’m not social. I don’t get an enormous input from the rest of the world. I wish I could get out, but I can’t (qtd. in Lax 1991: 179).

In Stardust, the confusion between real life and fiction also takes the form of the constant interference of the public into the private sphere. Fans wanting Sandy’s attention during the retrospective constantly interrupt his private conver-sations. The viewer can be never fully captured by the film’s romantic plot; the breaking of the news that Sandy’s lover left her husband and his own flirtations with a neurotic violinist are disrupted by the appearances of fans. Sandy’s personal life is constantly transformed into spectacle – from a surprise visit to his sister (witnessed by her yoga friends) to his first encounter with his lover’s children (under the eyes of a restaurant’s customers).

In addition to involuntarily generating curiosity, Sandy is perceived as a reas-suring presence – yet another element inspired by the director’s own experiences. Baxter’s biography informs us that, knowing that Allen would not talk to stran-gers, some fans have “ask[ed] if they could walk a few blocks with him in silence, feeling themselves comforted in his presence” (1998: 278). Similarly, the fictional audience represented in Stardust is as interested in knowing Sandy’s inner motiva-tions as they are in exposing their own intimacies to the filmmaker. Stardust inverts

The Stand-up Auteur 31

the dynamics between artist and audience by having the spectators confide in the auteur, subverting the romantic model criticized by Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1981) (yet perhaps suggested by the conception of a reader yearning for the writer in The Pleasure of the Text). In the film, a fan approaches Sandy to tell him he was a Cesarean; another asks him to write an autograph to his wife calling her an “unfaithful lying bitch.” A young man wants Sandy to take note of his name because people say they resemble each other; a screenwriter wannabe wants him to hear his idea for a comic film. An aspiring actor wastes Sandy’s time showing and discussing his portfolio with him. A young woman shows up in his hotel room wanting to make love. A former schoolmate, now a cab driver, stalks the director to talk about the unfairness of life, contrasting Sandy’s glories with the dullness of his existence. Another man wants Sandy to film his amateur screenplay, and several representatives of charitable associations solicit Sandy’s contributions to and presence at special events.

Part of the hostility depicted in Stardust lies in the fans’ polarized attitudes of not seeing Sandy’s need for privacy and desperately wishing to be seen by him – in other words, in Allen’s portrayal of celebrity culture. The lack of empathy between artist and audience is also manifested in the opposites of not seeing and seeing too much, in refusing to understand the director’s artistic ambitions while comi-cally trying to find symbolism where there is none – asked to interpret the signifi-cance of the protagonist’s Rolls Royce, a spectator pompously replies that he sees it as “his car.” Allen’s conflicted relationship with his audience was expressed in a 1992 interview, where he stated that, contrary to what critics said about the pub-lic’s indifference to his work, it was he who had no concern for the viewers’ needs:

The backlash really started when I did Stardust Memories. People were outraged. I still think that’s one of the best films I’ve ever made. I was just trying to make what I wanted, not what people wanted me to make (qtd. in Baxter 1998: 290).

Stardust’s discussion of authorial expression revisits the debates about critical authority and lack of artistic control that have marked the American approach to film authorship since the 1940s. The controversy surrounding the possibility of artistic expression within a collective and industrial structure is articulated in the distinction between entertainment and art made by the producers and studio executives depicted in Stardust; they see Sandy’s incursions into existential crisis as self-indulgent, including him in the hall of filmmakers who, in the words of a producer, “try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” The artist’s loss of control lies partly in the meddling with the director’s career paths, with producers, critics, and the general audience protesting against Sandy’s desire to abandon the commercial production of comedies. Similarly, the constant har-assment – the public invasion of the director’s private sphere – indicates the artist’s loss of control over his personal life.7 Public and private are intertwined

32 Cecilia Sayad

by the parallel between lack of artistic freedom and lack of privacy, between Sandy’s concern with the integrity of his screenplay and his yearning for solitude.

Equally attuned with some of the debates that evolved around the film author in the United States is the satirizing of the audience’s curiosities about Sandy’s aspirations, calling to mind Barthes’ dictate that readers shall investigate the work rather than the man (1981: 209), which in turn echoes the dismissal of authorial intention found in the creative critical writings of Manny Farber or Parker Tyler. Sandy’s incorporation of the European auteur model finds resistance in the show business framework in which he operates. Yet his satirical answers about the meaning of some of his films, chief among which is “I just wanted to be funny,” aligns him with the skepticism of those critical trends which, with Pauline Kael, feared that the transformation of movies into an object for intellectual scrutiny would deprive them of their popular appeal8 – trends that, according to Stardust, may nonetheless be harmful for the director’s artistic development. The very enthusiasm about film is ridiculed in a scene where a fan asks about a possible homage to Boris Karloff and then blinks at the camera to comment on his own cinephilic erudition. Allen, however, partakes of this enthusiasm – not only does the director frequently invoke his love for Hollywood movies during his child-hood, film viewing is a constant in his oeuvre – Play It Again, Sam (1972), Annie Hall, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Hollywood Ending are some of the movies featuring the director in the role of a cinephile. Most importantly, Allen’s love of film is evident in the abundance of intertextual references that mark his personal style. Such a mockery is therefore a form of self-mockery – the very tribute that Stardust pays to 8 ½ is satirized when Sandy’s actor tells the aforemen-tioned film buff that the movie was not an “homage” to Karloff: “we just stole the idea outright.”

Allen’s topical comments on politics, lifestyle, aesthetic fashions, and American debates about film destabilize the notion of the auteur as producer of timeless works that transcend their eras. Yet, far from trying to undo the legitimization of Allen’s auteur status, I hoped to explore the ways in which the director’s experi-ence in stand-up comedy has tainted his films with the modes of variety theatre and television, thereby adding a new dimension to his auteur identity. The idea of a topical auteur, a commentator on current affairs, challenges the romantic conception of film authorship and, by extension, the validity of relegating artistry to the exclusive domain of auteur cinema.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Peter Stanfield, Peter J. Bailey, and Sam Girgus for their com-ments on this chapter, and Heather Green for her treatment of the images.

The Stand-up Auteur 33

Notes

1 Godard’s idea was later echoed in Peter Wollen’s contention, in Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, that “Hitchcock is at least as important an artist as, say, Scott Fitzgerald” (qtd. in Naremore 1990: 19).

2 For a collection of significant essays on the topic, see Caughie (1981).3 The presence of stand-up comedy elements in Allen’s films is discussed in Sayad (2011).4 In his analysis of the film in Subversive Pleasures, Stam (1989: 203) calls Blum’s associa-

tion with the fictional book a type of “erroneous attribution.”5 Sobchack analyzes the association between Allen’s real life and fictional narrative in

Husbands and Wives in “The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness” (2004: 258–285).

6 See Hoban (1992) and Denby (1992).7 Barbara Kopple’s documentary on the director (Wild Man Blues, 1997) provides an

insight into Allen’s relationship with celebrity as she follows him on a European tour with his jazz band. The documentary registers a similar dynamics between fan and star as that found in Stardust Memories – where fans are eager for attention and the artist is more annoyed than he is appreciative.

8 See Kael (1995).

Works Cited

Agee, James (1958) Agee on Film: Volume One. New York: Perigee Books.Andrew, Dudley (2000) “The unauthorized auteur today.” In Robert Stam and Toby Miller

(eds.), Film and Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 20–29.Bailey, Peter J. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press

of Kentucky.Barthes, Roland (1981) “The death of the author.” In John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Author-

ship: A Reader. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the British Film Institute, 208–213. (Original work published 1968.)

Baxter, John (1998) Woody Allen: A Biography. London: Harper Collins.Caughie, John (ed.) (1981) Theories of Authorship: A Reader. London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul in association with the British Film Institute.Conard, Mark T. and Aeon J. Skoble (eds.) (2004) Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My

Whole Fallacy Is Wrong? Chicago: Open Court.Denby, David (1992) “Imitation of life.” New York (Sept. 21), 60–62.Double, Oliver (2005) Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Standup Comedy. London:

Methuen.Girgus, Sam B. (1993) The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Haberski, Raymond, Jr. (2001) It’s Only a Movie! Films and Critics in American Culture. Lex-

ington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.Hoban, Phoebe (1992) “Everything you always wanted to know about Woody and Mia

(but were afraid to ask).” New York (Sept. 21), 32–42.

34 Cecilia Sayad

Kael, Pauline (1963). “Circles and squares.” Film Quarterly 16.3, 12–26.Kael, Pauline (1995) “It’s only a movie.” Performing Arts Journal 17.2/3, The Arts and the

University (May–Sept.), 8–19.Kim, Nelson (2003) “Charles Burnett.” http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/

burnett/ (accessed Sept. 30, 2012).Lax, Eric (1991) Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf.MacCabe, Colin (2003) Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux.Naremore, James (1990) “Authorship and the cultural politics of film criticism.” Film Quar-

terly 44.1, 14–23.Pogel, Nancy (1987) Woody Allen. Boston: Twayne.Sarris, Andrew (1962) “Notes on the auteur theory in 1962.” Film Culture 27, 1–8.Sayad, Cecilia (2011) “The auteur as fool: Bakhtin, Barthes and the screen performances

of Woody Allen and Jean-Luc Godard.” Journal of Film and Video 63.4, 21–34.Seib, Kenneth (1968) James Agee: Promise and Fulfillment. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pitts-

burgh Press.Sobchack, Vivian (2004) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press.Stam, Robert (1989) Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film. Baltimore,

MD: John Hopkins University Press.Stam, Robert (2000) “The author: Introduction.” In Robert Stam and Tobey Miller (eds.),

Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1–6.Stanfield, Peter (2008) “Maximum movies: Lawrence Alloway’s pop art film criticism.”

Screen 49.2, 179–193.Taylor, Greg (1999) Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism. Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Wollen, Peter (1972) Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 3rd edn. Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press.Yacowar, Maurice (1979) Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen. New York: Frederick

Ungar.

2

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.(Woody Allen, qtd. in Lax 1975)

In Robert Weide’s recent documentary on Woody Allen, film critic F.X. Feeney raises a good question that points to the problem inherent in Weide’s project: “Which Woody Allen?”1 He employs the question to explain that Allen has held several occupations in addition to filmmaking, including author of humorous pieces in The New Yorker, playwright, stand-up comedian, and clarinetist. However, Feeney’s question actually perfectly articulates the complicated figure Woody Allen embodies.

As a star persona, Woody Allen presents a conundrum. By any definition of “star,” Woody Allen should fit the bill. Yet you will probably not find Woody Allen included in a star studies text, and you will not hear his name come up often in conversations about stars. Certainly, his career as a filmmaker generally draws more attention than his star persona; however, this explanation does not seem sufficient considering the magnitude of Allen’s celebrity identity. After all, Allen has been a familiar face on television and film for nearly 50 years and has starred in 34 films. Adding to his powerful star aura, the private or offscreen Allen is virtu-ally indistinguishable from the public/onscreen Allen – so much so that his audi-ence generally perceives the two to be one and the same.

Indeed, Allen has established such a potent screen identity that we regularly refer to the “Woody Allen character” in his films, even when he doesn’t appear in the picture. Depending on the actor playing Allen, the character has sometimes been edgier (Branagh in Celebrity (1998) or more arrogant (Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway (1994) or both (Larry David, Whatever Works (2009)). Allen himself has

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Which Woody Allen?Colleen Glenn

36 Colleen Glenn

shifted his performance of Woody Allen over the years as public perception of his identity has changed (he evolved from endearingly hapless to cruel and destructive in Deconstructing Harry (1997)); even his appearance in the documentary on his jazz concert tour, Wild Man Blues (1997), seems calculated to deflect criticism over the scandal by proving he is too boring to warrant attention. Owen Wilson, the latest actor to play the Allen-type in Midnight in Paris (2011), marks a return to the more affable and innocent Allen of earlier years.

As a star persona, therefore, Woody Allen presents a difficult case study because the man we know as Woody Allen comprises so many different real-life and fic-tional identities that it becomes nearly impossible, despite his iconic public image, to sort out exactly which of the Woody Allens we mean when we say “Woody Allen.” Adding to Feeney’s list, we could add Allan Stewart Konigsberg (the “real” Allen), Woody Allen the screenwriter, Woody Allen the actor, Woody Allen the screen character, Woody Allen the slapstick comedian, Woody Allen the serious artist, Woody Allen the working class Jew from Brooklyn, Woody Allen the upper East Side intellectual snob, Woody Allen the schlemiel, Woody Allen the schmuck, Woody Allen the nihilist, Woody Allen the hopeless romantic, Woody Allen the comic strip character, Woody Allen the jazz musician, and Woody Allen the Knicks fan, aka the regular Joe. By the way, are we talking about Woody Allen pre-scandal or post-scandal? His films, too, reveal numerous and contradic-tory influences, including the silly, slapstick humor of Bob Hope and Groucho Marx and the meditative styles and existentialist themes of Bergman and Fellini.

Adding to the confusion, although Woody Allen is quite possibly the most consistent film director worldwide in terms of productivity (he has released one film a year for the last 42 years), he has often proven unpredictable in terms of the product he delivers. From year to year, we never know what to expect from Woody Allen. The five films he made just between 1977 and 1982, for example, oscillate wildly between sentimental romantic comedy and serious, existential dramas: Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982).

Like his rapidly swinging tastes in stories, Allen’s career, too, has had its ups and downs, and he has often thwarted expectations by either disappointing audi-ences greatly or surprising them wonderfully. Most recently, for example, after several lackluster films, Match Point (2005) appeared, effectively reestablishing Allen as an acclaimed director and beginning a new era of his career. While Allen has never fallen off the map, dramatic turns such as this attest to his proclivity to reinvent himself, continually challenging audience expectations.

Although his image is riddled with contradictions such as these, the amorphous nature of Woody Allen the man, the screen character, and the star obscures such fissures and results in a compelling and durable aura that make him a unique figure in cinematic history. In this light, we need to look discretely at the multiple Allens that constitute his star persona.

Which Woody Allen? 37

Woody, a Star?

From the mid-1960s onward, as Woody Allen was establishing himself as filmmaker, he was also establishing himself as a film star. Part of the difficulty in sorting out the multiple personas of Woody Allen includes his slippery classifica-tion as a star. Although Allen clearly belongs in the grouping by virtue of his fame and enduring, imitable screen image, he somehow does not seem compatible with the category. Allen possesses few of the traits common to most movie stars. He is not handsome nor sexy nor athletic, and he lacks what is known in Holly-wood as the “it” factor: he does not pop from the screen like movie stars do, dominating the mise-en-scène and becoming the focal point of the audience’s attention. (In fact, Allen looks best when playing opposite a dominant actor, providing a kind of comical imbalance to the shot. Positioned against a Diane Keaton or Martin Landau, for example, Allen nearly fades, but the skewed effect is compelling.)

Of course, Allen’s appeal can be attributed to his status as a comedian, as can his ability to compensate for his lack of traditional Hollywood star qualities. Like many comedians, Allen’s physical weaknesses become his advantages as he incor-porates them into his act. His forte – playing a neurotic, self-doubting, endearing, witty, sexually charged hypochondriac – developed over years of work in stand-up comedy and then later crystallized as he shifted to a film actor. Though his films evolved from zany comedies to more serious pictures over the years, Allen himself always plays a comedic role, even in his darker pictures, like Crimes and Misdemean-ors (1989) or Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

The personality traits for which he became known, in combination with his diminutive size, freckled-face, balding head, and thick-framed glasses, synchronize to form a compelling screen personality that feels genuine. As Sam Girgus has pointed out:

The humor of self-deprecation, the confessional mode of discourse, the revelations of emotional and psychological weakness and impotence, the jokes about masturba-tion, and the expression of personal venality and misdeeds all insinuate an intensity of authenticity and sincerity that create a veneer of impregnable credibility about his character  .  .  . Personal imperfection makes him more human and real (Girgus 2002: 5).

Girgus’s apt assessment regarding the sense of authenticity that imbues Allen’s image suggests that Woody Allen’s star persona can, at least in part, be defined by his lack of star-like qualities.

In other words, what makes Allen difficult to classify as a star also, ironically, helps explain his star appeal. Our interest in celebrity figures, according to Richard

38 Colleen Glenn

Schickel (1985: 4), is entrenched in what he calls the “illusion of intimacy.” Fur-thermore, we are encouraged to pursue the “truth” behind the star image (Figure 2.1). Richard Dyer (2004: 2) notes, “It’s the insistent question of ‘really’ that draws us in, keeping us on the go from one aspect to another.” Dyer explains:

How we appear is no less real than how we have manufactured that appearance, or than the “we” that is doing the manufacturing. Appearances are a kind of reality, just as manufacture and individual persons are. However, manufacture and the person .  .  . are generally thought to be more real than appearance in this culture. Stars are obviously a case of appearance – all we know of them is what we see and hear before us. Yet the whole media construction of stars encourages us to think in terms of “really” . . . which biography, which word-of-mouth story, which moment in which film discloses her as she really was? The star phenomenon gathers these aspects of contemporary human existence together, laced up with the question of “really” (2).

Connecting these two concepts, Erin Meyers (2009: 895) rightly suggests that the “search for the authentic celebrity . . . is closely related to the illusion of intimacy.” Thus, for audiences, Woody Allen provides the desired sensation of familiarity and knowledge of his real personality.2

If Woody Allen conjures a particularly resonant sense of intimacy with the audience by virtue of his seemingly authentic persona, then his frequent use of voiceover and breaking of the fourth wall in his films further intensify the audi-

Figure 2.1 The non-star star: Woody Allen in Stardust Memories. (Executive Producers: Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe. Producer: Robert Greenhut)

Which Woody Allen? 39

ence’s impression of familiarity. Both devices grant the audience access to his characters’ thoughts, as well as privilege the audience in terms of information (that is, we know more than other characters in the film). These devices in narra-tion coincide with Allen’s “confessional mode of discourse” that Girgus points to as an important component of Allen’s coming off as “real.” When Alvy turns to the camera in Annie Hall (1977), for example, it feels more like documentary than fictional film, adding to Allen’s aura of authenticity.

For his part, Allen does not behave like a star and feels uncomfortable with his celebrity status, further augmenting his ordinary quality. To counteract attention when in public, Allen wears a disguise, pulling a hat down over his ears: “I’ll go out with another actor and he won’t wear a hat or anything. It’s amazing. And I’m walking around with a brown paper bag on my head” (qtd. in Kelley 2006: 23). Notoriously shy, Allen rarely grants interviews and remains extremely modest and self-deprecating about his achievements. “I would consider all the movies that I’ve done failures,” Allen said in 1976. In 2010, by now having earned 21 Academy Award nominations, Allen remarked, “I’m not the great artist that I was certain I would be when I was younger . . . after forty, forty-one films, whatever – you start to realize: it’s just not there” (qtd. in Higginbotham 2010).

Journalists frequently comment on the rather extreme figure of anti-star that Allen cuts. Kathleen Carroll’s interview with Allen in the New York Daily News in 1974 opens with an anecdote: the News receptionist, failing to recognize the man waiting in the lobby wearing a battered Army surplus jacket, phoned an executive, saying, “There’s a bum out here who says he wants to see you.” The bum, of course, was Woody Allen. Carroll (2006: 3) remarks that the first time she met Allen “the News receptionist mistook him for a copy boy and almost sent him out for her lunch.”

The impression of Allen’s authenticity relies not just on his human and fallible attributes in the characters he plays onscreen and the fact that in real life he seems too ordinary to be a celebrity: it also depends on the widespread perception among the public that the “real” Allen is the same man both onscreen and off.

Woody vs. Woody

Separating Woody Allen the director (the “real” Woody) from Woody Allen the film star proves a difficult task. Allen has enjoyed one hundred percent creative control over every film he has made since 1969 and has developed a distinct, auteur style that includes casting actors repeatedly, especially himself. Of course, Woody Allen is not the only director who stars in his own films who has established a distinct screen personality. Several actor-directors, such as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Quentin Tarantino, among others, have forged unique screen identities and have deliberately used that well-known

40 Colleen Glenn

persona in self-reflective ways in their movies. What sets Allen apart is that to many members of his audience, the private Woody Allen, or what we might call the offscreen Woody Allen, is identical to the public or onscreen Woody Allen. The sheer repetition of the appearance of the endearing, self-effacing, neurotic-hypochondriac so frequently played by Allen in his films – virtually interchange-able from movie to movie – only solidified this merging of identities.

For his part, Allen has continually professed that he has little in common with the characters he plays, but the fact that he repeats this protest from interview to interview attests to the public’s perception that he simply plays himself. Allen, cognizant of this confusion, also demonstrates awareness that the slip-page between his onscreen and offscreen persona may account for much of his success. In an interview with Eric Lax (2007: 354), Allen speaks frankly of this misunderstanding:

ERIC LAX: [I]t’s so easy for viewers to confuse the person I’m talking with now with the identically dressed person who’s on the screen, who sounds precisely like you.

ALLEN: Right, they confuse it. That, of course, may be that’s why they come to my movies and I’m lucky they confuse it. I don’t know. But it’s been something I’ve denied my entire life, but they look at me and smile and say, “I know, I know, you’re right, you’re right.” But they don’t really believe it and there’s nothing I can do or say. They think it’s me.

According to Lax (2007: xii), who has enjoyed an unusually high degree of access to the star for nearly 40 years, “Woody Allen is the antithesis of his screen char-acter, who is usually frantic and in crisis.” Claiming to be far less cerebral or neurotic than the men he plays, Allen describes himself as a “lowbrow” who enjoys “beer and a football game” (qtd. in Itzkoff 2010). “I’m a serious person, a disciplined worker,” Allen states. “I’m not so inept as I depict myself for comic purposes. I know my life is not a series of catastrophic problems that are funny because they are so ludicrous. It’s a much duller existence” (Lax 2007: xii).

Yet the widespread confusion between the public and private Allen is well founded – not only because Allen dresses the same onscreen and off, but also because his fictional narratives contain so many autobiographical elements that it becomes difficult to sort out the real Allen from the fictional one. Take, for example, Lax’s account of interviewing Allen in February of 1973:

Woody and I are being driven to Tarrytown, New York, about an hour north of Manhattan, where he will talk at a film weekend organized by New York Magazine critic Judith Crist. He is wearing corduroy trousers, a cashmere sweater, and an olive green army jacket. He says he is “depressed. I saw [Ingmar Bergman’s] The Seventh Seal yesterday and Cries and Whispers today. I see his films and wonder what I’m doing.” He will soon head to Los Angeles to begin filming Sleeper, and he is not happy about leaving home (Lax 2007: 3).

Which Woody Allen? 41

Despite the distinction Allen would wish to draw between himself and his char-acters, these lines, out of context, could easily be mistaken as screenplay material from Stardust Memories (1980), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), or any number of movies in which Allen has starred as a neurotic, self-doubting artist.

After all, the facts of his life history – including his birth in Brooklyn, his lifelong adoration of New York City, his working class roots in which his parents held several jobs, his reverence for movies, his interest in the Knicks, his passion for jazz and 1940s music, his occupations as a comedian and writer, his self-developed intellect, his romantic involvement with women who are “out of his league,” his terrible fear of death – are familiar to us because we are familiar with his films, not with his personal history. Significantly, Weide’s documentary on Allen uses footage from Annie Hall (1977) and Radio Days (1987) to illustrate Allen’s child-hood, emphasizing the lack of distinction between Allen’s real life and fictional representations. For example, as Allen and his sister describe the many occupa-tions their father held as an unskilled laborer, Weide cuts to a scene in Radio Days where the curious Joe (the young “Allen”), pesters his father to tell him what he does for a living (Figure 2.2).

Well aware that he draws upon his life for inspiration when writing, Allen dis-tinguishes between autobiography and self-expression. According to Allen,

[M]y movies have been very self-expressive; that’s mistaken for autobiography. They’re expressive of observations of mine or feelings of mine, but what you’re seeing on the screen much more often than not are total fabrications, but those fabrications are in the service of my feelings (qtd. in Lax 2007: 311).

Figure 2.2 Autobiography and fiction blur: Seth Green as a young Woody Allen in Radio Days. (Executive Producers: Jack Rollins, Charles S. Joffee. Producer: Robert Greenhut)

42 Colleen Glenn

More accurately, we might say that Allen himself is in the service of those fabrica-tions. His popular screen alter ego took on a life of its own, placing Allen in the precarious position of having to cater to his creation.

Describing himself as a “silly comic” and “a lower comic,” Allen displays frank awareness of his range as an actor, claiming he can only play in comedies, and, furthermore, that the comedies which feature him tend towards light and frivolous due to the fact that this style is the comic tradition in which he is most confident and comfortable (Lax 2007: 42). Allen has felt restricted as to what kinds of roles he can play:

I’m not like Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro. These guys go out and do miracles on the screen. I’m a perfectly believable actor in my small range. So I can play a college professor, I can play a shrink, I could play an intellectual, even though I’m not an intellectual, or I can play a lowlife. I can play like Broadway Danny Rose or I could play a cheesy little bookmaker or a grifter of some sort because I can handle that. Me, the character for real, is closer to the sleaze ball, but I can act both of them (qtd. in Reagan 2008).

Yet the fact is his limitations as an actor have actually led to an incredible consist-ency in terms of the characters he plays, crystallizing Allen’s screen persona with each repetition onscreen. So similar are the characters Allen plays in each film that, other than differing plots, the Woody Allen role typically varies little. Even in films as diverse in subject matter and style as Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Shadows and Fog (1991), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Woody Allen plays virtually the same part. No wonder, then, that his audience believes him to be playing himself. The screen character offers the kind of consistency that a real person does; few screen characters (outside of a series) provide the same degree of stability.

Allen has felt pressured to incorporate the Woody Allen character into his screenplays, an encumbrance that comes partly from audience expectations of what it means to see a Woody Allen film. As Allen explains,

It’s hard to write good films and accommodate my character. It’s always been a problem. That’s why I’d just as soon keep out of my movies in the future and then I won’t burden myself and I won’t burden the audience and I’m free to do any movie I want and not have to face the problem of creating a good story and one that also has a funny part for a limited actor – me (qtd. in Lax 2007: 55).

Indeed, when asked if he would appear in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Allen responded,

No, it’s too much of a strain on me in the writing stage. I can only write a certain kind of film when I’m in it. When I sat down to write Match Point, it was refreshing. I never had to think, What’s the part for me? I just wrote scene after scene (qtd. in Lax 2007: 55).

Which Woody Allen? 43

The burnout Allen experienced from feeling obligated to write a part for himself into his screenplays undoubtedly influenced his decision to cast himself less frequently in recent years, but it is also true that it became quite difficult for Woody Allen to continue playing Woody Allen after 1992. Some of this can be attributed to age, especially in the last few years – the 75-year-old Allen is, by now, less castable in certain roles.3 But one reason we saw an alteration in Allen’s screen appearances in the 1990s had to do with the severe disruption of his heretofore-steady star image.

Woody, Post-Scandal

While the slippage between the real Allen and the fictional Allen helped secure success in defining a distinct and powerful screen aura, that same slippage made the scandal concerning his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn all the more disturbing for his audience.4 Actress Mia Farrow had long been linked with Allen, and the two were raising several children together. Farrow’s discovery of her longtime partner’s infidelity was harrowing by any standards: in this case, the “other woman” was her own 21-year-old adopted daughter, 35 years Allen’s junior. Farrow and Allen’s messy split, as well as subsequent allegations of sexual abuse concerning another adopted daughter, Dylan, age seven – sent shockwaves through the media and the public.5

By playing a starring role in this highly broadcasted scandal, Allen essentially broke his own type cast, prompting confusion among film critics and fans who grappled to incorporate this new information with the Woody Allen persona they had known for nearly 30 years. A headline in the New York Times written by Caryn James (1992) captured people’s feelings of betrayal as it proclaimed, “And Here We Thought We Knew Him.”

And yet, wasn’t part of the horrified reaction among fans due to a recognition of familiar themes in his work? How many Woody Allen films feature young, beautiful female ingénues who yearn romantically for a significantly older (and unattractive) male mentor figure? And how many of his films feature infidelity as one of the basic plot points? Nearly every film he has made since the late 1970s – Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Another Woman (1988), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Alice (1990), Husbands and Wives (1992), Deconstructing Harry (1997), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Celebrity (1998), Match Point (2005), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Whatever Works (2009), You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Midnight in Paris (2011) – and these are just the most obvious ones – deal with one or both of these major themes, themes that now define his life history in addition to his film catalog.

44 Colleen Glenn

Contrary to what we might expect, the ambiguity between the real Allen and the fictional/public Allen did not dissolve due to the scandal but rather seemed to become more muddled. Allen’s release of Husbands and Wives (1992) shortly following the scandal starring Allen and Mia Farrow in a failing marriage further encouraged scrutiny of his offscreen behavior. Despite the tremendous upheaval occurring in his personal life, Allen continued to work and star in films. In an unsettling moment in Weide’s documentary, six people, including Allen himself, comment upon his “ability to compartmentalize” his private problems and produce quality work. Weide draws attention to this odd moment of repetition by overlapping the identical comments; ultimately, this montage highlights the disconnect between Allen’s capacity to see his private life and work as quite separate and the public’s inability to do so. Expressing her feelings of resentment upon the debut of Mighty Aphrodite (1995), New York Times writer Maureen Dowd wrote,

[I]t was the correspondence between Mr. Allen’s work and Mr. Allen’s life that made him so popular. He was the same man in both. He wore the same clothes, ate at the same restaurants, thumbed the same paperbacks, admired the same music, hated the same mother and dated the same women. Artists, certainly, do not all have admirable lives. But what makes Mr. Allen so irretrievably creepy is the way he keeps revising his image in his movies while denying that his movies are about himself (Dowd 1995: 13).

“To Allen’s dismay, according to Dowd, the scandal actually intensified the public’s interest in the relationship between his private life and his films,” Girgus states (2002: 149). Allen’s situation of being understood as one and same man onscreen and off led to the creation of a potent star persona – a recognizable, continuous aura that guaranteed returning fans and box office success. But this same overlap also resulted in rigidity in terms of what other images he could project while maintaining a consistent star charisma.

To be sure, Allen is not entirely unique in this set of circumstances; other celebrities have found themselves in the difficult bind of balancing their public images with their private lives. Much like Allen in many ways, Charlie Chaplin became a repeated target of criticism due to his multiple marriages and divorces, as well as a (false) paternity suit waged by a former mistress (Robinson 1983: 137–140). He, too, became a kind of slave to his own screen persona, the beloved and iconic Little Tramp, with whom he was synonymous and from whom audi-ences did not like to see him stray. Unlike Chaplin, however, Allen could not distance himself from his alter ego by removing his costume, mustache, bowler hat, or by opening his mouth. Instead of splitting into a public and private Woody Allen after the scandal, Allen’s already blurred onscreen and offscreen personas further imploded into one another, ironically affirming that the public/private division, at least in the public’s eye, did not exist for Allen.

Which Woody Allen? 45

Interruptions to continuity in star personae are always risky. A critical compo-nent of movie stardom includes the ability to project an enduring and potent screen image over time. When a star strays too far from his or her image, it is almost as if a contract has been broken between celebrity and audience. And while this phenomenon can occur when a star plays a character far different from his or her usual type, audience backlash tends to be a greater issue when the public and private images of the star clash. Graeme Turner (2004: 4) argues that celebrities’ “private lives will attract greater public interest than their professional lives.” The incessant interest in celebrities’ private lives corresponds to the public’s drive to discover the authentic individual behind the public persona.

With most stars, we could expect that an aberration from their established image would result in a kind of bifurcation, such that we would begin to separate the character onscreen from the real-life actor. Take Tom Cruise, for example. Cruise’s couch-jumping antics on Oprah and subsequent bizarre interviews have resulted in a division whereby we perceive Cruise’s heroic movie characters as existing quite separately from the increasingly eccentric actor. By contrast, some-thing quite different occurred with Woody Allen post-scandal: he did not split into two, but splintered into many Allens.

Playing Woody Allen

Rather than force us to reconsider the character, the scandal forced us to reread the artist. The Woody Allen character persisted, but now reflected its creator in a more pervasive way, always reminding us of the man behind the image. The real-life Allen, and all of his baggage, became part of the metacommentary of his pictures.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Deconstructing Harry (1995), a brilliantly constructed film that brings the issue of the haziness between the real/offscreen Allen and the fictional/onscreen Woody Allen into sharp focus, even as it ulti-mately confirms the ambiguity between the two. Allen stars as Harry Block, a successful novelist who exhibits little distinction between his real life and the fiction he writes. The narrative follows Block over the course of a couple of days, as he struggles with writer’s block, runs into various ex-wives and lovers, and journeys upstate to his old college, Adair, where he will be honored (even though he was expelled).

From its opening moments, Deconstructing Harry feels different than previous Allen films. The editing is jarring, with abrupt cuts and repeated sequences that move between present time and scenes from Block’s novel with no transitions. The style of nonlinear storytelling and rapid scene changes emphasizes the ambi-guity between Block’s fiction and his real life, and indeed, most of what we learn about his personal history comes from the depicted scenes of his novels where he

46 Colleen Glenn

and the other members of his life are barely masked as characters. (Weide’s docu-mentary on Allen, as noted earlier, follows a similar pattern.) Block’s family members, ex-wives, and ex-lovers complain that, in addition to mistreating them, he exploits and humiliates them by incorporating their private lives into his novels with no regard for the consequences this wreaks on their lives.

Harry Block marks a drastic departure from the Woody Allen character. (The frequency of his use of the word “cunt” alone is jarring – a far cry from the “Woody we knew” who may have been amusingly depraved but never misogynis-tic.) Nevertheless, crucial vestiges of the familiar Woody Allen character persist, including a repertoire of one-liners and comebacks and a hilariously depicted obsession with death. The sum result of this combination is interesting: the figure is the same, the gestures and themes are familiar, but the Woody Allen character has mutated into a kind of extreme (bad) version of himself. In fact, Block com-plains of this very problem: as he breaks into a panic before the ceremony at the college, Cookie assures him she’s had to talk down many men who were overdos-ing on various drugs; he quickly corrects her, “That’s not what it is. I’m OD’ing on myself.”

Block’s statement could serve as an accurate assessment of Deconstructing Harry as a whole: Allen the artist looms over the picture, infusing the work with a nearly unbearable exaggeration of self-reflexivity (Figure 2.3). Later, when asked by one of the English professors at Adair what his next protagonist is like, Block responds:

Figure 2.3 Multiple Woody Allens: Ken, the fictional Harry Block (Richard Benjamin), confronts Harry Block, the fictional Woody Allen (Woody Allen) in Deconstructing Harry. (Executive Producers: J.E. Beaucaire, Jack Rollins, Charles H. Joffe, Letty Aronson. Pro-ducer: Jean Doumanian)

Which Woody Allen? 47

“It’s me, thinly disguised. In fact, l don’t think I should disguise it anymore. It’s me.” The film ends as he gets inspiration for a novel about “a guy who can only function in art, not life” (a confession he has repeated about himself throughout the film) and begins typing his next novel. Block is liberated from writer’s block when he fully admits that he is the central character in all of his fiction as well as when he imagines that he receives accolades from his characters, contradictory events that sum up what will be an enduring lack of distinction between Block’s real life and fictional world.

Girgus (2002: 152–153) reads Allen’s playing of a “truly miserable antihero” as a clever approach that allows Allen to incorporate his critics’ and fans’ condemna-tion into his film rather than attempt to counter it. “In the face of the negatively antiheroic character Harry Block, the focus of the critical discussion about Decon-structing Harry can concentrate on studying the significance and effectiveness of Allen’s creative effort rather than upon [himself].” But, while the screen Woody Allen’s self-castigation, so to speak, might have preempted some of the public outrage directed at the real Allen following the scandal, it also highlights the real Allen’s omnipresent presence in his fictional works.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Allen has demonstrated ambivalence concerning whether the film contains autobiographical material. When talking with Eric Lax about the film in 2006, Allen denied any resemblance between Harry Block and himself:

I know people think the film is about me and I think that is funny because the film’s not remotely about me. I thought when the picture was over that I would say, “Oh, yes, this is definitely about me,” and not go through the usual dance where I’m saying, “It’s not me, it’s not the way I work, I’ve never been blocked, I’ve never kidnapped my kid, I wouldn’t have the nerve to act like that, I don’t sit home and drink and have hookers coming over to the house all night.” If I was being honored by an old school – which I wouldn’t be – I probably wouldn’t show up. Apart from the ability to write anytime, there was nothing in the movie at all that was me, but the path of least resistance was to say yes. I’ve given up trying to say no (qtd. in Lax 2007: 53).

But Allen said something quite different about the film in 1998, shortly after its release:

As a matter of fact, [Harry Block] is a character I feel within myself. I could never portray an astrophysicist or an engineer. I wouldn’t know how to behave. Whereas I feel capable of portraying a writer or an actor, or anyone who expresses himself by the word and by recourse to fiction. The same thing happened with Annie Hall, where I played the part of an actor who was also a writer and who, at the end of the film, started writing a play about his breakup with Annie. Because the dividing line between life, my own life and art is so indistinct, so fine that it’s an obsessional theme with me (qtd. in Ciment and Tobin 2006: 171).

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Without a doubt, Deconstructing Harry raises questions concerning the “indis-tinct” line between Allen’s life and his art. Peter Bailey points out that despite the unorthodox content of Allen’s movie, the tenuous boundary between an artist’s life and his creative works has occupied the subject of several Woody Allen films. “The most unequivocally peevish of Allen’s depictions of artists,” he argues, “Deconstructing Harry represents less a new direction for Allen than a concentrated dramatic reprisal of his previous films’ indictments against them” (Bailey 2001: 4). Now, 14 years post-Harry, we can read it as belonging to a period in the evolution of Allen’s star persona whereby multiple Woody Allens begin to exist simultane-ously. Deconstructing Harry, for example, contains multiple Woody Allens, includ-ing Harry Block, the fictional Harry Block (the one we see in the scenes from his novels), as well as the star Woody Allen, who complicates the revisionary character with the reminiscence of the Woody Allen “we knew.”

Woody Allen has played “Woody Allen” less and less in the last 20 years, but he has not stopped writing the character into his screenplays: he has started casting other actors. Several actors have played the Woody Allen character, including John Cusack, Kenneth Branagh, Larry David, and Owen Wilson. Instead of offscreen and onscreen Allens, we now have onscreen and onscreen Allens. Like refractions of his screen personality, these other Woody Allens channel his aura and bend to new and diverse directions.

Casting other actors as “Woody Allen” has allowed Allen to reinvent his screen character and explore his boundaries. Though each actor interprets the character differently, they clearly evoke “Woody Allen” in their performances, and by doing so, they draw on our expectations for the character. Even before Deconstructing Harry, Allen placed John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway (1994) in the starring role of David Shayne, a playwright struggling between his idealistic vision and business realities. Shayne not only finds himself compromising his creative impulses in order to make the play a Broadway success, but also discovers that he possesses less aptitude for writing than a mobster who attends rehearsals as the bodyguard of one of the actresses. Although he spins the character slightly differently (Cusack comes across as more confident and temperamental), Cusack’s anxious rants, frequent hand gestures, nightmares, and self-doubting neuroses unmistakably channel “Woody Allen.” When meeting the mobster who has agreed to fund the play, for instance, Shayne nearly has a panic attack; looking for an exit, he makes a wry comment that he needs to go “check into a sanitarium.” Later in the film, a fellow artist assuages Shayne’s guilt over cheating on his fiancée by telling him, “An artist creates his own moral universe,” a line that echoes dialogue in Stardust Memories (1980) and Deconstructing Harry (1997). Ultimately, Shayne must choose between art and life: he gives up his work as a New York City playwright in favor of marriage and the Midwest and declares, “I’m free.”

Celebrity (1998) features Kenneth Branagh in the leading role of Lee Simon, a would-be novelist whose trepidation about putting himself on the line as a serious writer confines him to churning out travel pieces and celebrity profiles. Like other Woody Allens, Simon is neurotic, alternatively frantic and charming, and has great

Which Woody Allen? 49

success with women, including a movie star, a supermodel, and a waitress several years his junior. Quick-talking and flirtatious with lots of hand movement, Branagh invokes the personality of Woody Allen by imitating Allen’s gestures and turns of phrase as well as his trademark diction. In many scenes, he is a dead ringer for Allen, and the film encourages the connection. As Simon flatters the supermodel (Charlize Theron), she tells him she is “polymorphously perverse,” duplicating the line Alvy speaks to Annie in Annie Hall (1977). Lee Marshall of the Independent reported, “[Branagh] doesn’t just put on a New York accent, or attempt to method-act his way into the mind of the successful but frustrated journalist. He becomes Woody Allen – down to the smallest inflection, the slightest gesture” (Marshall 1999). Marshall continues, “Pressed, Branagh suggests it was Allen himself who insisted on such a close reading: ‘He directs, sometimes, very specifically. He’ll give you a line reading and he’ll do it and you’ll do him, copy him.’ ”

To be sure, Branagh, an actor and director best known for his Shakespearean film adaptations, impresses his own unique trademark on the Woody Allen persona. His handsomeness alone creates a considerably different Woody Allen, one who is considerably less sympathetic. Whereas Woody Allens played by Allen often got a pass on questionable behavior due to his disarming feebleness (this is true of films prior to Deconstructing Harry, such as Manhattan (1979) in which a 44-year-old Allen dates a high-schooler, or A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), in which Allen cheats on his wife with an ex-flame), Branagh, by contrast, secures little compassion from the audience by virtue of his projection of strength and competence. In fact, Branagh plays Simon on the sleazy side, his arrogance making his infidelity and constant straying from his partners inexcus-able, even if he is experiencing a midlife crisis. Simon, however, is “punished” for his decisions, finally landing with a young woman who blatantly refuses to commit to him.

Despite the nuances of Branagh’s interpretation, his astounding imitation of Allen borders on the uncanny. The premise of his performance rests on our famili-arity with the Woody Allen character, a personality which, by the time of the release of Celebrity, had been duplicated, revised, and distorted in a number of ways. The mimicry at work in the film creates an unsettled feeling that reflects the conflicted terrain of the Woody Allen persona itself.

Branagh’s memorable performance of the Woody Allen character stands out as the most derivative, but the multiple Woody Allens include Larry David (What-ever Works, 2009) and Owen Wilson (Midnight in Paris, 2011) as well. Both David and Wilson structure the Woody character more closely with their own star per-sonae; however, they also reprise him in interesting ways. Like Woody Allen, Larry David’s onscreen and offscreen identities are so closely intertwined as to be indis-tinguishable. Thus, David’s performance doubles the number of star identities at play, even as it dilutes the force of the Woody aura by virtue of David’s current Curb Your Enthusiasm notoriety, in which he plays “Larry David.” David, as Boris, a misanthrope semi-recluse who is a genius in quantum mechanics, explodes in sporadic Allen-esque moments of panic, fear, and OCD behavior, but David’s

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distinctive gruff voice and dominant attitude make for an acrimonious (albeit humorous) take on the Woody figure.

Wilson, by contrast, plays his Woody Allen (Gil) with his signature wide-eyed, endearing sense of wonderment. A disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter, Gil wishes to be a novelist, but remains locked in his profession due to writer’s block and discouragement from his selfish fiancée. With the assistance of illustrious writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (whom he meets in magical nightly transports to Paris of the 1920s), Gil manages to achieve his goal. Com-pared to other Woody Allens, Wilson’s character seems far more balanced and optimistic. Yet, the Woody character persists: talking almost incessantly, Wilson recreates the quickly-smitten loveable loser throughout the picture, particularly in his scenes with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), in which he fawns over her like Alvy over Annie. Allen’s fear of mortality crops up in Gil as well: When Hemingway bluntly asks him if he fears death, Gil replies, “Yeah, I do. I would say it’s my greatest fear.”

These multiple manifestations of Woody Allen can exist because of the degree to which he is enshrined in our collective memory. While the various Woody Allens make him a messy persona to unscramble, they also shore up his legacy, permitting it to continue and evolve in a way that would be impossible for Allen to do by himself.

Seeing Allen as an extreme case of a star persona that reconciles a number of conflicting identities can help us to recognize that stars rarely conform to the homogenized monolithic figures we make them out to be. That so many of Allen’s films deal with what it means to be a celebrity as well as the blurring between the public image and private person only compounds the sense of self-reflexivity that repeats and changes throughout his body of work. The star we know as Woody Allen contains so many images that, finally, it loses coherence. But, what it loses in consistency, it gains in flexibility, allowing “Woody Allen” to mutate infinitely from film to film. Allen may cheat death after all.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Sam Girgus, Alan Nadel, and Ramyar Rossoukh for their helpful feedback and insightful comments on drafts of this chapter.

Notes

1 Robert Weide, Woody Allen: A Documentary, American Masters series; Whayduck Pro-ductions (original air date: Nov. 20, 2011, PBS.)

2 I deal with the 1992 Soon-Yi scandal that influenced the perception of Allen later in the chapter.

Which Woody Allen? 51

3 Allen has discussed, for instance, how it no longer works to cast himself opposite a young actress as a romantic pairing: “I can’t be the love interest any more. I can’t play opposite Scarlett Johansson, it’s not appropriate” (qtd. in Cadwallader 2011).

4 For an in-depth discussion of how the scandal affected Woody Allen’s image, see Girgus (2002).

5 The allegations of abuse against Dylan were eventually dropped, but Allen lost custody rights to the children, and his children severed all contact with him. Allen and Soon-Yi married in 1997 and have two adopted children.

Works Cited

Bailey, Peter (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Cadwallader, Carole (2011) “Woody Allen: My wife hasn’t seen most of my films  .  .  .  and she thinks my clarinet playing is torture.” Observer (Mar. 13). www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/13/woody-allen-interview-carole-cadwalladr (accessed Sept. 13, 2012).

Carroll, Kathleen (2006) “Woody Allen says comedy is no laughing matter.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.) Woody Allen: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 3–6.

Ciment, Michael and Yann Tobin (2006) “Interview with Woody Allen: ‘My heroes don’t come from life, but from their mythology.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.) Woody Allen: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 130–142.

Dowd, Maureen (1995) “Auteur as spin doctor.” New York Times (Oct. 1), Week in Review, 13.

Dyer, Richard (2004) Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.Girgus, Sam B. (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. New York: Cambridge University

Press.Higginbotham, Adam (2010) “Woody Allen interview for Whatever Works.” Telegraph

( June 22). www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/7838767/Woody-Allen-interview-for-Whatever-Works.html (accessed Sept. 13, 2012).

Itzkoff, Dave (2010) “Woody Allen: the director’s cut.” New York Times (Sept. 15). http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/woody-allen-the-directors-cut/ (accessed Sept. 13, 2012).

James, Caryn (1992) “And here we thought we knew him.” New York Times (Sept. 6), Arts & Leisure, 7.

Kelley, Ken (2006) “A conversation with the real Woody Allen.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.) Woody Allen: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mis-sissippi, 7–28.

Lax, Eric (1975) Woody Allen and His Comedy. New York: Charterhouse.Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Marshall, Lee (1999) “Down to every last gesture, Kenneth Branagh has turned into

Woody Allen. What does he think he’s playing at?” Independent ( June 13). www.

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independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/down-to-every-last-gesture-kenneth-branagh- has-turned-into-woody–allen-what-does-he-think-hes-playing-at-1099746.html (accessed Sept. 13, 2012).

Meyers, Erin (2009) “Can you handle my truth?: authenticity and the celebrity star image.” Journal of Popular Culture 42.5, 890–907.

Reagan, Gillian (2008) “Woody Allen on reclusion, fame and playing a lowlife.” New York Observer (Aug. 8). www.observer.com/2008/arts-culture/woody-allen-reclusion-fame-and-playing-lowlife (accessed Sept. 13, 2012).

Robinson, David (1983) Chaplin: the Mirror of Opinion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Schickel, Richard (1985) Intimate Strangers: the Culture of Celebrity. New York: Doubleday.Turner, Graeme (2004) Understanding Celebrity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

3

Woody Allen has always had a privileged relationship with France. His Jewish intellectual Manhattan persona has proved particularly appealing to the French, and his films have mostly had a good reception. His popularity and his status as a cultural icon can be seen among other signs through the many French television programs devoted to him. Allen also refers to French culture both in his literary fiction and his films. Allusions are sprinkled through his short stories, from Flau-bert’s Madame Bovary (“The Kugelmass Episode”) to Sartre’s philosophy. French actresses appear in the casts (Olga Georges-Picot in Love and Death, Marie-Christine Barrault in Stardust Memories) of his movies, and some films are partly set in France. Allen has also worked with Ghislain Cloquet and other French techni-cians. French painters, especially impressionists (Manet, Renoir) are implicitly invoked in Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy or quoted verbally. Erik Satie’s music is used inventively in Another Woman. Additionally, Woody Allen is fond of French cinema, especially Renoir and the Nouvelle Vague. Godard even made a short documentary on Allen (Meetin’ WA). It seems useful to trace those influences in Allen’s films.

Among the allusions to French taste, one of the most emblematic is uttered by Al, Val Waxman’s agent, at the end of Hollywood Ending, when he announces against all odds that the French adore his film (which he directed while he was temporarily blind): “The French have seen your movie in Paris, and they say it’s the greatest American film in fifty years! . . . you’re being hailed as a true artist, a great genius! And, you know, France, it sets the tone for the rest of Europe, right?” To that divine surprise, Val reacts with the famous lines: “Here I am a bum, but there I am a genius, Oh, thank God the French exist.” Beyond the joke and even if there is deep irony (are the French critically blind?) in this remark, it emphasizes a truth – the fact that Allen’s movies have been consistently well received by the

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Woody Allen and FranceGilles Menegaldo

54 Gilles Menegaldo

French public and (mostly) by French critics from the outset of his career. Without confusing Waxman and its creator, we will ask ourselves if Woody Allen as a film-maker could endorse that statement, given that his films have attracted larger audiences in France than they have in America. In fact, Allen’s experience with the French may be more contrasted and ambivalent. When reading the critical output, which has expanded over the last decade, we realize that Allen’s films, often celebrated, can also be the target of mild or even harsh criticism. This endur-ing relationship with France may be examined through different angles: the way in which France is represented in the films, the building up of the Allen persona, or his own relationship with French cinema. I shall also highlight some critical approaches and examine how a certain image of Allen as an “auteur” both admired and controverted has been built up gradually. Last, I shall discuss his latest film, Midnight in Paris, which premiered at the 2011 Cannes festival.

Aspects of the Representation of French Culture in Allen’s Films

Allen has been associated with France since his first appearance in What’s New Pussycat? (1965) in which he plays chess with a young girl at a terrace of the famous restaurant La Closerie des Lilas. Allen wrote the script of the film set in and around Paris, but he was dissatisfied with the result and considered his ideas had been distorted or discarded. A bit later in Casino Royale, in which he portrayed James Bond’s small and evil brother, he may have met J.P. Belmondo, a young and promising French actor, impersonating a légionnaire. Since then, his films have included at least a passing reference to France: as a location, as names of artists, writers, filmmakers.

Indeed, Paris, which Allen visits regularly for the promotion of his films and interviews (also on his musical tour in 1997) and for sheer pleasure, is quoted in his films as an ideal city associated with romantic love. It’s seen either as a place to come back to or as a place to discover, as a goal for future escapades. It’s mostly a stereotyped vision of Paris with such clichés as the Eiffel Tower in Hollywood Ending where kissing Ellie appears in the eyes of Val as “the utmost romantic situ-ation.” At the end, the reunited couple prepares to leave for Paris, where Val has been solicited to make a movie after the French praise of The City that Never Sleeps. In Husbands and Wives, Gabe Roth evokes Paris as a seductive place with Rain ( Juliette Lewis), the young and bright student to whom he feels strongly attracted.

September opens on a nostalgic evocation of Paris. The frame is first empty and voices are heard offscreen, then the camera pans within a sitting room to reveal two characters (Howard and Lane) conversing in French before shifting back to English. In Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, while Maxwell complains he did not feel well in Paris because he was probably with the wrong person, Adrian replies

Woody Allen and France 55

that “if two people are really in love, a city like Paris becomes a great medium through which to explore their feelings.” In Manhattan, the reference to Paris is a direct quote from Casablanca. To Tracy’s question: “What happens to us?” Ike answers half-jokingly: “We’ll always have Paris,” which is quite meaningless, since they have no common memories there.

In Everyone Says I Love You, Paris is shown visually, but again more as a stereo-type. Djuna, the young narrator, evokes her father Joe Berlin (Allen), a novelist who lives there in “exile” after his divorce. This justifies some shots of the city, including one in which Allen is seen crossing the bridge in front of the Concier-gerie, a baguette under his arm! Having been let down by his French mistress, Giselle, Joe contemplates suicide by jumping off the Eiffel Tower, adding: “If I get the Concorde, I might be dead three hours earlier.” Later, as Joe manages, thanks to his daughter, to seduce Von ( Julia Roberts), a beautiful dissatisfied woman, Paris crops up again as an ideal dreamlike place, part of Von’s fantasy. Long shots of roofs and churches are taken from a garret apartment in Montmartre, with a view over the Sacré-Cœur. Paris is last seen as a Christmas tourist location for rich American families. We get shots of various highlights: Place de la Concorde, les Champs Elysées, the stairs of Montmartre and the famous Saint-Germain café Les deux magots.1 We also attend a comic carnival-like party scene at the Ritz,2 where all the revellers wear Groucho Marx masks or mustaches, dancing and singing, in French, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” (the character from Animal Crackers).

The only true emotional moment in the film corresponds to a tribute paid to Stanley Donen’s An American in Paris. Joe and his former wife Steffi (Goldie Hawn) walk along the banks of the Seine, visiting the place where they first met, evoking the past with a tinge of nostalgia and then start dancing. Far from trying to imitate Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, Allen uses special effects to suggest and even amplify the aerial quality of the dance, but he overdoes it as his partner seems to fly in the air too artificially. The kiss they exchange is a reminder of lost happiness (especially for Joe) and does not announce a love relationship, departing from the romantic trajectory of Donen’s film. Paris remains a romantic or touristy back-drop like Venice. However, Allen stages a delightfully parodic film and the seduc-tion of the film for the French public relies not so much on the way Paris is represented (though the magnifying of the city may increase the appeal) but rather on the way in which it takes up the main features of the classic musical while subverting some of its formal codes and injecting other generic conventions (romantic comedy, film noir) and a touch of social and political satire. Few other French places are mentioned in Allen’s oeuvre. We may remember the allusion to an “eating tour” in France in Manhattan Murder Mystery, evoked by Ted and Carol again in a nostalgic tone. This time, France is being associated with sexual desire and the temptation of illicit relationships.

The same approach applies to most of the references to France or French culture. Allen’s characters quote well-known artists, both in literature (Balzac, Flaubert) and fine arts (Cézanne, Lautrec), either to be celebrated or contested.

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In Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Balzac is considered as “vastly overrated” by arrogant professor Leopold ( Jose Ferrer) and his colleagues. In Annie Hall, the French writer is again the pretext for a joke as Alvy, proud of his sexual perform-ance with Annie, exclaims: “As Balzac said, there goes another novel!” In Manhat-tan, Cézanne’s apples and pears are celebrated as part of Ike’s list of things worth living for. One of Rodin’s famous sculptures, The Thinker, appears in Hannah and Her Sisters as Allen’s character wanders past it. French musicians are also men-tioned as part of high (or popular) culture for New Yorkers. In Manhattan, Mary Wilkes hands over to Yale, her lover, tickets for Jean-Pierre Rampal’s concert because they’ve just broken up. In Sweet and Lowdown, the real “French gypsy” Django Reinhardt is a fantasized rival of fictional guitarist Emmet Ray. He eventu-ally “appears,” causing Ray’s swooning, but stimulating his creative power.

Some emblematic French historical characters are also invoked. In Sleeper, Miles Monroe comments on a photograph of Charles de Gaulle, shown him by scientists of the future: “Famous French chef. Had his own television show. Showed you how to make soufflés and omelettes.” Even politics are derisively associated with food. In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Helena (Gemma Jones) thinks she might have been Joan of Arc in a previous life. Napoleon plays a part in Love and Death in which Boris is executed for attempting to kill him (he only wounds his double).

Food and wine are another topic related to France. In Stardust Memories, Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), wishing to stay alone with her lover for a tête à tête dinner, tempts him with a French recipe spoken in perfect French by the actress: “Filet de bœuf périgourdine with potatoes and rhum cassolette.” Literature and perfume (another French forte) are linked in Allen’s witty line as Sandy answers Dorrie’s praise of his nice smell in Stardust Memories: “I wear Proustian rush by Chanel.” Here, the woman praises the man . . . French wine is frequently mentioned as the utmost of refinement. Judah Rosenthal is praised for his knowledge of it, as is the pedantic Paul of Midnight in Paris. Characters in Melinda and Melinda drink Haut Brion in a French restaurant in Greenwich Village. In Match Point, the British bourgeois characters are very knowledgeable about French wine, as is the murder-ous aristocrat in Scoop. In Manhattan Murder Mystery, Carol (Diane Keaton) attends a winetasting party and drinks Mouton ’45 with her friend Ted, who also recalls urging Carol to drink Château Margaux, as a way of seducing her.

All these references testify to the appeal of French culture and French cuisine. For the American sophisticated middle class or bourgeoisie, these allusions partake of a living standard and are also an index of the snobbishness of some characters. Other verbal winks are made to French taste, fashion, or social and sexual mores, as in this short dialogue between Harry Block and his sister: “Your whole life is nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.” “You know, in France I could run on this slogan, and I’d win.” Allen’s success does not rely so much on the way France is represented in his films, rather on what makes his cinema appealing to the French – his comic genius, sense of satire, and philosophical bent.

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Building Up the Persona

It is impossible to give an account of all the ideas that have circulated about Allen in the French media. Apart from academic research, there have been many articles in newspapers (Le Monde, Libération) and magazines (L’Express, Le Point, Le Nouvel Observateur, Les Inrockuptibles, etc.). Special issues of Telerama and Le Figaro have been devoted to his life and work. Recently (2010), Stuart Hample’s comic strip, which partakes of Allen’s mythical aura, was translated into French.

The INA television archives provide insights into Allen’s popularity in France. From 1966 onwards, 712 audiovisual documents have been partly or fully devoted to Allen, including extracts from his films, comments, and interviews. One of the earliest was recorded at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in 1966 while Allen was known as a successful stand-up comedian. In 1972, Monsieur Cinema introduces him as the youngest of international comic artists and shows a clip of Take the Money and Run, while his play, Don’t Drink the Water, is performed on a Parisian stage. In Allons au cinema (1977), French director Michel Audiard notes his constant improving and the use of biographical material in his films and praises his “New York Jewish humour.” In Bon Dimanche (1977), Allen is associated with Groucho Marx. A clip from Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex illustrates his taste for parody and pastiche (Hamlet) and his knowledge of contemporary theatre (through an allusion to Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). In Cine-première (TF1, 1979), comic actor Jacques Villeret notes that though Allen’s name is “equated with laughter,” there are also in his films tough violent scenes which convey a sense of unease and anxiety. In Hollywood USA (1979), Allen asserts his love of big cities, insisting that only Paris is comparable to New York in terms of pace, rhythm, and excitement, while rejecting Los Angeles as being “too depend-ent on the automobile,” and affirming his dislike of sunshine and his predilection for grey skies and rain. He mentions his obsessions and phobias, including the fear that the universe will come to an end (which he shares with young Alvy Singer).

In Question de temps (Dec. 3, 1979), France Roche provides a documented and sensitive portrait. Her interview takes place while Allen, having been awarded four Oscars for Annie Hall, makes the cover of Time magazine and is labelled “A Comic American Genius.” Roche finds various formulas to describe his films. Bananas “confronts an apolitical dwarf with ideological giants,” Sleeper expresses Allen’s fear of a mechanized world, while Manhattan is seen as “aggressive love song and tender hatred.” The stress is laid on Allen’s characters’ anhedonia, a form of melancholy that prevents them from enjoying life and which is at odds with his comedian persona. A dual image emerges. Allen expresses, like his fictional characters, a pessimistic vision of modern urban America: “the terrible ugliness overcoming the big cities, a culture that is going down the drain, has no spiritual center, no sense of purpose.” He asserts that he makes films in order to “escape

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confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world.” The broadcast presents an interview with Marie-Christine Barrault, who plays a part in Stardust Memories, the provisional title of which remained Women in Autumn (alluding to Bergman’s Autumn Sonata). Barrault sees Allen as someone who sculpts the image and com-ments on his filmic methods, including lots of rehearsals, few takes and many retakes. She also reveals that Allen invented her character’s “revolutionary” pres-ence on the Paris barricades of May 1968 inspired by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the famous French activist and politician.

This documentary shows that Allen’s image is well established in 1979 and it reveals a number of facets of his personality: his interest in women characters (“always wonderful and interesting”), his lack of faith in politicians, whom he regards as mere civil servants unable to provide true answers, his obsession with death, which he perceived as “black emptiness,” his phobia about physical sickness (loss of hearing, nausea), and the revelation that he would like to be reincarnated as Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando. In December 1983, in Le Grand Echiquier, he appears in a silent sketch in Central Park with French painter and illustrator Jean-Michel Folon. In Cinéma/cinémas (Oct. 1984), he reveals that he did not wear glasses before the age of 17 (collapsing a fragment of the myth) and also that, in his job as director, he prefers the writing phase (before compromise starts and disillusionment ensues). His play, God Shakespeare and Me, is staged in Paris (1985) with two prominent French comedians, Pierre Richard and Rufus, who praise his comic genius and his sense of the absurd. He is described not only as a true inheri-tor of the Marx Brothers but as the “American Sacha Guitry” (a French director famous for his wit and dry humour). Another comedian, Michel Blanc, compares him favorably with Mel Brooks, who is reduced (unfairly) to mere slapstick comedy, while Allen is deemed “more profound and existential.” In Bain de minuit (Dec. 1987), a very fashionable program hosted by provocative Thierry Ardisson, Allen refers to television as a “mere transmitter which creates nothing.” In 1988, in Cinéma/cinémas, a German journalist tries to understand why September, despite his “impeccable direction,” has had a bad reception in the United States. Allen’s answers are reduced (with his complicity) to a minimum or were cut in the editing process. This iconoclastic interview suggests that Allen is now an icon. In 1989, when Crimes and Misdemeanors has just been released in Paris, Martin Landau sug-gests on TF1 that Allen should be classified as a “historical monument”!

More seriously, the best cultural program in these years, Bouillon de culture, hosted by Bernard Pivot, an iconic figure of French television, pays tribute to Allen. In 1992, Umberto Eco offers the French audience a semiotic analysis of the hold-up sequence in Take the Money and Run, praising Allen’s wit and subtlety. This recognition by a prominent intellectual is confirmed three years later when Pivot devotes the whole of his show to Allen. The main guests are Roger Dadoun, a famous psychoanalyst who speaks of the emphasis on sex in Allen’s cinema, and Charlotte Rampling, who evokes her collaboration with Allen on Stardust Memo-ries. After having praised her “erotic voice,” “Woody” comments on his last film,

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Bullets Over Broadway, and explains how he works with his actors, allowing them to change his dialogue, which is not “sacred.” Allen also admits that the existence or nonexistence of God is the “central question of life.” Among his answers to Pivot’s “questionnaire,” he confesses that he might like to be reincarnated as a sponge.

The peak of Allen’s media recognition is reached in 1998 when he is again the guest of honor while Deconstructing Harry is praised by critics. He is confronted with mediatized intellectuals – a writer, François Weyergans; Philippe Sollers, founder of Tel Quel, a thinker and novelist, and Julia Kristeva, a theoretician of literature and psychonanalyst. Kristeva considers Allen “living publicity” for psy-choanalysis, though she regrets that self-knowledge is in decline. Sollers notes that Allen invents truths while he gives the impression of stealing them and Weyergans evokes the interaction between the writer’s private life and his protagonists, citing in particular Harry Block of Deconstructing Harry.

Since that landmark broadcast, Allen has regularly appeared on French televi-sion. A special issue on Allen of The South Bank Show (1978), a famous British program,3 was broadcast in Cinéma de poche. An interview with his editor Susan Morse was shown in 1996 (Arte Channel). Allen has been part of the French cul-tural landscape for over 40 years; he is a familiar figure, admired by French filmmakers like Patrice Leconte. In 2002, Allen was a guest of honour at the Cannes film festival, where he was awarded the Palm of Palms for his career, an award only given previously to Ingmar Bergman. Among his latest films, Match Point was favorably received in Cannes, together with Allen’s new muse, Scarlett Johansson; both of them walked on the celebrated red carpet. In 2008, French minister of culture Christine Albanel welcomed Allen, encouraging him to shoot a film in France. After a trilogy set in London and one film shot in Spain, Allen has finally made his film set in France, before moving on to Rome for his next production.

This overview shows the extent of Allen’s popularity in France, but his close relation to French cinema is also noticeable in his films.

Allen and French Cinema

In the various interviews given for French or US newspapers or magazines, Allen regularly cites, along with famous European directors like Bergman, Fellini, Anto-nioni, and Bunuel, French directors whose films he liked to watch as a young film buff. Among these, Jean Renoir is regularly quoted as well as Truffaut, Resnais, and Godard.

Renoir’s films are sometimes alluded to in Allen’s films. In Annie Hall, one guest at the party in Beverly Hills claims that Renoir’s Grand Illusion is “great when you are high.” In Manhattan, Ike quotes the film as a great movie that he sees “every

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time it’s on television.” Later, Tracy will leave a message for him to watch the film, but he never returns her call. Apart from these half-serious, half-playful refer-ences, there is a clear link between Renoir and Allen that was first explored by Nancy Pogel (1987), who wrote a perceptive analysis of Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, pointing out links with Renoir. Allen’s film also shares similarities with Picnic on the Grass (1959). Etienne Alexis (Paul Meurisse) is a great biologist and potential president of United Europe, about to be married to a German countess who leads the Intereuropean Movement of Women’s Scouts. He strongly advo-cates scientific progress and is in favour of artificial insemination. The setting up of a ritualized public picnic is jeopardized by the intervention of a strange shep-herd, a satyr-like or Pan-like figure who, thanks to his flute, triggers a tempestuous wind which blows away people, but also generates sexual desire and leads to a quasi-orgiastic unleashing of instincts. While Alexis and his fiancée are separated, the professor is attracted by a young peasant woman, Nénette (Catherine Rouvel), an incarnation of natural and sensual femininity who could have figured in Auguste Renoir’s paintings. After overcoming many obstacles (the collusion between politi-cians and pharmaceutic trusts), Alexis discards the military-oriented countess, chooses Nénette, who carries his child, repudiates parthenogenesis, and confesses that: “Happiness may be submission to the natural order.” The film is famous for its celebration of nature and sexual love. A montage sequence accompanied by the lyrical score of Kosma shows, as a prelude to the seduction scene, a series of beautifully lit shots on flowing water, aquatic plants floating like women’s hair, close shots of flowers and insects (a close-up of a bee as symbol of vital energy and spirituality).

The discourses of the works are quite different. Renoir’s film is more ambitious, far-reaching, and polemical. Totally anchored in the sociopolitical and scientific context of its moment of production, the late 1950s, it evokes European politics, nuclear fear, and medical progress and uses the new television medium, adopting at times a pseudo-documentary approach. Allen’s film is a period piece set at the turn of the century, less concerned with actual political and scientific issues, more comedy-oriented even if there are some dramatic elements. It also favours illusion and magic, two of Allen’s favourite topics. However, the links are unmistakable. Alexis may be compared with Leopold, also presented as a prominent intellectual (philosopher, art critic, political theorist, outspoken pacifist) and a rationalist who claims: “Ghosts, little spirits or pixies, I don’t believe in them.” Leopold, as pompous and self-infatuated as Alexis, undergoes a similar evolution. He discards his fiancée, Ariel (Farrow), and falls for Dulcy, a more sensual nurse. Moreover, he regresses to a more primitive, barbaric stage and dreams of being a “Neander-thal hunting his enemies with primitive weapons.” Having wounded Maxwell, his rival, with an arrow, he exclaims: “I have drawn blood, who am I?” and rushes on Dulcy, tearing off her clothes and having “savage” sex with her. The outcome is different in Midsummer, however.

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Leopold dies and turns into one of those spirits hovering in the forest, “having passed away at the height of lovemaking.” In Allen’s film, Andrew is a crackpot inventor who has devised a spirit box, another kind of magic trick, but, like the Renoir character, he plays the flute. Allen tries (with the help of Mendelssohn) to be as lyrical and poetic as Renoir. He offers as well a montage sequence of natural scenes (an unusual choice for him): shots of trees, grass and various plants, swans on a pond, flowing water, various flowers and animals (a rabbit, a duck, a tortoise, a deer), expressing with a touch of irony an idealized view of nature. More con-vincing is the impressionistic treatment of light and colour, another link with Renoir, with echoes of Manet’s Déjeûner sur l’herbe and Monet. Both films exploit the voyeur motif. Alexis tries to turn away from the vision of Nénette’s naked body, but he can’t help peeping, while Allen’s characters constantly watch each other, using at times a spyglass, but also looking at the images projected by the spirit box. The spyglass motif establishes also a link with Renoir’s Rules of the Game, in which Christine de La Chesnaye, watching the landscape with binoculars, catches her husband the Marquis kissing Geneviève, his mistress. In Allen’s film, Leopold watches Andrew kiss Ariel. Both films play with the suicide motif. Jurieu tries to kill himself by crashing his car, while Maxwell shoots himself, and Andrew is tempted to use a gun against himself and is saved by Adrian’s arrival. Pogel compares Jurieu to Andrew, both being associated with flying. Finally, the jealousy and revenge motif is present in both films. Leopold pursues Andrew but wounds Maxwell by mistake while, in Renoir’s movie, because of a complex game of appearances and confused identities, the jealous Schumacher shoots Jurieu, mis-taking him for Octave (he wears his coat) whom he thinks has an affair with his wife Lisette (actually, Christine wearing Lisette’s cape). The end of Renoir’s film is tragic (anticipating the war) while Allen’s is lighthearted and comedic, Leopold’s death notwithstanding. Pogel traces the link with a third Renoir film, A Day in the Country, highlighting “the problem of missed opportunities and time’s passing” (1987: 160) and quoting from André Bazin, who stresses the conflict between the Appolonian and the Dionysian worlds which are at the center of Renoir’s film (and Allen’s).

Thus, though it has its own charms and merits, Allen’s film is clearly influenced by Renoir (it is also indebted to Bergman and Shakespeare). As Pogel states:

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy alludes to the style and themes of Renoir’s films mimicking not only impressionnistic techniques and compositions generally, but imitating specific Renoir scenes . . . both Allen and Renoir explore aesthetic conflicts that concerned the impressionist painters” (1987: 160–161).

If Allen admires Renoir’s work and pays him tribute, he probably has more affinities with French filmmakers of his own generation, those of the Nouvelle Vague.

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Truffaut, Godard, and Others

Truffaut is often quoted by Allen as one of his favourite French directors. In Play It Again, Sam, Allan Felix invites Linda to see the new Truffaut film (Two English Girls), but this is only a passing reference with no quotation from the film (in the play, they watch a Godard film). In a documentary on Truffaut by Anne Andreu (Truffaut, une autobiographie, Arte France and INA prod 2005), Allen recalls meeting him at a dinner party, stating: “He was one of the luminaries of the cinema and one of the inspirations for my generation. Antonioni, Kurosawa, Bunuel – among these great giants was Truffaut, a fresh, original and personal filmmaker.” Allen enjoyed Four Hundred Blows and Day for Night, of which we can find echoes in Stardust Memories and more generally in Allen’s self-reflexive approach to filmmak-ing. When Truffaut says: “Films are more harmonious than life, there are no traffic jams in films, no time lost, films move forward like trains in the night” (Andreu), the reader might be reminded of Allen or his character, Harry Block, who func-tions better in art than in life, or of Alvy Singer, who transforms the failure of his affair with Annie into a happy ending in the play that is adapted from his experi-ence. Both artists are interested in love relationships (and the difficulties inherent to them). There is a kinship in certain situations – for example, in the love triangle in Jules et Jim and Two English Girls can be found in Manhattan and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Both Truffaut and Allen are obsessed with death and both filmically project a positive view of prostitutes. Like Truffaut, Allen explores childhood and memory, deals with family-related issues; both are film buffs, constantly quoting from other works. In Stolen Kisses and Love on the Run, Truffaut exploits the motif of the writer borrowing from the life of others. Antoine Doinel ( J.P. Léaud) bases his first novel, Les salades de l’amour, on his own childhood and his affairs with various women, including his present wife Christine (Claude Jade) who, however, refuses to read the book, claiming: “I don’t like this idea of relating one’s youth, criticizing one’s parents, soiling them. A work of art can’t be a settling of accounts.” This recalls, in Manhattan, Ike’s complaint about his former wife Jill (Meryl Streep) exploiting their failed love life in a novel which cries revenge, and also Harry Block, who is accused by his former mistress of being a “fucking black magician” turning “everyone’s suffering into gold, literary gold.” Deconstructing Harry, though mostly a rewriting of Wild Strawberries, also pays tribute to Truffaut, featuring Harvey Stern, a fictional counterpart of young Harry, as a shoe salesman obsessed with women and a Japanese prostitute who reminds the viewer of Kyoko, Doinel’s lover in Bed and Board. As in Truffaut’s films, life is vampirized by art.

As regards filmic form, Allen uses similar devices to Truffaut’s: narrative voi-ceover, film within the film, address to the camera (the end of Four Hundred Blows, the beginning of Annie Hall and Whatever Works).

These devices are also used by Godard, whose relation with Allen is more complex and ambivalent. Their relationship started in 1986, when Godard was

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preparing his version of King Lear and wished Allen to play a part. Allen accepted under the condition that Godard would come to New York in order to discuss the project. Godard took advantage of his visit (April 1986) to shoot a half-hour docu-mentary entitled Meetin’ WA, coproduced by Cannes festival.

Allen finally accepted Godard’s proposal, but his part in King Lear is small. He appears towards the end (after the title “the end”), impersonating a modernized Shakespearean fool, a “professor” called, ironically, Mr Alien, who wears a Picasso T-shirt. While two characters are literally buried in rolls of film, Woody appears in the editing room, as a kind of parodic master editor. He works on some clips, trying to sew (“edit”) them with a thread and a needle. We actually don’t see his face but only his hands in close shot manipulating the film while Godard com-ments on his gestures in a rather sententious tone, expressing some of his views on the editing process which he links with time: “In editing, one holds in one’s hands physically the past, the present and the future. It is the only place . . . One knows the beginning and the end.” Then, Mr Alien, filmed in profile, recites the beginning of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (no. 60) while Godard speaks Lear’s famous lines (“so young and so untender”) but also Cordelia’s (“so young my lord, and true”). This scene is rather poignant and the film holds many beautiful moments and is not so iconoclastic and absurd as it first seems. Allen commented on this uncanny experience: “He reminded me of Groucho Marx playing Rufus T. Firefly, the great genius no one dares contradict. I did a lot of the things he asked me to do that couldn’t look anything but foolish on the screen. But . . . then, he’s Godard” (McCann 1990: 196).

Meetin’ WA was screened at Cannes festival in 1986 together with Hannah and Her Sisters. It is revealing of the ambivalent relationship that exists between Godard and Allen. The film opens with Rhapsody in Blue and a question by Godard in voiceover: “What was his [Allen’s] song?” Godard structures the film using the titles devised in Hannah. He asks him about his use of titles, which he sees as a cinematic device while Allen thinks it is literary. Godard uses puns: “Hannah Karenine,” “Staline Loves Ski” (Stanislavski is the name of Holly’s catering company), the title “Flash Gordon” (a comic strip hero) introduces jokingly Allen’s comparison between Gordon Willis, who prefers simple cuts and Carlo Di Palma, who favors camera movements. Meanwhile, Godard widens or narrows the frame on Allen, as a kind of illustration. Then the exchange revolves around the influ-ence of TV. Allen confesses that watching films on TV is a petty experience which badly hurts films. Godard relates movie theatres with freedom, a way to escape from the family, while television is keeping you within the home: “Cinema is linked with the forbidden while TV is allowed and domestic.”

For Godard, the distinction is essential, as it’s well known that, like Fellini, he hates television. Allen admits that it is a mere appliance rather than an art form and he does satirize television mores in his films. Godard then asks Allen, “Have you got the feeling that it [television] affects your creation?” and uses the metaphor of radioactivity (“cultural rems”) while his cigar smoke invades the room. Showing

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the montage sequence of New York buildings in Hannah, Godard slyly suggests that Allen shot the scene in the fast way television has to cover an event, a house or a war (a still of a war film is inserted), obviously being provocative. Taken aback, Allen admits it may be so, but does not explain further. Later, as he confesses liking the editing room “because it’s warm,” Godard replies soberly: “That’s already something!” Knowing his passion for editing (“the moment when it’s not over and you still have a chance” as he states in the film), Godard may have been disap-pointed by Allen’s remark. The last title, “Lucky I Ran into You” is accompanied by another pun, “Lucky Jean-Luc,” a reference to a famous western comic strip, Lucky Luke, featuring a solitary cowboy hero. While Allen’s voice expresses his views on creation, the image of his face is frozen. Godard gathers his tapes, his books and documents, and states: “the meeting is over.” The noise of the books set on the table is amplified so as to sound like an explosion.

Godard adopts a slightly ironical approach, through the subversion of Allen’s titles, the constant puns, the insertion of stills, and the manipulation of the frame (fade to black, slow motion, freeze, etc.). This flippant attitude can be contrasted with the more serious and respectful approach of André Delvaux, the Belgian director, in To Woody Allen: From Europe with Love (1980). Delvaux offers not only a very enlightening approach to Allen’s filmic methods on the set of Stardust Memories and in the editing room, but he shows real understanding and a kind of complicity in the sensitive portrait he draws of Allen, who appears as passionate about his work (contrary to later interviews), looking behind the camera, discuss-ing framing, lighting, and acting technique, praising his collaborators and speaking highly of his actresses in general, especially Diane Keaton.

Godard was interested in meeting Allen, but he seems more eager to assert his difference, associating himself with nature, woods, and (Swiss) lakes while Allen is linked with the big city, streets, and cars.

Beyond these collaborations, and despite Godard’s stance, there are clear affini-ties between the cinema of Godard and that of Allen, even if their universes as well as their approaches to cinema are quite different. Godard was definitely an influence on Allen’s cinema, but the reverse is not true. They both admire the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, a towering figure. While Allen tries at times to imitate Bergman and quotes him explicitly, Godard wavers between jealousy and fascination.

Like Godard, Allen has a taste for fragmented, self-reflexive narration and the unveiling of the cinematic process. Annie Hall displays many “dysnarrative” devices such as a blurring of space–time continuity (in the schoolroom scene), the coexist-ence in the same frame of two temporalities, a rather inventive use of split screen (the visit to Annie’s family), the use of subtitles in dialogue to express mental processes, superimposition (the doubling of Annie), the use of cartoons, etc. We should also point out the common use of a voiceover to narrate film events. Voi-ceover in Allen’s films is not used as in film noir (a confession, such as in Wilder’s Double Indemnity) but is similar to what Godard does in Band of Outsiders where

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he introduces the protagonists and intermittently comments upon the action. Husbands and Wives uses handheld camera and adopts a documentary style (based on interviews) of the type found in Godard’s films of the 1960s such as Masculin/féminin. In Annie Hall, Allen uses Godardian devices when Alvy Singer asks pas-sersby questions about their love lives. This device is also used by Godard in Band of Outsiders, but is justified by Léaud’s job as interviewer on societal matters. As Eithne O’Neill states: “Regarding broken narrative, the use of the first person, on-screen appearances, out-of-frame antiphrasis and intellectualization, Godard is a sister-soul to Allen.”4

Allen also shares with Godard a love of books and literary references. In a number of Godard’s movies, books are shown on screen and characters read passages from them. In Breathless, Patricia ( Jean Seberg) reads a passage from Faulkner’s Wild Palms, but other writers (Rilke, Maurice Sachs) are quoted, book titles being often associated with the characters’ fates. Pierrot le Fou starts with a long sequence with Ferdinand buying books and reading aloud extracts from a study on Velasquez. In Allen’s movies, books are also part of the setting. Alvy Singer comments on books on death in Annie Hall and he divides them with Annie when they split up. In Hannah, Elliott shares with Lee a love of E.E. Cummings’ poetry. Both Godard and Allen also quote films verbally and/or visually or refer to them by means of posters, photographs, billboards, etc. In Breathless Godard alludes to Hollywood film noir and in particular to films featuring Humphrey Bogart – The Maltese Falcon, The Harder they Fall, etc. Michel Poiccard (Belmondo), an admirer of Bogart, imitates his hero, passing his finger over his lips, adopting his casual attitude with women. In a similar way, in Play it Again, Sam, Allan Felix twists his lips and shows his teeth in a caricature of Bogart’s acting style. He later mimics his voice and tries to model his attitude on him. While Bogart remains a mere icon in Godard’s film, he features as a ghostly presence and gives advice to Allan, helping him to seduce Diane Keaton. At the end, Felix has no longer need of his mentor while Godard’s hero imitates Bogart, passing his finger on his lips as he dies.

Like Godard, Allen has recourse to jump cuts. In Stardust Memories, he uses a staccato rhythm to suggest the mental illness of Dorrie (Rampling) by means of a series of erratic close-ups of her distraught face looking at the camera. He will again use this device in Deconstructing Harry to contrast the fluidity of fiction as opposed to the chaotic reality of Harry’s life, illustrated in the opening scene by the repetition of Judy Davis’s arrival at his house. The look at the camera is used in an even more transgressive way in The Purple Rose of Cairo when Tom Baxter addresses Cecilia. Belmondo’s famous apostrophe to the spectator in Breathless (“If you don’t like the seaside, if you don’t like the mountains, if you don’t like the city, go fuck yourself !”) turns into a dialogue between a “real” and a fictional character.

Both Godard and Allen like to show the projecting apparatus (films within the film). In My Life to Live, Nana (Anna Karina), the young prostitute, is moved to

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tears when viewing the sequence of Joan of Arc’s death in Carl Dreyer’s film. Images of her face alternate with close-ups of the actress, Maria Falconetti, imper-sonating the French heroine and martyr. In a similar way, although the emotional impact is different, Allen’s characters (Alvy Singer, Cliff Stern, Cecilia) are immersed affectively in the films they watch. Both Godard and Allen make their fiction interact with the film within the film. In Masculin/féminin, the three young people go to the movies and watch a Swedish erotic film. They are both excited and repelled by the crude and violent sex on screen, and Godard comments on their feelings in voiceover. However, the film is not a genuine Swedish film, but a pastiche made up by Godard with one of Bergman’s actors and a Swedish model. In a similar way, Allen likes to use pastiche, as is illustrated in Zelig with the extracts of The Changing Man, a fictional Hollywood romanticized version of Zelig’s story, and, of course, in The Purple Rose of Cairo with the eponymous black and white film watched compulsively by Cecilia at the Jewel.

Allen has also at times a Godardian way of composing the frame. In Manhattan, the sequence announcing the breaking up of the relationship between Ike and Mary recalls a similar scene in Breathless, the moment when Michel and Patricia find it difficult to communicate. Godard films the scene mostly as a sequence shot. The characters are separated, each in his own space, part of the wall serving as an obstacle. Their discourses, akin to monologues, set them apart. The camera is constantly moving, mostly following Patricia’s movements through the room while Michel remains offscreen except at the end of the scene, when he occupies the frame. This scene mostly stresses separation and a sense of growing estrange-ment. In Manhattan, a comparable mood is created. The frame is divided and composition enhances its edges, emptying the centre. Ike and Mary work in sepa-rate spaces and they communicate verbally through open doors, never looking at each other. The shots are static and show, in shot reverse shot, the two characters. In the left part of the frame, Ike is seen through a half-opened door, a portion of space separating him from Mary typing on the right part, close to the edge. The grey mass of the wall centre frame arrests the spectator’s look but has also a symbolic function. Mary is enclosed in her own sphere, her body inscribed in a perfect square (a frame within the frame), a geometric space akin to a prison cell. The sound of the typewriter covers Ike’s voice, reinforcing the idea of separa-tion and lack of communication.

This analysis suggests that Godard has probably been an influence on Allen, and/or that they have certain affinities. However, the parallel should not be pushed too far. They have developed their art in different directions, as their careers demonstrate. Godard has had several phases, including a militant one, away from the commercial production system. He has gone back to that system (with Every Man for Himself), but most of the time with rather experimental and demanding films. Allen has kept to the same kind of system, with some variations. He has also gradually come back to a more Hollywoodian, less experimental form

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of cinema, playing upon generic conventions (film noir, musical, remarriage comedy) in inventive ways.

Allen has fewer affinities with Resnais, though his Shadows and Fog is a tribute to Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), whose coding Allen also takes up in Zelig, where color signifies present time while the “historical compilation in past tense is marked by black-and-white cinematography on grainy, aged film stock” (Pogel 1987: 178). Allen never quotes Resnais, but, in Annie Hall, he twice quotes The Sorrow and the Pity by Marcel Ophüls, a French documentary filmmaker he admires a lot. He first shows ( just after the McLuhan episode) the opening credit with the voiceover stating: “the German army occupies Paris.” After the film, Alvy and Annie comment. Alvy jokes about the courageous “résistants” who have to listen to Maurice Chevalier (a French icon with a Hollywood career), while Annie con-fesses that the film makes her feel guilty. The second clip takes place after Annie’s cabaret success while Alvy is trying to avoid going to a party with Tony Lacey (Paul Simon) and “mellow” people. It shows images of the exodus of French people with a propagandist comment in a German voiceover: “The Jewish war-mongers and Parisian plutocrats try to flee with their gold.” There is at the end a third verbal and visual reference when Alvy’s voiceover tells us that Annie “dragged” her new boyfriend to Night and Fog while we see a shot of the movie theatre. This insistent reference is a way for Allen to evoke anti-Semitism and more generally the enslaving of thought, but it is also used to humorous ends. Ophüls in The Trouble We′ve Seen (1994) pays tribute to Allen, showing the opening of Annie Hall as he comments on his own film: “I shall try to start my film, as years ago, my good friend Woody Allen started Annie Hall, you see, with a close up like that” (qtd. in Lowy 2008: 158, my translation). Later, Ophüls shows himself on a Vene-tian Grand canal background as he improvises a commentary like Allen in Manhat-tan (while the setting evokes Sontag’s interview in Zelig as she is filmed in Venice).

Aspects of Allen’s Critical Reception in France

Several books on Allen have been published in France, some of them offering in-depth analysis of his work, others being collections of interviews or essays on various topics. Most of these adopt a diachronic or thematic approach and few are concerned with the formal, stylistic aspects of his cinema. The main concerns are his comic art, his relations with women (sexual and otherwise), his “philoso-phy,” his relation to psychoanalysis, etc. There have been quite a number of articles published in academic journals, usually more concerned with the form of the films. Rather than discussing those books and articles, I shall give a brief outline of the critical reception through the articles and interviews published in two prominent film magazines, Les cahiers du cinéma and Positif. Almost from the

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outset, the latter has been the staunchest advocate of Allen’s cinema, publishing 12 interviews. The publication (2005) in book form of most of the essays about and interviews of Allen is revealing of his enduring reputation with the magazine, which has put him on its cover seven times. However, it took some years for Allen to establish his reputation at Cahiers. The early (short) articles are rather negative, although acknowledging some strong points. They denounce the “confusing and pretentious” mise en scene of Bananas (143, Oct. 1972), the solipsistic attitude of Allen as actor in Play It Again, Sam (148, Mar. 1973), the shortcomings of Allen as director and his dependence on television style in Sleeper (161, Sept. 1974).

The first article in Cahiers by Serge Daney is an insightful piece on Annie Hall, praising the strength and cohesion of the script and the subtle way Allen makes use of Diane Keaton’s specific brand of comedy, giving her free rein. The same film is praised in Positif by Robert Benayoun (1977), who established himself as the staunchest French advocate of the director. He is the true discoverer of Allen, whom he sees as the first intellectual comedian (using his Jewish culture as raw material) and the creator of the first adult comic character (Benayoun 1985: 42). He stresses the singularity of his writing, comparing him with artists like Chaplin and Jerry Lewis and designating him as “a true heir” of the Marx Brothers. He emphasizes his pessimism, his obsession with death and suicide and his “gallows humour.” As Eithne O’Neill (1975) states:

In his article on Love and Death (Nov. 1975), described as the “first film comedy on the serious subject of our last end,” Benayoun stresses the then unique blend in cinema of Angst and fun. A unique comic thrust, the play on intimate relations and verbal virtuosity combine with the fear of failure.”

Since then there has been a steady flow of (generally favorable) articles in Positif by prominent critics (Michel Ciment, Jean-Loup Bourget, and Vincent Amiel). Most praise Allen’s qualities: the fluidity of his narratives, the ease with which he sets a mood and defines characters, his comic efficacy. These turn at times to criti-cism as Allen is considered as simply using his mastery and offering a familiar universe without much surprise. While Stardust Memories is stigmatized by Olivier Assayas (1981) for its “sourness” and for making fun of its spectators, while Nicolas Saada (1990) criticizes Allen for making films on cinema to justify his auteur status, Zelig is praised in both magazines for its technical achievements, its originality and the depth of the central chameleon metaphor. Crimes and Misdemeanors and Husbands and Wives are considered as major achievements. Cahiers 462 (Dec. 1992) devotes two articles (and its front cover) to Husbands and Wives, presenting it as a “film somme,” the “most important of its enduring, resilient author.” It completes its section on Allen with an interview with the director and one with Judy Davis. Meanwhile, Positif no. 444 (Feb. 1998) on the occasion of the release of Deconstruct-ing Harry devotes 33 pages (one-third of the magazine) to Allen. The “dossier” contains two articles on Harry, a six-page interview with the director, a very

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insightful article by Vincent Amiel on Allen’s ghosts (reprinted in Valens 2008: 148–149), and a well-documented study of Allen and psychiatry. Allen would again make the cover of Positif no. 456 (Celebrity), no. 496 (Hollywood Ending), and most recently of no. 596 (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger).

Cahiers is less generous, at times relegating Allen’s films to the “other films” section. It is also more critical. September is seen as seductive, but superficial and derivative (of Bergman and Ozu!), Radio Days is seen (wrongly) as a failure, the mise-en-scène of Alice is seen as “crude mechanics,” Shadows and Fog is “seductive” but “soft.” Allen is asked to “focus his creative energy, put himself into danger instead of hatching products of good artistic and cultural standard.” In 1998, Cahiers devoted for the first time two articles to an Allen film, Deconstructing Harry, both by prominent critics (Serge Toubiana and Antoine de Baecque) and both appreciative. De Baecque likes the fact that theory may find a technical incarnation on screen (the inability to “focus”). On the other hand, Celebrity and Melinda and Melinda are only allowed a short “note.” Since then, Allen’s films have been chroni-cled regularly, usually in the section called “Cahier critique.” Anything Else is praised for its melancholy, but also for its rage. According to Baptiste Piegay: “Filming is again linked with a real creative drive, not only routine” (583, Oct. 2003). The British trilogy is rather well received, though Scoop is considered as a minor effort. Allen “reinvents himself ” in Match Point, “a tense, inexorably hard film, closer to opera than to jazz” (605, Oct. 2005). Cassandra’s Dream, focusing on chance, guilt, and destiny, is also praised for its narrative mastery and biting irony. The last three films (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Whatever Works, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger) offer no real surprise for the magazine. Though Allen is now fully recognized in Cahiers, he has never been given the same privileged status as he is in Positif.

Among the questions often raised is that of Allen’s auteur status. While his many qualities are acknowledged, the constant references to great American comedians and to major European filmmakers (Bergman, Fellini), the taste for quotation, parody, pastiche, are sometimes seen as an erasure of his artistic per-sonality rather than a part of it. While Positif sees boldness in the constant playing upon generic conventions, Cahiers criticizes a certain predictable character and a lack of surprise and invention. Allen is even at times denied a true sense of “cinema” because he sacrifices his characters to the necessities of the script. As Serge Daney, commenting on Crimes and Misdemeanors points out:

“cinema” never plays its game, its autonomy. There is never a shot without charac-ters, of landscapes, of things. Just once, the camera moves from Landau to the eyes of the dead woman (empty, opening on nothing) (Daney 1993: 243–244).

This seems excessive, but it reveals a kind of “reticence” among French critics. Jean-Claude Biette in “Qu’est-ce qu’un cinéaste?” distinguishes between “réalisa-teur,” “metteur en scène,” “cinéaste,” and “auteur” (1996: 5). While the first label

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is neutral and applies to all, “metteur en scène” supposes actors and space (as in theatre). “Cinéaste” evokes some “obscure demiurgy” concerned with shots and their organic arrangement while “auteur” supposes that the artist occupies a “posi-tion of responsibility” in filmic production and suggests an individualist stance which aims at “formulating a truth or a series of personal truths.” For Biette, Allen is only an “aristocratic avatar of television functionality,” and he would deny him the status of “cinéaste” and auteur, though Allen definitely deserves that label, as his 2011 film attests.

The project of Midnight in Paris was carried out during the summer of 2010, when Allen shot the film with an international cast (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates), featuring French stars like Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Gad Elmale, and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a former top model and singer and the French president’s wife. The film starts with a montage sequence (remi-niscent of the opening of Manhattan) of Paris highlights (the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Cœur, Montmartre, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Elysées, the Moulin Rouge, the Café de Flore). Sydney Bechet’s warm saxophone enhances the beauty of Darius Khonji’s images. Gil Pender (Wilson) is a successful Hollywood screen-writer who is nostalgic for the 1920s and longs to live in Paris and be a genuine novelist. He is about to marry Inez, his beautiful but authoritative fiancée. One night, as he gets lost in the Latin Quarter, close to the Montagne Ste Geneviève, he is taken back to the more glamorous and exciting Paris of the 1920s by means of an old Peugeot roadster, through some kind of time warp or magic trick. Rev-ellers invite him to a party, where he meets, his eyes dazed and mouth gaping, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, and, later in another place, Ernest Hem-ingway. At first incredulous, or wondering if he has gone mad, he finally accepts his predicament and makes the most of it night after night, meeting Picasso, Matisse, Bunuel, Dali, and Man Ray. He also falls in love with Adriana, a beautiful muse and lover for many artists (Picasso, Braque, Modigliani) and starts rewriting his novel, mentored by no less than Gertrude Stein. He gradually realizes that he and Inez are not meant for each other.

Allen plays very explicitly with clichés, trying to recapture the mood of this era as it is construed in our collective imagination. Most of these famous artists are rather idealized, even glamorized or at times slightly caricatured (Dali and his “rhinoceros” obsession). However, there are also details taken (or adapted) from reality. Hemingway may be different from the true writer whom Allen describes as “a bully brawling boor,” yet his lines evoke clearly some of the writer’s pas-sions and obsessions (boxing, big game hunting, Africa, courage and fear, mascu-linity), and there are clear allusions both to his war experience and his works (A Farewell to Arms, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”). In the same way, Zelda’s suicidal impulses and Gertrude Stein’s status and role in this community of artists are well rendered. Allen even has Gil provide Buñuel with an idea for a film which will become The Exterminating Angel. With regard to places, we could expect Polidor or the Moulin Rouge or Maxim’s, but it’s more surprising to be

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offered the uncanny decor of Deyrolle, a famous taxidermist shop. This shows that Woody Allen knows Paris beyond the touristy clichés and images that he joyfully stages with a very fluid mise-en-scène, lavish sets, and warm colours.

The film contrasts different images of Paris. The glorious, almost legendary French capital of the past hosting the whole artistic avant-garde is pitted against the contemporary Paris, still beautiful and attractive (especially on a grey sky, rainy day), but whose authenticity is partly threatened by both mass and luxury tourism (represented by Inez’s conservative “Tea Party” parents). However, though the character of Paul, the pedantic professor, is constantly made fun of, it’s he who (ironically) utters from the outset the ultimate truth, denouncing Gil’s nostalgic streak as a form of regressive romanticism and a denial of reality. Rather than staying with Adriana while they are “passing through” another golden era, the belle epoque of the 1890s, where they meet Lautrec, Degas, and Gauguin (who are nostalgic for the Renaissance), Gil chooses to return to contemporary Paris. He makes the choice of living in the present (and not alternative) reality, but according to values that may have been inspired to him by the tutelary figures he has just met. Allen shows that the mythical past is ultimately inaccessible; he exposes the vanity of illusions and fantasies and suggests we should stay in the “here-and-now” without repudiating the past (and our nostalgia for it). The happy ending associates reality (Gabrielle, the seductive brocanteuse) with a genuine artis-tic quest. Gil stays in Paris in order to write, like Hemingway and others. The only way to revive a mythical past is to recreate it in the present.

Midnight in Paris is the acme of Allen’s celebration of French history and culture. Allen may never provide a truly documentary account of Paris and Paris-ian life. His interest lies elsewhere, in the creation of a magnified, romanticized, selected, and stylized image, discarding any realistic approach. His Paris is closer to the cinematic city of Stanley Donen (An American in Paris) or Vincente Minnelli (Gigi) than to daily reality. Allen has managed, thanks to his spirited and witty conjuring up of literary and artistic legendary figures, to capture better than in Everyone Says I Love You the magic spirit of the “ville lumière,” fraught with history, memories, and fantasms.

In France, Woody Allen is still considered as one of the most emblematic American “cinéastes” because of the specificity of his fictional universe and his enduring career, but he is also celebrated for his creative autonomy and independ-ence from the Hollywood machine. This reputation, attested to by the bulk of interviews, documentaries, and critical output, is partly based on misunderstand-ing. Allen (and his characters) is seen as an intellectual, while he regularly denies that label, pretending it is a misidentification. There is still some confusion between his filmic persona and his biography, though it tends to be toned down because he appears less often in his films. Despite artistic recognition, some influential critics still deny him access to the pantheon of “auteurs.” Midnight in Paris is criti-cized in Cahiers du cinéma (668, June 2011) for its shallowness and “monstrous parade of cameos,” while Positif is rather enthusiastic. France has been essential

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in shaping the reputation of Allen as “cinéaste” and the most European of con-temporary American filmmakers has also benefited from the heritage of French cinema. Each new Allen opus is eagerly awaited in France and expected to provide some inventive, sparkling combination of light and dark comedy with a satirical or nostalgic tinge and often a reflexion on creative processes, the Allen touch. There are many pleasurable moments from his films (lighthearted, hilarious, lyrical, poetic, even tragic) that remain imprinted in our memories and justify our lasting admiration.

Notes

1 This famous café, a French institution, was frequented by artists and writers such as Picasso, Prévert, Hemingway, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Its mention gives an intellectual touch to the tourist trip.

2 This restaurant is one of Allen’s regular haunts in Paris in which he often dines and also where he meets the press.

3 This show, produced by novelist Melvyn Bragg, is devoted to portraits of personalities of the international artistic world.

4 Author’s email interview with O’Neill (Feb. 1, 2011). O’Neill has long been part of the editorial board of Positif.

Works Cited

French

Biette, Jean-Claude (1996) “Qu’est-ce qu’un cinéaste?” Trafic 18, 5–15.Assayas, Olivier (1981) Review of Stardust Memories. Les Cahiers du cinema 319 ( Jan.)Benayoun, Robert (1977) Review of Annie Hall. Positif 199 (Nov.)Benayoun, Robert (1985) Woody Allen, au-delà du langage. Paris: Herscher.Daney, Serge (1993) L’exercice a été profitable, Monsieur. Paris: P.O.L.Hample, Stuart (2010) Angoisse et légèreté, Woody Allen en comics. Paris: Fetjaine.Lowy, Vincent (2008) Marcel Ophüls. Sofia: Le bord de l’eau.O’Neill, Eithne (1975) in Positif 175 (Nov.).Saada, Nicolas (1990) in Les Cahiers du cinema 428 (Feb.).Valens, Gregory (ed.) (2008) Woody Allen, collection Positif. Paris: Scope.

English

McCann, Graham (1990) Woody Allen, New Yorker. Cambridge: Polity Press.Pogel, Nancy (1987) Woody Allen. Boston: Twayne.

4

In his posthumous On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Edward W. Said challenges the notion that aging entails a discernible movement in the direc-tion of reconciliation, wherein the artist accepts his or her mortal condition and the frustrations and defeats that are thought to characterize it:

Each of us can readily supply evidence of how it is that late work crowns a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of “ripeness is all”? (Said 2007: 7).

What about all the late work that “involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against . . .” (7). It is an interesting question, provoked perhaps by Said’s own long-term illness, an illness that took his life as he was writing the book. It is a question that I would like to pursue in regard to Woody Allen’s late films, beginning with Husbands and Wives (1992) – films that have oft been represented as a falling off, but that raise new questions, questions that are, in their most despairing moments, Sophoclean, and that generally, even when the mood is less dark, “reverberate with implacable melancholy, [and] a sense of loss” (Dargis 2008).

Allen’s critics have been noticeably harsh on his later films, especially following the 1992 scandal involving Allen, Mia Farrow, and two of her adopted children, one of whom, Soon-Yi Previn, he later married. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd has repeatedly sought to put a stake through the heart of Allen’s reputation, beginning one column with the query, “Where have you gone, Woody Allen?,” following this with an elegy:

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

“Raging in the Dark”

Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films

Christopher J. Knight

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He was an American classic; the shmendrick who gets the girl by being smart, funny and true blue. He was not strong and silent, but weak and chatty. He was an inept Lothario but an ept moralist. That likable non-hero is gone forever.

Then, she moved to indictment: “what makes Mr. Allen so irretrievably creepy is the way he keeps revising his image in his movies while denying that his movies are about himself ” (Dowd 1995). Later, responding to Deconstructing Harry, Dowd chose, again, to dismiss the line separating the artist from his character:

I know, I know. This movie is a fiction about a man who writes fiction. Mr. Allen is protesting that he is not Harry Block, that Harry Block is the sublime creation of his cultivated imagination. It’s the old is-it-fact-or-is-it-fiction routine. This movie is an apologia or it is nothing. In fact, it is both” (Dowd 1998).

Licensed to identify the artist with his character, Dowd can, in a single swipe, denounce both: “Deconstructing Harry, the latest ‘comedy’ of Woody Allen (nee Allen Konigsberg), is told from the point of view of a weaselly, overcivilized, undermoralized, terminally psychoanalyzed terminator” (1998). It is not Dowd alone, however, who now speaks of Allen with contempt. One hears it in Ricky Gervais’s aside:

I’ll tell you something. I was offered a part in a Woody Allen film. I won’t tell you which one, but when I saw the rest of the cast – other British people on telly – I just pulled out of it. I thought: that’s no fun. This is the Woody Allen who doesn’t know. He thinks these people are all good because he likes the accent. Woody Allen isn’t Woody Allen any more” (qtd. in Klink 2007).

And one sees it in brazen newspaper headlines such as New York Magazine’s “Is Match Point Woody’s Comeback, Or Did He Just Get Lucky?” (Smith 2005) and the Guardian’s “Woody Allen Has No Reputation to Ruin  .  .  .” (Sweney 2009). As the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver writes in 2009, “what really makes me sad is that it’s now so easy, and so acceptable, to give Allen a hard time. His faltering output in recent years has coincided with a general perception that he’s foolish (at best) and a sleazebag (at worst).”

Pulver is sympathetic to Allen’s films. Yet like many, he wishes to divorce his approval from the post-Farrow work:

I prefer to remember the glory days. It’s hard to credit it now, but until Soon-Yi-gate, Allen basically muddled along undisturbed in his small-scale, small-budget corner, turning out one fantastic film after another. No one paid much attention; and none were box-office hits of any great substance after Annie Hall. Not everyone will agree, but in my view Allen’s run of movies between 1979 (Manhattan) and 1992 (Husbands and Wives) was arguably the richest seam of films ever excavated by any director working in America (2009).

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It is good of Pulver to remind his readers of the strength of Allen’s mid-period films. Yet Allen has directed more than 20 films since Husbands and Wives (1992), the last one Pulver judges worthy; and many of these have either been of excep-tional quality – Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Match Point (2005), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Whatever Works (2009), and Midnight in Paris (2011) – or handsomely successful within the space of the director’s more circum-scribed ambition: Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Small Time Crooks (2000), and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). Deconstructing Harry (1997) perhaps does not belong to either category, but it remains of interest, especially for those attentive to the arc of Allen’s career. So while there is a perception that Allen’s work went into eclipse in the post-Farrow period, this period has, in fact, included many fine achievements and when it is taken into account that the director is responsible for all of a film’s facets, these achievements become more unarguable. Think, for instance, of the brilliant cin-ematography in Husbands and Wives (Carlo Di Palma, DP), Sweet and Lowdown (Fei Zhao, DP), Match Point (Remi Adefarsasin, DP) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona ( Javier Aguirresarobe, DP). Think of the scintillating performances of Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives; Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Tilly, and Chazz Palminteri in Bullets Over Broadway; Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite; Sean Penn and Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown; Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox, Matthew Goode, and Scarlett Johansson in Match Point; Colin Farrell, Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson, and Hayley Atwell in Cassandra’s Dream; Hugh Jackman in Scoop; Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works; and Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard in Midnight in Paris. Think of the choreography in Mighty Aphrodite and Everybody Says I Love You and of the music that so enhances Everybody Says I Love You, Sweet and Lowdown, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream (Philip Glass, composer), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. And think of Allen’s own script work in Sweet and Lowdown, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Midnight in Paris. There have been definite successes, and not to extend Allen his due should entail a serious misjudgment.

This said, something did happen in the period of the Farrow–Allen breakup that has had consequences for the later films. In The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, Peter J. Bailey says that “[a]s if in reaction against the artistic compromises and civility of the Hannah era, Allen’s post-Farrow films have sought deliberately to reflect the deepening vulgarity of the world he depicts” (2001: 243). This is true, yet what also comes in for criticism is the artist and his own protagonists. That is, there are repeated instances of self-loathing – Gabe Roth’s “I see myself sleepwalk-ing into a mess and I’ve learned nothing over the years,” Jack’s “My life is such a fucking mess,” Harry Block’s “I’m od’ing on myself; I’m a shit. . . . I’m a shit. . . . I’m the worse person in the world,” Lee Simon’s “I’m fucking Prufrock” and “I’m the worst off son of a bitch,” Emmet Ray’s “I don’t need anybody. I made a mistake,

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okay, I made a mistake, I made a mistake,” and Boris Yellnikoff ’s “What could I offer you [Melody] but a bad temper, hypogastroceles, morbid fixations, reclusive rages and misanthropy?” Their self-abasements bring to mind Hamlet’s “I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me” (Act 3, sc.1) and Jonathan Edwards’ “It has often appeared to me, that if God should mark iniquity against me, I should appear the very worst of all mankind; of all that have been since the beginning of the world of this time: and that I should have by far the lowest place in hell” (1966: 94). In fact, bettering Edwards, Allen’s Gabe Roth visits Hell (again, its lowest place or floor) where he rebukes the Devil for his pussyfooting:

I’m more powerful than you because I’m a bigger sinner. Because you’re a fallen angel, and I never believed in God or Heaven or any of that stuff. I’m strictly quarks and particles and black holes. All the other stuff is junk to me. And also I do terrible things. I cheated on all my wives and none of them deserved it. I sleep with whores. I drink too much and take pills and I lie and I’m vain and cowardly and prone to violence (Deconstructing Harry).

The self-accusations, one suspects, connect to Allen’s conviction that “we live in a world where there’s nobody to punish you, if you don’t punish yourself ” (Björkman 1993: 212). But, like his characters, he is rather good at punishing himself, and we scarcely need others to point out his failings, for he does an excel-lent job of this himself, a fact exploited by another New York Magazine headline: “Woody Allen Explains How to Tell Which of His Movies Are Bad” (Hill 2009). In the post-Farrow period, however, the failings are not simply artistic, to be offered up in self-deprecating acknowledgments: “You can look at a film of Kuro-sawa’s and a film of mine, and see the difference. There’s just no qualitative comparison. One is a work of art, and even my best film is just a good film” (Allen n.d.). The failings are also, it is implied, moral. Consequently, in the same inter-view (following Sweet and Lowdown’s release), Allen makes an allusion to his own troubles by invoking John Richardson’s 1991 Picasso biography:

Look, we’ve just been learning what a terrible person Picasso was, how awful he was to everyone around him. But it didn’t encroach on his art. His art is sublime. So I wanted to put something in the movie [the affirming ending] to keep the audi-ence happy. You know, so they didn’t think that I was . . . a total monster! You know, the truth.

Or, more recently and humorously, in a 2008 interview with Douglas McGrath, Allen speaks of having “inherited the worst” of his parents’ traits: “I have my father’s hypochondria and lack of concentration. I have his amorality. I have eve-rything bad that he had. Then I have my mother’s surly, pill-like, complaining, whining attitude” (McGrath 2008). Granted, we are not truly being asked to take these statements at face value; and yes, Allen has made attempts (most notably in

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his 1994 interview with Douglas McGrath) to exculpate himself from the charge, leveled by Farrow and others, of genuine “amorality”:

First they say, “You can’t see her [Dylan, Allen’s adopted daughter] because you could be a molester.” When that argument crumbles, they quickly shift to “You have a relationship with Soon-Yi.” When we point out that Soon-Yi is a twenty-four-year-old woman and that Dylan always knew I wasn’t Soon-Yi’s father . . . , they now say, “Well, you can’t see her because you haven’t seen her in so long it might cause her stress.” When I ask about the long-term stress of losing her father, they don’t have an answer. The longer we’re kept apart just provides greater consolidation against me, and a dependency on a parent who refers to me as Satan (McGrath 1994).

The legal case, involving two unmarried adults who jointly adopted a female child, has its own interesting dimensions. In the Farrow–Allen case, the matter, as we know, became more complicated, with the result that Allen lost custody of the adopted child and was granted limited, supervised custody of his natural male child. The moral case did not require the same settled judgment, and critics and ethicists will continue to examine its lessons. Yet, at this point, there are too many unknowns for most of us to say what transpired in the quasi-family space that Farrow, with Allen’s approval, created. What does, however, seem evident is that both Farrow and Allen acted irresponsibly, and that Allen, in entering into a sexual relation with a very young Soon-Yi, the daughter of his partner, also acted immorally. In her memoir, What Falls Away, Mia Farrow writes, no doubt truth-fully, of Allen’s ill-judged behavior and growing hurtfulness toward her: “He had grown remote since our first years together, and cruel; not all the time, but so often he made me feel stupid and worthless” (1997: 240–241).

This, a summary, is to suggest that Allen has had reason to feel not only remiss about his earlier behavior but also stronger, moral misgivings. And I wish to argue that these same misgivings, combined with a continuing inability to reconcile himself to life’s fractiousness and brevity, helped to foster a mood in Allen’s post-Farrow films akin to Said’s notion of late style. I date this mood (interspersed by other moods, including the comedic) from the 1992 release of Husbands and Wives, for it was while shooting the picture that Farrow became conscious of Allen’s intimacy with Soon-Yi, and there are scenes between Allen and Farrow in the film that suggest a raw anger. In its intensity and form, then, the film recalls both PBS’s An American Family (1973), a groundbreaking documentary that in cinema vérité style bore witness to the breakup of a family (the Louds) highlighted by the separation and eventual divorce of the parents, Bill and Pat, and Ingmar Berg-man’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973), an emotionally wrought film, with its own documentary-like style, focusing upon the breakup of the marriage of Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann).1 Husbands and Wives itself begins in the Upper-West Side apartment of Gabe (Allen) and Judy Roth (Farrow), as they await the arrival of their longtime friends, Jack (Sydney Pollack) and Sally ( Judy Davis). The plan is to go out to dinner, which they eventually do, but not

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before the latter couple have announced their decision to separate. The news shocks both Gabe and Judy, with Judy becoming especially distraught (“I just feel shattered”). As she seeks out temporary refuge in her bedroom, where the hand-held camera does not follow, we hear her lacerated voice (“I’m upset, all right, I’m upset!”), after she has given way to invective (“Bullshit! This is just bullshit!”) fol-lowing Jack’s effort to put a calming spin upon the revelation. The cinematic roughness of the scene, as shot by Carlo Di Palma, corresponds, and is meant to correspond (Allen’s first inclination was to shoot the movie in 16 millimeter2), to the rough, shattered nature of the human lives, beginning with those of Jack and Sally but soon ensnaring Gabe and Judy’s as well. As Allen has said, his employment of the frequent jump cuts, both in this first scene and later, was to make the material “more disturbing” and

more dissonant, like the difference between Stravinsky and Prokofiev. I wanted it to be more dissonant because the internal, emotional and mental states of the charac-ters are dissonant. I wanted the audience to feel that there was a jagged, nervous feeling. An unsettled and neurotic feeling” (Björkman 1993: 252).

The unraveling is also enhanced (a first in Allen’s films) by the frequent lapses into profanity, as the characters lose their sense of self-possession. This happens to all the principle characters ( Jack’s “This is my fucking house!” is met by Sally’s “This is my fucking house!”), so while they are each well educated and verbally adept, they are undone by the personal upheavals that they themselves have heedlessly invited into their homes. And even while Jack and Sally argue over whose house it is, their dueling is witnessed by the house’s guest, Michael Gates (Liam Neeson). Jack to Sally: “What’s he doing? Fucking in our bed?,” until Jack’s new, younger partner Sam (Lysette Anthony), hitherto pressed to remain outside, barges in, making them a foursome. Jack’s false, bitter note of invitation, “Hey, come on in. This is about all of us; we don’t have any secrets,” is bluntly dismissed by Sally: “That’s bullshit. We have nothing but secrets.”

Husbands and Wives is an important film in Allen’s oeuvre. Like Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, it speaks of the failure of modern marriage to replace prior, more metaphysical or religious values. Without a more encompassing well of belief, humans find it difficult to minister to each other’s needs for love and meaning. In Allen’s early and middle films, unlike Bergman’s, the faith in marriage or romance has, in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “romantic readiness” (2003: 6), been a central ideological component. In these films especially, it is found basking in the limelight of civility and generous good will. Nevertheless, marriage and romance are not necessarily the same thing. Romance, as it gets identified with the Ameri-can Songbook composers such as George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers, Johnny Mercer, etc., and later with Allen himself, is inclined to push marriage toward the horizon. Marriage remains the desideratum, but it is a perpetually postponed desideratum. And when the Songbook meets its final

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chapter in Stephen Sondheim, marriage (for a host of reasons) is no longer even a desideratum, but is more akin to a curse. Think of “My Husband the Pig,” “Could I Leave You,” “Live Alone and Like It,” and “Getting Married Today.” But, like Gabe, whom Jack speaks of as someone who, “[l]ike all of us . . . grew up on movies and novels where doomed love was romantic,” Allen’s work inclines toward romance. Yes, we hear the twice-divorced Isaac Davis, in Manhattan, say to his 17-year-old lover Tracy, “I don’t believe in extramarital relationships. I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics,” but Tracy’s response (“maybe people weren’t meant to have one deep relationship. Maybe we’re meant to have, you know, a series of relationships”) is generally more reflective of the way in which matters play out in Allen’s films. Romance displaces marriage, and even those who find themselves married or engaged (cf. Yale in Manhattan; Elliot in Hannah and Her Sisters; Judah and Cliff in Crimes and Misdemeanors; Gabe, Judy, Jack, Sally in Husbands and Wives; Lenny and Amanda in Mighty Aphrodite; Lee in Celebrity; Steffi in Everybody Says I Love You; Elli in Hollywood Ending; Susan and Hobie in Melinda and Melinda; Chris in Match Point; Vicky in Vicky Cristina Barce­lona; Jessica in Whatever Works; Alfie, Sally, and Roy in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger; Gil and Inez in Midnight in Paris) find the seductions of romance too strong not to be tempted waywardly. So if, in Victorian times, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” could sincerely propose that marriage might substitute (“Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!”) for a lost faith, in Allen’s world this same sense of loss has unhinging consequences for matrimony.

And while, throughout Allen’s oeuvre, romance generally comes to the rescue, in his darker moments and films – most of which comprise the post-Farrow period – even romance finds itself challenged to stem the tide of loss and self-alienation. Romance might even be part of the problem, as in Anything Else, a dour comedy whose central lovers, Jerry Falk ( Jason Biggs) and Amanda Chase (Christina Ricci), are brought together not only by their mutual affection for Cole Porter, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald, but also by their dread of commitment. When they first meet, they are living with other partners, Brooke (KaDee Strickland) and Bob ( Jimmy Fallon), each of whom appears more emotionally together than either Jerry or Amanda. So it is that Amanda initiates their relation with the challenging confession, “I can’t commit. I guess I have a problem with commitment. I dream of meeting someone who I would just love to give myself over to, you know, where I would be the person hurt in the end. But it hasn’t happened yet.” Jerry, in response, confesses to a similar dysfunction, adding that, the night before, while listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s Porter album, he found himself dreaming of Amanda. “You were listening to Cole Porter and you thought of me,” replies Amanda. “You must really have a crush on me.  .  .  .  I’d say it is fatal.” It does prove fatal, for once the two have made their breaks with their lovers and formed their own union, the romance fades and frigidity (Amanda’s mostly) finds a new home. At the same time that Amanda and Jerry’s romance is faltering, Amanda’s mother Paula (Stockard Channing) leaves her own lover and moves into the couple’s

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apartment, bringing with her a piano, and thinking that she will “put a number of songs together and do a nightclub act.” In the wee small hours, Paula gives voice to Peggy Lee and Hubie Wheeler’s “There’ll Be Another Spring” with its hope that there will be “another chance to love.” Of course, the American Song-book is all about this hope, though when purchased at the expense of the love one has, it can prove “fatal.” In the end, Anything Else subverts a romantic ethos – identified with the likes of Fitzgerald (F. Scott and Ella), Gershwin, Porter, Sinatra, and Allen himself – that, in the twentieth century, offered solace of a sort for other, more sustaining values that had been lost.

Troubling as it often is, Anything Else remains a comedy and it only partly belongs to the group of films – Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity, Sweet and Lowdown, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Whatever Works – that I have most in mind when speaking of late style. These latter films also evince differences from one another, even within the context of late style. The first three or four of these films have characters who are often lacerating, either toward others or themselves. In Husbands and Wives, Jack loudly berates his girlfriend, Sam: “All that crap about astrology. It’s so stupid. I’ve told you.  .  .  .  I’m so sick of listening to your crap about soybeans, and zen food and fucking zodiac”; in Deconstructing Harry, Joan (Kirstie Alley) screams at Harry: “You son of a bitch. You sick, sick, sick, sick, fucking bastard. . . . You little fucking asshole”; in Celebrity, Bonnie (Famke Janssen) likewise screams at Lee (Kenneth Branagh): “You’re a sick son of a bitch.  .  .  . Yeah, you’re a total, total asshole.  .  .  . You’re a fucking psychotic!” The moments here are fraught, when relationships are coming apart, but these are also evocative of an Allen period – the years following upon the public shame – when the director seems to have been struggling to hold himself together. Deconstructing Harry is repeatedly spoken of as representing the nadir of Allen’s filmmaking, but it remains a fascinating film, no doubt because of its authentically felt mood of abject defeat and despair. To have, during the Soon-Yi scandal, the most intimate and, sadly, most salacious moments of one’s life exposed to view must have caused Allen the greatest pain. To his credit, Allen did not collapse, but continued working at the pace for which he had become, and is still, known. It is also to his credit that some of the films made in this period – Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and Everyone Says I Love You (1996) – might have been made at any moment in his career. That is, they do not seem reflective of personal turmoil, in the way in which Husbands and Wives (1992), Deconstructing Harry (1997), Celebrity (1998), and Sweet and Lowdown (1999) do.

Another film that, like Deconstructing Harry, might be said to be expressive of Allen at his moment of greatest self-doubt and, perhaps, despondency is Celebrity. Celebrity is, in some ways, a reprise of Manhattan, but without the esprit and core innocence that is embodied in Tracy. Once more, the protagonist is a New York writer, Lee Simon, whose subject is decaying values: “My book is about the values of a society gone astray, a culture badly in need of help.” And like Manhattan,

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Celebrity was shot in black and white. But if in Manhattan the effect is to create a sense of 1940s romance, in Celebrity the effect is deglamorizing, pushing scenes in the direction of Nathaniel West and Diane Arbus. First among the grotesqueries is Lee himself, a man whose unfaithfulness to his wife Robin ( Judy Davis) and his subsequent girlfriend Bonnie is paralleled by his subservience to the film and fashion personalities whose frailties, ironically, do not escape him. Thus thinking himself immune, he aspires to be a Fitzgerald-like unveiler of those lives lived in the frolic of the film and fashion world’s spurious glamor. Yet he too has become ensnared, to the point that his own life begins to look just as empty as those whose lives he would expose. To his credit, he knows this; and there is a poignant moment when he sets chase after Bonnie – who, jilted by him, has fled with his novel manuscript – in the direction of the South Street Seaport Pier, where she, boarding a ferry moments before its departure, lets fly upon the water page by manuscript page, as he watches from the pier. His novel has been the one thing that Lee has truly cared about and to watch helplessly as it is destroyed does take the heart out of him, a fact well captured by Branagh’s distraught face. If he has not been especially good at helping himself, help is what Lee needs, and this is confirmed by the film’s opening and closing moments featuring a skywriting plane inscribing the word “HELP” above Manhattan’s streets.

The film has been praised by reputable critics, including Girgus and Bailey. The first, interested in Branagh’s remarkable (some have said perverse) impersonation of the traditional Allen hero, describes the film as “[o]ne of Allen’s most inventive and startling efforts to effectuate the recently desired separation of his public persona from his character in a film” (Girgus 2002: 14). The need for this separa-tion, argues Girgus, is certainly connected with the Soon-Yi scandal but it also speaks to a larger need for Allen to deconstruct or complicate the long-term incli-nation of audiences to view the man and the character as one. Bailey, meanwhile, conceives the film as reflective of “the very real ambivalence Allen feels about his responsibility as a filmmaker to confront viewers with ‘the terrible truths of exist-ence’ or to distract them through comedy” (Bailey 2001: 86). The film is said to be “Woody Allen’s most cynical film,” an “incessantly sour and soulless comedy” (264), but as the director refuses to offer a “positive alternative to riding the super-ficial values of media culture” (264), his “nearly fathomless cynicism” supplies us with “a vision of contemporary life” (257) that is memorable for its honesty, for its depiction of “the bleak truth of human corruptibility” (264). Bailey is not alone in thinking the film offering little in the way of an alternative, or redemp-tive, vision (“that he [Lee Simon] resisted the temptation to declare himself com-pletely above all the corruptions to which celebrity culture is subject is perhaps provisionally redemptive” [264]). In fact, he represents the consensus here, all the more reason to highlight Celebrity when speaking to the matter of late style in Allen’s work.

One does not have to admire the film or share its viewpoint – even while con-ceding its many brilliant parts – to claim the film important to Allen scholars for

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its evincing of a despairing artist (Simon but also, and more importantly, Allen) who has, in a sense, lost the plotline – i.e., the conviction that the artist-cum-priest has something to say to us for the reason that he or she has taken the trouble, exercised the discipline, to put him- or herself in truth’s company. In Celebrity, it is not just the characters who appear adrift, in need of help; it is also Allen. Of course, it is but one film, yet Celebrity represents more than this, for it gives evi-dence of a director who has misplaced his moral compass, something that many found themselves thinking when viewing the oral sex routine (featuring the actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Richard Benjamin) that opens Deconstructing Harry and that is revisited here, first with the actors Melanie Griffith (as Nicole Oliver) and Branagh and later, in a different, playacting variation, with the actors Judy Davis and Bebe Neuwirth (as Nina). Admired actors are put in fairly humiliating positions and not for a good cause, for the jokes are adolescent. And Allen’s filmic interest in oral sex (“[t]he structuring dirty joke at the heart of this relentlessly sleazy satire” [Bailey 2001: 263]), like his longstanding references to masturbation (Alvy Singer: “Hey, don’t knock masturbation! It’s sex with someone I love”), does raise questions about the breadth of Allen’s moral understanding, leaving one wondering if this interest bespeaks a person capable of the kind of sexually aber-rant behavior to which he stood charged by Farrow. One hopes (and even thinks) not, and one admires the director’s longstanding practice of not placing his actors in pronounced sexual situations, though in Celebrity this practice seems neglected, again raising a question of whether Allen, in this film, has lost focus. If so, this too might be understood as a sign of late style, of the “nonharmonious, nonserene tension” spoken of by Said (2007: 7).

To this point, in discussing films such as Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry and Celebrity, I have been giving attention to a quality of emotional turmoil, a turmoil that I suspect to be connected with the events surrounding the unsettling breakup with Farrow. Sweet and Lowdown is also a film characterized by, and perhaps reflective of, emotional turmoil, it being the story of the fictitious 1930s jazz guitar player Emmet Ray (Sean Penn) whose musical talents far exceed his emotional and moral understanding. An early exchange between Emmet and Phyliss (Carol Saxon) proves telling, for she tells him that he hurts both others and himself by keeping his “feelings all locked up,” and that this also must have unhappy consequences for his music. To which he replies that while he loves the company of women, “[t]hat’s the way it is when you are a true artist,” and would she please stop talking. It is fitting that Emmet, who sees no point in talking, wishing in this scene, as in others, to move as quickly as possible to a clambering embrace, should next find himself in a relation with Hattie (Samantha Morton), a young laundress who cannot speak. Or, as her friend Gracie (Kaili Vernoff ) tells Emmet and his friend Billy Shields (Brian Markinson) on first meeting, “Hattie don’t talk; she’s mute.” It should not matter to Emmet, but it does, for he is quick to assume that Hattie’s muteness must signal a mental impairment: “Oh this is great, this is great, I got a mute, orphan, half-wit.” And while Gracie does say that

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Hattie is perhaps impaired, Hattie’s emotional intelligence proves much finer than Emmet’s. And, in truth, Hattie’s muteness does not prove an impediment, for Emmet needs little by way of conversation, so consumed is he not only with his music but also with his own take on reality. As he tells Hattie: “I’m not the marrying kind. I can’t settle. The whole idea leaves me cold. . . . I can’t have my life cluttered. I’m an artist, a truly great artist.” He is, in fact, a great artist, pos-sessed of “a gift of God” – a gift however that leaves little space for anything or anyone else. It is a situation, Emmet’s autistic tendencies notwithstanding, that recalls the dilemma posed by W.B. Yeats: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark” (“The Choice”).

Unlike Yeats, Emmet is too closed off to imagine the situation as a choice, but Allen is not, and he more than once suggests the possibility that Emmet’s artistry might even be better – might rival Django Reinhardt’s – were he to allow others into his life. Echoing Phyliss, Emmet’s wife Blanche (Uma Thurman), who has displaced Hattie, tells him, “Do you realize if you could just let your feelings out, you might even play better, richer?” It is a real question, and while we would be mistaken to identify Emmet Ray too much with his creator, it is a question that has often surfaced in Allen’s films. One recalls, for instance, Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) saying to the tightly wound comedian Alvy Singer (Allen), “I think that if you let me, maybe I could help you have more fun” (Annie Hall); Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) saying to the equally withholding writer Isaac Davis (Allen), “I could help you fix this place [his apartment] up if you’d give me a chance” (Manhattan); and Judy threatening to leave if her novelist husband Gabe “continue[s] not to want to make me pregnant” (Husbands and Wives). So, if Ray is too different to be viewed as another Allen-like persona, the problem of life versus art is a regular visitor in Allen’s work. And Sweet and Lowdown does, again, leave us wondering about the art imitating life correlation as it pertains to the artist as sketched by Farrow, recalling Allen’s indifference when told they were to have a son: “When we returned from the trip I learned that the baby, due in December, would be a boy. A more perceptive person might have noticed Woody’s interest slip from zero to minus. His focus was on the next movie” (Farrow 1997: 242). His focus might have been on the next movie, but the next would almost inevitably reflect upon what had transpired in the life, however unflattering. It may not be to his credit, but Allen has not shied away from putting on film those Yeatsian “Things said or done long years ago, / Or things I did not do or say / But thought that I might say or do,” to the point that Allen might further say with the poet that they “Weigh me down, and not a day / But something is recalled, / My conscience or my vanity appalled” (“Vacillation”). Some critics would say that Allen does not proceed this far (“Allen’s films reflect a guilt and/or shame to which he has never person-ally admitted”3), but as I have earlier suggested, when speaking to the matter of the artist’s self-loathing, I do conceive of Allen as both a man and artist wracked by guilt.

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The late-style films that I have hitherto focused upon – Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity, and Sweet and Lowdown – have been of this sort, wherein the director’s projections of conscience and/or vanity have taken some abuse. Such is less the case with the last four films I wish to discuss: Match Point (2005), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), and Whatever Works (2009). These, too, are what I should classify as late-style films in Said’s notion of the term, but their lateness is less autobiographically raw than their predecessors – the consequence, one suspects, of Allen both achieving an emo-tional distance from the Farrow period and of his finding some stability in his marriage with Soon-Yi. Instead, their lateness is more reflective of the director’s philosophical inability to reconcile himself to mortality. At the press conference following the 2010 Cannes showing of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (the title itself an allusion to death personified), Allen joked, “My relationship with death is the same. I’m strongly against it” (qtd. in Corliss 2010). But in the masterly companion films Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, death is no joke. In fact, it can be, as in the earlier Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), murderous, though the earlier film has both the quasi-comedic subplot involving Cliff (Allen) and Lester (Alan Alda) (“If it bends, it’s funny”) and the more overt moral tale, identifiable with both the Holocaust survivor Professor Louis Levy (Martin S. Bergmann) (“It is only we with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe”) and the rabbi Ben (Sam Waterson), whose furthering blindness, paradoxically, enhances his moral vision. What also distinguishes Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream from the earlier films is their more insistent naturalism, a naturalism that recalls Theodore Dreiser’s novels, especially An American Tragedy (1925).4

It is a naturalism that tends to place the viewer in a morally vexed space, for we find ourselves surprisingly anxious for the safety of the murderers themselves, be they Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy, Chris Wilton ( Jonathan Rhys Meyers) in Match Point, or Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry Blaine (Colin Farrell) in Cassandra’s Dream. And in Match Point, we are especially set up this way for the reason that the film’s opening monologue, addressed to the audience, is spoken by Wilton, as he gives consideration to the differing values of character and luck as they pertain to fortune: “The man who said I’d rather be lucky than good saw deeply into life.” And then he, a tennis professional, offers an analogy that will prove prophetic:

People are afraid to face how a greater part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a tennis match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second it can either go forward or falls back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win. Or it doesn’t, and you lose.

If this were truly life’s governing logic, then we might say that Wilton proves not only lucky but also a winner. After all, when the double murder that he pulls off – killing both his blackmailing lover Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) and (masking

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the motive) her aged neighbor Mrs. Eastby (Margaret Tyzack) – is on the brink of being found out by a suspicious and determined Detective Banner ( James Nesbitt), the wedding ring (taken off Mrs. Eastby’s hand) that Wilton tosses in the direction of the Thames bounces on the top of the net-like railing, hanging in the air for a split second, until falling back onto the pavement, only to be found by a “junkie with a long stream of convictions” who then, in time, is murdered in a drug sale with the incriminating evidence still on him. Case closed; Wilton wins. But of course he does not win, not only in the eyes of those less disbeliev-ing than he but also in those of Allen himself, notwithstanding his mindfulness of the part luck plays in anyone’s good fortune and his history of pronounce-ments regarding the meaninglessness of life. That is, despite Allen’s readiness, in interviews, to shoot from the hip, we do better to recall D.H. Lawrence’s admonition: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale” (1975: 2). And what both Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream show is that there are consequences to murderous behavior and immorality more generally, that one truly does not get away with murder. In the first instance, Wilton, following the murders, is, like Macbeth, haunted by his victims’ ghosts. They return; they take up residence in his con-science; and they will not let him rest, though he, like Judah in Crimes and Mis­demeanors, still holds to the thought that this is possible. “You can learn,” he says to the ghosts, “to push the guilt under the rug and go on. You have to. Otherwise, it overwhelms you.” But the guilt does appear to undo, if not to overwhelm, him, and when reminded by Mrs. Eastby’s ghost that among his victims was “your own child,” he responds with the chilling and despairing reflection, “Sophocles said, ‘to never to have been born may be the greatest boon of all.’ ” For Wilton, this does now seem true, and when told by Nola’s ghost that he should “prepare to pay the price,” he speaks almost longingly that he might: “It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.” Of course, whatever Wilton’s real stance towards his crime might be, the ghosts themselves are a “sign of justice,” recalling us to the conviction that justice is never reducible to law, always yet to come. Or as the lawyer, Harry, in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, succinctly puts the matter, “Justice? – You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law” (1994: 11).

In Cassandra’s Dream, one also does not get away with murder, again not because the law and its agents are infallible but because (for starters) conscience – Terry’s at least – will not permit it, knows instinctively that the taking of another person’s life entails a crossing of a line. As Terry says to his brother Ian about the murder scheme – forced upon them by their uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), whose large business dealings will unravel if his associate is allowed to testify against him – “this is wrong, Ian, it’s just wrong.” Ironically, their mother (Claire Higgins) accuses Terry of lacking a conscience, even as she credits Ian with such: “At least he [Ian] has got some conscience. You never had any conscience.” But it is Ian who is truly seduced by the scheme, even though his motivations – a stake

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in a California hotel venture and the attraction of a beautiful young actress, Angela (Hayley Atwell) – appear slight compared to Terry’s, whose gambling has left him in a position of deadly indebtedness to loan sharks. Yet repeatedly it is Terry, magnificently played by Farrell, who drags his feet, puts up resistance, and is pre-pared to call a thing by its proper name (“Ian, it’s murder”), whereas Ian is inclined to obfuscate the moral dimension of what they are about to do. “You push a button and it’s over,” he assures Terry, to which the latter replies, “Except it’s not a button, Ian.” Terry’s right, of course, and his refusal to make his conscience the handmaiden to his circumstances leads him further into drink and insomnia, until the deed is done and he becomes completely undone – drinking even more, popping pills, experiencing nightmares and panic attacks, and, in time, losing his job. To his brother, he speaks of suicide and going to the police: “I just want to tell someone, serve my punishment, have it off me.” The fact is, he tells Ian, “We broke God’s law.” To which Ian responds, “What God? What God, you idiot!” And more desperately, “Go and commit suicide; leave Howard and me out of it.” The last is spoken in anger, but Ian also means it, and as it has become apparent that Terry has every intention of going to the police, Ian, further pressed by their uncle, decides to murder his brother, knowing that he can mask it as a suicide or death by overdose. Things do go according to plan, but when it comes to the point of proffering Terry the drug-laced beer, Ian cannot do it, verbally lashing out at him instead. This leads to a tussle aboard their sailboat, resulting in the accidental death of Ian and the suicide, by drowning, of Terry. It proves to be a tragedy of Greek proportion – itself signaled by the earlier garden party references to Euripides, Medea, and Clytemnestra, as well as by the sailboat’s prophetic name, Cassandra’s Dream, chosen by Terry after he wins a 60-to-1 shot at the races by betting on a dog of the same name. “It’s a lucky name,” says Terry, unmindful of the more ancient suggestion.

“Tragedy is a form to which I would ultimately like to aspire,” Allen once said. “I tend to prefer it to comedy. Comedy is easier for me. There’s not the same level of pain in its creation, or the confrontation with issues or with oneself, or the working through of ideas” (qtd. in Girgus 2002: 132). The statement, made in 1979, most looks forward to Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, for these two films figure, even more so than Crimes and Misdemeanors, as tragedies, wherein the hope for reconciliation, the hope that defines comedy, is experienced as tenuous. Allen, quite clearly, has a comedic gift, yet his has long been a tragic view of the world, understanding it as a Godless place that makes mock of human aspirations, and as it does so, providing evidence of its own evil:

I think at best the universe is indifferent. At best! Hannah Arendt spoke of the banal-ity of evil. The universe is banal as well. And because it’s banal, it’s evil. It isn’t diabolically evil. It’s evil in its banality. Its indifference is evil. If you walk down the street and you see homeless people, starving, and you’re indifferent to them, you’re in a way being evil. Indifference to me equals evil” (Björkman 1993: 225).

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True, there appears some confusion here, for Allen conflates the universe’s evil with the individual’s, at the same time judging both from a point predicated on the possibility of a good that transcends either this or that person’s notion of the good, returning us to metaphysics. One is reminded of “the eighteenth-century distinctions between metaphysical evil, natural evil, and moral evil,” which, writes Denis Donoghue, might be distinguished as follows: “Metaphysical evil is to have a wrong sense of the world, and to live its consequences. Natural evil is floods, earthquakes, disease, suffering, and other catastrophes. Moral evil is the bad things that particular individuals do” (Donoghue 2010: 23). Instances of natural and moral evil have always been quite easy to come by in Allen’s films – allusions to disease and suffering are a constant, as are people behaving badly. As for meta-physical evil – that is, the disinclination to see the universe as reflective of a Deity’s providence – one might well view Allen’s above statement regarding the universe’s evil as an instance of such. But if Allen, in interviews, demonstrates too great a readiness for the large, quasi-philosophical statements of dismissal and despair, his films have, more often than not, been smarter than this, more sensitive to the demands that the world and its creator (“We broke God’s law”) make upon us. In particular, Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream speak not of evil’s banality, but of the damage, the evil, that is done when a line is crossed (Terry: “there’s a line I can’t cross”), as Wilton crosses a line with the murders of Nola and Mrs. Eastby and as Ian and Terry cross a line with the murder of Martin Burns. And this evil seems a real, wider evil, in the sense that it destroys both the person (or thing) hurt and the person doing the hurting. As Mark W. Roche, commenting upon the theodicy of Crimes and Misdemeanors, writes, “[t]he more complex moral reading of the theodicy is not that God punishes the wicked man but that God withdraws from them” (2006: 276), a sense as palpably experienced with Match Point’s Wilton and Cassandra’s Dream’s Terry, Ian, and Howard as it is with Crimes and Misde­meanors’ Judah.

For Allen, tragedy’s form assumes a special appeal late in his career, for it allows him to pursue questions, philosophical and theological, that he conceives as more challenging than those presented by comedy. The situation recalls W.H. Auden’s reflection on late Shakespeare:

In this period,  .  .  .  Shakespeare appears to be tired of writing comedy, which he could do almost too well – he was probably bored because of his facility in the genre. Comedy is limited in the violence of language and emotion it can present” (2002: 160–161).

By the comparison, I do not mean to oversell Allen’s abilities, though I think his abilities are far greater, and his films far more complex and compelling, than he or they are generally given credit for. I only wish to make the point that while Allen does not entirely forego comedy in his last films – Scoop (2006), for instance, is largely comedic – his interest has gone elsewhere and that this has not, popular

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opinion notwithstanding, proven to be a bad thing. And even in his next two films – the splendid Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and the splenetic Whatever Works (2009) – tragedy is never that far away, though the genre of the first might be spoken of as a romance (in the Shakespearean sense) and of the second as a dark comedy. Addressing herself in “The Portrait of Two Ladies” (2008) to the dimension of the tragic in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Manohla Dargis nicely observes about Rebecca Hall that her performance as Vicky is “tinged with sadness, [and] makes evident that this is as much a tragedy as a comedy.” It is true, just as the allusion to Henry James seems right, for Strether’s memorable counsel, in The Ambassadors, to little Bilham, “Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!” (1986: 214–215), echoes not only in the specific counsel, also learnt from experience, that Judy (Patricia Clarkson) offers to Vicky – “Do something or the years will pass by, and you’ll be sorry” – but in the larger film, as when Juan Antonio ( Javier Bardem) invites Vicky and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) to join him on a trip to Oviedo: “Life is short, life is dull, life is full of pain, and this is a chance for something special.”

In Vicky Christina Barcelona, James’s The Ambassadors meets, to excellent effect, François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962). The latter, of course, is Truffaut’s most lyrical film, also centered upon a ménage à trois, and blessed, like Allen’s film, with one of film’s loveliest scores (by George Delerue). Vicky Cristina Barcelona might even be said to be a homage to Jules and Jim, with its staid voiceover narra-tion, its celebration of the artist and the Bohemian life (Allen’s Barcelona recalling Truffaut’s Paris), its mixture of the pastoral and the tragic, and its Academy winning performance by Penélope Cruz as the femme fatale Maria Elena, itself a tribute to Jeanne Moreau’s unforgettable performance as Catherine, a woman drawn to two men, Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre). In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the human relations, if possible, are perhaps even more complicated than in Jules and Jim, for Juan Antonio makes love not only to the two American friends, who meet Europe as many a Jamesian protagonist has met Europe, with eyes newly opened, but he also enters into a ménage à trois with both his ex-wife Maria Elena and Cristina, a relation that is ever shifting, and also entails lovemak-ing between the two women. If Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine could be described, in Jules and Jim’s trailer, as “a generous woman who sought happiness without jealousy, lies or hypocrisy,” and if Jules and Jim, based upon the Henri-Pierre Roché novel, itself could be described by Truffaut as first and foremost a moral tale (the morality is “invented by the characters as they go and never out of self-indulgence, but out of necessity”; Truffaut 1962), we might, analogously, wish to understand Cruz’s Maria Elena as equally generous and searching and Vicky Cristina Barcelona itself as a moral tale, wherein the morality is not pre-set. That is, even as both Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, most notably, disregard proprieties, each appears to be searching for a way to live in the world without betraying self and other, though this proves more difficult than first imagined. The attempts are punctuated

“Raging in the Dark”: Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films 89

by violence, first by Maria Elena’s knife-wielding attack upon Juan Antonio (pre-ceding the film’s temporal frame), then by Maria Elena’s attempted suicide following the breakup with her Madrid lover, and then, near the film’s end, by Maria Elena’s pistol-waving confrontation with both Juan Antonio and Vicky. Yet between the second and third episodes, Juan Antonio, Maria Elena, and Cristina do discover a sweet spot, living and sleeping with one another and each doing his or her best artistic work (like Juan Antonio, Maria Elena is a painter, and Cristina, encouraged by them, has been pursuing her gift as a photographer). It is a spot lyrically rendered with images of the bicycle-riding threesome in the country that, again, invoke not only Jules and Jim but the tradition of Nouvelle Vague cinema more generally, reminding us of Allen’s career-long aspiration to work in an Euro-pean tradition.

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it is not just Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, or Cris-tina, who are attempting to invent – out of necessity, out of need – a new morality, but it is also Allen himself. Like Gaddis, who spoke of the need to concoct “fictions to get us through the night” (2002: 107), Allen is concocting fictions as a way of finding what might help him to endure the spaces, even trials, of his own disbelief. (“Making films is a distraction for me,” Allen confesses: “If I didn’t have them, if I had nothing to distract me, I would be fighting depression, anxiety, terror” [qtd. in Ebert 2005].) He is in search of what will work, and when Vicky, who herself has been turned inside out by her relation with Juan Antonio – even while engaged and then married to another man (Doug) – responds to Cristina’s amatory revela-tions with the phrase “whatever works,” neither she nor the film’s director appears condemning, though Vicky’s husband’s clear disgust keeps the matter properly unsettled. In any event, the phrase will, as we know, become the title and theme of his next film, Whatever Works (2009), the last that I will address here.

If Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a late-style romance, and hence different from both Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, Whatever Works is a comedy, but a rather dark comedy that begins with the dyspeptic hero, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), recall-ing both his father’s suicide and his own attempt, one that he will later repeat. The recollection is offered in the course of a brilliant, counter-wisdom tirade that Boris, stepping away from friends at a table outside Greenwich Village’s Caffe Vivaldi, directs at the audience:

What the hell does it all mean anyhow? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nothing comes to anything. And yet, there’s no shortage of idiots to babble. Not me. I have a vision. I’m discussing you. Your friends. Your coworkers. Your newspapers. The TV. Every-body’s happy to talk. Full of misinformation. Morality, science, religion, politics, sports, love, your portfolio, your children, health. Christ, if I have to eat nine serv-ings of fruits and vegetables a day to live, I don’t wanna live. I hate goddamn fruits and vegetables. And your omega 3s, and the treadmill, and the cardiogram, and the mammogram, and the pelvic sonogram, and oh my god the-the-the colonoscopy, and with it all the day still comes where they put you in a box, and it’s on to

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the next generation of idiots, who’ll also tell you all about life and define for you what’s appropriate. My father committed suicide because the morning newspapers depressed him. And could you blame him? With the horror, and corruption, and ignorance, and poverty, and genocide, and AIDS, and global warming, and terror-ism, and-and the family value morons, and the gun morons. “The horror,” Kurtz said at the end of Heart of Darkness, “the horror.” Lucky Kurtz didn’t have the Times delivered in the jungle. Ugh . . . then he’d see some horror.

It is a view reminiscent of Gaddis’s McCandless: “It’s all just fear he said, – you think of three quarters of the people in this country actually believing Jesus is alive in heaven? And two thirds of them that he’s their ticket to eternal life?” (1986: 157). Granted, Gaddis, before his 1998 death, spoke of Allen’s films as instances of “sentimental humanisms” (2002: 42), yet this is a criticism harder to sustain when taking into account the late films.5 Boris himself appears prepared to pay the price of his views – in addition to the suicide attempts, he leaves both a Columbia professorship and a Beekman Place spouse and address to take up an isolated existence in a Little Italy “rat-trap,” eking “out a meager living teach-ing chess to incompetent zombies.” “More important than how” he makes his living, he says, “is why I live at all.” For 60ish Boris, age has not reconciled him to life, has brought him less Dr. Johnson’s “celestial Wisdom” than Keats’s “Wisdom is folly.” “[C]ut out the wisdom,” Allen recalls Paddy Chayefsky advis-ing him (Lax 2007: 123), and here Boris has not only cut out the traditional wisdom – the passed down pieties – but has sought to replace it, as he says in the film’s opening, with whatever works: “My story is whatever works, you know, as long, as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Any way you can filch a little joy in this cruel, doggy-dog black chaos.” As in the prior instances of Juan Antonio and Maria Elena in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and, perhaps, of Allen, the responsibility for finding meaning and happiness is thrust upon Boris himself and all those others who see the world in a similar way. In the film’s course, several others do, in fact, come to share his ethical pragmatism, including Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachael Wood), the teenage runaway from Mississippi who has landed beneath Boris’s fire escape, followed, a year later, by her mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and then her father John (Ed Begley), the separated couple brought to New York by their quests to find their daughter, now married to Boris. And while Melody’s parents each arrive in New York with their con-servative Southern Christianity – or the caricature of such – intact, they soon find themselves subscribing to the ethos of whatever works, to the point that Marietta, encouraged by her lover Leo Brockman (Conleth Hill), sets out to develop both her talent as a photographer (moving into the edgy space of nude collages) and her newly aroused sexuality, which puts her in a ménage à trois relation with Bronkman and his gallery-owner friend Morgenstern (Olek Krupa). John, meanwhile, has his own sexual (gay) awakening, partnering with Howard Cummins, née Kominsky (Christopher Welch).

“Raging in the Dark”: Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films 91

Marietta and John’s awakenings, as well as their daughter’s further awakening to the love of a young man, Randy Lee James (Henry Cavil), who lives on a boat, are played largely for laughs, and the film would count as a more familiar comedy were it not for Larry David’s acidic performance of the Yellnikoff role. It is said that Allen initially wrote the script in the 1970s with the understanding that Zero Mostel would play the part.6 Mostel died and the script was put aside. However, in 2008, with the Screen Actors Guild threatening a strike, Allen resuscitated the script and began casting. At first, David said he was not interested, thinking the role would be outside his “comfort zone” (qtd. in Ryan 2009). But eventually he agreed, with the result that his performance brought to the part, in Kenneth Turan’s words, a “hard-edged savagery” that seems perfect given the character’s unrelenting despair and irrepressible meanness. (Boris to Melody: “If I can under-stand quantum mechanics, I can certainly understand the thought processes of a sub-mental baton twirler . . . The universe is winding down; why shouldn’t we?”). That “savagery” also seems consonant with Allen’s movement, in his later films, to displace the earlier films’ more consoling meanings with ones more “hard-edged” (though the ending of Whatever Works is itself not an instance of this). Thus, Allen, when asked about the film’s misanthropy, responded:

I never think of it as misanthropic . . . [I]t seemed to me, that it’s a realistic appraisal of life. Life is quite terrible and you can see by what goes on. So, this is fiction and it can be read as misanthropic and being interpreted that way but I don’t think it is; I think it’s simply realistic. The real world is as horrible or actually much more hor-rible than the world Boris envisions (qtd. in Ryan 2009).

To defend Boris’s caustic view of the world as realistic, or as not realistic enough, for the reason that it sugarcoats existence’s horrors, seems distressing, but it speaks to where this director, probably America’s finest, has moved in his later work. Yes, the continuity with the earlier work is there, but Allen, in his post-Farrow films, has also carved out a new terrain, less steeped in comedy’s reconciliations and confirmations and more inclined in the direction of tragedy’s hurts and losses. In films such as Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry, Celeb­rity, and Sweet and Lowdown, the hurt often feels raw, as if the director is respond-ing to events that future biographers might make more understandable but for now we incline to conceive of in the light of the acrimonious Farrow–Allen breakup and ensuing scandal. In films such as Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, Allen instilled a more detached naturalism, one imbued with a more explicit tragic sense than in his earlier films, especially as no room is made for comic subplots. These are major works of art and in time will receive their proper due. So, one hopes, will Vicky Cristina Barcelona, another major film, and Whatever Works, two films – one a romance, the other a dark comedy – whose principal protagonists are, at the start and also later, as lost as any of Allen’s most despair-ing heroes, Harry Block included. Together, these films constitute a rich vein not

92 Christopher J. Knight

only of American filmmaking but also (as my allusions have suggested) of writing,7 of the sort that Mark Twain – who did so much (cf. The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth) to introduce Americans to late-style – wrote after watching his own hopes and joys give way to something much more grim . . . and challenging.

Notes

1 See Sam B. Girgus’s “Introduction to the Second Edition,” The Films of Woody Allen (2002) for a developed discussion of the importance of the documentary style through-out Allen’s work. As Girgus notes of Allen, “His repeated use of the documentary form to structure works of fiction suggests his interest in the documentary nature of all film as well as his insight into the intrinsic relationship in film between documentary and fiction” (9).

2 Husbands and Wives (1992) “Trivia.” Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com/title/tt0104466/trivia (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

3 Peter J. Bailey, in a note to the author ( July 4, 2011).4 Inspired by the novel, George Stevens directed a film, A Place in the Sun (1951), starring

Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. It is likely that Allen knew the film, if not the novel.

5 Cf. Allen: “I personally was a Lubitsch man, because Lubitsch was cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and unsentimental to the end.” Quoted in Kent Jones (2011: 37).

6 Cf. Kenneth Turan (2009) and Mike Ryan (2009).7 Cf. Jonathan Schwartz: “You got to remember that Woody Allen is a writer. . . . It can

be argued that he is America’s greatest writer.” WNYC Radio ( June 18, 2011).

Works Cited

Allen, Woody (n.d.) “Sweet and Lowdown: Woody Allen interview [with Prairie Miller].” www.woodyallen.art.pl/eng/wywiad_eng_11.php (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Auden, W.H. (2002) Lectures on Shakespeare. Ed. Arthur Kirsch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bailey, Peter J. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Björkman, Stig. (1993) Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Björkman. New York: Grove Press.

Corliss, Richard (2010) “Cannes: Woody Allen meets A Tall Dark Stranger.” Time (May 15). www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1988868_1988866_1989524,00. html (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Dargis, Manohla (2008) “The portrait of two ladies.” Rev. of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, dir. Woody Allen. The New York Times (Aug. 15). http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/movies/15barc.html (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Donoghue, Denis (2010) “The banality of Eagleton.” Rev. of On Evil, by Terry Eagleton. Commonweal ( June 4), 22–24.

“Raging in the Dark”: Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films 93

Dowd, Maureen (1995) “Auteur as spin doctor.” The New York Times (Oct. 1). www.nytimes.com/1995/10/01/opinion/liberties-auteur-as-spin-doctor.html (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Dowd, Maureen (1998) “Liberties; Grow up, Harry.” The New York Times ( Jan. 11). www.nytimes.com/1998/01/11/opinion/liberties-grow-up-harry.html (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Ebert, Roger (2005) “Cannes # 1: Woody Allen gets sexy.” rogerebert.com (May 12). http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050512/

FILMFESTIVALS01/50512001/1023 (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).Edwards, Jonathan (1966) “Personal narrative.” In Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings. Ed. Ola

Elizabeth Winslow. New York: Signet Classic.Farrow, Mia (1997) What Falls Away: A Memoir. New York: Nan A. Talese.Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2003) The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner. (Original work published

1925.)Gaddis, William (1986) Carpenter’s Gothic. New York: Penguin Books.Gaddis, William (1994) A Frolic of His Own. New York: Poseidon Press.Gaddis, William (2002) The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings. Ed. Joseph

Tabbi. New York: Penguin Books.Girgus, Sam B. (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Hill, Logan (2009) “Woody Allen explains how to tell which of his movies are bad.”

nymag.com (Oct. 1). www.vulture.com/2009/10/woody_allen_helpfully_explains.html (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

James, Henry (1986) The Ambassadors. New York: Penguin Classics. (Original work pub-lished 1903.)

Jones, Kent (2011) “Life is a dream.” Film Comment (May–June), 31–37.Klink, Immo (2007) “Ricky Gervais: The joker.” Independent (Nov. 10). www.independent.

co.uk/news/people/profiles/ricky-gervais-the-joker-399509.html (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Lawrence, D.H. (1975) Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Viking Press. (Origi-nal work published 1923.)

Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, The Movies, and Moviemaking. New York: Knopf.

McGrath, Douglas (1994) “If you knew Woody like I know Woody.” New York Magazine (Oct. 17). Reprinted in Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblenz (eds.) (2006) Woody Allen in Interviews. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 116–129.

McGrath, Douglas (2008) “Woody Allen.” Interview Magazine. www.interviewmagazine.com/film/woody-allen-/# (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Pulver, Andrew (2009) “Film blog: Why is it so easy to trash Woody Allen?” Guardian (Apr. 16). www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/apr/16/woody-allen-american-apparel-reputation (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Roche, Mark W. (2006) “Justice and the withdrawal of God in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In Charles L.P. Silet (ed.), The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 268–283.

Ryan, Mike (2009) “Woody Allen, Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood & others discuss Whatever Works.” Starpulse.com. www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2009/06/16/woody_allen_larry_david_evan_rachel_wood (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

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Said, Edward (2007) On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Vintage.

Smith, Logan (2005) “The defector: Is Match Point Woody’s comeback, or did he just get lucky?” New York Magazine (Dec. 18). http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/features/15357/ (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Sweney, Mark (2009) “Woody Allen has no reputation to ruin, says American Apparel in $10m lawsuit.” Guardian (Apr. 15). www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/15/woody-allen-american-apparel (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Truffaut, François (1962) “Jules and Jim interview.” http://jeremyandthemovies.blogspot.com/2008/08/franois-truffaut-jules-et-jim-interview_15.html (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Turan, Kenneth (2009) “In Allen’s Whatever Works, not much does.” National Public Radio ( June 19). www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105421407 (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

5

Woody Allen has left the country, and the screen as well, for that matter. The iconic American film auteur appears to be in exile. Aside from two anomalies – his onscreen presence in Scoop (2006), and the domestic location of Whatever Works (2009) – Allen’s recent films – Match Point (2005), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), and Midnight in Paris (2011) – have been marked by his frequent absence as a character and/or by settings or locations outside the United States. Although Allen does appear in Scoop, it is set in London; and while Whatever Works is set in New York, Allen is absent as a character. The theme of exile is so pervasive, both externally and internally, that Allen’s recent body of work might be understood as his exilic period.

Externally, Allen’s cinematic expatriation and onscreen absence suggest a search for a new creative space for his film art. This search is dramatized explicitly in Allen’s most recent film, Midnight in Paris. In the film, the central character, Gil, takes an imaginative journey through the Paris of the 1920s, in which he receives new inspiration from the old ghosts of T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like Gil, Allen is on an imaginative journey in Europe to get his cinematic groove back and leave his whimsical trace in the hearts and minds of his faithful audiences. As A.O. Scott has pointed out in his review of Midnight in Paris, Allen’s new creative period is an attempt to “leave something behind – a bit of memorabilia, or art . . . – that catches the attention and solicits the admiration of lonely wanderers in some future time” (Scott 2011). In short, Woody Allen is seeking the redemption of his film art.

Although Allen has cited rising production costs in New York (Itzkoff 2010), and his success with European audiences (Germain 2008), as reasons for his recent

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A Difficult Redemption

Facing the Other in Woody Allen’s Exilic Period

John Douglas Macready

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cinematic exile, his expressed desire to make more serious films (Lax 2007: 184) suggests that his exile is intended to open a new creative space in his cinema. This space is produced by an inherent tension in the exilic experience itself – a tension between being and becoming, leaving and returning, despair and hope. Hamid Naficy has suggested that these exilic tensions are the source of auteurial creativ-ity, and that “many of the greatest and most enduring works of literature and cinema have been created by displaced writers and filmmakers” (Naficy 2001: 12). One need only think of exilic writers such as James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, and Salman Rushdie; or filmmakers such as Andre Tarkovsky, Jonas Mekas, Stanley Kubrick, or Fernando Solanas. When artists expe-rience or precipitate this type of dislocation, it produces a space of creative tension between who they were and who they are becoming; between their departure from traditional spaces and the possibility of their return; between their artistic stagnation and their hope of new aesthetic insights. Naficy refers to this space as “an agonistic form of liminality” where artists are

freed from the old and the new, they are “deterritorialized,” yet they continue to be in the grip of both the old and the new, the before and the after. Located in such a slip zone, they can be suffused with hybrid success, or they may feel deprived and divided, even fragmented (2001: 12).

The dislocation of the artist becomes a place of deprivation and liberation – a space in which a break with the past is both necessary and impossible, and a new period of creativity emerges as a possibility. By dislocating his cinema from the United States, and removing himself from the screen, Allen has produced the necessary tension in order to enter a new creative period in his work.

Allen’s exilic period is his most serious period yet. In an interview with Eric Lax prior to filming Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen lamented his role in Scoop because it limited his ability to make a serious picture, and he indicated that it was unlikely that he would ever be on the screen again. He explained:

When I wrote Scoop I put myself in it because I felt, I haven’t been in a film in a while, I should do it. But I really dislike the experience of having to make sure if I’m in it that there is a Woody Allen character. So I vowed that I wouldn’t do that. And I won’t be in the one I do in Barcelona, either, which is going to be a serious picture. Maybe never again. It limits me when I am conceiving a project to have to think that there needs to be a Woody Allen character, because that immediately requires it to be a certain type of movie. I’m not going to be able to write Cries and Whispers or The Bicycle Thief and accommodate my character (Lax 2007: 184).

The Woody Allen persona as an onscreen presence “limits” Allen’s auteurial aspirations to make films like Bergman’s and de Sica’s – films that are visually poetic, emotionally penetrating, and that leave the burden of tragedy unresolved.

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By removing himself from the screen – going into cinematic exile – Allen is initiat-ing a break with his previous film art. Moreover, his designation of Cries and Whispers and The Bicycle Thief as paragons of cinematic excellence suggests that this new period in his work will be marked by ethical concerns.1

This ethical turn in Allen’s work can be seen in the internal use of a mise-en-scène of exile in his recent films. For example, his use of European backdrops in England, Spain, and France represent a break with his traditional New York city-scapes and interiors. These backdrops serve as exilic frames for his dislocated characters struggling to find redemption – a recovery of wholeness from their fragmentary and alienated existences. In Match Point, Chris Wilton, the young tennis pro, is in exile from his humble Irish beginnings, and from his career in professional tennis, while Nola Rice is in exile from her failing acting career in Colorado. In Cassandra’s Dream, the two brothers, Ian and Terry Blaine, are seeking an exile from their working class existences, and their wealthy uncle Harold faces a criminal exile in prison. In Scoop, Sondra Pransky is an American college journalist living abroad, and her ghostly source, Joe Strombel, is living in a per-manent exile from living. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, both Vicky and Cristina take a summer exile in Spain where they stay with the expatriates Judy and Mark Nash. In Whatever Works, Boris Yelnikoff lives in exile from the “failed species” of the human race, and the young runaway, Melodie St. Anne, is in exile from her rural home in Mississippi. In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, exiles abound! Alfie Shepridge is in exile from his marriage, Roy Channing is an expat novelist from the United States, and Dia is from a family of Indian exiles. In Midnight in Paris, Gil is in an imaginative exile from the shallow and pretentious world he lives in with his materialist fiancée. The exilic experiences of each of these characters become ethical starting points for redemption. Homi K. Bhabha has noted the ethical implications of exile:

If in everyday speech and writing, we consciously read “exile” as enforced displace-ment and dislocation, then it is worth remembering that the term also carries within it, invisibly, unconsciously, its Latin root, salire: “to leap.” It is an ethical “leap” that requires us, in a kind of bounding, boundary-breaking movement to move, as Ben-jamin suggests, beyond “our metropolitan streets and furnished rooms”; to revise our knowledge of some of the “savage” discourses of power, possession, knowledge and belonging, that rise from the uncanny far-flung ruins and debris of metropolitan discourse (Bhabha 1999: xii).

Although exile is conventionally understood as an externally imposed state, Bhabha emphasizes the way the exilic experience is appropriated by dislocated persons. Whether exile is externally enforced or self-imposed, the experience is the same. Exile, spatially and metaphorically, is a transgressive movement across borders that constitutes a break with previous locations and commitments. Allen’s mise-en-scène of exile frames his characters’ struggle for redemption by locating

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them on the boundary between conventional understandings of themselves and others, where they encounter startling new visions of themselves and their ethical responsibility for others.

As Vittorio Hösle has noted, Woody Allen “is a profoundly philosophical come-dian” (Hösle 2007: x). More precisely, he is a profoundly ethical comedian; that is to say, he takes ethics seriously, even if often in a comic way. While scholars of Allen’s films have endlessly explored the existentialist themes in his work, and linked him to philosophers such as Schopenhauer (Ascione 2004: 133), Kierke-gaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger (Detmer 2004: 193), and even more theologi-cal thinkers like Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Lee 1997: 108–111), few have considered the resonances with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.2 Ever since Jean-Paul Sartre thumbed through the pages of Levinas’ dissertation, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénomenologie de Husserl, the philosophy of Levinas has exerted a substantial influence on continental philosophy (Lechte 1994: 115). Indeed, Derrida, Blanchot, Irigaray, and Lyotard all take their cue from Levinas’ “rethinking of the concept and reality of the Other [Autrui]” (Lechte 1994: 115). This reconsideration of the place of alterity in philosophy was Levinas’ attempt to make ethics “first philosophy” instead of ontology (the study of being). As Richard Cohen has put it,

Levinas insists on ethics, on a metaphysical responsibility, an exorbitant and infinite responsibility for other human beings, to care not for being, for the unraveling of its plot, but for what is beyond and against being, the alterity of the other (Levinas 1985: 3).

Levinas emphasized the primordial ethical relationship of the self and other as the constitutive factor of being human – to be human is to be in relation with others. This primordial ethical relationship is a nonreciprocal face-to-face encoun-ter between ourselves and others, in which a Thou confronts an I and demands a response. The I, in its awareness of the other, is aware of both his capacity and responsibility to respond to the presence of the other, and therefore, his capacity to accept or reject the other. For Levinas, ethics was about a journey out of the ontological narcissism of subjectivity towards the other. This journey demanded a “substitution” of self for the other, who calls my “appropriation of the world” into question (Levinas 1981: 119, xxix). Levinas’ ethical philosophy is best under-stood as a journey that is simultaneously an exile of the self from itself towards responsibility for the other, and a redemption of the self by means of substituting oneself for the other.

The close correlation between exile and redemption in Allen’s recent films reso-nates with the ethical philosophy of Levinas. Contemporary film theorists, such as Sarah Cooper (2006) and Sam Girgus (2010), have recently begun to apply the ethical philosophy of Levinas to film. Following the pioneering work of Michael

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Renov (2004), Cooper has applied Levinas’ anti-ocular notion of visage to French documentary film, as a means of excavating the invisible asymmetrical relations between self and other that both traverse and rupture the filmic (2006: 12). Cooper’s analysis probes the ethical dimensions of documentary film that are both continuous and discontinuous with the temporal and narrative structures of the film. Girgus has made similar applications to narrative films. By rethinking Levinas’ notions of time, ethics, and the feminine, and their relationship to film, Girgus has highlighted a body of films that “enact the struggle to achieve ethical tran-scendence by subordinating the self to the greater responsibility for the other,” – a self-abnegating journey towards the other which unfolds as a transition from being (ontological identity) to being-for (ethical subjectivity) (Girgus 2010: 5). Girgus argues that this ethical journey is dramatized within what he calls “the cinema of redemption,” as he explains:

I introduce this term, the cinema of redemption, to apply a Levinasian lens to the examination of the quest in film for a redeeming ethical experience that centers on the priority of the other. The journey transforms what Levinas, in “Substitution,” terms the “ontological adventure” (Emmanuel Levinas, 86) of immediate, immanent experience into the ‘ethical adventure of the relationship to the other person’ (Levinas, Time and the Other, 33). The films in the cinema of redemption dramatize the struggle for this transformation from being to ethics. They articulate a crisis of the change from ontological identity to ethical subjectivity (2010: 5).

The transition from ontological identity to ethical subjectivity is a place of crisis. It is an ethical crossroads where the ethical subject finds herself torn asunder by an infinite demand placed on her by the other. This experience of an infinite ethical demand is analogous to a trauma, which ruptures the subject and creates an ethical tension in which the subject becomes aware of their capacity for accept-ing or rejecting the other and provides the conditions for the possibility of redemp-tion – the recovery of wholeness by means of ethical responsibility. The films in Allen’s exilic period are inscribed with this ethical tension, making redemption a core theme of this new creative period.

Match Point stands out as Allen’s most ethical film in his exilic period. This film represents Allen’s opening gambit in his exploration of what might be termed a difficult redemption – a search for redemption that is ambiguous and often fails. It is a deeply ethical film that takes seriously the separation between self and other, the conflict between love and desire, the primordial responsibility for the other, and the inevitability of moral failure. The film blends narrative strands from Dos-toyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy, and George Stevens’ film adaptation of Dreiser’s novel, A Place in the Sun (1951), as well as Allen’s own previous ethical experiments in Crimes and Misdemeanors. These nar-rative references suggest a tragic search for redemption – one doomed to failure. Girgus has noted this fragile, ambiguous, and difficult pursuit of redemption as a

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distinctive characteristic of the European cinema of redemption, whose “films become frustrated on the road to redemption, often confronting profound, and sometimes insurmountable obstacles” (2010: 23). Match Point can be situated within this category of the cinema of redemption. Chris Wilton’s search for redemption from the mediocrity and meaninglessness of modern bourgeois life is a struggle between his egoistic enjoyment of the world and his increasing aware-ness of the infinite ethical demand of responsibility for others. Chris’s seemingly endless pleasure cruise from the rural coasts of mediocrity to isles of aristocratic decadence is interrupted by those who have made it possible. In this film, Allen weaves a tragic thread of frustration, ambiguity, failure, and despair into Chris’s pursuit of redemption.

The difficult redemption of Match Point is framed and organized by Allen’s mise-en-scène of exile. Chris Wilton searches for personal regeneration and social rebirth that can occur only in a confrontation with forces outside of him-self. The difficulty comes when he is confronted with the choice between satisfy-ing the desires of his ego and his ethical responsibility for those around him. At one point in the film, after learning that his lover Nola Rice is pregnant, Chris seems intent on revealing his affair to his wife, but eventually he loses his nerve. Sensing that something is wrong, Chloe asks him if he is having an affair. Staring out the window of their high-rise apartment, Chris surveys the new shiny world that is now laid out before him; but then he turns to Chloe to answer her question, her face confronting him with his responsibility to her as a husband and to the family they are trying to create, but he cannot summon the moral courage to admit his affair. The scene concludes with Chris making only a vague confession that he feels “guilty,” but he does not say why. To do so would be to sacrifice his new aristocratic status, and this he cannot bring himself to do. His redemption will require an exile of the ego – a journey out of himself, in which he accepts that he is always, and already, responsible for the other. Chris’s redemption will require that he face the other.

Allen’s mise-en-scène of exile traverses Match Point in a Levinasian double movement of what Abi Doukhan has referred to as an “exile of the face,” and an “exile of the self ” (Doukhan 2010: 235). The concept of exile lies at the core of Levinas’ ethical philosophy (Doukhan 2010: 235). Contrary to Jacques Derrida’s thesis that the concept of hospitality – the welcoming of the transcendence of the stranger – was central to the philosophy of Levinas, Doukhan argues that “exile constitutes the very structure of hospitality of the face”; that is, exile provides the conditions for the possibility of hospitality – redemption of the self by means of passivity to, and responsibility for, the other (2010: 235). Within this double move-ment there are four discernible moments: separation and summons (exile of the face), and refusal and return (exile of the self ). These four moments represent a Levinasian paradigm for mapping Allen’s exploration of a difficult redemption in his exilic period. Girgus’s analysis of the final scene of La dolce vita offers a succinct example of these four moments in a single scene:

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In the concluding scene of La dolce vita a “monster” from the sea washes ashore to the amazement of giddy onlookers and exhausted partygoers, who stop to stare back at the dead fish’s single grotesque eye. Marcello looks and moves away from the single eye to look across a small inlet to a beautiful gesturing figure, the girl from Perugia, Paola (Valeria Ciangottini), who has been the embodiment in the film of innocence. Connection between them proves impossible, however, because Mar-cello cannot bring himself to respond seriously to her gestures (Girgus 2010: 12).

Girgus’s ethical analysis of this scene3 isolates the four moments of a difficult redemption. First, there is the visual separation between self and other (Paola and Marcello are separated by a small inlet). The inlet is “small,” and yet, paradoxically, difficult to cross, because it requires a journey from being-for-oneself to being-for-the-other. In Levinasian terms, this separation represents the “absolute interval of separation” between the self and the other (Levinas 1969: 110). Second, there is a moral summons (Paola’s gesture to Marcello to cross the inlet) that originates from the face, and entails an ethical obligation to the other for which every response is inadequate. For Levinas, this summons is constitutive of the human condition and involves an infinite demand – a demand that exceeds our ability to respond, but nevertheless requires our response – for absolute ethical responsibil-ity to the other – a relationship that precedes, and exceeds, the limits of the indi-vidual self and aspires to the infinite. Third, there is a refusal to accept the fact of this infinite responsibility for the other (Marcello refuses Paola’s invitation to cross the inlet). This refusal constitutes the ethical murder of the other – a refusal to acknowledge one’s intrinsic relationship to the other, which is a refusal to welcome or offer hospitality. Fourth, there is a return to the prison of one’s own ego (Mar-cello returns to his narcissistic life in despair). Instead of embarking on an ethical revolution through an exiling of the self, the self returns to itself, and undergoes an involution into narcissistic despair. These four movements – separation, summons, refusal, and return – of a difficult redemption are paradigmatic of Allen’s recent exploration of redemption in his exilic period.

Allen’s exploration of the difficulty of redemption in Match Point centers on an old trope in his work that is given a new ethical focus in this film: luck. In the opening narration, Chris Wilton praises the aleatory nature of life when he says that the person who said that he “would rather be lucky than good,” recog-nized that much in life is out of one’s control. While this insight fills most people with fear and trepidation, Chris embraces it. He too, would rather be lucky than good. In a lucky life there are many possibilities, according to Chris, but few in a good life. He views his life as a wager, and is willing to “risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,” as Kipling put it in his poem “If ” (Kipling 2007: 170). This com-mitment to luck opens Chris to unforeseen possibilities of love and rejection, success and failure – outcomes that are beyond one’s control. It inaugurates an Abrahamic journey to the unknown land of the other.

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Chris embarks upon an erotic adventure that he hopes will lead to a life of love, success, and the joie de vivre that has eluded him thus far in his career as a strug-gling tennis pro. He is romancing the unknown – courting transcendence – by gambling on whether his serve will drive the ball over the net or fall short of it. His erotic adventure resembles what Levinas described as an ethical passivity, that both constitutes the subject, and renders him vulnerable to the other (Levinas 1981: 15). J. Allan Mitchell has noted the similarities between medieval notions of courtly love and Levinas’ conception of ethical relations. He writes that “amatory fortune [the possibility of future love] makes ethics possible,” because:

the possibility of ethics as radical passivity before fortune and future contingency: a passivity that resembles a kind of courtship, given its demanding waiting period and uncertain end, its privileging of heteronomy over the autonomy of the self, its disavowal of self-sufficiency, and its subjection of self to other (Mitchell 2005: 102).

When Chris begins his journey from his humble Irish origins to the inner sanctum of the British upper class, he is making a wager before a “future contingency” – hoping for fortune while recognizing the possibility of utter failure. In privileging luck over goodness, Chris is subjecting his autonomous search for “the good life” to the heteronomy of chance. His quest for a lucky life constitutes an ethical pas-sivity that both forms him and renders him vulnerable to failing in his search for redemption and his ethical responsibility for others.

But Chris’s ethical passivity is complicated by his conflicted egoistic love for his wealthy wife, Chloe Hewett, who paves the way for his life of wealth and privilege, and his lover Nola Rice, in whom he finds an irresistible source of pleasure. Chris’s struggle for meaning and status is a way of recreating himself that takes place in the conflict between love and desire. However, this search for regeneration and rebirth falls short of Levinasian ethical redemption. As Levinas writes, “in order for Redemption to be accomplished, love cannot remain at the mercy of the indi-vidual” (1993: 59). Love, for Levinas, goes beyond individual whim to entail ethical demand. Love is a redemptive act, according to Levinas. It is a journey out of the confines of subjectivity towards the other – an exiling of the individual. This exilic journey of redemption is not a divine work of God upon humanity, but rather a human work that occurs in the ethical relationships of human beings. Redemption is “the love of one’s neighbor” which is the human response to God’s love for humanity (Levinas 1990: 192). However, as the “slaughter-bench” of human history shows, with its wars, genocides, and atrocities, love of neighbor is the exception, rather than the rule. In Match Point, desire, not love, carries the day. Chris discovers the inherent risk that love of one’s neighbor poses to the ego, and Allen dramatizes this risk through his exploration of a difficult redemption. From a Levinasian perspective, Allen’s form of exile can be interpreted as a love quest that renders the individual vulnerable to the transcendence of the other. It is not a quest of desire that seeks to return to the cave of egoistic enjoyment. Rather, it

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is an endless journey into the land of the stranger, in which one remains radically passive to,4 and infinitely responsible for, the other – an ethical journey of redemp-tion. Radical passivity to the other – the abandonment of egoistic enjoyment – constitutes the conditions for the possibility of ethical action.

But love is nothing if not difficult, in the exilic films of Woody Allen. As a character in his own films, Allen continually searches for love, finds it, and inevi-tably loses it. His other characters face the same failures in love. As Foster Hirsch has noted, the “characters in Allen’s movies are forever missing each other, failing to connect; no wonder his heroes are always on the prowl, the perfect, enduring relationship forever eluding them” (2001: 166). Their love seems to “remain at the mercy of the individual” – an especially egoistic, self-centered act. Allen’s view of love has traditionally been interpreted along Sartrean lines, because Allen repeat-edly depicts love as a fragile magic spell that can be broken at any time, and that reduces the other to a mere object of sexual desire (Lee 1997: 309–316). However, Match Point lends itself to a more Levinasian interpretation, in which the contin-gency and fragility of love become the conditions for the possibility of ethics. In this film, love is depicted as a difficult search for redemption – a struggle to liber-ate love from the confines of the desirous ego that wants simply to encompass and possess, and this is precisely where Chris Wilton fails.

Chris’s ethical passivity to the contingency of the future creates an awareness of the interval of separation between himself and other characters. This interval constitutes the first moment of the exile of the face (separation), in which the other remains beyond the encompassing grasp of the individual self, and yet, engenders (and perhaps seduces) a response. It is as if he is standing on a shore looking out into the vast and seemingly infinite ocean, watching the horizon for his future to appear. He cannot traverse the interval, he is subject to it, and it is precisely this subjection to the impossibility of possessing and controlling those around him for his own pleasure and benefit that constitutes Chris’s dilemma. Both Chloe and Nola continually exceed his possessive grasp, and call his insatiable desire into question. For Levinas, ethics is a journey out of the ontological narcis-sism of subjectivity towards the other. This journey begins as a “substitution” of the self for the other, the one who calls my “appropriation of the world” into question (Levinas 1981: 119, xxix). Girgus has described this journey as “a struggle to achieve ethical transcendence by subordinating the self to the greater respon-sibility for the other” (2010: 5). Chris’s dilemma hinges precisely on this ethical problematic – redemption of self through responsibility for the other. Chris cannot have one without the other. He must embark upon a journey across this interval of separation between himself and the other – the person and relationship greater than himself. In Chris’s case, this specifically means his relationship to both women.

This interval of separation is dramatized through Allen’s construction of scenes in which characters are separated by small obstacles or distances. These

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scenes frame the tension between the characters in their physical relationship to each other, and suggest an ethical abyss between them that is difficult, if not impossible, to cross. These scenes exhibit the first movement of Allen’s explora-tion of the struggle for redemption, and resonate with what Levinas called the “absolute interval of separation” between the self and the other (Levinas 1969: 110). Although for Levinas’ this interval of separation is neither visible nor spatial, film provides a medium for exploring this metaphysical concept in spatial images. In the movement of the exile of the face, it is the inner life of the other that remains in exile, beyond the grasp of the self, so that the approach of the other is simultaneously a departure. We are never able to fully comprehend the deep mystery of another person. All of our conceptualizations of the other are wholly inadequate to express who the other is. This creates an intractable interval between the ethical subject and the other, and marks the other with a strangeness, and it is precisely this strangeness that ruptures the subject – interrupts the egoistic enjoyment that interpret everyone and everything in the world as an object of desire – and constitutes a summons to ethical responsibility.

In Match Point, Allen represents this separation through a pattern of encounter and absence. The relationship of Chris and Nola develops along a trajectory of pursuit and withdrawal. During the first half of the film, Allen alternates scenes of encounter with scenes of absence. These encounters are framed around spatial intervals in which characters are separated by obstacles and distances. The inter-vals grow smaller as Chris pursues Nola for his own enjoyment, but increase as she withdraws from him. After each encounter Allen constructs scenes that make Nola’s absence palpable, and Chris’s passivity explicit.

The first encounter between Chris and Nola occurs over a ping-pong table. Chris enters the room just as Nola defeats an opponent. Her faceless voice is heard inquiring, as if from another world, about her next “victim.” When her face appears, she directs her request to Chris, and summons him to a game. He aces his first serve and crosses the table to coach her in the art of table tennis. Chris attempts to seduce Nola, but she refuses his advances, remaining beyond his grasp. Eventually, his friend Tom walks in and introduces Nola as his fiancée. After the brief introduction, Nola kisses Tom and leaves the room. Her absence remains as a lingering presence in Chris’s facial expressions and in his questions about her to Tom.

The second encounter occurs in a restaurant over a table where Chris and Chloe join Tom and Nola for dinner. This time Chris cannot cross the table without offending his friend Tom, or ruining his relationship with Tom’s sister, Chloe. Instead, Chris pursues Nola through covert glances, trying to visually seduce her and capture her affections, but she remains at the perimeter of his ocular advances. She refuses to be captured in the frame of his amorous vision. At one point in the conversation, while she discusses her acting career, and her desire not to appear as a failure to those in her hometown in Colorado, she says, “not that I am ever going back to Colorado – ever!” Allen captures Chris’s face in a close-up, after this

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prescient remark. His expression registers the possibility of Nola’s future absence – if her acting career fails in London, she may return to Colorado, in spite of her words to the contrary. Her absence becomes explicit in a later scene where Chris convinces Chloe that they should join Tom and Nola at the cinema to watch Motorcycle Diaries. When Chris and Chloe arrive, only Tom emerges from the taxi, announcing that Nola is ill and cannot make it. Again, Allen captures her absence in a close-up of Chris’s face, which expresses his vulnerability to Nola – the way in which he is captured by her, rather than the other way around. Nola continues to remain beyond Chris’s grasp, and Chris remains in pursuit of her.

A third encounter occurs in a field after Nola is insulted by her fiancé’s mother while visiting the Hewett country home. Nola leaves the house, and walks out into a large field. Chris sees her through a window walking away from the house. Allen frames Nola in a window pane with a long grassy path separating Chris from her as he watches her depart. Again, Nola’s withdrawal – the interval of separation between her and Chris – reveals that Chris is primarily the object of Nola and not the other way around. Chris is radically passive to Nola – he is affected by her before any of his attempts to affect her. He pursues her in the rain, attempting to traverse the interval by means of a sexual encounter. He wants to possess her and enjoy her. When he finally catches up with her, she gives into his advances. But even after this steamy tryst in the rain, Nola remains beyond Chris’s grasp. Allen follows this scene of pursuit and encounter with scenes of withdrawal and absence. Chris confronts Nola at the opera one evening, after she has treated him coldly. She tells him that their encounter was only a “moment” and cannot continue. When Chris eventually learns that her relationship with Tom Hewett has ended, he begins to search for her, but he learns that she has moved out of her apartment – she has returned to Colorado after all. Her absence becomes a traumatic experi-ence for Chris. She is in exile, beyond his reach, and her absence calls his life into question.

Although it would seem that Allen has made Chris into the most unlikeable character in the film, when Match Point is compared to George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951), it becomes clear that Allen is attempting to preserve a tension in Chris’s character. Chris is like George Eastman, a common man seeking a new life in an aristocratic world. Chris is everyman, and at the same time, what every man wants to avoid becoming. He embodies the aspirations of the common man and the vicious desire for advancement into high society. It seems as though Allen wants the audience both to identify with Chris, and to be repulsed by what they find both he and themselves capable of.

Nola’s withdrawal and absence illustrates what Levinas means with his notion of exile of the face. For Levinas, the face was not simply the physical-phenomenological face, but the “pure expression” of the other – the expressivity of the deepest dimension of human being and the locus of the ethical relationship (Bergo 1999: 99, 90). What Levinas is attempting to convey is the ineffable sacred-ness of the human subject. Language fails effectively to communicate this unique

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dimension of the human being, so Levinas uses difficult and often paradoxical language to express this crucial ethical insight. Allen is attempting to communicate something similar in his mise-en-scène of exile. In the exile of the face, this dimen-sion is always incomplete – something remains hidden, and undisclosed to the individual subject. In Totality and Infinity Levinas referred to this hiddenness as an “absence” and a nakedness”:

The nakedness of the face is not what is presented to me because I disclose it, what would therefore be presented to me, to my powers, to my eyes, to my perceptions, in light exterior to it. The face has turned to me – and this is its very nudity. It is by itself and not by reference to a system . .  . The transcendence of the face is at the same time its absence from this world into which it enters, the exiling [depayse-ment] of a being, his condition for being stranger, destitute, or proletarian (Levinas 1969: 75).

The nakedness of the face always eludes the conceptualizing grasp of the self, and remains a mystery, shrouded in alterity. However, as Doukhan points out, “while the face will not be approached on the cognitive level, it is nevertheless possible to approach it, according to Levinas, on the sensible level” (2010: 237). The sensible level is prior to the cognitive level, according to Levinas, and is the source of enjoyment (Levinas 1969: 138–139; Doukhan 2010: 237). But enjoyment of objects or persons is always an “involution,” a “withdrawal into oneself ” (Levinas, 1969: 118), and consequently, “enjoyment is without object” (Doukhan 2010: 238). Enjoyment is completely, and innocently, egoistic, as Levinas explains:

In enjoyment I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others, not “as for me  .  .  .” – but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate – without ears, like a hungry stomach (Levinas 1969: 134).

The involution of enjoyment leaves the face of the other in exile, where no approach is possible. But it is precisely this exilic character of the other – its strangeness, destitution and nakedness – that indirectly intrudes upon the self and ruptures it. As Doukhan points out, the life of enjoyment – happiness – where “the whole world is mine to possess” and enjoy, is the condition that makes the intrusion of the destitute other possible (2010: 239). Egoistic enjoyment proceeds under the illusion of absolute solitude, but this illusion is shattered by the inescap-able presence of the other. We are never absolutely alone. We are always in rela-tion to others. It is precisely Chris’s desire to use Chloe, and possess Nola, that produces his awareness of the hidden presence of their faces and calls his solitary life into question. Chloe’s naive innocence and consistent unselfish generosity make Chris’s relentless enjoyment of the wealth and privilege that their relation-ship brings him increasingly difficult. Chris becomes aware that Chloe is an end

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and not simply a means. Nola’s desire for a deeper love and commitment to her and their child call Chris’s insatiable desires into question. He cannot simply enjoy her, he must love her, too. Her true nakedness exceeds that of her body – a sacred excess that overwhelms Chris. These revelations come in the form of a summons – a call to ethical responsibility that Chris cannot escape.

After Chris and Chloe are married, he sees Nola again at the Tate Modern in London. Her return in this scene serves as a turning point in the pursuit/withdrawal motif in the film, in which scenes of Chris’s pursuit of Nola are followed by scenes of her withdrawal or absence. Chris sees Nola from a distance on an escalator in the Tate. She is still separated from him by an ethical distance that parallels their physical distance, and withdrawing from him down an escalator. He pursues her through the building, and finally finds her standing in a gallery before a large painting with her back turned to him – still in the mode of exile. She begins to turn slowly, scanning the rest of the gallery when she notices Chris, standing at a distance and facing her. In a single shot, Allen captures the two characters standing still, facing each other from a short distance. As Chris approaches her, Allen pans back and forth between their faces: each face is filled with uncertain anticipation. Finally, facing Nola, Chris speaks nervously, interrogating her about where she has been, where she is living, what her phone number is, and when he can see her. Nola is resistant, but Chris will not give up, until his wife Chloe appears unexpect-edly. After a brief period of polite chatting, Chloe leaves Chris and Nola to finish their conversation, and he asks for her number again. This time she gives it to him. In giving her number to him, she gives him access to her, but this access involves a summons – a demand for ethical responsibility.

The second moment of the exile of the face (summons) begins when Chris and Nola begin having an affair. This affair becomes the locus of a summons to respon-sibility. At the beginning of the affair, Chris is insatiable and aggressive. Allen films him on top of Nola, pinning her against walls, and beds, and tearing her clothes off. But as the relationship develops, the roles change, and Nola begins to take charge of their sexual encounters. In one scene, Nola blindfolds Chris, epitomizing Chris’s ethical blindness to her. As the relationship intensifies, Chris becomes torn between his unruly desire for Nola, and his desire to preserve the wealth and prosperity he has achieved through his marriage to Chloe. He is faced with the central ethical dilemma of the film: the summons to move from enjoyment to love – a summons to redemption, to a wholeness that includes the other. This redemption will require Chris to respond to the ethical summons of both Chloe and Nola, but because he cannot love both women equally, failure looms on the horizon. He is faced with either self-abnegation or the rejection of the other.

Allen uses Chloe’s father Alec as an ethical counter-image in the film. Chris admires Chloe’s father because, as he tells Chloe one evening, her father is “wealthy but not stuffy, enjoying his fortune, having a grand time, supporting the arts.” But, Chris misses the most important quality of Chloe’s father: he lives for his family.

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He is a generous and hospitable man. He makes room for others – even Chris. He demonstrates what Levinas described as “morality itself ” – existing for another instead of existing for oneself (Levinas 1969: 261). Both Chloe and Nola summon Chris to a life similar to Alec’s, an existence for-the-other – a life of ethical respon-sibility. But the lure of an existence of egoistic enjoyment creates a tension between these two ethical poles in Chris. Frequently, Allen captures this tension in the anguish of Chris’s expression, which reveals a dissonance between his awareness of the summons and the lure of his ego. The summons constitutes a rupture of Chris’s egoistic enjoyment.

The first summons to responsibility occurs when Nola eventually becomes pregnant, and calls Chris to inform him. Allen uses a phone conversation to drama-tize the summons as an intrusive demand. Allen depicts them in separate interior spaces. Chris dines with his wife’s family in their luxurious home, one that serves to insulate them from the world, while Nola sits alone in her small London flat. The phone call ruptures the safety of Chris’s space of enjoyment. When Nola tells Chris that she is pregnant, she interrupts his egoistic seclusion and calls upon him to take responsibility for her and the child he has fathered. It is a request to welcome the stranger (the child) and to provide hospitality. For Chris, this summons is an opportunity for redemption, but he hesitates to respond. He realizes the difficulty. He understands what he would be required to sacrifice: his wealth, privilege, and pleasure. He would be required to go into exile, and subordinate his egoistic existence for the existences of Nola and their child. He tells her he will talk to her the following day and hangs up.

Children themselves serve as a summons in Match Point – they are the demand of an absent presence that cannot be commanded. They arrive unexpectedly, as if by chance, or luck, throughout the film. In spite of fertility science, Chloe seems incapable of becoming pregnant in the film. Children are discussed throughout the film, but remain absent. It is only in the final scene that a child even appears. They are the symbols of the self become other, or as Levinas put it, the child is “me a stranger to myself ” (Levinas 1969: 267). The child is the heteronymous approach of the self as other, which ruptures the autonomous existence of the self. As Lisa Guenther has commented,

the child is not merely the offspring of biological repetition, or the cultural product or “work” of the parent. Rather, the child to whom I give birth is an Other whose arrival alters my own existence; he is myself become an Other . . . For Levinas, the alterity of the child engenders in the parent an alteration of the self, a transforma-tion from one who is welcomed to one who welcomes an Other; this transformation also alters the self ’s relation to past and future time (Guenther 2006: 77).

For Levinas, children introduce a new dimension of intensity to the ethical encoun-ter. Children, as the self become other, rupture the egoism of the parent and make a visible ethical demand on them. The alterity of the child summons the parent

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to hospitality and responsibility. Allen’s use of children in the film is perhaps his most brilliant exhibition of his mise-en-scène of exile. By using the absent pres-ence of children anticipated in the womb, born, aborted, and murdered, Allen expresses the rupturing presence of the other – the primordial ethical relationship. He is weaving a dark ethical thread into the tapestry of this narrative that creates a moral tension in the film. The other is constantly approaching in the film, sum-moning everyone to responsibility.

In fact, each sexual relationship in the film eventually produces a child. Tom ends up marrying a woman after getting her pregnant, and taking responsibility for her and the child. Chloe wants Chris to make her pregnant, and they try unsuc-cessfully throughout the film, achieving success only towards the end. Nola becomes pregnant as well. Her pregnancy threatens Chris with the approach of an other who will make an infinite demand on him – self-abnegation and substitu-tion. Chris’s wealth and success are threatened. Nola demands that Chris divorce Chloe, marry her, and take responsibility for their child. She tells Chris that she expects him to do the “right thing.” But the journey of self-abnegation proves too difficult for him. He suggests that Nola abort the child – refuse the other hospital-ity – murder the other. But Nola tells him that she can’t do that again. She had aborted a child as a young woman, and another for Tom, but she could not bring herself to abort this child. Nola will not refuse to offer hospitality to the other. Chris is left with at an ethical crossroads where the two paths of welcome and murder stretch out before him.

The most dramatic example of an ethical summons of the film occurs when Chris lies to Nola about going on a trip for three weeks, and promises to tell Chloe that he wants a divorce when he returns. When Nola learns that he is still in town and avoiding her, she confronts him outside his and Chloe’s apartment and begins shouting at him “You are a liar! A liar! A liar!” Her shouting ruptures the quietness of his life and the secrecy of their relationship. She demands to speak with Chloe. Her summons to responsibility is now a demand. He must not abandon her, or refuse her hospitality. He must not ethically murder her. Her demand drama-tizes the “primordial expression” of the face of the other, which Levinas described as the commandment “you shall not commit murder” (Levinas 1969: 199). Chris realizes he can no longer avoid her summons. He finally tells Nola that he will “do the right thing,” but for Chris, “the right thing” is simply the most expedient thing.

The second movement of Allen’s exploration of a difficult redemption is marked by failure. At the crossroads between welcome and murder, Chris is sum-moned by Nola and their unborn child to an “exile of the self,” where he must substitute himself for Nola and their child. His ego must undergo a radical trans-formation by experiencing exile himself – “a de-centering, a de-positing of itself as the center of the universe” (Doukhan 2010: 235). This is the path of hospitality, which as Doukhan points out, requires

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recognizing that the world is not my sole possession, that the other also has a claim on it too; it is to acknowledge my own exile in the world, my own home-less-ness within a world which is no more unquestionably mine, which does not revolve around me anymore (2010: 242).

This is redemption, a self-abnegating act of generosity that creates space for the other. But Chris is unwilling to answer the summons to responsibility. He refuses to go into exile.

Nola has called Chris’s life of enjoyment into question and ruptured his ego with an infinite demand. As Doukhan notes, “the other casts a shadow upon that relationship of possession, his/her presence problematizes this relationship” (2010: 239). Nola casts a shadow on Chris’s chronic mineness, and converts his enjoyment into a problem. This problem dislocates Chris, and evokes an aware-ness of his responsibility for the other. This is precisely what Levinas means by ethics, as he explains:

A calling into question of the same – which cannot occur within the egoist sponta-neity of the same – is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics (1969: 43).

But this ethical dislocation, the exile of the self does not necessarily lead toward the hospitality that Levinas sought to articulate as ethical subjectivity (1969: 27). On the contrary, the exile of the self is, initially, an ethical crossroads, where two paths open up before the ethical subject: welcome and murder.

No matter what path Chris takes, the shadow of the other remains. The summons to responsibility can be refused, but it cannot be abrogated. The ethical relationship, as Levinas tirelessly reiterated, is the essence, or the principal defini-tion, of what it means to be human. To be human is to be in an ethical relationship with others. If, like Cain, Chris chooses to cast off his responsibility for Nola and his child, and expel them through murder in order to escape the exile of the self, he will find that the shadow of the other remains with him – the blood of the other continues to cry out. Responsibility for the other is a precondition of sub-jectivity. We are responsible before we are. As Levinas puts it, “the self is through and through a hostage” to the other (1981: 117; cf. Genesis 4:10). Chris’s respon-sibility for Nola and their child is the foundation of his self. To murder them would be to violate his ego.

Chris refuses Nola’s summons to responsibility, and murders her, their child, and Nola’s neighbor Mrs. Eastby. While in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Cassandra’s Dream murder is carried out by the hands of others acting in the perpetrators’ stead, in Match Point Allen has Chris carry it out himself. The murders, which Chris had hoped would dispel the shadow of the other, and absolve him of respon-sibility, prove to be less of a solace, and more of a burden. The murders dislocate Chris, and the shadows of his victims fall across his face. Even in their absence,

A Difficult Redemption: Facing the Other in Woody Allen’s Exilic Period 111

his victims continue to interrupt and unsettle him. Allen repeatedly captures the anguish and torment on Chris’s face, which remains until the end of the film. The relation with the other cannot be severed by murder. Responsibility for the other cannot be abrogated. The revelation of the ethical relationship with the other remains as a shadow cast over the self. One cannot exist apart from this shadow of the other. As Levinas points out, the relation with the other is primor-dial – prior to being and existence, and prior to any act of hospitality or murder. No amount of solace can console Chris. He is guilty of murder. He, like Cain, has killed the one for whom he is responsible.

After the murders, Chris returns to the prison of his ego. Visibly disturbed, he takes a cab to the theater to meet Chloe. He wants to simply return to his life of comfort and ease, but something lingers – something that unsettles the very structure of his self. In spite of Allen’s usual nihilistic approach to morality, he seems unusually concerned with the ethical effects of others in his exilic period. In both Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, characters commit murder and become haunted by the absent presences of their victims. In Cassandra’s Dream, Terry is tormented by the psychic presence of his murdered victim, Martin Burns. In Match Point, the presences of Mrs. Eastby, Nola, and their unborn child hang like an ethical anvil on Chris’s soul. This concern highlights the significance of Allen’s ethical turn – the concern with the primordial ethical relation between self and other. The refusal of the other does not lead back to the ego as a palace of enjoyment, but rather to a prison. Murder is not a release from the ethical relationship, as it was in Crimes and Misdemeanors, but rather reveals the inescap-ability of it.

In one of the final scenes, Chris is visited by the ghosts of Nola and Mrs. Eastby, who confront him with his ethical violation – his refusal of hospitality. In this scene, Allen dramatizes the primordial ethical relation of self and other, but also the infinite alterity of the other. These presences can judge, but they cannot be murdered. They remain simultaneously present and absent. They continue to hold Chris responsible in spite of his “lucky” exoneration by the police. As if recapitu-lating the final scene of Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen has Chris tell Nola that “you can learn to push the guilt under the rug and go on, you have to, otherwise it overwhelms you,” but there is little sign that Chris is able to “go on.” When the next-door neighbor questions him about why she was killed, Chris waxes Hegelian and says, “the innocent are often slain to make way for a grander scheme – you were collateral damage.” But, when Mrs. Eastby reminds Chris that part of the “collateral damage” was his unborn child, he realizes that he has murdered his own child. Chokingly, he tries to justify the murders by quoting Oedipus from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, “To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.” The quotation is spoken by a blind Oedipus living in exile, who will soon be taken up by the gods, vindicating him of his crimes. Like Oedipus, Chris is ethically blind – he cannot see the face of the other. But there are no gods to vindicate him. He murdered freely, not by fate. He is guilty, responsible, and there

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will be no escaping the ethical consequences of his act, in spite of the fact that he escapes the legal consequences. Nola tells him to “prepare to pay the price.” Chris responds by saying that if he were caught and punished it would be a sign of justice and meaning in the world, but Chris fails to realize that he has already caught himself, and his punishment has begun. Even though Detective Tanner gets lucky, figuring out how Chris committed the murders in a dream, Chris avoids prosecution for the murders. Tanner’s partner informs him the next day that they caught a small-time drug addict, who had been killed during a botched robbery, and who had Mrs. Easby’s ring in his pocket. Chris gets exonerated by luck, not the gods, but his return to his life with Chloe is not without consequences.

The film ends with the birth of a son to Chloe and Chris. The child is a visual representation of the invisible presence of the child Chris murdered. His newborn son is the sign of judgment. The face of his new son becomes a sign, a perpetual summons to responsibility for the child he murdered, and for his other victims. This is particularly evident in Allen’s decision to use the aria “Una furtiva lagrima” from Gaetono Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore as the closing musical piece. In this aria Nemorino sings after seeing his beloved Adina weep after drinking a love potion he has purchased, which is only cheap wine purchased from a travelling vendor. Nemorino takes Adina’s tears as a sign of her love for him and of the efficaciousness of the love potion. But, as Adam Harvey has noted, Allen deliber-ately begins this aria at the with the second verse, “Un solo istante i palpiti del suo bel cor sentir! [For a single instant I felt the beating of her beautiful heart!]” (Harvey 2007: 88). Like Nemorino, Chris feels the beating hearts of Nola and their child when he looks at the face of his newborn son. They remain present even in their absences, reminding him of the responsibility he refused. Every sweetness of egoistic enjoyment is now laced with bitterness and regret. The aria ends with the words “Si può morir d’amor [I could die of love].” Chris’s search for redemp-tion from mediocrity and meaningless has failed.

Chloe’s father, Alec, proposes a toast to the new child, hoping that he will be “great,” but Tom interjects that he doesn’t care if he is great, he just hopes he’s “lucky.” The scene ends with the camera lingering on Chris’s face, full of guilt and despair. In this final scene, Allen distances himself from his ethical nihilism in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Chris is not Judah. He cannot rationalize or deny what he has done. He cannot sweep everything under the rug, and return to his life of wealth and privilege as if nothing has happened. His victims will not fade over time. The faces of Chloe and his son will remain icons of the faces of Nola and his unborn child. Even though he retreats into the prison of his ego, he cannot escape the face of the other.

Woody Allen’s cinematic exile has created a new space for his film art to develop a fresh perspective on our ethical relationships. This perspective is deeper and richer, yet still bears Allen’s signature of the tragic. When his recent films, such as Match Point, are examined through a Levinasian film analytic, the ethical texture

A Difficult Redemption: Facing the Other in Woody Allen’s Exilic Period 113

and detail of Allen’s new perspective comes into relief. Allen is not creating ethics in his films. Rather, he is discovering and exploring the ethical structure of human relationships. Whether he will return to his nihilistic roots, lampooning conven-tional morality, and celebrating human neuroses, remains to be seen. What is clear is that Woody Allen has entered the most ethical period of his career. His exilic explorations of a difficult redemption serve as an ethical summons to his faithful audiences. He stands, as it were, across an inlet, beckoning to us to cross the infi-nite abyss between ourselves and others. His new films summon us to our own difficult redemption, which will require a love that is willing to embark upon a journey into an unknown land – an exile – where we will encounter the face of the other.

Notes

1 Both of these films are tragedies that wrestle with the painfulness of life, and the ever present threat of death. They involve desire exceeding its limits, and the difficult, and often ambiguous, pursuit of redemption.

2 To my knowledge, Girgus first made such a Levinas–Allen connection. See Girgus (2008).

3 Girgus explains the ethical significance of this scene by saying “in effect, Marcello resists the potential she offers of transcendence through a relationship with the other. He dismisses the ethical potential of the encounter to a failure to hear and understand. In fact, he really fails to see and believe.  .  .  .  In effect, Paola gestures to Marcello to have him accept a temporality that challenges his ordinary existence. She invites him to cross over the inlet, a symbolic act that suggests a new spiritual, transcendent view of life. Seeming to come from nowhere, like the fish, her presence introduces the other into the scene, challenging Marcello to create a new subjectivity. Her appearance means Marcello should move from a linear temporality of death to one of transcend-ence that recognizes her face as the face of humanity that touches infinity. It is time for Marcello to appreciate his own place in the world and his irreplaceable, irreducible responsibility in it to the other” (Girgus 2010: 12).

4 Levinas characterized exile as a modality of passivity, a type of ethical extroversion in which one arrives at an inwardness by becoming vulnerable to the other (Levinas 1981: 138). For Levinas, exile is a movement towards the other that does not involve a return. Levinas illustrates this ethical journey in his essay “The Trace of the Other” by oppos-ing “the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca” and “the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land . . .” (1986: 348).

Works Cited

Ascione, Lou (2004) “Dead sharks and dynamite ham: The philosophical use of humor in Annie Hall.” In Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble (eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong? Chicago: Open Court, 132–150.

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Bergo, Bettina (1999) Levinas Between Ethics and Politics: For the Beauty that Adorns the Earth. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1999) “Preface: Arrivals and departures.” In Hamid Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. New York: Routledge, vii–xii.

Cooper, Sarah (2006) Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary. London: LEGENDA.Detmer, David (2004) “Inauthenticity and personal identity in Zelig.” In Mark T. Conrad

and Aeon J. Skoble (eds.) Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong? Chicago: Open Court, 186–202.

Doukhan, Abi (2010) “From exile to hospitality: A key to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.” Philosophy Today 54.3, 235–246.

Germain, David (2008) “Home away from home: Europe welcomes Woody Allen.” Seattle Times (May 21). http://seattletimes.com/html/movies/2004428651_apfilmcannesfestivalwoodyineurope.html (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).

Guenther, Lisa (2006) The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. New York: State University of New York Press.

Girgus, Sam B. (2008) “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” Cineaste 34/1, 55–57.Girgus, Sam B. (2010) Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine.

New York: Columbia University Press.Harvey, Andrew (2007) The Soundtracks of Woody Allen: A Complete Guide to the Songs and

Music of Every Film, 1969–2005. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Hirsch, Foster (2001) Love, Sex, Death & the Meaning of Life: The Films of Woody Allen. Cam-

bridge: De Capo Press.Hösle, Vittorio (2007) Woody Allen: An Essay on the Nature of the Comical. Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame Press.Itzkoff, David (2010) “Woody Allen: The director’s cut.” The New York Times (Sept. 15).

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/woody-allen-the-directors-cut/?scp =2&sq=woody%20allen&st=cse (accessed Sept. 14, 2012).

Kipling, Rudyard (2007) “If.” In Kipling Poems. New York: Knopf.Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Lechte, John (1994) “Emmanuel Levinas.” In Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Struc-

turalism to Postmodernity. New York: Routledge, 115–119.Lee, Sander H. (1997) Woody Allen’s Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on His Serious Films.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso

Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.Levinas, Emmanuel (1981) Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.

Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.Levinas, Emmanuel (1985) Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA:

Duquesne University Press.Levinas, Emmanuel (1986) “The trace of the other.” In Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction

in Context. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 345–359.Levinas, Emmanuel (1990) “‘Between two worlds’ (the way of Franz Rosenzweig).” In

Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Séan Hand. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 181–201.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1993) Outside the Subject. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Mitchell, J. Allan (2005) “Romancing ethics in Boethius, Chaucer, and Levinas: Fortune, moral luck, and erotic adventure.” Comparative Literature 57.2, 101–116.

Naficy, Hamid (2001) An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Renov, Michael (2004) The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis, MN: University of Min-nesota Press.

Scott, A.O. (2011) “The old ennui and the lost generation.” The New York Times (May 19). http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/movies/midnight-in-paris-by-woody-allen-with-owen-wilson-review.html (accessed Sept. 14, 2012).

6

I mean to raise the question of comic faith in Woody Allen, show how it bears on the way he sees death, and focus on the relationship of comedy, tragic action, absurdity, faith, art, and morbidity in six of his best twenty-first-century films. Here’s the nub of my argument: Thesis: comic faith. Antithesis: tragic history, tragic facts (murder, suicide, frivolous warfare, aging and dying, despair, and the cruel amorality of collective human existence) and a catharsis of justified misan-thropy, bitterness, and nostalgia. Synthesis: late Woody.

Everyone knows that Allen found his identity in comic vision and made himself an artist through his sense of humor. With his brilliant comic mind, he shows in his movies what it can mean to be funny and how you can use a memorable comic persona to make art and define life. Ultimately, though, the question that haunts him throughout his career and becomes even more pronounced as he moves closer to his own non-Hollywood ending is whether comedy and a vocation for it really do matter at all. Do suffering and death finally obliterate the value of any creative comic faith?

Comic faith is what some witty, creative people can have – or try to have – instead of God and/or eternal bliss. I define the term as the particular insight and sense of the world that allows you to find or create mirth, to justify life, and to imagine the means and desirability of its continual regeneration.1 Sometimes that’s what you see in Allen’s films. For him, God never worked and orthodox religion is a sham and a scam when it comes to any rebate on the death tax. His identity as a filmmaker increasingly is dedicated to showing the absurd historical truth about the moral horrors and the meaninglessness of existence. He’s a man

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Comic Faith and Its Discontents

Death and the Late Woody

Robert M. Polhemus

Comic Faith and Its Discontents: Death and the Late Woody 117

whose imagination keeps coming back to the decisive fact of life: our species is subject to, conscious of, and defined by its last thing, death. For him, the gift-wrapping of existence with jokes and joys is always stamped with a skull-and-crossbones, and his moviemaking reflects his will to bring to the subject of death the power of comic imagination. From Allen’s twentieth-century films, here (chosen from scores) are two examples: (1) the vision of antihero Boris (Woody) at the end of Love and Death (1975), after his firing-squad execution, prancing along through trees in a lovely riverside setting to great Prokofiev music, led by a white-robed, cavorting figure of Death (the dance of death thus turned into a dance of life); (2) suicidal Mickey (Woody Allen) in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) finding his raison to continue d’être while watching the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup mock the idiocy of war. In the changing twenty-first-century scene, his comic vision oscillates, fades, and revives in protean forms. Comic faith endures, but not without showing how age, history and devaluation of life can savage it. Like many Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others, Allen can practice a faith without always believing in it.

In Manhattan (1979), Ike (Woody Allen) famously sets out a basis for comic faith:

Well, all right, why is life worth living? That’s a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? Okay. Um, for me, oh, I would say . . . what, Groucho Marx to name one thing . . . uh, and Willie Mays, and, ummm, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and ummm . . . um, Swedish movies, naturally  .  .  .  Sentimental Education by Flaubert  .  .  .  uh, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra . . . umm, those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne . . .  And Tracy’s face of course (Allen 1982).2

So here, it seems, a brilliant comedian, physical grace, music, movies, books, performing talent, great painting, and the loveliness of a woman can justify exist-ence. But, as time goes by, he’s more doubtful, and as the long post-World War II optimism of the American twentieth century has faded into the new century, he has to keep readjusting his point of view to test and keep faith.

Allen’s output by now is so vast – more than 40 pictures – that only a few can take all it in, much less remember it all. I want to concentrate here on what he’s tried to do for you lately in his great signature films Melinda and Melinda (2004), Match Point (2005), Cassandra’s Dream (2007) Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), What-ever Works (2009), and – my coda – Midnight in Paris (2011). I’m arguing that, contrary to much “conventional” opinion, Woody Allen, deep into his seventies, has made, in the first decade of this century, a remarkable string of excellent, intellectually challenging, original films that include some of his finest work. And (as of 2011) he shows no signs of stopping. These movies render both the fragility and high significance of any viable comic vision for a new age and open up ten-sions and absurd, terrible links between comic and tragic visions that have shaped life and literature. He’s often been scorned in the last 20 years for being out-of-date

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and repetitive.3 But, in the unbrave new world of perpetual wars of choice, occu-pation of distant lands, out-of-control narcissism, ignorance of the past, subprimal greed-is-good (with its global “derivative” of the colossal inequality of wealth and hope), the de facto collapse of both Marxist and “free” market ideologies, the scary zeal of fundamentalist religions, neotribalism, the reverence for the military, rampant anti-intellectualism, the news media’s devotion to trivia and ranting inci-vility, the heartbreak of political incompetence, and the need both to confront and escape from such a world, Allen now looks to have tottered right back into fashion – not behind but ahead of the times.

In his twenty-first-century work, Allen looks hard at what it means – and whether it helps – to imagine life through the categorizing terms of comedy and tragedy. That “binary” subject inspired him because it gave him a way to dramatize primal contradictions in the new century: he’s out to show the schizophrenic nature of postmodern life. Melinda and Melinda (2004) is full of wit, sad wisdom, and sophis-ticated satire, but nothing matters more about it than the way Allen uses it to illuminate that “binary.” He bases his movie on the premise that people, whether they know it or not, adapt and use preexisting narrative and cultural forms (for example, comic, tragic, romantic, slave narrative, etc.) to chart their paths through life. The structure of Melinda allowed Allen to begin getting deep into the conflict-ing, yet resonating, modes of the tragic absurd.

Melinda and Melinda is one of Allen’s most theoretical films: it interweaves comic and tragic visions of the same protagonist – Melinda (Radha Mitchell) in two different stories. It opens with a prologue-dialogue between two dramatists – one writes comedies, the other tragedies:

“The essence of life isn’t comic. It’s tragic. There’s nothing intrinsically funny about the terrible facts of human existence.”

“I disagree. Philosophers call it absurd because, in the end, all you can do is laugh. Human aspirations are so ludicrous and irrational. I mean, if the underlying reality of our being was tragic, my plays would make more than yours because my stories would resonate more profoundly with the human soul.”

“[And] I mean, it’s exactly because tragedy hits on the truly painful essence of life that people run to my comedies for escape.  .  .  .  Tragedy confronts, comedy escapes.”

This talk sounds likes an inner dialogue going on in Woody Allen. Reality – and not just in a work of art – may depend on aesthetic perspective, i.e., on what artists (Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world”) through time have infused into the cultural imagination.

Each writer then imagines a different Melinda story, and the film moves back and forth between them. A desperate, bedraggled Melinda crashes her college friend’s dinner party and shows up as a failed wife, failed mother, failed adulterer, failed friend, failed recovering alcoholic, failed suicide (though she keeps on

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trying), and a failed psychiatric patient who had to wear a straitjacket. But she is a successful murderer who got off shooting her cad lover. At the end of her story, jilted by a good man who likes somebody better, she tries to leap out the window, but, the last we see of her, she’s been subdued and looks out from behind a prison-bar grid – an image that, at best, promises more straitjacket time.

A fey, “normal” Melinda provides a comic “escape” from downer Melinda. Single, winning, and loved by an unhappily married, funny, much put-upon, nice-guy (Will Ferrell), she at last makes him and herself happy in Allen’s little divorces-are-made-in heaven counterplot.

Melinda and Melinda shows the conflict in the filmmaker between life as full of comic possibilities and life as so painfully skewed it seeks the death of self or others. He doesn’t try to harmonize these visions, but instead makes vivid the idea that any single person, depending on luck, might play such different roles. It’s confusing, though, to follow the two Melindas, and that’s the point. It’s no longer easy to keep tragic and comic perspectives and identities apart, but it’s also hard to unify them. The film ends with dialogue between the two writers:

“We hear a little story, a few hearsay details. You mold them into a tragic tale. . . . And that’s how you see life.”

“Whereas . . . you put them into an amusing romance. . . . It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

But for Allen, a beholder has two eyes, and art must “see” both comic and tragic visions. They depend on one another – like “hot” and “cold.”

Allen found the “tragic” Melinda more interesting, and that’s how she comes across.4 Through her he can get into much deeper water, where he wants to go. In Radha Mitchell’s extraordinary delivery of one line (which – I can’t help saying – all serious movie lovers deserve to see), ravaged Melinda, in the midst of a banal conversation with a shallow guy hitting on her, steals the show and inaugurates a new wave of Allen’s cinematic power: “I want [heavy pause]  .  .  .  to want [heavy pause]  .  .  .  to live.” In a trice, Mitchell’s Melinda defines and personifies the pull and tragic power of the death wish, the sad, fragile need for faith in life, and the depth and passion of Allen’s own creative anhedonia – his desperate, shifty longing for some comic antidote to the plague of life and dying.

He not only told Eric Lax that the Melinda comic plot was a mistake, but so was the whole Woody-side of Crimes and Misdemeanors.5 He was wrong in both cases, but the emergence of the “low, dishonest decade” that began the new century and an ebb tide of his own comic faith were pushing him to do something radical. That was – and is – Match Point.

Match Point (2005) comes across as very tough – focused on the beauty and moral worthlessness of a glossy culture gone rotten. In its historical context, its crime comes to stand analogically for a new age’s wickedness; Allen fuses the personal

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and the political in a way new for him.6 The film’s vision and text radically ques-tion what sustains Woody Allen’s own comic faith – when he can sustain it. Here all his great good things – erotic joy, art, aesthetic capital, family values, luck, vocation, good sex, and the pleasure that money can buy – show up and then turn into “bad” things. Match Point focuses on characters and a modern world set off against the cultural heritage of tragic art – most obviously, here, tragic opera.

Taking his title from the decisive moment in tennis, Allen makes its explosive points out of the collision in this match of love and death. In it, unlike the earlier Crimes and Misdemeanors (to which it’s often compared), he narrows his focus in order to make the vision of unjustified violence, unpunished homicide, and unmit-igated evil even clearer and more disturbing. When Judah in Crimes and Misde-meanors confronts the corpse of his mistress, the scene switches abruptly to an old film that Cliff (Woody Allen) and his niece are watching: suddenly the daft Betty Hutton, siren of vulgarity, is blasting out a comic song, “Murder, He Said. Murder, He Said.” In Match Point Allen rids his work of any such distancing irony or diffu-sion of its appalling implications.

The mesh of a film with its music always matters to Allen, but never – even in Everyone Says I Love You and Sweet and Lowdown – more than in Match Point. The music here is nineteenth-century opera. Right away, over the opening credits, you hear a plangent aria, “Una furtiva lagrima,” sung by Caruso, from Donizetti’s L‘Elisir d’Amore. Allen repeats and then repeats again its key lines as the closing credits roll:

A single secret tear. . . . She loves me . . . Heavens! Yes, I could die! I could ask for nothing more, nothing more. Oh, heavens! Yes, I could, I could die! . . . Yes, I could die of love.7

So there’s the gist of what’s to come – Allen staples, love and death. But at first viewing, you have no idea why this musty old opera highlight prefaces a new movie. After several viewings and some drudgery, you can later find out how all the selections of the opera music do fit and serve as accurate, if esoteric, captions for what’s being played out.

Why this pedantic use of allusion? One reason is that opera for Allen becomes a dramatic symbol of cultural capital and the way it can work for those who have it and know how and where to invest it. Who – what sort of person – might pick up on the operatic references in Match Point? One answer is its protagonist Chris Wilton ( Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who speculates in cultural capital. Allen is making a subtle, but important point. He imagines that the heritage of aesthetic capital – art – can, ironically, both touch and trap, both soften and harden, its entrepre-neurial devotees as it infuses and shapes their perceptions. And there is something more going on: a serious and shocking in-joke by this fan of the Marx Brothers, whose most famous comedy was A Night at the Opera. Match Point is Allen’s ironic, ultimately terrifying twenty-first-century Night at the Opera. In the film’s last scene,

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the killer, who you’ve seen shoot his mistress and their unborn fetus, brings home, with his wife and family, their firstborn baby, and all celebrate the new son. On the soundtrack, you hear Macduff ’s “O figli, o figli miei!” from Verdi’s Macbeth. The lyric in translation is “Oh my children! / You have all been killed by that tyrant, / Together with your poor mother!”8 That music, in its terrible irony, conveys both the complexity and moral horror of this film.

“I love opera,” says tennis teaching-pro Chris to rich Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), and their mutual love of music gets Chris an invitation into the Hewett family’s Royal Opera House box and, from there, right smack into the upper class. Later, to impress Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), Chris gives her a rare col-lection of Caruso. It expresses, he says soulfully, “all that’s tragic in life.” But pas-sionate love of art and good music, as Hitler proved, can accompany the martial dirge of killer nihilism.

The film per se opens with a voiceover as you look at a close-up of a net with a tennis ball passing over it, back and forth. You see only the net and the ball, as the speaker makes his point:

The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of our control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t and you lose.

The scene is an overture and, not so incidentally, an example of the psychological force of “motion” pictures. It prepares you for the sequence much later when Chris throws jewelry into the Thames, and, as he hurries off, finds another a ring in his pocket, makes a hasty throw, and keeps on going. Suddenly comes a switch to slow motion and a shot of the telltale ring floating slowly, slowly through the sky, then hitting the top of the river wall and bouncing back. Set up by the film’s “luck” preamble, this shot becomes one of the most memorable in all of Allen. And, when it comes, you may think, a bit smugly, that you’ve just seen how random luck will decide a murderer’s fate. And you’re right – except the actual effects of any piece of luck are unpredictable and, as this scene and the whole movie suggest, hundreds of unknown instances in the flow of luck touch you every day. The deepest subject here is the growth of evil in a modern psyche, and how it blooms can be a matter of blind luck.

The “voiceover” of course belongs to Chris Wilton. Before you see him hus-tling after erotic fire and materialism’s gory glory, you hear him as this thoughtful commentator. Allen by no means wants early or total alienation between his audience and his main character. Like Chris, most twenty-first-century people somehow inevitably get stuck related to or dealing with that symbolic Hewett Company “Global Infrastructure and Finance.” It’s the diseased corporate heart of the movie.

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Chris stands out as one of Allen’s most fascinating characters – chilling as Ant-arctica. The fusion of a bright, polite, labile man from the working class, a capital-izing culture vulture, an up-and-coming business scion, a terrorist devotee to “the bitch-goddess success,” and a sire of a blessed baby all in one figure is serious business. Allen takes pains to establish his protagonist’s split personality, and that schizoid fissure rocks our century.

The richness and beauty of the world here help make its moral and philosophical meanings both deep and sinister. It’s one of the most beautiful movies Allen ever made – relentlessly beautiful – and the viewer sees what Chris sees: life at, on, and from the top. You get vistas of London from on high, picturesque views of country greenery, shots of lovely interiors and intriguing artwork (amazing paintings of all kinds), passionate lovemaking – in short, the gorgeous cinematography of Remi Adefarasin which features the steamy, intimate images of Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) and Chris.

Sex early gives the movie energy, and the scene when Nola and Wilton first meet teems with emotional foreplay.9 But it’s also drenched with ironic foreshad-owing. Chris, on his first visit to the Hewett mansion, walks alone through the house and into a rec room where the click-clack of ping-pong sounds. He sees a striking young blonde, in a white dress full of conspicuously nice bulges and curves, hit a hard shot past a man who turns away, beaten.

Adefarasin’s camera now alternates images of these two beautiful people showing how they see – like the audience – and feel their mutual erotic force. I focus on this scene because the sheer throbbing life in it can make clear, later, the horror and nihilism of the murder to come:

NOLA [brash, impertinent]: So. Who’s my next victim? [Sizes him up; he’ll do] You?  .  .  .  Would you like to play for a thousand pounds a game?

CHRIS: What did I walk into? . . . [She serves, and he slams the ball right past her]

NOLA: What did I walk into? [He moves around the table right up to her]

CHRIS: It’s like this – May I?NOLA: Please.CHRIS: [He moves behind her body, puts one arm and hand tightly

around her waist and grabs her paddle hand with his – bold to show right away how much he wants to touch her] You have to lean in and hit right through it.

NOLA: I was doing just fine until you showed up [the intimacy of “just kidding”, but also, in retrospect, frightful irony].

CHRIS: That’s the story of my life. [Self-deprecating charm, fol-lowed quickly by a flirtatious assault on English social reserve] So tell me, what’s a beautiful young American ping-pong player doing mingling among the British upper class?

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NOLA: Did anyone ever tell you, you play a very aggressive game? [Double entendre spreads through the scene now. Less than a minute after they meet, their lips are nearly touching and they’re in a virtual embrace]

CHRIS: Did anyone ever tell you have very sensual lips? [an extraordinary thing to say to a woman you don’t know at all in the family home of your upper-class girl friend – an abso-lute come-on]

NOLA: Extremely aggressive [not showing any resentment, not turning away].

CHRIS: I’m naturally competitive. Is it off-putting? [daring candor again, and Allen aims it not just at Nola, but at his audience]

NOLA: I’ll have to think about that for a while.TOM: Ah, there you are. I want to introduce you to Chris

Wilton. Chris Wilton, Nola Rice, my fiancée.NOLA: Hm. So you’re the tennis pro. [Tom, in a proprietary way, kisses her]NOLA: He was trying to have his way with me over the table

[spoken in a “many a true word spoken in jest” manner].TOM: Oh really, well you better watch out for this one. He’s

made his living out of hustling. [Light-hearted, but con-descending – and Chris goes quiet with resentment and jealousy]

NOLA: I’ll be ready for you next time. [Double entendre]

What Allen gets across here is the force of sexual desire, the appeal of la dolce vita, the aphrodisiac of humor, the unpredictable and funny games people play, physical grace, and the appeal of a woman’s face – all those signs of his comic faith. But not now: here it’s all prologue to moral disaster. The tempting vulnerabil-ity of women, the inevitability of conflicting desires, class impulses, and a kind of assertive male craziness also stand out, and they become the tricky first act to a very unfunny Murder, He Said.

Chloe Hewett falls in love with Chris, and she and her father (Brian Cox) mean to “groom” him. She meets him at a chichi restaurant. At first it looks casual, but it’s a fatal temptation scene. She comes in, solicitously loving, and orders cham-pagne. An agent of her father has just called Chris about “the possibilities of a job” that she says she spoke to “Papa” about. She’s pushing him. It’s “a stepping stone for you  .  .  .  to a bigger job, more responsibilities, and greater earnings potential.” That’s her genuflection to the dominant twenty-first-century religion: money-faith. “Papa” runs “Global Infrastructure and Finance” and that’s literally what counts.

When Tom Hewett comes in with Nola, still his fiancée, he’s formidable in his ease. He takes charge. It’s his world – an infrastructure of class, consumption, credit, and finance. The talk turns to Aston Martins, caviar, blinis, vintage wine,

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and the country estate – luxury’s trappings. Chris looks woeful and shut out, but he opines again, “I think everybody’s afraid to admit what a big part luck plays. It seems that scientists are confirming more and more that all existence is here by blind chance. No purpose. No design.” He’s desperately wanting to establish authority, but he’s also stating a philosophical problem that bothers Woody Allen: how do you reconcile faith (in his case, comic faith) with a world and life that has no higher purpose? Tom, in a mocking voice, intones, “What was it the vicar used to say? ‘Despair is the path of least resistance.’ ” Chris answers, “I think of faith as the path of least resistance.” That’s a deep, rebellious sentiment Allen some-times shares, and he imagines it to be just the sort of thing his Hewetts would scorn:

CHLOE: Can we change the subject please?TOM: Two bottles of Puligny Montrachet.

This restaurant scene has extraordinary economical power, in the full sense of that word – conveying both the cash nexus and the quick transaction of key cinematic business. Immediately the film cuts away from the Montrachet to Global Finance, where, in the briefest of scenes, Chris signs on – and then soon after marries Chloe.

Why would a character like Chris choose to murder Nola? It’s a shocking move that makes good drama, but the question gets at the crux of the film’s meaning and menace. In the scenes between them in the first half of the movie, you see how much he loves Nola, obsesses over her, wants her, and melds sexually with her in pretty rites of flesh and spirit. But, as time goes by and she keeps nagging him to leave Chloe, he comes to realize that a union with Nola would wreck his career. He tells his tennis mate: “It’s crazy . . . I have a very comfortable life with my wife . . . I don’t fool myself that I haven’t got used to a certain kind of living.”

When Nola gets pregnant, the film moves into a neo-Hitchcockian world of suspense and murderous pathology. She refuses to get an abortion and gives Chris an ultimatum. “I expect you to do the right thing .  .  . Tell Chloe.” “Okay, okay. I’ll do the right thing.”

That night, Chris sleeps by Chloe, but then you see him wake up, brood, and make a quick decision about what that “right thing” is: if Chloe and the Hewetts knew the truth – months of sleazy deceit with Tom’s cast-off sexpot, Chloe still trying without success to get pregnant, Nola now ready to flaunt her condition – he’s sure they would destroy him.

Next you see him arming himself. He plots the elimination of Nola like a one-man blitzkrieg. Whatever he was before, he’s now a sociopath desperate to keep what he’s gained. He’s both logical and maniacal (like people planning a “war of choice”). He calmly gets his father-in-law’s shotgun, makes plans, sees Nola, tells lies, and fixes the assault hour.

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In the movie’s jaw-dropping murder scene, when Chris, amid tears of agony, shoots down Nola’s neighbor and then her, Allen makes his most sustained use of opera (10 minutes’ worth). He juxtaposes the entire episode against the conversation-duet between Othello and Iago from Verdi’s Otello Act II when Iago manipulates the Moor into killing his beloved wife. Allen thus juxtaposes the murder of Nola with Othello’s tragic slaughter of Desdemona and those cultural twin peaks of drama and opera in Shakespeare and Verdi. The filmmaker is trying hard to create important art (he succeeds), but he is not comparing Chris to Othello, not present-ing a tragic vision. He’s matching him with Iago, the classic sociopath in drama whose advice for all seasons is put money in thy purse. As Chris’s elaborate scheme unfolds, it gives you not a tragic Othello drama, but life in a modern Iago world – a strategic killing with the motive of putting money in your portfolio.

In the film’s late, great, dream sequence, Chris’s murder victims return to confront him. It’s not a long scene but it’s one crammed with mind-food. Beginning with a quick shot of Chris asleep in bed, it jumps to an image of him dozing, head on his desk next to his laptop. Just in front of him sits a mostly empty glass of beauti-ful rose-red wine. He wakes, hears a noise, then clumsily knocks over the glass and spills the wine (dream-scene symbolism picking up on “Sangre! Sangre!” [Blood! Blood!] from the murder-scene soundtrack of Otello). He gets up to mop up the wine and Nola appears behind him.

“Nola?” Quiet, pensive, he talks to the dead, “It wasn’t easy. But when the time came I could pull the trigger. You never know who your neighbors are until there’s a crisis. You can learn to push the guilt under the rug and go on. You have to. Otherwise it overwhelms you.” That could be mad rationalization, chaotic dream talk, glib wisdom, the disintegration of the self, political allegory – or all of them and more. Pulling “the trigger” and managing “the guilt” might make a terrible kind of sense, but the trite sentiment “you never know who your neighbors are until there’s a crisis,” applied to the slain neighbor is so perversely twisted in its idea of how a neighbor might help you out, so bizarrely ironical, that you know you’re now in a special poisonous realm of moral revulsion and evil.

Allen does, in this crucial scene, use particular murder victims to represent impersonal, collective killing, and in so doing he expands its allegorical meaning and force. The dead older woman (Margaret Tyzack), whom Chris sacrificed in his “crisis,” inquires, “What about me?  .  .  .  I had no involvement in this awful affair. Isn’t there a problem about me having to die? An innocent bystander?”

Chris’s cool, formal answer moves him and the movie beyond dream and limited story to the center of the real world’s nightmare where each year thou-sands of people purposely kill thousands of other people and populations acqui-esce to massacres of civilians: “The innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme. You were collateral damage.” Those words surely have broad political relevance, and the movie hits home. “A grander scheme”: you have here the deadly claim of special privilege – the driving spirit of terrorism, imperialism,

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oligarchy, organized crime, and the exclusionary “true faith” of religions, parties, classes, and races. Like “innocent bystander,” that obscene expression “collateral damage” can’t help but stand out and explicitly relate Match Point to the bloody era that spawned it. “Collateral damage”: to designate the shotgun killing of an old woman (and pregnant Nola), Chris adopts the bureaucratic military term for the killing of the unlucky.10 Allen sometimes says he avoids the immediate political and historical context of his time, but nothing could be more relevant to the lying twenty-first-century “weapons-of-mass destruction” American history of “collat-eral damage” than this passage, this scene, this film.11

“So was your own child,” is the good neighbor’s devastating reply.Chris tries to change the subject by expanding the discursive field: “Sophocles

said, ‘to never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.’ ” This response, like every remark he makes in the dream, might, on its own, make sense and even appear eloquent and thoughtful, but in context each sounds spooky and insane. It’s as if he were assuming a grandiose tragic identity and the voice of a great tragedian to distance himself from causing others to die – moving to a godlike perspective on human life and death. But his response to the chilling line “so was your own child” is just horrific in its weirdness. The astonishing cynicism of killing your own engendered flesh and blood and then saying, in this double entendre context, “the greatest boon is never to have been born” (little baby-to-be, I just did you a big favor), surely matches the evil of Iago, the gold standard of villains.

“Prepare to pay the price, Chris. Your actions were clumsy, full of holes, almost like someone begging to be found out.” The gist and cadence of Nola’s speech doesn’t sound like her, but it’s what Chris would fear: stereotypical police mental-ity honing in on him like Detective Banner ( James Nesbitt), who does suspect him. The dream is widening.

Again, Allen has Chris disdain mere defense, and instead keep using cultural capital to raise himself to some level of moral authority: “It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.” Far from remorseful honesty, it’s a self-deceiver’s way of escaping from a vicious self into the softer abstractions of ethics and literature. The film has taken you into the realm of the tragic absurd, a dream world where you may live without having to see what you’ve really done or take any responsibility for the larger life outside of your own skin and neural network.

Suddenly – no transition – the screen gives you Detective Banner sitting up in his bed, awake from a dream, startling his wife, and blurting out, “Chris Wilton did it. I see how.” So now the dream can be his as well as Chris’s, one in which Banner sees the truth. It’s the dream of a Cassandra, however, who knows the truth but can’t get herself believed. Allen has moved the range of the dream into the area of Alice’s dream at the end of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: “Let’s consider who dreamed it all. This is a serious question. . . . Which do you

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think it was?” Carroll adds, “Life, what is it but a dream?” The crime has become a dream of reality and a creator’s work of art that subverts the basis for either comic or tragic faith. It leads directly to Cassandra’s Dream.12

Not for nothing did Allen call his icy 2007 movie Cassandra’s Dream. The title comes right out of the end of Match Point with its hectic, prophetic dream content. Starting with the name, Allen lades his text with teasing references to Greece, theater, tragedy, and myths and so keeps signaling that forms of Cassandra’s nightmare go on shaping the world. Here, Cassandra’s Dream is the gas-burning sailboat that two brothers, Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell), trying to scrabble out of the working class, manage to buy. It floats in their lives like the phantom of golden luxury that traps them, and it becomes the site of their end.

Moreover, you have key late Woody projection in the title: he’s made this haunting figure a chief muse in his recent work. In Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, Whatever Works, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger he identifies with this never-heeded, screwy prophet of doom whose combination of brilliant insight and powerlessness is said to define the tragic condition of humankind. It’s as if he took to heart the banter of the mock Greek chorus in his comedy Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and literally assumed the role:

“I see big trouble.”“Oh, for God’s sakes, you’re such a Cassandra.”“I’m not such a Cassandra. I am Cassandra.”

Now he’s dead serious about his film’s allegorical meaning and heritage. The rhetorical function of the title is to make you keep thinking about how and why what’s in front of you relates to crucial patterns in ancient lore and modern history. It calls for the analogical imperative that is so important in late Allen – compare, compare, compare!

What Cassandra, manic truthteller, does – most notably in Aeschylus’ Agamem-non – is to imagine and predict murderous ruling-class violence and its conse-quences. She conveys the political and social horror that bleeds out into the wide world from homicidal behavior of men and women in leading families and turns the ensuing lives of more and more people into masses of gore. In Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, so does Allen, this aging, unique seer from Brooklyn and the comic tradition. He sees the awful truth of his times, but, since few take him seriously, he can’t change a thing. He could hardly get Cassandra’s Dream – a pro-found work – screened for two weeks straight in his own land.

But the movie works. The best thing in it, the sign of this filmmaker’s tremen-dous energy and ambition, is that he takes you straight to Cassandra, the mythic figure whose very being defines and proclaims the tragic absurd by fusing com-edy’s distancing ironic perspective with inescapable personal tragedy. The meaning of her being – always to be right, always to be ignored, always crazy, always telling

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you that the truth is right there before you, but that you can’t or don’t want to see it – shows how the character of ancient texts becomes an immortal archetype. Says she, in Trojan Women, “Whoso is wise should fly from making war.”13

Cassandra is an ambitious, austere film – an attempt at modern tragedy, an intellectual crime drama, a tragic anatomy of murder and murderers, and a vision of Mammon’s violence out of control and spreading. Tragedy has to deal with death – the hardest fact of life – and with the dispensing of death to others. More specifically, the traditional basis of the tragic genre has been the drama of willed deaths: who causes it, who dies, what happens to the killers, and why. Nowadays, it’s mostly underprivileged people who actually do the killing and who get killed. Like Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Allen wants to explore the possibilities of modern tragedy and see whether an authentic tragic vision linked to the heritage of ancient tragedians can be found – needed to be found – in “ordinary” life. The tragic plot of Cassandra’s Dream is simple. Ian and Terry desperately need money, and their rich uncle will give it to them if they do away with a man whose testi-mony would destroy his business and life. Uncle Harold (Tom Wilkinson) squeezes them hard, and they do kill for him and his money. One brother can live with the guilt, one can’t, and this fatal split brings about their deaths.

The film dramatizes Allen’s version of the famous Miller line in Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid” – paid here, that is, to the mercenary system involving weedy people enforcing the power of capital, the literal and figurative shock troops of “wealth management.” Colin Farrell as Terry and Ewan McGre-gor as Ian portray with skill, and even sympathy, feckless brothers co-opted into murder. As Match Point made a jump from the vicarious murder contracted by Judah in Crimes and Misdemeanors to Chris’s actual, trigger-pulling homicide, so Cassandra’s Dream takes violence one step further and makes its killer-brothers reluctant mercenary assassins for their anything-goes free enterprising Uncle. “The whole of human life is about violence,” Ian says to Terry. And, according to Woody-Cassandra’s vision, modern life involves the will of those who can afford to pay for the use or threat of violence to get and keep what they want.

The life of the brothers early on in the movie features their scramble for money, sleek cars, glamor, gambling, and business opportunities. Uncle Harold, a crucial figure, internationalizes and historicizes the brothers’ slice of life. A “self-made” man and a plastic surgeon, he moved to Hollywood and America, turning his practice into a global franchise of “organized medicine” with clinics even in China: “You’d–You’d be amazed what’s happening in–in–in China today,” he tells the brothers, “They’re–They’re–They’re way more capitalistic than we are.” Ian tells Terry that they have to do what Uncle wants, and he rationalizes, “If we were in the army, we’d be expected to kill strangers everyday to profit men who are up to here in corruption.”

Allen puts you in a grim, symbolic narrative that reeks with analogies to the bloodshed and violence of twenty-first-century imperialism. The cards are stacked

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against the brothers. Neither Terry, a mechanic with a massive gambling debt, nor Ian, a would-be investor trying to shed his class background and win his dream girl (Hayley Atwell), have a chance without Uncle’s cash. They finally manage to kill, but they have little in common with Chris Wilton. They bumble, agonize, quarrel, and end up dead. But Uncle Harold’s plan succeeds; he’s in the clear, back in America, having maintained his strong financial position in the global infrastructure.

Allen tried to create tragedy in the life and death of Terry and Ian, and, at least with Terry – flawed, well-meaning, compulsive gambler seduced into killing against his will – he nearly succeeds. The film makes him inarticulate, limited, sometimes foolish and easy to look down on, but then Allen unexpectedly – mov-ingly – shows that this surprising figure comes to know and feel the real truth about why death matters, what he has done, what he must do, and how and where he must live out his days. That domicile collectively is his heart, his psyche, and his culture, and it’s the same place Cassandra identifies and describes in her famous outburst in Agamemnon before she enters the royal palace of death: “This house stinks of blood-dripping slaughter.”14 How well, as this film indicates, that describes the White House of the early twenty-first century.

Cassandra the eponymous seer of dead-on-target abattoir prophecies and Cassan-dra the movie’s symbolic take on the widespread business of death surely might drive you to see what could be salvaged for comic vision. Allen next made Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) – a movie that sets out to show you great physical beauty. It’s a classic film that invites critical scrutiny on any number of topics, but here I simply want to point out how it responds to the assault on comic faith in Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream. One short-but-sweet antidote to the morbidly conta-gious moral poison rendered in those works is seize the day – or, more precisely, see and then screen the day. The word Barcelona in the title connotes something good and real in life: namely the vacation – here, an intense, much-needed emo-tional vacation from Cassandrastan.

The film is a romance and, in part, an idyll of late Allen comic faith. It doesn’t sentimentalize life with the closure of a happy love story, but it does celebrate the body beautiful, the human face divine, “worth-it-all” moments, the marvel of the arts, intelligent language, the uniqueness of personality, great movie stars, and the controversial “gaze” of movies – both a male and female gaze, both the direc-tor’s and the spectators’ gaze, both characters’ and actors’ gaze, both the camera’s and the editor’s gaze.15 Life, Allen shows, can be extraordinarily good-looking: like Gaudí’s great Barcelona church La Sagrada Familia; like Penélope Cruz as Maria Elena and Scarlett Johansson as Cristina; like Rebecca Hall’s rational Vicky fall-ing irrationally in love and turning gorgeous; like Javier Bardem’s handsome and charming Juan Antonio.

In Allen’s long career, you can watch a seemingly endless stream of talented, lovely women at the peak of their careers, working for comparatively little money,

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giving glorious performances. That fact should not be taken for granted; it shows a major theme in this film and by extension in Allen’s whole comic vision – one so obvious it’s easy to ignore or dismiss. Cumulatively and visually, female beauty and talent become one lasting basis for comic faith. Glamour attracts; sex really does appeal; movies can show you scenes of amazing beauty; people really do find actors beautiful and winning, and it’s fun to see good-looking, accomplished ones showing off in movies and sinking into your mind’s eye, so you somehow live vicariously and closely with them for a time (à la Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo).

Allen milked a long-running comic shtick featuring a dweebish, funny fast talker seeing, wanting, and even for a while getting the most attractive babes in cinema’s toyland. But after Soon-Yi and Deconstructing Harry, that jokey wish ful-fillment no longer played well. He just looks too old and creepy. What makes Vicky Cristina Barcelona work and come off as something new and different is that Allen, free of his own body, speech mannerisms, and image here, can present and explore convincingly absurd, significant, and complex desires in male fantasy life (as he would do again in Midnight in Paris). He can sublimate and project them onto his Spanish protagonist, the artist Juan Antonio and, as Bardem plays him, the most charismatic male lead in all his films.

In “respectable” American media, you rarely see a winning, straightforward pitch for hedonism put forth rationally by a nice person. Here you do: “Life is short. Life is dull. Life is full of pain and this is a chance for something special,” says Juan Antonio to the attractive, smart, but tightly wound skeptic Vicky and the golden honeypot Cristina. “We’ll eat well, drink good wine, and make love.” The onscreen appeal of doing this with beautiful people comes across so power-fully that you can see why society needs to muster against it all the ammo of civic control, repression, and religion’s supernatural sticks and carrots. Bardem’s Juan Antonio is what Allen imagines most men (and maybe most women?) would like to be: a creative, interesting, cultured, honest, kind person, open and caring in sensual life, wonderfully articulate, and able to sleep with, love and like – and be loved and liked by – the most beautiful, talented, interesting women on earth. In a delicately erotic scene, he and Vicky, temperamental antagonists, surprise each other by suddenly falling in love and then making love. Later, Juan Antonio manages to live harmoniously for a time in a stellar ménage à trois – surely as aesthetically pleasing as any in imaginative history – with Cristina and his estranged wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz). Cruz with incomparable force and skill acts out her director’s idea – like it or not – of Maria Elena as woman at her hottest, most gorgeous, most gifted, and craziest. Somehow the magnetism of Bardem’s acting suspends disbelief, and Woody Allen, the projector of the film’s projection of desire, fulfills visually, for a time, the fantasies of free love, timeless beauty, and delight in women that animates desire in his movies. His vision seems meant to convey, to himself as well as his audience, that as you change and grow old and your world falls apart, beautiful people – other beautiful people – will

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appear and dance the dance of love and death with passion and an irresistible talent to amuse.

But is most of this just barefaced piggy-sexist escapism that just turns women into stylish items for the men’s store? “Well,” says Allen in effect, “take a good look at Vicky Cristina Barcelona and see how you feel about what you see.” A movie in which that glamorous pair Cristina and Marie Elena play sexually liberated women living in the same place with their lover, whom each wants and needs to bed – and does – is a movie (bet on it) that flagrantly features “the male gaze.” But much more is going on here. Allen is very much in the process of using, transforming, and plotting the gaze to see in another direction. What happens is that the camera becomes a center of female subjectivity and the means by which Cristina can succeed for a time as an artist. Mentored by Maria Elena (whose own original “gaze” has formed Juan Antonio’s art) she becomes a fine photographer (Figure 6.1). One of the most moving features of the film is the whole relationship between Cristina and Maria Elena, and one of its best scenes takes place between them in their red-lit darkroom. Allen shows you two women working together, and as they do, they come to see and respect the aesthetic sensibility of the other – the barrier between art and love, work and physical intimacy, sex and creation, friendship and ambition (that wall that so often characterizes and subverts rela-tionships with and between men) dissolves into fused sensual and intellectual affection.

Figure 6.1 Artistic inspiration: Maria Elena poses for Cristina’s camera in Vicky Christina Barcelona. (Producers: Charles H. Joffe, Javier Méndez, Jack Rollins, Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, Gareth Wiley, Helen Robin)

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Art gives people something to do, enjoy, and believe in. It’s tangible and visible, and you don’t need metaphysics or miracles to adore it. In Allen’s Barcelona, art is the local religion and it pulls institutionalized religion into its service (Gaudí’s great church was for half a century an icon of art before it was officially con-secrated). Juan Antonio makes ritual pilgrimages to see a religious statue in Oviedo that keeps on inspiring him. After he shows Vicky this work of Christian art which he adores, she asks him, “Are you very religious?” and he surprises her: “No, no, I’m not. The trick is to enjoy life, accepting that it has no meaning whatsoever.”

When Cristina tells Vicky and Vicky’s husband-to-be about her lovemaking with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, she shocks buttoned-up Doug. But Allen has Vicky – newly swimming in the swirling emotions of love life and the contradic-tions of being a very intelligent, sensual, and mixed-up human being – articulate, under her breath, her creator’s desperate, absurd faith, “Whatever works.”

Whatever Works: that’s the meaty title Allen gave his audacious, controversial 2009 comedy. “My story” says Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), sour veteran of despair and the film’s anti-Juan Antonio, anti-Bardem protagonist, “is whatever works. You know as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Any way you can filch a little joy in this cruel, dog-eat-dog, pointless black chaos. That’s my story, yeah.”16 It’s a rough story, but it can be a funny one too.

A postmodern avatar of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1666), this film has all the relevance for twenty-first-century America that Molière’s play had for the leading seventeenth-century power, France.17 Allen’s big point here, like Molière’s, is that if comedy is to matter as art, it must contain (in both senses of the word) misanthropy.18 The film starts with bilious Boris speaking for seven minutes straight. In all those words, Allen grants the truth of the near-nihilism and the death-wishing compul-sions of Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, with their grim analogies to modern global history (e.g., both heartless hedge funder and Abu Ghraib kinds of “collateral damage”) and the shame, anger, and repressed guilt it has brought to so many. The film then moves to show how it still might be possible to imagine value in a flexible comic perspective. It somehow does filch (perfect Allen diction) joy – but just barely.

Whatever Works is to Allen what The Misanthrope is to Molière – art that blends a daring gospel of intellectual pessimism and hard truths with the privilege of professing it in a world that still offers a variety of pleasures and humor. In the classic French play, the contradictions between the moral force of misanthrope Alceste’s denunciation of a corrupt culture (the proof of which would later issue in such strange fruit as Marie Antoinette’s severed head) and his involuntary love for the flirtatious, fun-loving Celimene make for a volatile comic vision. Whatever Works, with Boris’s opening screed of misanthropy followed by his zany hook-up with his total opposite – the young, peppy, ignorant, and sweet Melody Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) – loosely follows Molière’s pattern in which Alceste, with

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his contempt for the world, gets compromised (and saved) by social Celimene and “irrational” love. Here – as the names make obvious – “Celestine” takes over Celimene’s role.

But death is closer to Allen’s heart than Molière’s. The first thing you hear, as the titles roll by, is Groucho Marx singing “Hello, I must be going” from Animal Crackers. It’s an audio epitome of late Woody: a gifted comic trying to subsume the certainty of death (“I must be going”) in order to make it into a laughing matter. Which Allen does here – the movie is like an anhedonist’s black-humor mass that celebrates, with real, if absurd jollity, misanthropic intelligence.19

Allen’s comic imagination tries to animate death and turn its finality into the process of how people see and revitalize it – how, using whatever works, they can, in the fullest sense of the phrase, live with death. That’s exactly what he would do in Midnight in Paris (2011), but in a different form in which he imagines how “dead and gone” artists can live within the self and inspire it. Here, early on, Boris moans “I’m dying! I’m dying!” but when his first wife wants to call an ambulance, he yells, “Not now! Not tonight! Eventually!” Beneath the hysteria, Allen is showing that knowledge and fear of death – even seeking to die and the experience of dying – are facts of life, not death.

Returning to the “out-the-window” theme he used seriously with Professor Levy in Crimes and Misdemeanors and tragicomically in Melinda, he makes jokes out of Boris’s two suicide leaps and their failure – the “fortunate falls” of this movie’s faith. When Melody dumps Boris near the end, he washes his hands, then suddenly runs to jump out the window, and – Hollywood ending – lands on another woman, whom he subsequently marries. What you see is Allen answering Groucho’s “I must be going” song with a visual pun, the image of Boris flying through a large window but not “going.” As George Eliot says, “These things are a parable.”

In his movies, Allen is first of all a writer, and often his misanthrope Boris, off-putting as he can be, has a dazzling way with words. Here, for example, is Boris on sex, a subject hard to say much new about (but not for him):

Think of it . . . The absurd choreography, like a sewing machine, up and down, up and down, up and down . . . Reproducing the species over and over. Toward what goal? Carrying out what moronic design?

In the claustrophobia of convention, wild nay-saying can let in fresh air.I want to focus on Boris’s scorching “failed species” oration that begins the film,

sets its tone and makes it so provocative and risky. It presents a language of comic purgation – pushing a comic catharsis not of pity and terror (Aristotle’s tragic catharsis), but of hostility and sentimentality. This “speech-act,” virtually unprec-edented in film history, gives the movie its distinction and makes Boris one of Allen’s most important characters. One premise driving the talk is that you can’t

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know what works if you don’t know the problems in life and can’t honestly acknowledge what doesn’t work. It was bound to turn off both his fan base nos-talgic for those “early, funny” movies and the condescending hate-and/or-patronize-Woody crowd as an “unacceptable” message from a discredited source. Allen, however, wants to use its bitter content as an aesthetic and moral inoculation to make his whatever works faith credible. It comes as the comic shock therapy of an ironic secular Calvinism.

Allen gets very personal in this Liebestod of cynicism: “I have a vision. I’m dis-cussing you.” Mostly a soliloquy spoken directly to the audience – you and me – it might be the most quixotic overture in screen comedy. In fact, it’s not a prologue, but the heart of the movie, and what follows it is, in essence, an hour-plus, comic epilogue dramatizing, mocking, disputing, affirming, glamorizing, and humaniz-ing Boris’s raillery.

Talk with friends turns fast into monologue:

Big money in the God racket. Big money. Hey, the basic teachings of Jesus are quite wonderful. So by the way is the original intention of Karl Marx. What could be bad? Everyone should share equally, Do unto others, democracy, government by the people. All great ideas  .  .  .  But they also suffer from fatal flaw  .  .  .  the fallacious notion that people are fundamentally decent . . . But . . . I’m sorry to say, we’re a failed species.

Boris is defying – crucifying – popular American ideology. Not only does he stress religion’s greed and duplicity, he then brands humanity as an evolutionary mistake. He isn’t joking here, but he is talking for pleasure. For Allen (like all good satirists) there’s a comic uplift in appropriating the authority – like a god – to judge and condemn human nature and thus to get high on truths others aren’t strong or honest enough to face. Deep in Allen, deep in comedy, deep in misanthropy, deep in your mind, conflicting passions churn for both the joy of fulfilling desires and the truth of contemptus mundi (which tells you that a rat race is not worth running and so it’s not so bad to lose). If you keep in mind late Allen’s Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, and what they show (“collateral damage” and the “triumph of the will” to defy “thou shalt not kill”), it’s easy as cherry pie to think of mankind as a “failed species.”

Boris’s overture next turns to the personal, and his comment takes you right into a pregnant analogy for Allen’s death-obsessed, shaky comic vision.

That’s why this woman you like, Joe, so what if she’s an embalmer’s assistant, so she stinks from formaldehyde . . . For Christ sake, you gotta take what little pleasure you can find in this chamber of horrors.

In late Woody, everybody can’t help but reek of the universal mortuary business. Yellnikoff is just getting started:

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There’s an audience full of people looking at us  .  .  .  They paid good money for tickets, so some moron in Hollywood can buy a bigger swimming pool. . . . Some are eating popcorn, some are just staring straight ahead breathing through their mouths, like Neanderthals.

Baiting an audience is tricky. Allen wants to get subversive things said, so he has them proclaimed by a weirdo – this odd, bitter little man with whom you don’t have to identify. Because he’s such a nerd you don’t have to be defensive: you can give his words, ideas, and humor the attention they deserve. That’s the film’s rhetorical comic ploy. People, though, tend to resent preachy, ironic talk that belit-tles them, as some reviews and anti-Woody blog fury about the movie makes clear. And yet, for some, wheezing in a smoggy social atmosphere of banal pieties, clichéd mind-fuzz, public anti-intellectualism, stifling repression, and the soul-killing carpentry of building and keeping up a good front under an implacable death sentence, the speech and Allen’s prose as a whole can be an example of “whatever works.”

Why would you want to hear my story? Do we know each other? Do we like each other? Let me tell you right off, okay? I’m not a likeable guy. Charm has never been a priority with me. Just so you know this is not the feel-good movie of the year. So if you’re one of those idiots who need to feel good, go get yourself a foot massage.

Such talk in a film is so off-the-wall that it might engage you right away in the complex processes of art – how personal it can be: Am I someone this schlemiel is calling an idiot? Do I need a phony story to feel good? Allen’s script puts it to you directly: these words are about you and you need to see how and why. If he convinces you, he wins. If not, not.20

Next, Boris the monologist appropriates Shakespeare the monologist:

What the hell does it all mean anyhow? Nothing. Zero, zilch. Nothing comes to anything [“Nothing can come of nothing,” King Lear I, i, 92]. And yet there’s no shortage of idiots to battle [“It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,” Macbeth V, v, 26–28].

Yellnikoff is anything but a tragic hero, but in the balancing act between misan-thropy and comic equanimity in Allen’s evolving twenty-first-century work, the heritage of tragedy’s language and vision is key.

I have a vision. I’m discussing you. Your co-workers. Your newspapers, the TV. Everybody’s happy to talk. Full of misinformation, morality, science, religion, poli-tics, sports, love, your portfolio, your children, health . . . And with it all the day still comes when they put you in a box, and it’s on to the next generation of idiots who’ll also tell you all about life and define for you what’s appropriate.

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Death is always pending, but since there’s obviously immortal folly in the ever-present bossy know-it-all who keep dictating to every generation what’s “appropri-ate,” maybe there is a kind of ridiculous eternal life for the species – but one, thankfully, that’s not, for the individual, the hell of no exit.

My father committed suicide, because the morning newspapers depressed him. And could you blame him? With the horror and corruption and ignorance and poverty and genocide and AIDS and global warming and terrorism and the family value morons and the gun morons. “The horror,” Kurtz said at the end of Heart of Darkness – “the horror.”

There’s just Boris’s talking head, but his linguistic energy is so relentless that it can make you long to see something to mitigate it. The Conrad quote implies the need for some kind of art – some aesthetic mode – to help inure you to life’s horrors.

But what can you do? You read about some massacre in Darfur or some school bus gets blown up, and you go “Oh my God! the horror,” and then you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free-range chicken. Because what can you do? . .  . I tried to commit suicide myself. Obviously it didn’t work out.

Unless you just tune it out, the range of the speech is astounding – disturbing, fascinating, funny, but terrible too. Boris has the will to kill himself but not the skill.

But why do you even want to hear about all this? Christ, you got your own problems. I’m sure you’re all obsessed with any number of sad little hopes and dreams. Your predictably unsatisfying love life; your failed business ventures; “Oh, if only I’d bought that stock”; “if only I’d purchased that house years ago”; “if only I’d made a move on that woman?” If this, if that – you know what – give me a break with your could haves and should haves.

From atrocities and suicide to a missed chance to hit on some fetching woman or make more money, the diatribe moves from a review of horror and death to the staging ground of deflationary humor and unpredictable feats of imagination. And that’s the overall pattern of this whole movie and, indeed, of late Allen’s work through Midnight in Paris.

Philosophical pessimism and satirical humor, though they offer indispensable knowledge that thoughtful people need to deal with reality, just can’t overcome or negate the appeal and interest of personal narratives – of “my story,” as Boris puts it. A particular story might have in it the appealing vitality – the life force – of a Melody Celestine and her mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), but to see and appreciate all that might depend on a purging of both sentimental illusions and bitterness through inspired and inspiring misanthropy.

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“Whatever works” can mean a liberation in golden fantasy. An autobiographical imperative drives Midnight in Paris, if you can believe Allen. Before he made his own movies, he went to Paris as a young scriptwriter for What’s New, Pussycat? (1965). He told Eric Lax,

I had, or fancied myself having, an artistic temperament, and I was plunged into Hollywood at its most venal . . . The redeeming thing about the film was that I got to spend eight months in Paris and I developed a love for the city . . . I have a regret, or a semi-regret, that I didn’t stay there. Two of the girls who did the costumes liked Paris so much they stayed there and lived there and worked there. I didn’t have their independence or spirit or originality. It took a more adventurous soul than me to do it, and it’s a shame (Lax 2007: 294).21

The film proves that you can’t live in the past, but that the past can live in you and then, if your art is good, in others.

Midnight in Paris (2011) is a late-Woody masterpiece of comic faith, but it wouldn’t exist without Allen’s misanthropic discontents and the Cassandra- like probings of his preceding twenty-first-century films. It combines the “inspired silliness” of his earlier movies with the “rueful fatalism of his later work.”22 It’s built on nostalgia for the aesthetic glory of the past, but paradoxically this phe-nomenal nostalgia is strictly a product of present-day wish-fulfillment psychology and imagination. There’s no nostalgic Golden Age without a strong contemporary need for art to recreate the present by recreating the past.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), would-be novelist, wants to escape his sell-out present and “give literature a real shot.” He’s a “successful” young “Hollywood hack” (his own words), disgusted to be doing scripts and rewrites for bad big box-office films. On a vacation with his gorgeous, venal fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her rich parents dedicated to twenty-first-century Mammonism, he dreams of staying on in Paris, where so many Americans and other expatriates have gone to do their work. At midnight, he’s out alone walking and lost, when revelers drive by and invite him to get in their old luxury Peugeot. He soon finds himself transported to his Golden Age, 1920s Paris. There, in a recurring fantasy of enormous gaiety and charm, he hangs out with the era’s crowd of famous artists. He meets and talks with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (Allison Pill and Tom Hiddleston), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brophy), and many others – but most important of all, with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), imaginary lover of Modigliani, Braque, and Picasso, with whom he falls in tender love and who falls in love with him. All of them help him and believe in his book.23 Allen does a wonderful thing in this film: out of the past, he appropriates art into comedy, and he brings off the dif-ficult feat of making artists and even forms of art funny without denigrating their radiance.

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Five haunting phrases characterize this movie:

1. “You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway and others, and Hemingway used it as the epigraph for The Sun Also Rises. Allen makes her the benevolent authority figure in the film because her sentence defines its very being and focus. He doesn’t actually have Stein say those words, but they literally make the movie: he finds and films “a lost genera-tion,” with the myriad of meanings the epithet suggests. And when Adriana tells Gill, “I find you interesting too – in a lost way,” Allen suggests that everyone is fated to get “lost” and needs to find some connection to the living nature of the past.

2. “Golden Age thinking”: When pedantic Paul (Michael Sheen) hears that the setting for Gil’s novel is a “nostalgia shop,” he mocks the idea of a Golden Age as a silly delusion. Dreaming of another age that would have been a better place for you to live, he lectures, is a “denial” of real life. Yet the movie shows people sometimes do need to get out of the cloying rut of their lives – get away on temporal as well as physical vacations – in order to get back in touch with their own being. What if you could visit your fantasy of a Golden Age for a while – take in (and project out) what you like about it, get intimate with the genius of the past? Wouldn’t that be fun? (Wouldn’t it make a great movie?) Gill sees his Golden Age in 1920s Paris, with all its creativity and joyous hedonism; Adriana, his adorable fantasy love, sees her Golden Age in the Parisian “belle epoque” of the 1890s. But Midnight in Paris makes beauti-fully, movingly, and comically clear that all generations are lost until the art-ist’s imagination finds them and also, that, as the kingdom of heaven is said to be “within,” so the Golden Age is also “within” and part of the present – the only place where it can, for a brief time (a spot of timelessness) exist.

3. “The magical and camp”: Gertrude Stein reads that phrase aloud from the start of Gil’s novel Out of the Past in which the protagonist in his nostalgia shop takes the “prosaic,” “vulgar” “products” and “memorabilia” of the past and transmutes them into “the magical and the camp.” The “nostalgia shop” and the artist as a peddler of nostalgia may be a deflating “camp” analogy for the whole enterprise of art but, on the other hand, artistic crea-tion out of the dreck of sentimental memories and delusions can be stun-ningly magical and meaningful – and a trope for how art works. Kent Jones (2011), in his brilliant review of Midnight in Paris, says, “The lasting is housed in the memory of the ephemeral – something we learn over and over again in Allen’s work.”

The words “magical” and “camp” describe the effect, the destination and fascinating poise of the film and suggest why it’s had such an unexpect-edly strong appeal for viewers: “Magical” is one thing, “camp” is another, but combine them successfully in their full, literal meanings – appealingly, mysteriously transcendent and outrageously, provocatively absurd – and you have a

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radiant fission of toggling energies that only a few artists – Austen, Dickens, Joyce, Nabokov, Beckett, Waugh, and Allen, say – ever achieve.24 Late Woody brings the “magic” and “camp” the out of a Golden Age past and fuses them in high comedy.

4. “The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair, but to find the antidote to the emptiness of existence.” So Stein says in the midst of telling Gil that, though “we all fear death and question our place in the universe,” he should have confidence in the vitality of his art. Over his long career, Allen has serious doubts about the efficacy of art,25 but here that unequivocal statement by the one authority figure the film doesn’t undercut means that Midnight in Paris, though it makes wonderful glee out of artists’ egos and foibles, represents the vocation of art as the highest calling: in this movie’s here and now, it’s the “whatever” that “works” best.

5. “Cold, violent, meaningless”: that’s how Gil describes the universe to Adriana. It’s “Paris” that’s hot, he says. He’s a kind, enthusiastic figure of modesty and ability, but those same nihilistic words could have been said – in effect, were said – in Allen’s twenty-first-century scripts by Gil’s protagonist predecessors, Boris, Juan Antonio, and Chris Wilton. Midnight in Paris exudes delight and charm, but Allen sets down for Gil bits of invective excoriating those contemporary political realities that could make you long to escape into art and Golden Age fantasy. When Gil’s neo-robber-baron father-in- law-to-be, “John” (Kurt Fuller), rudely voices his francophobe, Bush-era views, Gil answers mildly enough that you “can’t blame them for not fol-lowing us down the rabbit’s hole of Iraq and all that Bush stuff.” But when Inez reprimands Gil, he, with a smile, simply calls Daddy a devotee of “right-wing lunacy.” When John later told Gil that Tea Party Americans are just patriotic citizens trying to take back their country, Gil, à la Boris, blasted back with cogent misanthropy denouncing them as “Republican, Tea Party, crypto-fascist, airhead zombies.” In such a world, the question for Gil (and for Allen) is still Boris’s “But what can you do?” Here the answer finally is that the character can write a good novel and the filmmaker can make a fine movie (Figure 6.2).

I want to end by going back to Allen’s existential question in Manhattan (1979), his answers to which, I said, established a basis for a comic faith then. Posing the question again three decades later, I’m setting down the answers I see in Midnight in Paris:

Well, all right, why is life worth living? That’s a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? Well, maybe the fact that you can travel back and forth through time by means of art and artists of the past and present (who run the ultimate nostalgic shop) and you really can be thrilled, now and then, to be a part of a brilliant, joyous, ridiculous, delusionary, dangerous,

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futile, and creative species. Okay. Um, what else? I would say, Paris, “city of light” in the dark – urban heat, roiling and boiling with art, history, and romance in a freezing solar system. What else? Well, um, how about falling head-over-heels in love with someone so beautiful and adorable that for a time you care about nothing else and can hardly believe your good luck at being alive . . . And, hmmm, Monet’s Water Lilies that turn walls into heaven, no matter what pedants say . . . and, um, a fabulous comic sense that mocks all the thought police and, um, also makes fun of

Figure 6.2 “We’ll always have Paris”: Gil and Gabrielle walk off into a rain-imbued future at the close of Midnight in Paris. (Producers: Letty Aronson, Raphaël Benoliel, Javier Méndez, Helen Robin, Jack Rollins, Jaume Roures, Stephen Tenenbaum)

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artists while exalting them. What else? .  .  . belle epoque golden merry-go-rounds, and Gabielle (Lea Seydoux), happy to walk with you in the rain of the present . . . And cinematographer Khondji who can shoot the cliché Paris sites, then show them fresh and golden, and make you see and feel why the tourists have to come . . . and um, music and lyrics by Cole Porter giving you every rhyme and reason to just do it  .  .  .  and the jazz of Bechet, Django, and Grappelli  .  .  .  and dotty, pretentious, Hemingway with his clean prose and macho pose, still alive, magnetic, ridicu-lous . . . and, of course Cotillard’s face – loveliness that, in a flash, explodes the idea of humanity as a failed species.

Coda: Directly and indirectly, literally and allegorically, Allen’s recent movies confront and imagine for viewers the dilemma of living with and even being faith-starved, death-haunted, money-mad, truth-fearing, erotically confused, intel-lectually provincial, handwashing witnesses and rationalizers of violence, vicari-ous murder, trivializing ambition, envy, avarice, and cynicism who have made and are making twenty-first-century history. Comic faith comes hard, and that’s why Midnight in Paris could seem so touching and powerful in showing that an original comic genius lives on and can do great new work.

Notes

1 See Polhemus (1980: 3–6, 20). 2 For discussion of this passage, see Polhemus (2005: 294). 3 The critics’ raves for Midnight in Paris may mean that – as sardonic Boris in Whatever

Works would put it – “the inchworms have turned.” See, for example, twenty-first-century Woodyphobe Kenneth Turan, major critic for the Los Angeles Times: “Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write again: Woody Allen has made a wonderful new picture, Midnight in Paris” (Turan 2011).

4 The adjective is Charalampos Goyios’s in his article on the use of opera in Match Point, when he says, in an aside, that Allen tries to inscribe a “binary ideology of life as a struggle between ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ best exemplified by Melinda and Melinda (2004)” (Goyios 2006).

5 See Lax (2007: 56). 6 Match Point is now beginning to get the wide range of scrutiny and the variety of

critical approaches it merits. See, for example, Goyios (2006) and Vogel (2008): “Edward Burch posted his message in the blogosphere on August 22nd, 2006: ‘I think this is one of Woody Allen’s best movies in years . . . (Iraq War allegory, anyone?).’ ” Writing as both an economist and an econocritic, Vogel agrees.

7 Translated by Aaron Green, “Una furtiva lagrima lyrics and translation.” http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/classicalmusictips/qt/unafurtivalagrimatext.htm (accessed Sept. 24, 2012).

8 Translated on the Classical Karaoke web site. www.classicalkaraoke.com/lyrics.php?tab=lyrics&aria=O+figli,+o+figli+miei! . . . + (accessed Sept. 24, 2012).

9 On this subject, see Carrichner (2005).

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10 According to Vogel (2008: 13) the term “collateral damage” is more than just a euphe-mism. It is code for the US military doublespeak that dates back to the Vietnam War. “The expression has been resuscitated in the wake of tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the ongoing Iraq War. Woody Allen’s placement of ‘collateral damage’ in the most reflexive scene of the movie is highly significant but not at all obvious. It requires the critic.” In Midnight in Paris, in a satiric vein, Allen again overtly makes the same point, and, as Stephen Applebaum 2011) puts it, “gets in a potshot at the US’s actions in Iraq.”

11 See, for example, Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen, in which Allen told him, “[T]he problems my movies reflect could by chance be on the minds of people, but they never are social or political issues” (Lax 2007: 127–128). As D.H. Lawrence said, “Trust the tale and not the teller.”

12 Allen’s next movie, the comedy Scoop (2006), builds on a fantasy joke vision of the place of afterlife in it. The film’s not-so-subtext is that you can play at seeing what isn’t there and actually imagine people having an afterlife. Your fantasy, for a few moments, can let you see funny pictures that mock and deny the reality of death. But, as he said, he’s not serious about his comedy here, and it’s a minor Allen film.

13 Euripides (415 BCE).14 Agamemnon, line 1309.15 Psychoanalytic and cinematic theory has suggested that the male “gaze” occurs

when the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man. Laura Mulvey, in a classic article, argues that the male gaze takes precedence over the female gaze. In effect, then, this influential, much discussed and debated theory says that the male gaze denies women subjectivity, relegating them to the status of objects, hence, the woman reader and the woman viewer must experience the text’s narrative secondarily, by identifying with a man’s perspective. See Mulvey (1975).

16 The theme of Allen’s next film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), whose playful title defines for Allen the human condition, explicitly presents a version of Boris’s philosophy in which the plot centers on the fact that “whatever works” for an aging, lonely woman – a fraudulent psychic’s advice – does work, but it badly hurts her family and others.

17 Reviewers, looking for a “handle” on Whatever Works, glommed onto the “fact” that Allen had written a version of the script long ago as a vehicle for Zero Mostel. Virtu-ally irrelevant to the film that exists, this factoid got Mostel more attention than Molière and misanthrope Boris’s amazing soliloquy.

18 According to Donald Frame (1968: 19), Molière “was clearly testing the limits of the comic and struggling to enlarge its domain.”

19 At the 2010 Cannes film festival, Allen made a superbly ironic, revealing joke about his point of view and about the comic potential in misanthropy: “Life! I do believe it’s a grim, nightmarish, meaningless experience. One must have one’s illusions to go on living” (qtd. in Gille 2010).

20 Judgments about Allen’s films notoriously divide, and that’s especially true of What-ever Works, which many people absolutely detest and others find fascinating. Here are two published telling responses from professional critics: “This toxic, contemptuous, unforgivably unfunny bagatelle finds Allen at his most misanthropically one-note”

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(Hornaday 2009); “Whatever Works, a Manhattan-set hymn to atheism, is  .  .  . a reli-gious experience” (Shoard 2010).

21 Sragow (2011), also discusses this passage. Besides the homage to Paris, I can’t help suspecting, in the candid, brave, and loveable characters Adriana and Gabrielle, a bit of nostalgic and Allen homage to those costume girls.

22 Scott (2011). Scott looks to redeem himself for unfairness to Allen in the past – and he does: “Mr. Allen has gracefully evaded the trap built by his grouchy admirers and unkind critics – I’m not alone in fitting both descriptions – who complain when he repeats himself and also when he experiments . . . Allen has often said that he does not want or expect his own work to survive, but . . . “Midnight in Paris” . . . suggests otherwise . . . art, if you like that word.”

23 Midnight in Paris was Allen’s most positively reviewed and popular film in a genera-tion, and, within two weeks of its American opening, Joseph Berger published a virtual crib sheet, explaining who the artists are and what the allusions mean to those who might not know but were eagerly flocking to the film: “Decoding Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris” (2011).

24 Stephanie Zacharek (2011), one of Allen’s fiercest, most hostile critics in the twenty-first century, amazingly gave Midnight in Paris a glowing review, and she gets at the special combination of qualities that makes it so powerful, calling it “sometimes delightfully silly . . . at other times strangely, deeply moving.” Except that the key to its distinctive aesthetic impact is not just “sometimes” and “other times” but at the same time.

25 See Bailey (2001) for a far-ranging, excellent discussion of this subject in twentieth-century Allen.

Works Cited

Aeschylus (458 BCE) Agamemnon. Trans. E.D.A. Morshead, Internet Classics Archive. www.theoi.com/Text/AeschylusAgamemnon2.html (accessed Sept. 24, 2012).

Allen, Woody (1982) Four Films of Woody Allen: Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memories. New York: Random House.

Applebaum, Stephen (2011) “Film review: Midnight in Paris.” New Scotsman (May 11). http://news.scotsman.com/movies/Film-review-Midnight-in-Paris.6766720.jp (accessed Sept. 24, 2012).

Bailey, Peter J. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Berger, Joseph (2011) “Decoding Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.” The New York Times (May 28).

Carrichner, John (2005) “Original film review.” (Dec. 2). www.blueorbdesign.com/filmrev.html (accessed Sept. 25, 2012).

Euripides (415 BCE) The Trojan Women. Ed. and trans. E.P. Coleridge. Perseus Digital Library (1999). www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0124 (accessed Sept. 24, 2012).

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Frame, Donald (1968) The Misanthrope and Other Plays by Molière. New York: Signet Classics.

Gille, Zac (2010) “Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger reviews.” Salon (May 15).

Goyios, Charalampos (2006) “Living life as an opera lover: On the uses of opera as musical accompaniment in Allen’s Match Point.” Senses of the Cinema 57 ( July 31). http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/feature-articles/match-point/ (accessed Sept. 24, 2012).

Hornaday, Ann (2009) “Review of Whatever Works.” Washington Post ( July 3).Jones, Kent (2011) Film Comment (May/June). Film Society Lincoln Center. www.filmlinc.com/

film-comment/article/midnight-in-paris (accessed Sept. 25, 2012).Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Mulvey, Laura (1975) “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.” Screen 16.3, 6–18.Polhemus, Robert (1980) Comic Faith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Polhemus, Robert (2005) Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption and Women’s Quest for Authority.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Scott, A.O. (2011) “The old ennui and the lost generation.” The New York Times (May 19).Shoard, Catherine (2010) “Whatever Works.” Guardian Online ( June 24). www.guardian.co.uk/

film/2010/jun/24/whatever-works-film-review (accessed Oct. 26, 2012).Sragow, Michael (2011) “Why Owen Wilson really IS Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris.”

Baltimore Sun ( June 7).Turan, Kenneth (2011) “Movie review: ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” Los Angeles Times (May 20),

B1.Vogel, Joseph Henry (2008) “Ecocriticism as an economic school of thought: Woody

Allen’s Match Point as exemplary.” OMETECA Science and Humanities 12, 105–119.Zacharek, Stephanie (2011) “Cannes review: Woody Allen returns to form – for real this

time – with Midnight in Paris.” Movieline (May 11). http://movieline.com/2011/05/11/cannes-review-woody-allen-returns-to-form-for-real-this-time-with-midnight-in-paris/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral (accessed Sept. 25, 2012).

PART II

Movies about the Movies

7

Critical Theory, also known as the Frankfurt School of Sociology, was transported to the United States by Jewish intellectual émigrés from Nazi Germany. Interweav-ing Marxist sociology, economics, and political theory with Freudian psychoanaly-sis, the theorists struggled to understand the impact of social forces associated with the emergence of modernity on the human psyche and their political conse-quences ( Jay 1973). Under Max Horkheimer’s guidance at the Institute of Social Research, social theorists such as Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm brought an interdisciplinary approach to theorizing the contradictions located in the processes of modernization.1 While these writers point to capitalism as the primary determinant for the organization of social life, they shift the Marxist focus on production to exchange (distribution, marketing, consumption) and con-centrate their analyses on the legitimizing function of cultural production (Kellner 1989).

In the United States, they directed their lens on what Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) refer to as the “culture industry.” Whereas the production of culture in Nazi Germany was controlled by the totalitarian state, in the United States, media corporations were producing a new cultural form, mass culture – an increasingly rationalized form that is administered and produced like any other commodity. The juggernaut of mass culture destroys aesthetic sensibilities and intellectual reflexivity, transforming cultural production into a mindless ethos of consumer-ism. While Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the film and music industry, Marcuse (1964) argues that advertising produced a new form of totalitarianism, restructur-ing human needs to fit the needs of the marketplace. Corporations not only produce commodities but also stimulate the need structure necessary to sell those

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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commodities. Fromm (1955) notes that the individual experienced the self through a marketing orientation “as a thing to be successfully employed on the market.” Modern alienation permeates not only work but also consumption. Later writers such as Stuart Ewen (1977) extend Fromm’s argument by using the term “com-modity self ” to describe a person who defines him/herself as well as others by the commodity signs he/she consumes. He argued that advertising creates a social world in which individuals feel constant anxiety and they then locate solutions to this anxiety in the act of consumption. More recently, Fredric Jameson (1991) refocuses the lens on new hyperanomic social formations theorized under the rubrics of postmodernity, hypermodernity, or liquid modernity. Here, the ever-increasing velocity at which cultural texts and/or fragments of texts circulate appears to undermine even the idea of authenticity. Within the postmodern para-digm, the best we can do is piece together an identity out of cultural fragments. The ongoing task of Critical Theory is to unravel the threads of modernity and postmodernity to reveal the dynamics of these historical social formations.

I argue that Allen’s concerns are located within the parameters of Critical Theory’s analysis of modernity and now postmodernity. Both Critical Theory and Allen share the same concerns: the destruction of an anchored intellectuality; the pursuit of status and the resulting inauthenticity of self-presentation; the reduction of the psychoanalytic to the therapeutic; a desire to understand the organization of the erotic; and the expansion of social formations – particu-larly media – which produce a narcissistic obsession for recognition. Allen explores the intersection of meaning, pleasure, and identity in relation to the social and cultural contradictions of modernity. We encounter the most pronounced articu-lation of this in Zelig. As I will illustrate, the diegesis of Zelig is a direct extension of Fromm’s (1941) analysis of the underlying psychological conditions produced by modernity reflected in the rise of Nazism.

Allen’s work following Annie Hall is particularly sensitive to the workings of the culture industry, its penetration into everyday life, and its role in organizing the fantasy life of its audiences. He traces the social psychological consequences of this industry as we move from modern to postmodern social formations. Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Radio Days focus on the explosion of modern forces in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s mediated by newsreel, film, and radio. Interiors and Stardust Memories explore the role of the artist and her/his relation to the forma-tion of identity. The multinarrative structure of Celebrity, a later work, presents a fully developed postmodern world in which, at the end of the film, protagonist Lee Simon can only look up at the sky as a skywriter writes HELP.

Although I contend that Allen explores the problem of authenticity and self-hood within Critical Theory’s construction of modernity, to claim that Allen is philosophically bound to any one of these theorists or is in any way committed to Critical Theory’s agenda would be erroneous. For Allen, the culture industry produces a conflicted terrain which not only produces dreams and reignites mem-ories, but also reduces culture to triviality and empty formulae. Moreover, Allen

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resists any attempt to theorize and mistrusts any social agenda deducted from abstract theoretical positions. Nevertheless, Allen’s approach to cinema, whether comic or serious, exposes the contradictions located at the level of everyday life in cultural landscapes. His characters are negotiators. Some negotiate the contra-dictions more successfully than others. This chapter illuminates Allen’s treatment of this world and the way in which it resonates of and departs from the concerns and analyses of Critical Theory.

Zelig: Reflections on the Cultural Landscape

Against a montage of images of nightclub jitterbuggers, airplane stuntmen playing music on the wings of a plane, flagpole-sitters weaving back and forth high above the New York skyline, the documentary-intoned voiceover of Zelig states,

The year is 1928. America, enjoying a decade of unequal prosperity, has gone wild. The Jazz Age it is called. The rhythms are syncopated, the morals are looser, the liquor is cheaper when you can get it. It is a time of diverse heroes and madcap stunts, of speakeasies and flamboyant parties (Allen 1990).

With the Charleston playing in the background, Allen invites us to the coming-of-age party of modernity. Here tradition recedes into distant nostalgia, replaced by the excitement of the speeded up flow of novelty captured so well when silent films shot at 20 frames per second are now projected at 24 frames per second. “Events in the Jazz Age move too rapidly, like Red Grange,” attests the narrator. Lindbergh’s iconic transatlantic flight stamped the decade in which everything is possible in a world with seemingly no limits.

The 1920s is a pivotal decade for American society. The United States is rapidly transforming itself into a mature urban society. For decades, immigrants have been pouring into the country from Europe, settling in ethnic enclaves, and now their sons and daughters are assimilating into the American melting pot. Industrial capitalism is “successful”; mass production is outrunning consumption. A cultural explosion is brought about by new technologies: the mix of print and photogra-phy, sound and film, news and cinema, and the maturing of radio. Cinema and advertising provide the models for success. The stars, exotic locations, and narra-tives of Hollywood are the materials out of which the dream factory manufactures fantasies. Marchand (1985) observes that, speaking the language of urbanity, advertising supported the dictum, “what was new was desirable.” But he also notes that the themes of advertising responded to the anonymity and impersonality of the city, the lack of self-sufficiency and control, and the need to learn how to manipulate others. This constant “state of flux” is both intoxicating and disorient-ing (Berman 1981).

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While the 1920s are remembered as the Golden Age of modernity, Marx and Engels, over 70 years earlier, theorized the social and economic forces underlying its emergence. In 1848, Marx and Engels (2002) rang the death knell of the tradi-tional world with the words, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Recognizing that Capital mowed down everything in its path, Marx clearly understood that the cultural architecture of traditional Europe and the social relationships it supported were collapsing around him. Marx, however, did not decry this collapse nor nostalgically pine for the lost world’s return. The traditional world was filled with superstition, backward think-ing, and exploitation legitimized by religious belief and caste systems. Capitalism is the economic juggernaut churning through the social landscape, tearing it apart, rebuilding it and then tearing it apart again, a process Schumpeter (1950) termed “creative destruction.” As ascribed social roles become unglued from their tradi-tional moorings, a Hobbesian world emerges. Stripped naked before the social forces that make life unpredictable and uncertain, it is every man for himself. For Marx, however, this was a world of possibility – one so destructive and ruthless, and so riddled with contradiction, that revolutionary change was inevitable. This is the world of Critical Theory. This is also the world that gave birth to Leonard Zelig.

Starting with Marx’s vision of the social landscape but now also armed with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Critical Theory asked: “In this maelstrom of social and cultural change, how does the individual produce a sense of self that not only can cope with these macro social forces but also live a reflective, produc-tive life?” In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm describes what he sees to be the modern dilemma:

Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerless-ness and aloneness (1941: 140).

For Fromm, this moment, simultaneously disorienting and liberating, can be transformed into “positive freedom,” a spontaneous active engagement with work, play, and relationships. Or, one can use “mechanisms of escape” to protect oneself from the anxiety attached to the state of anomie in which humanity finds itself. Fromm provides Allen with the modern dilemma, and it is within this world that Zelig negotiates. Will Zelig succumb to the forces of modernity and escape from the new freedoms associated with it, or will he transcend these forces and become a reflexive, autonomous individual?

Fromm posits three mechanisms of escape: conformity, destructiveness, and authoritarianism. Zelig explores all three. We first meet Zelig as the uber-conformer, taking on the characteristics of whomever he is with, no matter how divergent

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they are. At a Sutton family party, he transforms himself first into Republican aristocrats then to Democratic working staff. As his condition worsens, he physi-cally changes into a range of ethnicities. Finally, he is hospitalized. Fascinated with his condition, Dr. Eudora Fletcher becomes his psychiatrist and begins to explore its causes. All she is able to extract from analyzing him is Zelig’s simple answer “I want to be liked.”

Ironically, despite America’s celebration of individualism, it is the theme of overconformity that fascinated post-World War II writers like Fromm and his disciple, David Riesman, who popularized this discussion in The Lonely Crowd (1950). He argues a new form of conformity, other-directedness, emerges in the 1920s, taking hold in the post-World War II period with the rise of what C. Wright Mills (1951) calls the new middle class, a bureaucratic class which no longer owns the means of production. For Reisman, it is a world filled with anxiety, the fear of failure plaguing the individual before she/he even enters a situation. One’s radar always has to be on. To be successful means to fit in, to be able to do the necessary facework. Other writers followed Reisman’s lead. William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) decries the loss of individuality and the loss of entrepre-neurship in the corporate world. Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) constructs a social world of role players quickly shifting identi-ties as fast as a waiter goes through a restaurant’s kitchen doors.

In this new consumer society, one does not just consume goods, but commod-ity signs – images associated with commodities – become the constituents from which a person constructs an identity. In Captains of Consciousness, Ewen (1977) argues that in the 1920s even ethnic presses were running ads that denied and degraded ethnicity; advertising was creating a world in which individuals felt that they were constantly being judged. The new model of success was located in Protestant bourgeois culture. It is against this model that the immigrant experi-ences marginalization. The new cultural imperative is to transform oneself, to slough off one’s ethnicity and to assimilate into the American melting pot. Throughout the film, we watch Zelig become Chinese, Greek, African American. What is noteworthy is that it is only at the film’s end when he marries Eudora Fletcher and comfortably settles into a WASP identity that Zelig feels fully at home. Johnston (2007) argues that Zelig has learned civility and vertically assimi-lates into the middle class, that he is more a conformer now than when he suffered from his neurosis. Ironically, after escaping from Germany and flying upside down across the Atlantic Ocean, Zelig states that, “I have never flown before in my life and it shows exactly what you can do if you’re a total psychotic.” Saul Bellow’s comment follows: “His sickness is the root of his salvation  .  .  .  it was his very disorder that made a hero of him” (Allen 1990). Perhaps Allen leaves a loophole at the end of the film: well-adjustment is not salvation.

Destructiveness, Fromm’s second mechanism of escape, aims at eliminating the threatening object, the cause of anxiety: “I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside of myself by destroying it”

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(Fromm 1941). Paradoxically, the threatening object is the disruptive force of modernity itself, an undefinable enemy. And so substitutions are made – domestic violence, racism, and the genocides it supports, as well as the moral panics that project these fears onto the other. Throughout the first part of the film we are comically taken through the early life of Zelig as destructiveness infects all the personal relations surrounding him. “My brother beat me,” Zelig, under hypnosis, tells Dr. Fletcher. “My sister beat my brother. My father beat my sister and my brother and me. My mother beat my father and my sister and me and my brother. The neighbors beat our family. The people down the block beat the neighbors and our family” (Allen 1990). Later, Allen makes reference to destructiveness in the backlash of hatred and rage directed at Zelig when he falls from grace. On the left he is vilified by labor, and on the right by the Ku Klux Klan. The fear of Zelig, who is now the threatening object, is given voice by an older woman sitting before a microphone in a radio studio: “Leonard Zelig sets a bad moral influence. America is a moral country. It’s a God-fearing country. We don’t condone scandals – scandals of fraud and polygamy. In keeping with a pure society, I say lynch the little heathen.” Here Allen takes a comic swipe at talk radio and its ability to project hostility onto weaker objects.

Allen states that Zelig is “not a pleasant fantasy of metamorphosis but about the kind of personality that leads to fascism” (Perlmutter 1990: 42). Fromm’s third mechanism is authoritarianism. Here, the terror of loneliness and the deep feel-ings of insignificance produced by the breakdown of community and tradition and the dissolution of moral certitude are replaced by fusing oneself to someone or something more powerful. Fromm suggests,

The annihilation of the individual self and the attempt to overcome thereby the unbearable feeling of powerlessness are only one side of the masochistic strivings. The other side is the attempt to become a part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself, to submerge and participate in it. This power can be a person, an institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion (1941: 155).

In each case, the anxiety-ridden, hollowed-out self is replaced by an all-powerful phantasm. The freedom and exhilaration of the American Jazz Age took on the opposite form in Nazi Germany. The dislocated individual is now reconstituted in the crowd, easily directed by a charismatic leader. The Fascist movements of the 1930s absorbed those persons displaced by the forces of modernity.

In Zelig, authoritarianism also exists in what appears to be a more benign form: in celebrity culture – a theme that is also taken up in Allen’s later work. In an allusion to Citizen Kane, we encounter Zelig and Eudora Fletcher in a Pathé news-reel at a San Simeon party. They are mingling with a pantheon of stars from a variety of professions: Marie Dressler, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Jimmy Walker, Tom Mix, Adolph Menjou, Claire Winsor, Dolores Del Rio, James Cagney, and Bobby Jones. Zelig and Fletcher are “on top of the world.” Not only does

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celebrity culture permeate the film, but so does the culture industry, which pro-duces it. Mass media can instantly transform anyone into a celebrity – not just Fletcher and Zelig, but anyone connected to them: Martin Geist, Zelig’s sister, Zelig’s former wives, even the man on the street with an opinion, no matter how uninformed or irrational it might be. And while celebrity culture is clearly less destructive than fascism, both forms are underwritten by the same sociopsycho-logical dynamic – the need for identification thrives on isolation, loneliness, insig-nificance, anxiety, and powerlessness. Rather than filling the void within, fusing oneself to a phantasmagoric other for both Fromm and Allen connotes a loss of identity.

Fromm (1941) separates freedom into two categories: objective freedom or the freedoms guaranteed by democratic formations – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, etc.; and subjective freedom, a psychological category, the ability to think critically and act independently and creatively. It is the latter that concerns both Fromm and Allen. The dilemma for Allen is the same dilemma for Critical Theory: how can Zelig transcend the disruptions of moder-nity itself and become an authentic, autonomous self ? How does one theoretically explain how the social determines the psychological while simultaneously freeing the individual’s psyche from that determination? If alienation produces the need to escape, can’t it also produce autonomy and resistance? What are the mecha-nisms of transcendence?

Allen explores these questions through Zelig’s relationship with Dr. Eudora Fletcher, a psychiatrist. Fletcher is fascinated with Zelig, who claims to be a psy-chiatrist as well. They have numerous unsuccessful, frustrating sessions in which Zelig spews out gibberish – these scenes perhaps commenting on psychiatry in general. Asking him for advice, Fletcher reverses roles and claims to be a patient. When Zelig becomes disorganized, she hypnotizes him and begins to unravel his defenses. Finally, she produces a “subject” who not only has an opinion but also will excessively defend it. After Zelig gets into a fight with another doctor, Fletcher does some “fine tuning,” and Zelig becomes a socially functioning being. He appears normal. Is the attainment of normalcy the solution to the social disrup-tions of modernity? A psychiatry producing well-adjusted people who can func-tion in the chaotic uncertainty of modernity or what has now developed into a full-fledged therapeutic society?

Allen constructs Zelig as an object, a non-self. Throughout the film, he is acted upon by the medical community, the media, Fletcher, Geist, and his sister. Allen’s use of the mockumentary structure reinforces this position. Voiceover, when spoken by a character, subjectivizes the character. The externalizing of the inner voice as the all-knowing narrator produces a deep self who is both reflexive and autonomous. However, Allen’s use of third person voiceover reduces Zelig to an effect, determined by both the structure of the film and the social world which the narrator describes. It is only when Zelig speaks that his subjectivity is apparent. This takes place in two forms: in his psychological double-talk and his abbreviated

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aphoristic-laden speeches – “Be yourself. You have to be your own man” – neither of which suggests any sense of reflexivity or agency.

Has Allen boxed himself in? If all that psychiatry can do is produce a better object, what’s left? Allen chooses romanticism. Love is given the status of an autonomous, transcendent formation, existing outside the social. Not only is Zelig lost in the currents of modernity, but we find Eudora Fletcher there as well. She is also a nonperson living out a script. The only difference is that she appears to be successful and normal. When she reverses roles with Zelig and becomes the patient, she is not performing. The daughter of successful, though dysfunctional, Protestant parents, Fletcher is not just a psychiatrist, but also a damaged person. It is the love relationship that develops between Fletcher and Zelig that cushions them from this anomic social world. The voiceover quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald, “In the end it was after all not the approbation of many but the love of one woman that changed his life.”

In his discussion of Zelig, Allan Bloom (1987) criticizes both Allen and Fromm for their retreat from Nietzche’s nihilism:

If Allen’s art is ultimately shallow and disappointing, it is because it tries to assure us that the agonies of nihilism are just neuroses that can be cured by a little therapy and a little stiffening of our backs. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) is Dale Carnegie with a bit of middle-European cultural whipped cream on top. Get rid of capitalist alienation and Puritan repression, and all will be well as each man chooses for himself (85).

Bloom is correct here. Both Allen and Fromm retreat into idealism without any material grounding. They desire an autonomous authentic individual without being able to recognize any social formations which might support it. It is not surprising that a later work of Fromm’s is entitled The Revolution of Hope (1968). Fromm had moved away from the Marxist base of Critical Theory to an idealistic humanistic perspective.

Critical Theory is ambitious: its goal is to theorize the contradictions of moder-nity against the proposition that social formations ought to be designed to ame-liorate human suffering and reduce exploitation. If there is going to be a new man, it must emerge under new structural formations. Critical Theory calls for strategic structural changes. Fromm drifts away from this macrotheoretical position; Allen, however, has always ridiculed the hubris of it.

From Interiors to Radio Days: An Exploration into Art and Culture

Critical Theory elevates what it referred to as “authentic art” to a privileged posi-tion; it articulates the negative side of the dialectic essential for social progress.

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Adorno (1997) and Marcuse (1979) argue that the role of the artist is to express alienation and estrangement produced by the inequities in the social relations of production. By expressing the negative, it simultaneously gives voice to liberating possibilities. It expresses that which is not yet, but could be. It positions itself against the reproduction of the status quo. The problem occurs if artistic produc-tion loses its autonomy and functions primarily as legitimizing discourse support-ing unequal distributions of power and wealth.

Two seminal essays on the changing nature of art and culture in modernity have shaped the debate on film as a cultural object. In “Art in the Age of Mechani-cal Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin (1968) describes the fundamental change in the art object. Benjamin argues that the traditional art has an “aura,” a result of its functional place in ritual. The meaning of art is locked in location and context. As the ritualistic use of art declines, so does its aura. Consequently, art in the age of mechanical reproduction is no longer dependent upon ritual but exhibition. Photography and film liberate the art form from the “parasitical dependence on ritual” (224).

Benjamin entertains two positions. On the one hand, he argues that film, because of the nature of its production as a commodity, reduces culture as a legiti-mate voice for depicting the existence of modern man.

In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations (Benjamin 1968: 232).

On the other hand, Benjamin contends that film breaks down perceptual barriers of socioeconomic location. Consequently, film has a liberating potential that no previous art form has.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling (236).

Influenced by the work of Brecht, Dziga-Vertov, and Eisenstein, Benjamin gives voice to questions that still haunt filmmakers and film theorists: is film by nature of its production/distribution nexus destined to be nothing more than a commod-ity determined by the logic of capital and spectacle? Where does film’s liberating potential lie? Are specific aesthetic strategies more appropriate to the medium?

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While Benjamin gives voice to both sides of the debate, he is almost always identi-fied with the latter position, that film has liberating potential.

In contrast, Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay, “The Culture Industry” (in Horkheimer and Adorno 1972), aptly subtitled “enlightenment as mass decep-tion,” argues that the production of mass culture driven by market forces does little to produce transcendent possibilities.2

The phrase “culture industry” denotes not only a top-down model of culture production but also an assembly line process driven by market efficiencies not unlike the production of automobiles. Because Hollywood realism is the domi-nant aesthetic, film is particularly problematic, simply duplicating what already exists. Designed to be consumed as a market commodity, film employs the use of stereotypical characters, simplistic plots, unsublimated sexuality, and repetition. This not only promotes infantilism in its audiences but also conformity and sub-missiveness to existing political economic powers. The culture industry, supported by mass communication technologies, reduces artistic production to mindless entertainment. Supporting the expansion of a consumer society, it functions to contain the contradictions produced by capitalism.3

Adorno’s critique is not a critique of popular culture, but of the loss of auton-omy of the artist producing under capitalism. Waldman argues that

the heart of Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, then, is based upon the changed function of the “non-autonomous” art work: it affirms, rather than negates, falsely reconciling the general and the particular, and consequently reconciling the mass audience to the status quo (1977: 43).

Unlike folk culture, which is organically tied to traditional communities, or high culture, which expresses the interest of the bourgeoisie, mass culture is deter-mined by the logic of capital. In this form, art is reduced to a commodity, an exchange value. Moreover, mass culture absorbs both folk and high culture – not only by destroying aesthetic sensibility but also by reducing alternative critical ground. This process reproduces an ideological position synonymous with what Marx termed false consciousness or Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony. Unlike traditional Marxist critique, however, which focuses on the politically correct content of a work, Critical Theory concentrates its critique on the use of standardized repetitive mechanical forms. Rejecting Marxist realism, Adorno and Horkheimer argue for a radicalization of the formal qualities of the cultural text – i.e., Dadaism or Surrealism. They offer a theory of form rather than content.

In a later essay, “Transparencies of Film,” Adorno (1981–1982) does not critique film per se, but criticizes instead the process that tethers its aesthetic vision to the demands of marketability. Praising “works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality” (199), he argues for amateur independent cinema. Noting that “the ideology provided by the industry, its officially intended models, may by no means automatically correspond to those that affect the specta-

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tors” (201), Adorno resisted collapsing text and reception. Most importantly, Adorno recognized the sociological nature of film aesthetics: “There can be no aesthetics of the cinema, not even a purely technological one, which would not include the sociology of the cinema” (202). Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique centers on the concentration of production in Hollywood and what they saw as the commodification of cultural forms. The mass production of culture deeply violated the bourgeois conception of the artist as one who could express the deepest contradictions experienced by man as he encountered the human condi-tion. Sarris’s (1968) auteur theory is an extension of this position, a belief in the power of the autonomous authentic artist, the élan of the auteur – not just a technical expert nor a stylist but an artist with vision.

Allen is concerned with the same questions. When do cultural formations produce infantilism, conformity, and fascism? When is film liberating to the viewer? When is it deadening? What is the responsibility to the filmmaker to himself, to his audience? What is the relationship of aesthetics to the social? Most importantly, what is the relationship of art to the struggle for meaning? How does one articulate suffering, meaning, love, the relationship of living to the moment of dying? Allen’s exploration of these questions takes place in carefully con-structed social landscapes echoing Adorno’s proposition that there is no aesthetic of cinema without a sociology of cinema. Allen’s formal aesthetic choices are determined by the social dynamics infused in each film’s diegesis.

While Allen’s romance with popular culture positions him on the opposite side of the culture debate with Adorno and Horkheimer (Grimsted 1991), Allen’s work itself as well as his exploration of the role of the artist/intellectual parallels Adorno and Horkheimer. For many, in Annie Hall Allen establishes what is often seen as an anti-intellectual bias in his work. The famous Marshall McLuhan scene in which he pulls McLuhan out of thin air to correct a movie-line know-it-all, and the New York party scene in which he escapes intellectual gibberish to the bedroom to watch a Knicks game establish a style in which he regularly jibes at intellectuals. However, Allen’s attack on the intellectual as well as the artist takes place under three conditions: intellectuality is divorced from the reality of everyday life, the speaker is shallow and ungrounded, and/or the speaker is using his/her relation-ship to knowledge or art as a status enhancer. Allen is not critical of intellectual discourses, but of how they are used in social situations.

Allen makes a significant leap from his jibes at the “intellectual” in Annie Hall to his study of the centrality of aesthetics to bourgeois identity in Interiors. Each character reflects a different side of what Bourdieu (1984) refers to as the aesthetic disposition. For Eve, the matriarch and an interior designer, aesthetics is formal, a function of the relation of one object to one another; for her, the relationship of the aesthetic to actual life is secondary. The consequence of this position is a lifeless aesthetic, an ice palace. Renata, the successful but burnt-out poet, pro-duces work composed of aphorisms divorced from lived experience. Her poem is entitled “Wondering,” but wondering about what? It celebrates a subject without an object. What’s missing is an experiential referent. Nevertheless, her sister and

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husband envy her success. Joey, the middle daughter, is a would-be artist, who jumps from medium to medium. She lacks the artistic talent necessary to succeed and therefore lacks the cache to attain full bourgeois identity. Frederick, Renata’s husband, is the clever writer in whose work style outruns content. As a critic, he is willing to tear down other writers, but he hastens into a narcissistic retreat when he is criticized. Michael, Joey’s husband, a Marxist filmmaker married into a bourgeois family, is uneasy about the hypocrisy of his life in relation to his work. Flynn, the youngest daughter, has gone to Hollywood to make movies. Lacking the intellectual finesse of other family members, she fails to enjoy the higher status associated with serious art. Her sexuality, however, gives her a power that the other daughters lack. Rose, the outsider engaged to wed the sisters’ father, has no pretentions: she simply enjoys life. Her son sells kitsch at a Las Vegas casino. Joey refers to her as a vulgarian. While Allen steers away from class politics, Interiors is a sophisticated analysis of the intersection of class, status, and aesthetics. It is not that class doesn’t matter for Allen; for him, more dangerous than the effects of class on relationality is a political agenda to eliminate social class.

Paying homage to both Bergman and Fellini, Stardust Memories is an exploration of both the internal and external life of filmmaker Sandy Bates. The film inter-weaves dreamlike memories of childhood, family, friends, and lovers and clips from Sandy’s autobiographical films juxtaposed with a nonstop staccato barrage of the filmmaker’s demanding fans. Sandy must negotiate these constant intru-sions as he explores the meaning of filmmaking in relation to audience, industry, art, and life itself.

In the film’s loosely constructed narrative, Sandy, a successful director, heads to a film culture weekend, a publicity event at which fans, writers, critics, and academics can mingle with the director. Everybody wants something from Sandy. He is offered speaking engagements, scripts to read, even sex. Autograph seekers and picture-taking fans interrupt his most intimate moments. The cult of the celebrity promoted by events such as this one has turned back on the celebrity. Every moment is destroyed by fan adulation. Feeling exploited by turning out comic films, Sandy ventures out and produces a serious piece. His agent and pro-ducer, however, question his judgment.

SANDY: I don’t want to make funny movies anymore. They can’t force me to. I don’t feel funny. I look around the world and all I see is human suffering.

AGENT: Human suffering doesn’t sell tickets in Kansas City.PRODUCER: They want to laugh in Kansas City, they’ve been working in the wheat

fields all day (Allen 1983: 286).

Sandy rejects being just another cog in the culture industry. With a wall-sized image of a Vietnamese man being executed in the background, Sandy expresses the dilemma to his girlfriend, Dorrie.

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All those people and how unhappy most of them are. The terrible things they do to each other. Everything’s over so quickly and you don’t have any idea if it’s worth it or not” (Allen 1983: 287).

Later in the movie, when he meets a group of space aliens, he asks them why there is so much suffering and what he can do about it. He is told to make funnier movies.

Critical Theory and Allen share this same concern. What is the role of the intellectual/artist faced with human suffering? Critical Theory starts with a socio-logical proposition that in a given society specific possibilities exist for the amel-ioration of human suffering and Reason can guide us to the specific ways for realizing those possibilities. For Critical Theory, it is the role of the artist/intellectual to recognize those social forces that contain the contradictions that produce positive social change. Critical Theory is driven by a Marxist agenda. To the extent that mass media is a force of containment, simply reproducing the status quo, it is to be criticized.

Allen also expresses a deep concern for human suffering but starts from a philo-sophical position that suffering is a function of the human condition. How does one position oneself as an artist in relation to this dilemma? Unlike Critical Theory, which directs criticism at the control and distribution of resources and power, Allen focuses on the interpersonal. It is at this level that pain and suffering are produced. Allen is leery of political agendas: for him, they are as limiting to the artist as is the organization of the culture industry itself.

Allen does not deny inequality nor the strictures of social class. They are simply taken for granted. In interviews, Allen frequently refers to luck as the key ingredi-ent of success. In Stardust Memories, Jerry Aber, a childhood friend with whom he played stickball, stops to talk to Sandy.

SANDY: So what are you doing ? What are you up to?JERRY: You know what I do now. I drive a cab.SANDY: You look good. There’s nothing wrong with that.JERRY: Yeah, but look at me compared to you. Beautiful broads.SANDY: What do you want me to say? I was the kid in the neighborhood that told

the jokes. Right. So we live in a society that puts a big value on jokes. Think of it this way. If I had been an Apache Indian – those guys didn’t need comedians at all. Right? So I’d be out of work.

JERRY: Come on – that doesn’t help me feel better.SANDY: I don’t know what to say – I’ve got such a headache. Luck. It’s all luck. I’m

the first to admit it. I was a lucky bum. If I was not born in Brooklyn, if I were born in Poland or Berlin, I’d be a lampshade today. Right? It could happen just like that. Be thankful that you’re not Nat Bernstein. Yeah, wasted away. Incurable disease. It was absolutely terrible (Allen 1983: 342).

Allen recognizes the existence of class relations but nullifies them by privileg-ing luck as the main ingredient in his position. Although Allen has an acute

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understanding of the dynamics of social class, his focus is on the interpersonal, not the macrosocioeconomic.

Allen believes in the integrity of the artist who must resist the demands of the culture industry to produce films that are moneymaking commodities. When the studio decides to reshoot the ending of Sandy’s film, landing the travelers on the train at jazz heaven instead of the garbage dump, Sandy protests.

SANDY: And, you know the whole point of the movie is that no one is saved.WALSH: Sandy, this is an Easter film. We don’t need a movie by an atheist.SANDY: Jazz heaven – that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t control

life; it doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only–only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I’m an absolute expert (Allen 1983: 335).

Similarly, when the studio wanted to change the ending of The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen stood firm in the face of the difference in box office receipts a happy ending would have generated (Schickel 2003).

Allen’s answers to the questions that surround art and life are personal and romantic. Meaning is reduced to the nonrepeatable idyllic magic moment.

Sandy narrates:

It was one of those great Spring days. A Sunday. And you knew summer would be coming soon. I remember that morning Dorrie and I had gone for a walk in the park and back to the apartment and we were just sort of sitting there and I put on a record of Louis Armstrong which is music I grew up loving. It was very, very pretty. And I happened to glance over and I saw Dorrie sitting there  .  .  .  and I remember thinking to myself how terrific she was and how much I loved her. . . .  I guess it was the combination of everything . . . the sound of that music, and the breeze and how beautiful Dorrie looked to me and for one brief moment everything just seemed to come together perfectly, and I felt happy, almost indestructible in a way. That simple little moment of contact moved me in a very, very profound way (Allen 1983: 372).

All of Sandy’s artistic struggles are meaningless next to this memory. A beautiful day, a beautiful woman imaged up with Louis Armstrong playing in the back-ground. Ironically, Sandy’s memory of this moment with Dorrie places him in jazz heaven.

In Stardust Memories, Allen takes on the relationship of the filmmaker to the culture industry and here the industry includes all the mechanisms that produce an audience – publicity events, fan clubs, academic journals, university courses, award ceremonies, etc. In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen looks at the relationship of Hollywood to everyday life. He sets the film in the Depression in a factory town in New Jersey. The factory has closed down; men are out of work, hanging around the street; the houses have deteriorated. Even the amusement park is

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barren and emptied of life. The washed-out, drab colors of the film, the dull overcoats everyone seems to wear, project a sense of struggle to just to get through each day.

In the midst of this, we are introduced to Cecilia, who works as a waitress in a diner with her sister. As they talk about the lives of Hollywood stars, a costumer yells “Where’s my toast?” and the boss prods them, “Let’s go, girls. Cecilia, your sister is slow. Ladies, there is a depression on. A lot of people would like this job if you can’t handle it.” The fantasies produced by Hollywood only last a moment before the grind of everyday life intrudes. In the next scene, we are introduced to Monk, Cecilia’s husband, an out of work, brutish man who is pitching pennies with buddies. When Cecilia appears, he asks her for some “dough.” As the film progresses we learn that she is a victim of domestic violence; Allen, however, never shows us the violence.

Stuart and Elizabet Ewen (1982) argue that cinema and fashion were two domains in which young women, particularly immigrant women of the 1920s and 1930s, could escape the oppressive patriarchal formations found in ethnic immi-grant enclaves. Cinema provided new roles that expressed the desire for autonomy and empowerment. Ewen and Ewen argue that these moments are only ironic, because cultural hegemony is at work. The dynamics of capitalism redirect their dreams into fantasies and consumption rather than into real political change. Hol-lywood is simply another discourse (like advertising and fashion) that distracts individuals from a reflexive relationship to their everyday lives, disguising contra-dictions by functioning as a legitimation discourse for the inequities produced by capitalism.

Allen interrogates Hollywood cinema from a sociological position. By choos-ing to locate the film in the Depression, he widens the gap between fantasy and everyday reality. Art opens up an imaginary world of possibility, but it is just that imaginary in which kisses are perfect. Against the backdrop of the Depres-sion, movies can only provide a momentary illusion. Harsh reality waits outside the movie theater.

But Allen does not simply create a binary world of illusion and reality. Even in the Hollywood illusion of the interior Purple Rose of Cairo, inequality seeps in. Allen includes Delilah, the black maid, into the illusion. Delilah is making the bed while the countess is lying on a couch, painting her nails. While Delilah notes her romantic infatuation with Tom Baxter, the countess replies, “Come on, Delilah, draw my bath.” And Delilah responds “Yes, M’am. Now would you be wantin’ the big bubbles or the ass’s milk?” The inequalities of class and race are injected into the Hollywood version of reality, contradictions waiting for a later historical moment to draw them out.

Most readings of the film focus on the ending and applaud Allen’s con-flicted and complex construction of the relationship of cinema to everyday life. Bailey notes that Purple Rose of Cairo dramatizes “Cecilia’s gradual, ultimately ecstatic reabsorption into a ‘heaven’ whose utter fraudulence it has been her

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dismal necessity to confront throughout the film” (2001: 152). Brode applauds Allen’s ability to hold contradictory positions expressed in the character of Cecilia: “She is a person of romantic sensibility tempered by a realist’s awareness: She is Woody Allen.  .  .  .  Thus, he experiences the worst of both possible worlds: a romantic’s innocence and idealism, a realist’s cynicism and pessimism” (1991: 241). Dunne also praises the film’s ending: “Unlike Stardust Memories, this film does not serially propose and reject such conclusions. Instead, it suspends the positive and negative, the real and the imaginary, in a purely cinematic form of ambiguity” (1987: 27). For both Critical Theory and Allen, the processes of projection-identification produced by Hollywood cinema and the realist illusion have their dangers. But for Allen they also provide some magical moments as long as the illusion is recognized as such.

Although Stardust Memories expresses Allen’s desire to maintain his distance from the entertainment industry, The Purple Rose of Cairo accepts the realm of entertainment as producing joyful moments, which can be mimicked in everyday life – for instance, the ukulele scene in a music store. This theme is carried into his next film, Radio Days, a series of vignettes loosely based on Allen’s childhood memories. Each story is tied to a radio-induced memory, often narrated by Allen: Joe getting caught stealing from a collection fund to establish the state of Israel in order to purchase the Masked Avenger ring, Tess listening to the Breakfast with Irene and Roger Show while she cleans her family’s dirty dishes, Aunt Bea’s date leaving her in the countryside when hearing Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, the failed rescue of Dolly Phelps, a young girl who fell into a well, the broadcast ultimately saving Joe from a spanking. Despite the rabbi’s warning – “Radio. It’s all right once in awhile. Otherwise, it tends to induce bad values, false dreams, lazy habits. Listening to the radio, these stories of foolishness and violence” – Allen’s stories weave the events and personalities of radio innocently and romanti-cally into the fabric of everyday life.

Schickel writes that Radio Days contains some of the recurring themes in Allen’s work –

his somewhat unreasoned (but heartfelt) love of his city, his sense of the endless mutability of fashion, his awareness of how magical phenomena, like radio, can profoundly affect us and then, in the wink of history’s eye, become totally irrelevant (2003: 37).

Moreover, radio, because it lacks the visual, opens up an imaginative space. The characters on radio were larger than life. It is the disconnect between body and voice, description and reality, that produces space for individual fantasies to take form. The Masked Avenger is portrayed by small, bald Wally Shawn; family members pointlessly debate the talents of a radio ventriloquist; Biff Baxter sends the neighborhood boys looking for German submarines off the coast of Rockaway – these are the magical moments of childhood enhanced by radio. Unrecognized

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when they are experienced, these moments are nostalgically gathered together to produce warm familial memories. These moments intertwine with popular culture: the premise of Radio Days, the last scene on the train in Sandy’s movie in Stardust Memories, even the bittersweet ending of The Purple Rose of Cairo – for Allen, popular culture anchors identity.

First generation Critical Theorists’ relationship with radio heavily influenced their later analysis of mass culture. Unlike its associations for Allen, radio was associated with the power of Nazi propaganda, the rise of the totalitarian state, and the memories of genocide and death camps. State-controlled German radio was an essential tool in Hitler’s solidification of power. Emerging from this moment of history, it is no wonder that most Critical Theorists are wary of all forms of mass media. Horkheimer and Adorno projected their fears on the Ameri-can media industry. It is perhaps these two radically different experiences with radio that explain the different orientations that Critical Theory and Woody Allen have to the production of culture.

Celebrity, Negotiating Identity

In the age of postmodernity, Critical Theory faced two fundamental challenges: Lyotard (1984) lays out the first premise of postmodernity, arguing that the grand narratives of modernity – science, humanism, Marxism – have lost legitimacy and have collapsed. The belief in scientific, technological, and societal progress under the auspices of the Western tradition were delegitimized by historical events, such as the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalinism, as well as the Vietnamese War. Moreover, the rise of postco-lonial and other voices from the margins called into question the use of Enlighten-ment narratives associating technological progress and civilization as discourses that served the interests of colonial powers. Critical Theory’s agenda to produce a totalizing theory, to elide Marxism with psychoanalysis and to extend the Enlight-enment project, were shaken.

The second challenge faced by Critical Theory and a central problem with which Allen engages is the problem of interiority. Postmodern theory called into question the notion of the deep self, a belief that fueled the bourgeois conception of identity. For Critical Theory, the deep self emerges out of a moment of aliena-tion, an awareness of what possibly could be, a sense of the self in relation to the social with the ability to reflect on the contradictions between existence and pos-sibility. For Critical Theory alienation presumes the possibility of coherency, a reconciliation of the self with the social. It is the role of the artist/intellectual to speak to this moment of alienation. The problem of interiority also haunts Allen’s films. His work is often self-reflexive to the point at which he accuses himself of being of self-indulgent. Interiors, a study of the aesthetic dimension and

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the construction of self, finds in human relations nothing but rivalry, jealousy, and narcissism, and yet the form this film takes demands at least an understanding of the artist’s dilemma. Stardust Memories follows an artist struggling to produce a meaningful work, one who struggles to make sense out his life. Similarly, Zelig assesses the impact of modernity on the formation of identity. Allen also expresses the problem of alienation as neurosis, a privileged position he uses comically to explore the contradictions between self-formation and the social materialized as interpersonal relations.

Fredric Jameson (1991), who carries the banner of Critical Theory into the current era, locates postmodernity as a function of advanced industrial capitalism in which commodification takes over all aspects of everyday life. Jameson articu-lates the problem of identity formation in the age of postmodernity using the metaphor of schizophrenia to describe the relation between cultural fragmenta-tion and self-fragmentation. He argues that postmodern cultural formations are composed of disconnected, decontexualized commodity signs. Driven by the logic of capital supported by electronic technologies, the velocity by which these signs travel through our lives has highly accelerated. If identity is a function of culture, what happens to the self when a culture is composed of fragmented, decontextual-ized, fast-moving commodity signs? Jameson theorizes that the postmodern self is composed of signifiers that fail to link to a coherent sequence, like words without a sentence. When all that matters is surface, the logic of the spectacle, which aggrandizes all surfaces, prevails. This is the world of Celebrity.

The protagonist of Celebrity is Lee Simon, played by Kenneth Branagh. An Allenesque character, Lee speaks in a hyper, panic-driven language. Working as a magazine writer, not quite a gossip columnist but one who has entry backstage to the private lives of the stars, he “rubs elbows” with actors and actresses, super-models, critics, novelists. Although he is driven by the desire to break into that group, he skirts the edges and remains on the margins, waiting for his big break.

Lee is unable to commit to anything – his work, his novel, his relationships. He is not anchored to anything or anyone. His self-deprecating manner of speaking uses a language structure composed of fragments and nonsequiturs. His dimin-ished sense of self leaves him lacking in the bravado necessary to ascend to heav-enly world of celebrity.

Lee has divorced Robin, his schoolteacher wife of 16 years. Lacking self-confidence and completely embittered by the experience of rejection, she floun-ders after the divorce. Guided by a friend, she tries therapy, a religious retreat, and finally winds up at a plastic surgeon’s office. Instead of undergoing plastic surgery, she meets Tony, a grounded TV producer who is doing a show on the practice. Tony not only offers Robin a job but also marriage. At the end of the film, Robin has her own TV show interviewing celebrities at a famous restaurant. She has ascended to celebrity status. Ironically, Robin is doing what Lee is doing: pro-ducing celebrity; the only difference is that she does it in front of the camera.

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For Allen, celebrity culture has penetrated all cultural formations. At a Catholic retreat complete with a “Kumbaya”-singing nun and celebrity priest, practitioners debate whether the pope is more popular than Elvis, Jesus, or the Beatles. At an opening, the artist Bruce Bishop narcissistically comments, “Don’t buy my paint-ings to be in, buy them only if you have to have a Bruce Bishop,” reducing art to a signature on a painting. Dr. Lupus, a plastic surgeon featured in Newsweek, cannot keep up with demand. Robin even interviews a celebrity real estate agent.

In this short dialogue scene in the kitchen, Allen captures the central contradic-tion of celebrity culture.

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: This is your 15 minutes of fame.TONY: Hey look. I never believed what Andy Warhol said about

everybody being famous for 15 minutes. It sounds great, but it’s not true. Almost nobody will be famous for even one minute, so enjoy it.

ROBIN: OK. How did I manage to swing this? Last year I was teach-ing English, performing a serious function and suddenly through a whirlwind series of events I’ve become a woman I always hated, but I’m happier.

While Allen criticizes the spectacle of celebrity culture, he refuses to theoretically locate it in the logic of capital. He paints a narcissistic culture in which fame and recognition replace money, a Hobbesian world in which everyone battles everyone else for attention. There never seems to be enough. This new world is not a world of bourgeoisie and proletariat, but of smug self-confident celebrities and anxiety-ridden wannabes. Filled with narcissistic pretenders who are unaware that they are pretending, surface dominates the postmodern world. Self-knowledge is at a premium; everyone is an actor – the successful ones become celebrities. The rest press their noses to the glass, desiring to be on the other side. In Celebrity, the opening song, “You Ought to Be in Pictures,” appears to be taken literally by everyone, an ode to narcissism rather than nostalgia.

In this new cultural formation, where is the self located? Is it, as Jameson argues, simply sliding from one signifier to the next? – none of which is attached to a signified? Authenticity and meaning have been overwhelmed by the pervasive-ness of the spectacle. Allen is generally a romantic – Zelig finds love, Sandy nos-talgically remembers a moment, Annie and Alvy become friends and share memories of their good times together, even Cecilia returns to the movies to experience the magical moments of Astaire and Rogers dancing, and Radio Days is full of warmth from beginning to end. In Celebrity, there is no redemption via ecstatic moments. The film ends where it began. The camera pans the audience at the screening of The Liquidator, finally resting on Lee’s face. He looks up at the screen to see “HELP!” written across the sky. Here Allen comes very close to Adorno and Horkheimer’s position that the growing pervasiveness of mass culture

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leaves the individual without the necessary cultural material to develop an anchored sense of self and incapable of acting from a reflexive moral position.

Conclusion

Using Critical Theory to interrogate Allen’s work produces an uneasy reading. His relationship with popular culture, his romanticism, and his refusal to tie himself to a political position are at odds with Critical Theory’s agenda, and yet there are nagging connections: his construction of the cultural landscape, his privileging of marginality, and the aesthetic of his work itself.

The filmmaker not only tells a story but also constructs the world in which the story takes place – the diegesis: “a fictional universe whose elements fit together to form a global unity” (Aumont, Bergala, Marie, and Vernet 1992). Allen’s con-struction of the cinematic world draws heavily on the same intellectual concerns as Critical Theory. Although Allen refuses to tie himself theoretically to either Marx or Freud, his landscapes are ripe with cultural contradictions produced by class, gender, and ethnicity that cause psychological injuries. Moreover, Allen integrates the anomic forces of modernity and postmodernity into his films. Characters are both extensions of these forces and agents who must act in a world determined by them. Zelig is a product of disruptive intense social change associ-ated with the emergence of modernity in the 1920s. In Interiors, the family is encumbered by destructive cultural dynamics embedded in the lives of the upper middle class. As a victim of domestic violence, Cecilia’s life is structured by the intersection of class and gender, their dynamics intensified by the economic hard-ships of the Depression in The Purple Rose of Cairo. In Celebrity, Lee and Robin must negotiate a world in which narcissism runs wild. Confronted by macrosocio-logical forces, Allen’s characters flounder in their search for solutions to the dilem-mas in which they find themselves. These are the same dilemmas theorized by Critical Theorists.

Although Allen’s films are undergirded by a sociology that focuses on cultural contradictions of modernity and their impact on the lives of his characters, Allen is often positioned as antitheoretical. Allen’s relationship to intellectual interpreta-tions is always strained and tainted with the comedic. He grounds his films in a theoretically constructed diegesis but is not willing to commit the narrative or his characters to a theoretical position. Uncertainty is Allen’s guiding principle. The nature of human existence is simply too complex, random, chaotic to make sense out of it. Allen’s refusal to accept any one explanation as total and complete pro-duces an open discursive space for the audience to interject their interpretations. Nevertheless, the cinematic worlds he constructs in his films contain the same social dynamics found in Critical Theory’s vision of modern society.

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Allen draws heavily on the position that we live our lives in a narcissistic culture continually inflamed by the needs of media. His characters have to contend with the penetration of media into everyday life, which is also the central concern of Adorno and Horkheimer. Allen’s characters suffer the inadequacies and unfilled desires produced by an excessively media-drenched society. Although Allen has no utopian inclinations, his voice is a critical one. Life ought not to be this way. This stance is most pronounced in Allen’s depiction of neurosis. It is from this position that Allen takes jabs at the dynamics of mainstream culture reproduced in his own and his characters’ identities. He produces an everyman who struggles with cul-tural dynamics and social forces outside of his understanding and control. Conse-quently, the neurotic is both marginalized and privileged. This disruption to the psyche produces a negative ground, equivalent to Critical Theory’s contention that art expresses the negative.

It is Allen’s romantic relationship with popular culture that positions him against the rigorous analysis that Critical Theory directs at mass culture. However, Allen’s work itself stands outside of the culture industry. If the role of artist is to produce a critical dimension, an alternative to the status quo, Allen is such an artist. Critical Theory argues for an aesthetics that open up new ways of think-ing about the social. Allen’s use of multiple aesthetic forms is a refusal to be constrained by Hollywood realism. Allen produces a range of reflexive aesthetic structures, which function as a critical sociology. Although Allen himself often dismisses the sociology of his work, the cinematic worlds he produces are heavily informed by an understanding of the sociopsychological dynamics that are central to the work of Critical Theory.

Notes

1 In the introduction to Eclipse of Reason Horkheimer (1974) pessimistically describes the central contradiction of modernity. “The present potentialities of social achievement surpass the expectations of all of the philosophers and statesmen who have ever out-lined in utopian programs the idea of a truly human society. Yet there is a universal feeling of fear and disillusionment. The hopes of mankind seem to be farther from fulfillment today than they were even in the groping epochs when they were first formulated by humanists. It seems that even as technical knowledge expands the horizon of man’s thought and activity, his autonomy as an individual, his ability to resist the growing apparatus of mass manipulation, his power of imagination, his independent judgment appear to be reduced. Advance in technical facilities for enlight-enment is accompanied by a process of dehumanization. Thus progress threatens to nullify the very goal it is supposed to realize – the idea of man.”

2 “The Culture Industry” is a chapter in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlighten-ment (1972). Adorno, however, is given first authorship to this chapter.

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3 Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument is heavily criticized for its elitism. Adorno’s cri-tique of jazz further positioned him as a European who didn’t understand American cultural formations. Even Brecht, whose work Adorno admires, referred to him as a cul-tural mandarin.

Works Cited

Adorno, T. (1997) Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.Adorno, T. (1981–1982) “Transparencies of film.” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn/

Winter), 199–205.Allen, W. (1983) Four Films of Woody Allen. New York: Farber.Allen, W. (1990) Three Films of Woody Allen: “Zelig,” Broadway Danny Rose,” “The Purple Rose

of Cairo.” New York: Farber and Farber.Aumont, J., A. Bergala, M. Marie, and M. Vernet (1992) Aesthetics of Film. Austin, TX:

University of Texas Press.Bailey, P. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of

Kentucky.Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.Berman, M. (1981) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York:

Simon & Schuster.Bloom, A. (1987) “How Nietzsche conquered America.” The Wilson Quarterly 11.3,

80–93.Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.Brode, D. (1991) The Films of Woody Allen. New York: Citadel Press.Dunne, M. (1987) “Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the tradition of metafic-

tion.” Film Criticism 12.1 (Fall), 19–27.Ewen, S. (1977) Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer

Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.Ewen, S. and E. Ewen (1982) Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American

Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill.Fromm, E. (1941) Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.Fromm, E. (1955) The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart.Fromm, E. (1968) The Revolution of Hope. New York: Harper and Row.Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.Grimsted, D. (1991) “The Purple Rose of popular culture theory: An exploration of intel-

lectual kitsch.” American Quarterly 43.4 (Dec.), 564–578.Horkheimer, M. (1974) Eclipse of Reason. New York: Seabury Press.Horkheimer, M. and T. Adorno (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and

Herder.Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute

of Social Research, 1923–1950. Boston: Little, Brown.

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Johnston, R. (2007) “Ethnic and discursive drag in Woody Allen’s Zelig.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24, 297–306.

Kellner, D. (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Lyotard, J. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: Uni-versity of Minneapolis Press.

Marchand, R. (1985) Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press.

Marcuse, H. (1979) The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press.

Marx, K. and F. Engels (2002) The Communist Manifesto. New York: Penguin.Mills, C.W. (1951) White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University

Press.Perlmutter, R. (1990) “Zelig according to Bakhtin.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12,

37–47.Riesman, D. (1950) The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Sarris, A. (1968) The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968. New York:

Dutton.Schickel, R. (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Schumpeter, J. (1950) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper.Waldman, D. (1977) “Critical theory and film: Adorno and “The Culture Industry Revis-

ited.” New German Critique 12 (Fall), 39–60.Whyte, W.H. (1956) The Organization Man. New York: Simon & Schuster.

8

This chapter arrives on a decidedly postmodern trajectory, one where reflexivity1 is as much a practice of reading a film as it is a process of making one (Frus 2008: 57). It is influenced by my own experiences with films in general, and Woody Allen’s work in particular, over the last 35 or so years. It is steeped in heuristic inquiry,2 a process of discovery that acknowledges both the personal and creative dimensions of critical analysis. And, finally, this chapter will be by necessity “an” interpretation, not “the” interpretation, for, like the emerging genre of the “essay film” (Rascaroli 2008: 25), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) poses questions but offers no simple solutions, and is elusive and inconclusive. I offer these caveats as a framing device, for this discussion is as much about you, the reader, as it is about me, the writer. Unlike a typical Hollywood narrative that offers easy access but limited potential for interpretation, Crimes can be fairly impenetrable for all but those willing to do the spadework of interpretation – not unlike Eco’s classic “open text” (1979: 49). At the very least we need to actively meet this film, for it resists what Barthes would call passive viewing (1974: 4) and, like all reflexive works, Crimes and Misdemeanors demands engaged (or even imaginative) thinking (Stam 1985: 16).

Many of Allen’s films contain themes pertaining to morality and existential angst, and Crimes and Misdemeanors is no exception. Mark Roche sees competing philosophies of justice (2006: 269), Sander Lee places the film within Allen’s career-long investigation of the moral decline of society (2002: 139), and Mashey Bernstein suggests the film is a meditation on the nature of good and evil in a post-Holocaust world (1996: 227). For my part, however, in this chapter I am looking at how both main storylines can be seen as interlinked ruminations not only on the art and process of filmmaking, but also on the concept of story, the construction of the cinematic narrative, and the audience’s role in its

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Reflections on Reflexivity

Gregg Bachman

Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reflections on Reflexivity 171

interpretation and experiences. What is challenging is that all the strands are tightly woven into the film’s fabric, and no amount of tugging on any one indi-vidual thread holds the easy promise of a clean and complete unraveling.

In order to locate Allen’s efforts within the zeitgeist of postmodern filmmaking, we must accept the development and refinement of his reflexive tendencies as a natural outgrowth of his career as a stand-up comedian and author of comedic essays. I have argued elsewhere that Allen’s earliest public, professional persona is inextricably linked to his Jewish identity (Bachman 1996: 179). Although it is dangerous, if not foolhardy, to try to sum up all of Jewish humor (Whitfield 1986: 247), at its core is an intellectual tradition, steeped in cerebral manipulations that expose ironies and contradictions in a harsh and cruel world. It is a comedy of self-deprecating outcasts (Bleiweiss 1996: 203) that “raise(s) comedy-as-hostility and comedy as tragic catharsis to new levels and new expectations” (Cohen 1987: 9).

Allen’s “little man” persona, positioned as he is on the margins of society, affords him an opportunity to critique the mainstream norms and mores from the perch of an outsider, yet much of his humor depends on his location as an insider, albeit a poorly fitted one (Pogel 1987: 8). Laughter depends on the recognition of this self-consciousness (Yacowar 1979: 5), of the swinger or self-professed ladies’ man who enjoys so little success yet can’t seem to gain the perspective that he’s a loser at love, of the sophisticated intellectual who can’t even manage a relationship with his kitchen appliances. His comedy routines depend on the powers of dis-junctive comparison, ironic Hegelian dialectics, born of competing visions – one rooted in traditional logic and the other whirling around in an almost surreal plane. The target audience is limited, however, to those who can appreciate, if not comprehend, the obscure references. This is captured beautifully in a starkly autobiographical moment in Annie Hall (1977) when Annie (Diane Keaton) enthu-siastically responds to Alvy’s (Woody Allen) stand-up routine before a college audience, a routine cribbed directly from Woody Allen’s own stand-up catalogue. “I’m beginning to get the references . . .” Annie assures Alvy, who then warns her that the later show is layered with even more challenging material.

This understructure emerges more sharply in his comic writing, his “occasion-als” that appear in periodicals such as The New Yorker and Esquire. Much of his humor depends on the reader’s at least nodding acquaintance with the founda-tional theories and critical processes of literature, philosophy, academia, art, or religion, which he then gently probes and critiques: “God is silent.  .  .  . Now if man could only shut up” (Allen 1980: 5) or “Can we actually ‘know’ the universe? My God, it’s hard enough finding your way around Chinatown” (Allen 1971: 29). His critiques never appear to be withering or sharp; he pokes, he prods, he exposes possible flaws, he offers momentary delight and then opens the door, as only the best comedy can, to more serious consideration (Mast 1973: 15).

Allen’s comedic sensibilities seemed to have uniquely positioned him to take full advantage of the emerging freedom of expression employed by the bold

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cinematic experimenters in the 1960s, an era alive with artistic possibilities. Led by such daring young filmmakers as those of the French Nouvelle Vague, the classic cinema was under assault. The illusion of reality, the basic premise of the classic Hollywood narrative, arguably the dominant artistic mode of the twen-tieth century, was undermined by fresh takes on the tropes of genre and the conventions of the strict formalist lexicon that had shaped and informed the com-mercial medium for decades. Inspired by the likes of such visionaries as Resnais, Truffaut, and Godard, filmmakers became enmeshed in a dialogue on the very nature of motion pictures, transforming themselves into, as Godard observes, critics who made movies instead of just writing criticism (qtd. in Stam 1985: 17). Academia soon followed suit, creating grand theories of how movies make meaning, borrowing heavily from psychoanalysis and the literary fields.

Allen was apparently not immune to such heady machinations. From his first forays as a director, we can see an overt tendency to explore and exploit the cin-ematic medium. Take the Money and Run (1969) is a full-on assault on the tropes of the documentary, operating in (and perhaps helping to define) the parodic modality of the “mockumentary.” His next effort, Bananas (1971), has an almost manic reflexivity, pulling out all the stops in a tour-de-force send-up of media in the modern, electronic age. Even though such playful reflexivity can be dismissed as a mere superficial method of demystification (Stam 1985: 165), this does not preclude such efforts from the possibilities of more significant meanings. For example, a small moment with larger ramifications occurs in Bananas when Woody Allen’s character, Fielding Melish, receives an invitation to dine with the president of the small banana republic in which he finds himself. Melish lies back on his bed in a rhapsodic reverie, accompanied by the standard, nondiegetic harp music on the film’s soundtrack. Something attracts Melish’s attention, however, and we quickly realize it’s the music itself, whose narrative functionality is punc-tured when Melish throws open the closet door, exposing the source of the music, a harpist who apologizes, explaining that he has trouble finding a place in which to practice. Laughter ensues but, through reflection, Allen has made his point. He has literally “opened the door” to speculation on the narrative functions of non-diegetic music.

Throughout the 1970s and beyond, Allen continued to refine his use of reflexiv-ity to the point that his audiences came more prepared to suspend belief rather than disbelief (Recchia 1991: 258). These films parody literary and filmic genres, bend time and space, and probe art and philosophy in increasingly skillful efforts, leading us to Crimes and Misdemeanors, which sits, conveniently as of this writing, at the midpoint of his filmmaking career.

There are two main plot lines in Crimes and Misdemeanors. The seemingly more serious story – and for the purposes of this chapter, the more traditional in the narrative sense – concerns Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a successful ophthal-mologist who engineers the murder of his mistress, Dolores “Del” Paley (Anjelica Huston) when she threatens to expose their affair and, potentially, his questionable

Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reflections on Reflexivity 173

financial moves. The seemingly “lighter” plot concerns Allen’s Cliff Stern, a small-time documentary filmmaker who loses both in love and in his art. Both plots can be approached as inquiries into the nature of the filmic experience. I arrive at this reading not only by way of his earlier works, but also by his utilization of the intertextual technique of inserting excerpts of old black-and-white feature films into the narrative flow. That all of the scenes come from mainstream studio releases of the Golden Age of Hollywood, with their neatly structured, unambigu-ous endings, clearly defined character arcs, and unmistakable moral structures is a point that should not be ignored. This consciously reflexive technique prompts the viewer to speculate on the idea of narratives, of stories, their interpretations and (re)telling, that permeates the entire film.

The first excerpt appears after the initial contentious scene between Judah and Del, centered on the letter she sent to Miriam (Claire Bloom), Judah’s wife, which he intercepted and subsequently destroyed. Tension and argument ensue and the scene ends with the two in an uncomfortable embrace as Judah sighs, “Oh, God.” This quiet moment is suddenly ruptured by the disorienting appearance of Ann (Carole Lombard) and David (Robert Montgomery) in an argument from Alfred Hitchcock’s RKO release Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), followed closely by the revela-tion that this is the movie which Cliff and his niece, Jenny ( Jenny Nichols), are watching in a darkened theatre (Figure 8.1).

Although it’s an elegant answer, from a filmmaker’s perspective, to the question of how to transition from the Judah plot line to Cliff ’s, it is a revealing choice

Figure 8.1 Cliff Stern and his niece Jenny watch one of the movies that provide an ironic counterpoint to the plots of Crimes and Misdemeanors. (Producers: Robert Greenhut, Charles H. Joffe, Thomas A. Reilly, Helen Robin, Jack Rollins)

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nonetheless. There is a plethora of scholarly literature on Hitchcock, long the darling of academe.3 That Allen, who has a habit of delving into dialectics, would select a Hitchcock film, then, isn’t very surprising. But there is a very telling moment in this film that informs all that follows in Crimes, although it isn’t included in Allen’s film. Ann and David decide to have dinner at a restaurant they visited before they were married. The place and neighborhood have seen much better days, however, but they make the best of it, convincing the proprietor to allow them to dine out on the sidewalk. A group of children gather to watch them, and the couple decides to unnerve the kids by staring back at them. In a shot/reverse shot, both they and the children are seen staring not so much at one another, but at the camera and, by extension, directly at us in the audience. We watch and we’re being watched. We’re the ones who become, if not unnerved, then certainly aware of the voyeuristic experience, one that is not introduced without a certain element of risk (Howe 2008: 17). This is a technique that Hitch-cock employs in several of his other films, and has served as an inspiration for a veritable cottage industry in academic circles utilizing psychoanalytic strategies to decipher his films.4

Of course, if we miss this connection (and I will be the first to admit that it took several screenings to come to this realization), we’re denied both the depth of the experience and the opportunity to wholly take part in the intertextual dia-logue, but such is the strategy that Allen consistently employs, not only in these intertextual references, but also across the body of his work. If you care to engage in the dialogue, your experience is enriched; if not, you run the risk of being alienated from, or at best, limited to, a superficial experience of the entire enter-prise. A perfect example occurs when Halley (Mia Farrow), upon first meeting Cliff, observes that he really doesn’t like Lester. Cliff responds, “I love him like a brother. David Greenglass.” I must confess that I had to dig to discover that David Greenglass was Ethel Rosenberg’s brother and had played an important (and questionable) part in her conviction. Armed with this information, the joke is apparent and funny, but I had to work to get there, not unlike Annie in her strug-gles to fully appreciate Alvy’s stand-up routines in Annie Hall or even, in the present case, of connecting Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith to Crimes.

Once this reflexive genie, inspired by the concept of watching, is out of the bottle, it’s difficult to put it back in. We’re encouraged to engage in the ongoing debate surrounding the abandonment of the “cloak of invisibility” taken for granted in the classic Hollywood narrative (Willemen 1986: 212) which then leads us to a reconsideration of Judah’s opening speech at the dinner given to honor his philanthropic efforts. Judah notes,

I remember my father telling me . . . the eyes of God are on us always . . . the eyes of God. What a phrase to a young boy. I mean what were God’s eyes like? Unimagi-nably penetrating, intense eyes, I assumed.

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This scene can understandably be used as an introduction to the religious and moral themes of the film, but in this case I am suggesting that it also contains the seeds for the reflexive discourse. In the cinematic experience, it is the spectator who enjoys a certain Godlike, omniscient vantage point. We who watch in the audience can see not only what the characters see, but what they don’t see, as well. We are voyeurs, witnessing, with unimaginably penetrating eyes, subjective internal states as well as objective fly-on-the-wall points of view. This all-seeing, all-knowing privileged position, long the domain of the classic narrative structure, comes with an oddly quixotic entitlement – we are empowered to see, yet to do nothing in the face of the unfolding events. We are assured, however, within the strictures and demands of the classic Hollywood narrative, of a logical, and, if not happy, an invariably unambiguous conclusion – a point Allen will exploit within the narrative of Crimes.

We then must consider the other intertextual moments in the film, which are often counterpoints to the dramatic action and are at once comic but also no less revealing of what Bailey identifies as Allen’s “self-conscious reconfiguring of the relationship between the chaos of experience and the stabilizing, controlling capacities of aesthetic rendering” (2001: 5). For example, as Judah wrestles with and recoils from the terrible responsibility of engineering Del’s murder, we’re treated to an outtake from This Gun For Hire (Tuttle, 1942) in which Gates (Laird Cregar) doesn’t want to know the gory details of a planned murder. Tommy (Marc Lawrence) persists in telling him, calling it a “work of art.” It’s soon revealed that Cliff and Halley are watching the film, and Cliff whispers, “This only happens in the movies.” Cliff ironically, albeit unwittingly, refers not just to the movie on the screen but to Judah’s struggles as well.

At another point, after Del’s murder, hard on the heels of the revelation that a detective wants to talk with Judah, Cliff and Jenny watch a scene from Happy Go Lucky (Bernhardt, 1943) in which Betty Hutton energetically sings the song “Murder He Says” which contains the line, “murder he says in that impossible tone will bring on nobody’s murder but his own” (Figure 8.2). The suggestion here is that the narrative demands (and thus we expect) that Judah be brought to justice.

The final scenes from the movie screen of the Bleeker Street theatre occur right after Cliff learns that Halley will be leaving for London for work. Cliff and Jenny watch The Last Gangster (Ludwig, 1937), in which Edward G. Robinson’s Joe Krozac serves time in the notorious Alcatraz prison. The first image is of the all-imposing “Rock” in San Francisco harbor, but then we cut to a much later section of the film, a typical montage sequence signaling time passing through the super-imposition of clock hands and the word “months” rolling over images of Robinson sweltering away at his demeaning prison job in the laundry. The connection here is that Cliff, too, suffers as he waits for time to pass. But instead of just allowing us to make the connection contextually, Allen conflates the two experiences by

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using a title superimposition of “Four Months Later” to introduce the next scene. Production notes indicate that Allen is very aware of this device: “Note that there will be no textless background for this title since Mr. Allen wants all audiences to see the title move onto the screen in the same manner as in the black-and-white clip . . .” (Gelula 1989: 176). In other words, Allen appears intent upon having us make the connection between the diegesis of Crimes and the worlds of the Hol-lywood clips. This interrogation through reflexive juxtaposition, if you will, of the various levels of cinematic experience is echoed in how Cliff, the filmmaker whose purported documentary is enfolded within the diegesis of Crimes, uses the same type of techniques (née shenanigans) in his send-up of Lester, thus further thick-ening the already rich, intertextual stew.

Another moment of watching an audience watch occurs not in a theatre but in Cliff ’s editing suite. Cliff and Halley watch a scene from the musical Singing in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952) on the flatbed editor. The idea that all film musi-cals are reflexive in and of themselves enjoys a rich history in scholarly discourse. The choice of this particular film, which is self-reflexive in that it’s a film about filmmaking, is doubly revealing. But this moment is distinct from the others, for we’re held at bay, denied the pleasure of watching the actual film itself. The camera, positioned behind the flatbed, slowly tracks right and then holds. We watch Cliff and Halley watch; never once do we see the scene that they see. If you know the film (and again there are certain demands here for willing and active participation) you can see it play across the movie screen of your memory. “All I

Figure 8.2 Betty Hutton sings “Murder, He Says” more cheerfully than Judah Rosenthal reacts to the murder he plots and purchases in Crimes and Misdemeanors. (Producers: Robert Greenhut, Charles H. Joffe, Thomas A. Reilly, Helen Robin, Jack Rollins)

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do is dream of you,” the characters sing. We, to a certain extent, dream this film as we voyeuristically peer over the edge of the editing machine, reminding us that dreams themselves, and the act of dreaming, are a rich metaphor for the cinematic experience (Linden 1970: 175).

This is a convenient transition for us to now explore the more obvious of the reflexive story lines. Cliff Stern is a cash-strapped filmmaker who makes docu-mentaries with limited appeal. He is stuck in a loveless marriage to Wendy ( Joanna Gleason), a college professor who no longer has any appreciation for Cliff ’s artistic endeavors. Cliff is lost in the impossibly long shadow cast by Wendy’s brother, Lester (Alan Alda), a wildly successful television producer with a “closet full of Emmys.” Cliff reluctantly accepts the opportunity to become Lester’s biographer, an arrangement that Lester offers out of familial responsibility to his sister, and which Cliff pursues to raise money to finish his current project, a documentary on the existentialist professor, Louis Levy. It is while in production of the Lester film that Cliff meets and falls for assistant producer Mia Farrow’s Halley Reed.

This obviously self-reflexive setup invites an investigation into the nature of the documentary in the age of commercialism. Surrounded by the apparatus of film-making, this plotline pushes forward with its consideration of the raw stuff of documentary, the gathering of actualities and the ethical responsibilities of story-tellers. Cliff ’s film about Lester is being funded by public television as a part of its ongoing “Creative Minds” series. Although cloaked in this nonprofit veneer, it is understood that these PBS documentaries are ultimately commercial enterprises with sizeable audiences expecting a diet of popular figures. In contrast, the Levy project is an artistic endeavor, a labor of love of personal expression, presenting a man who offers challenging ideas on morality and religion.

At first, we assume our sympathies should lie with the little man, Cliff Stern. His efforts appeal to the more noble aspects of documentary filmmaking, laying bare realities on shoestring budgets and confronting weighty, thought-provoking issues. We become acquainted with the Levy film in Cliff ’s editing suite. Sur-rounded by trim bins, split reels, and shelves burgeoning with motion picture footage on cores, the Levy interviews grind through a six-plate, flatbed editor, the image a washed out workprint marred by grease pencils and scratches.5 It is here that serious documentary work is pursued, as we listen to Levy, shot in close-up, probe esoteric and cerebral concepts.

In contrast, we witness Cliff shooting his Lester film out in the streets of Man-hattan and in Lester’s offices. Lester is presented as arrogant and full of bluster (among other things). His is a powerful presence, and we are manipulated into interpreting his pronouncements as nothing more than narcissistic nonsense. “If it bends it’s funny . . . if it breaks it’s not funny” is Lester’s oft-repeated line, which Cliff and, by extension we, meet with an eye roll and a head shake.

Allen, however, doesn’t allow us to swallow any of this framing easily. There is ambiguity – Lester actually shares many traits with Woody Allen, the real man behind the camera. For instance, he prefers shooting in New York City, takes on

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edgy issues, and, in spite of the fact that he never finished college, ivy league universities offer courses on the existential motifs in his comedies. All of this could have very easily been torn from the pages of Allen’s own biography. Then there is the question of who Lester really is. We hear comments from other characters of how generous Lester has been his whole life, supporting a number of charities and even paying for his niece’s wedding. And when Halley Reed, portrayed by Allen’s real-life paramour, for whom we have a great deal of respect if not affec-tion, returns from London engaged to the egomaniacal Lester, what are we to think? “Give me a little credit, will you?” Halley asks Cliff, although she might as well be asking us, in the audience.6

We are forced, then, to consider the rather subjective idea of “story” – who controls it and where the “truth” lies. Although Cliff is the putative director, there is never any question that Lester assumes he’s in control, as he instructs Cliff as to what should and should not be filmed, or where they’ll pick up the line of questioning after a break from shooting. When we watch the rough-cut hatchet job in the screening room and realize that Cliff has mixed in both archival newsreel footage and outtakes from fictive film to compare Lester to Mussolini and Francis the Talking Mule, we’re not surprised at the outcome. Although Lester’s firing of Cliff might have more to do with ego than anything else, we cannot dispute Cliff ’s violation of what Hampe would call a “sacred” principle of the documentary genre of never intentionally fooling an audience (Hampe 1997: 37).

Cliff ’s blatant subjectivity finds its corollary in his Levy film. When the profes-sor commits suicide Cliff is completely blindsided. Despondent (more over the loss of his film than anything else), Cliff seeks solace in his editing suite. As an interview unspools through the flatbed, we realize that the potential for Levy to take his own life had been there all along, captured in celluloid and on the mag-netic recording tape. “But the universe is a pretty cold place. It’s we who invest it with our feelings. And under certain conditions we feel the thing isn’t worth it anymore,” Levy opines, and then the film, literally as well as metaphorically, runs out. A skillful documentary filmmaker might see a great (albeit ghoulish) oppor-tunity in this tragic turn of events. This is not the film that Cliff wants to make, however, and, in choosing to ignore Levy’s surrender to the bleakness of life, he draws attention to how similar documentaries and fictive films really are in their construction of stories (Vighi 2002: 492). Ironically, Levy, much like Lester, also takes over Cliff ’s film by indirectly asserting control over the story through the taking of his own life, forcing Cliff to abandon the project.

As much as the Cliff Stern plot is “filmmaker as character,” the Judah storyline can be seen as “character as filmmaker,” although it’s far less transparently reflex-ive. This is understandable. The morality play of “(m)urder and infidelity, the existence of God and human responsibility” (Vipond 1991: 99) justifiably overshad-ows any other suggested interpretation. As John Pappas writes, the seminal ques-tion of “[i]f we knew we could get away with murder would we be able to rationalize it?” (2004: 204) can easily absorb most of a viewer’s attention. However,

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if we’re willing to do the work, we can recognize that the raw reflexive material is nonetheless present, with Judah’s desperate struggle with his conscience serving as a search for an alternate resolution to the classical Hollywood model.

In Judah’s opening speech, he not only speculates on the eyes of God, but also introduces the concept of his always having been a religious skeptic. If we inter-pret this skepticism toward religion as a substitute for his desire to subvert the expected narrative, all the pieces can fall into place. The Old World religious point of view embodied by Sam Waterston’s rabbi, Ben, represents the inherent struc-ture of cause and effect, an Aristotelian logic that is deeply embedded in the Hol-lywood model. Reflexive filmmakers are, if anything, always in search of ways to subvert this intended order. As such, Judah confronts these conventions through Ben, within the milieu of the eye examinations, and their relationship becomes symptomatic of this struggle over cinematic narrative design. Associating eyes with cameras may be clichéd at this moment in time (Friday 2001: 359), but it’s had a rich and fruitful relationship since the days of the camera obscura (Ihde 2000: 21). Even the ophthalmic apparatus, with projectors casting beams of light on screens in darkened rooms, extends this metaphor. The first time we observe Judah as he examines Ben’s eyes, Judah is seeking to assert control as he directs Ben to follow a projected spot of light in the dark. Ben confirms that he sees it, but Judah sighs, “Oh, God,” and asks for a break; the tension here can be construed to be not merely about Judah and his conscience, but about Judah’s confrontation with the inevitabilities of the conventional narrative structure. After Judah comes clean about his affair, Ben holds to the rational story arc of confession and forgive-ness. But this, not unlike Cliff ’s struggles with both Lester and Levy, is not the story resolution that Judah desires. To underscore this point, this same conversa-tion is revisited as Judah, again in the dark but this time in his home, lit by the light of the fire and flashes of dramatic lightning, comes to the conclusion that he must order the murder of his mistress.

The next time Judah examines Ben in the dark it is after the murder. Ben inquires about Judah’s “personal difficulties,” and Judah responds that the woman had “listened to reason.” Ben then says, “That’s wonderful. So you got a break. Sometimes to have a little good luck is the most brilliant plan.” Maybe so, but this “deus ex machina” strategy is without dramatic logic, and satisfies neither the conventional narrative nor audience expectations very well. Ben’s impending loss of sight then can be construed as the emerging impotence of the classical story structure, exposing it as the mere “organizational principle within the cumulative randomness of events” (Bottiroli 2002: 14).

This malleability of story lives at the heart of Crimes. In the Passover Seder sequence in which Judah not only observes but, in a signature Allen strategy,7 interacts with characters within a flashback, Aunt May (Anna Berger) and Sol (David S. Howard) debate the relevance of the ritual retelling of the exodus story. Aunt May (a person to whom Judah is later favorably compared) brings up the contemporary issue of Hitler and the Holocaust, and poignantly asserts that, had

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the war turned out in the Nazis’ favor, history would tell a decidedly different story. “History is told by the winners,” May pronounces, reminding us that the invention of narrative is as much a construction of artists as it is an “objective record of true facts” (Frus 2008: 54). To this, Sol takes great umbrage, insisting that, “whether it’s the Old Testament or Shakespeare, murder will out.” That he associates biblical narrative with a dramatic conceit is key, and when he concludes that given the choice, he would always choose God over the truth, he concedes, within this interpretative landscape, that he chooses a preordained story structure over the uncertainty of nontraditional, if not unstructured, events.

This discourse speaks directly to Professor Levy’s observations of the paradoxes inherent in certain stories. We watch and listen as he lectures to us from the flatbed editor’s screen, commenting on how the early Israelites could not imagine a truly loving image of God, as he demands Abraham to sacrifice his only son. Later, he underlines the contradictions of love, how we simultaneously desire to both return to and undo the past. If anything, art represents our human attempts to get things that don’t go well in life to work out right, a point Alvy Singer makes towards the end of Annie Hall when we witness a rehearsal of his play in which the breakup scene, that we have just witnessed, is reworked to have the Annie character decide to return to New York with the Alvy character. “[W]hatta you want? It was my first play,” Alvy explains directly to us, breaking the fourth wall. “You know  .  .  .  you’re always tryin’ t’get things to come out perfect in art because . . . it’s real difficult in life” (Allen 1982: 102). Story, here, is shown to be pliable enough to even recast the actual role of “the winner.”

Again, in sequences that are both intratextual (Sol and Levy) as well as intertex-tual (Annie and Crimes), we are asked to reflect on the narrative and how it makes meaning. Both moments are reflexive, whether through the subversion of conven-tions ( Judah interacting with his flashbacks) or in our witnessing Levy, mediated through the apparatus of filmmaking (the flatbed editor).

I arrived at this reading through the process of heuristic inquiry, in which, as Moustakas suggests, we become aware of the interplay of our own conscious and unconscious minds, and actively seek to harmonize the two (Moustakas 1990: 28–29). To illustrate this point, I must indulge in some reflexivity myself and break from the traditional conventions of scholarly discourse to reveal a little of my own processes in the creation of this chapter. The moment I wish to discuss occurred late at night. I had just concluded reviewing the latest draft, in particular sifting through the possibilities offered up by Allen’s choice of the Hitchcock film Mr. and Mrs. Smith and how it colored my subsequent interpretations. As I slipped into bed and began to drift into the lovely twilight state that limns the borders of the dream world, I was suddenly confronted by an image of Mount Rushmore. Running around on the iconic faces chiseled into the rock were three people engaged in a desperate cat and mouse game. “In heuristic investigations,” Mous-takas writes, “[we] may be entranced by visions, images and dreams that connect (us) to (our) quest” (1990: 11). I quickly recognized it was a scene from Hitchcock’s

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splendid North by Northwest (1959) with Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) being pursued by the cloying henchman Leonard, played by none other than a callow Martin Landau, appearing in only his second feature film.

After a moment’s confusion, I leapt out of bed and frantically fumbled for a pen and paper in the dark. The word “heuristic” comes from the Greek “heure-tikos” which means “I find” and is related to the more familiar “eureka” (Douglass and Moustakas 1985: 40), a word I wanted to shout but, mercifully out of defer-ence to my sleeping spouse, didn’t. North by Northwest, if anything, is a film that Stanley Cavell invites us to (re)interpret as a boldly reflexive film, not only in regards to its source material of Hamlet but in its investigation of the relationship between life and art (Cavell 1986: 251–254). Now, I am not asserting that this had any influence over Allen’s casting choice, or that it even occurred to him; inten-tionality on the filmmaker’s part is not essential when reading for meaning in a film (Frus 2008: 59). What I am drawing attention to is the interplay between our expectations as scholars and critics and motifs that occur within and across films. It is a complex matrix, but once Allen introduces someone such as Hitchcock into the mix, many Hitchcock-inflected moments suddenly become evident in the film; once you ring this particular bell, it’s difficult to un-ring it.

Take, for example, when Judah drives his car to revisit his boyhood home. There is a shot/reverse shot sequence that is very reminiscent of Marion Crane ( Janet Leigh) in Psycho (1960). We see Judah as he drives; we hear, in voiceover, his thoughts; and we see, from his subjective point of view, where he’s driving (in this case, through a dark tunnel). Then there is the moment that Judah returns to the scene of the crime to retrieve some incriminating personal effects. He stands over Dolores’ body and stares down in horror. The camera moves in a very atypical way for Allen – a long, slow tilt and pan, down the length of Judah’s body, to Del’s face and her lifeless eyes, then back again. This move is very reminiscent of the aftermath of the murderous shower scene in Psycho. It is atypical of Allen, because he is most noted for his love of master shots and mise-en-scène (Lax 2007: 199). It is rare that the camera makes itself known in such a manner.8 Hitchcock, on the other hand, is well known for quite the oppo-site: his restless, moving camera that always reminds us of the man in the direc-tor’s chair.

Let us now revisit the last eye examination when Judah shines the light of his projector into Ben’s eye. This inspires a flashback to when Del asks Judah, early on in their relationship, if he agrees that “the eyes are the windows of the soul.” Judah responds, “Well, I believe they’re windows, but I’m not sure it’s a soul that I see.” Although the implication is supposed to be sexual, the introduction of the concept of “windows” allows us to come back into the intertextual dialogue with Hitchcock, who uses windows so prevalently in such films such a Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Psycho, and, most prominently, Rear Window, with the suggestion that frames within frames offer opportunity to reflect on the very nature of the

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cinematic experience itself. If all art is in some measure about itself, then this kind of reflexivity draws us even closer to the dialogue (Affron 1980: 42).

But probably the primary “Hitchcockian” moment is a manipulation of our perception of character and thus our response to that character’s murder. Dolores Paley is not a particularly sympathetic woman – she is played as high-strung, unreasonable, and neurotic. Judah calls her a hysteric, and we can hardly disagree with him. Thus, when she is murdered, offscreen, we feel perhaps a little ambiva-lent. Hitchcock does this kind of manipulation in Strangers on a Train (1951). Miriam (Kasey Rogers), the wife of Guy Haines (Farley Granger), is unsympatheti-cally played. She is shrill, manipulative, and an unreasonable impediment to Guy’s happiness, and so we don’t feel terrible when she’s murdered, despite Guy’s revul-sion when Bruno (Robert Walker) reveals his awful deed. Judah similarly is repulsed by the suggestion of murder made by his brother Jack ( Jerry Orbach), and so to a certain extent he distances himself from the foul plan.

If anything, these allusions to Hitchcock add to the cumulative effect of the reflexive dialogue interwoven into Crimes. Motifs that refer to watching and vision, beyond those already addressed here, weave their way into the very fabric of both plots, either directly or indirectly, in large ways or smaller, quieter ones, almost in reflection of the film’s title. For example, when Judah and Del are on an apparently deserted beach, Judah becomes uncomfortable for fear that someone might be watching; Aunt May demands of Sol to “open your eyes” to how people can escape punishment; in an argument with Wendy, Cliff asserts that Halley’s staring at Lester is a result of her not being able to “believe her eyes”; Lester invokes Oedipus; Halley assures Cliff, “I’ll be seeing you” when she breaks away after their first kiss; and even the music contributes, with “Jeepers Creepers” (where did ya get those peepers) and, for the closing montage, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Thus in both plots, in flashbacks and in the films within the film, subtle, reflexive motifs echo throughout in an almost call and response dynamic.

All of this points us towards the end of the film. In the penultimate scene, Cliff and Judah, our two main protagonists, finally meet. We in the audience, of course, are well aware of their respective backstories, which have, on the surface, run in parallel, with supporting characters crossing lines, dipping in and out of both of their lives. Now they get a chance to “compare notes,” if you will. They’ve both sought out some quiet amidst the joyful tumult of the wedding of Ben’s daughter, and Judah stumbles upon Cliff, alone in a room. Judah observes the obvious (“Off by yourself, eh?”), but then says, “You’re like me.” Although this refers to their choice of finding solitude, or even, perhaps, that they’re both “well lubricated,” it can also be read as the comparison of their twin struggles over the control of the narratives that we’ve witnessed throughout the film. To reinforce this reflexive track, the topic of movies and murder comes into the conversation:

JUDAH: You look deep in thought.CLIFF: Yeah, I was plotting the perfect murder.JUDAH: Yeah? Movie plot?

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This takes Cliff by surprise, for we are to assume he is thinking (albeit not very seriously) of a possible real-life murder of his rival in love, Lester. Ironically, Judah, who has apparently committed the perfect murder, refocuses us on the world of fiction. “I have a great murder story,” he begins, but realizing that he might be going too far, he attempts to break it off. Cliff, however, invites him to continue, and after a cut to another scene, we return to Judah, now in a medium close-up, staring off into the distance, having divulged, we assume, the spine of the real-life murder of Dolores. He tells Cliff of the “character’s” inner struggles with guilt, issues that we have seen plague Judah after the actual murder. But then “one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining and his family is around him and mysteriously the . . . crisis is lifted. . . . he finds he’s not punished. In fact, he prospers.” Essentially, Judah pitches the narrative that has been revealed through the diegesis of Crimes as a fictive piece with an unexpected ending (which, in essence, it is).

Cliff counters that in order for the film to achieve “tragic proportions” the character must assume responsibility and turn himself in. Judah looks at him in sur-prise. “But that’s fiction. That’s movies,” he responds. “You see too many movies. I’m talking about reality. If you want a happy ending, go see a Hollywood movie.” In other words, Ben’s Old World construct of cause–effect, of crime and punishment, the hallmark of classic Hollywood, has no standing in Judah’s story.

To punctuate this point, Judah’s wife Miriam interrupts, suggesting that it’s time to leave. After bidding Cliff farewell, Judah joins Miriam, where they’re both framed in the proscenium arch of the doorway, perfectly lit as if in their own movie. Faint applause is heard as they embrace, murmur love devotions, and plan for a presumably (and scathingly paradoxical) happily-ever-after future (Figure 8.3).

The camera then swings back to Cliff. When he first was resistant to take on the task of shooting Lester’s documentary, Lester recorded an idea into his ever-present, pocket tape recorder. “Idea for farce:  .  .  . a poor loser agrees to do the story of a great man’s life, and in the process comes to learn deep values.” This would be the expected character arc of the traditional narrative. Cliff, through losing Halley to his nemesis, on the verge of divorce and with no prospects of finishing any of his work, should learn from his mistakes and experiences and, if not change course, then at least give us some sign that he is now a bit wiser for all the tumult and effort. But the only sense that we have is that he is condemned to continue his life of lonely, quiet desperation and we’re not convinced he’s actu-ally learned anything at all.

The final section of the film is anchored with Ben, the now blind rabbi, dancing the traditional father/daughter wedding dance, to the tune, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” As cruelly ironic as this may seem, we’re then presented with a montage of images from a variety of moments within the film we’ve just watched. They all represent crucial plot points in both the Cliff and Judah storylines, but they appear in no particular narrative order, shuffled like a deck of cards. The context is supplied by Professor Levy’s voiceover narration, as he ponders how we are defined by the

184 Gregg Bachman

choices we make. We jump through time and space, seeing Judah and Del argue, then the aftermath of Judah making the phone call ordering her murder, back to Judah and Jack in the pool house, and then to the flashback of the Seder dinner. Intercut with these scenes are excerpts from the Cliff plot, when he kisses Halley, then the newsreel footage of Mussolini on the balcony, to Lester pestering Halley as she attempts to talk on her cell phone, and then Cliff and Jenny, on the sidewalk and eating pizza.

From the moral perspective, meaning can be derived from the skillful juxtaposi-tion of Levy’s words with the passing images. “We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions. Some are on a grand scale,” supports the images of Del and Judah; “Most of these choices are on lesser points,” refers to Halley and Cliff ’s furtive kiss in the editing room, and so on. However, what is also intriguing here is that in a relatively short montage sequence we get to experience the totality of the film in an order not necessarily linked in a linear, dramatic line.9 The cause/effect connection is subverted. “Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation,” Levy intones, as we watch an excerpt from the Seder dinner juxtaposed with Del, walking in the street on the night of her murder. Levy could just have been easily addressing the narrative design of Crimes, however, which offers no predictable narrative and no happy resolutions. Levy’s final words, that we keep trying with “the hope that future generations might understand more,” are ambivalent, at best, although I will admit that, at one point in my life, I determined them to be rather hopeful

Figure 8.3 Judah and Miriam Rosenthal are happily ever aftered in the close of Crimes and Misdemeanors. (Producers: Robert Greenhut, Charles H. Joffe, Thomas A. Reilly, Helen Robin, Jack Rollins)

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(Bachman 1996: 186). But within the present context, the film concludes with a shrug. The audience, in the guise of the wedding guests, applauds offscreen, drawing our attention once again to the fact that we’re experiencing an artistic construction whose meaning, in the end, future generations may be able to figure out. Maybe . . . or maybe not, for we can’t forget that these hopeful words come from a character who has killed himself.

Notes

1 For the purposes of this chapter, I approach the concept of reflexivity as defined by Robert Stam as a strategy in which the film “points to its own mask and invites the public to examine its design and texture” (1985: 1).

2 I have borrowed heavily from the social scientist Clark Moustakas and liberally adapted his methodology for the humanities. For further reading please see his Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology and Applications (1990).

3 A quick search on the database Academic Search Complete (www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-complete) reveals that references to Hitchcock dwarf those of his contemporaries, trumping the likes of Welles and Ford by at least two to one.

4 Please see Marian Keane (1986), for an excellent overview and discussion.5 Allen extends this technique in Husbands and Wives (1992) in which editing marks are

actually left on the release print.6 I can’t help but think of Manhattan (1979) where Tracy also heads off to London and

admonishes Ike, “Not everyone gets corrupted.”7 We’re reminded of Annie Hall here where Alvy and his friends both observe and inter-

act with flashbacks.8 This long take style can easily be seen as reflexive in and of itself. Take the long scene

in the pool house between Judah and his brother Jack. The classic narrative demands at some point some kind of shot/reaction shot, but we’re disappointed – unless we’re used to Allen’s unique style.

9 This is not an entirely novel approach for Allen, as we’ve experienced this same strategy in Annie Hall.

Works Cited

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Allen, Woody (1971) “My Philosophy.” In Woody Allen, Getting Even. New York: Random House, 27–33.

Allen, Woody (1982) Four Films of Woody Allen. New York: Random House.Allen, Woody (1980) “Remembering Needleman.” In Woody Allen, Side Effects. New York:

Random House, 3–8.

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Bachman, Gregg (1996) “Neither here nor there.” In Renée R. Curry (ed.), Perspectives on Woody Allen. New York: G.K. Hall, 177–187.

Bailey, Peter (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Barthes, Roland (1974) S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.Bernstein, Mashey (1996) “My worst fears realized.” In Renée R. Curry (ed.), Perspectives

on Woody Allen. New York: G.K. Hall, 218–235.Bleiweiss, Mark (1996) “Self-deprecation and the Jewish humor of Woody Allen.” In Renée

R. Curry (ed.), Perspectives on Woody Allen. New York: G.K. Hall, 199–217.Bottiroli, Giovanni (2002) “Fitzgerald’s nickel: Stories of stimulus and simulation, from

Greenaway to Fincher.” Textual Practice 16.1, 13–29.Cavell, Stanley (1986) North by Northwest. In Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague

(eds.), A Hitchcock Reader. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 249–264.Cohen, Sarah Blacher (1987) Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor. Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press.Douglass, B. and C. Moustakas (1985) “Heuristic inquiry: The internal search to know.”

Journal of Humanistic Psychology 25, 39–55.Eco, Umberto (1979) The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloom-

ington, IN: Indiana University Press.Friday, Jonathan (2001) “Photography and the representation of vision.” Journal of Aesthet-

ics & Art Criticism 59.4, 351.Frus, Phyllis (2008) “The figure in the landscape: Capote and Infamous.” Journal of Popular

Film & Television 36.2, 52–61.Gelula & Co. (1989) “Crimes and Misdemeanors. Combined continuity and master English

subtitle/spotting list.” Los Angeles (Sept. 27). Unpublished annotated script.Hampe, Barry (1997) Making Documentary Films and Reality Videos: A Practical Guide to

Planning, Filming, and Editing Documentaries of Real Events. New York: Henry Holt.Howe, Lawrence (2008) “Through the looking glass: Reflexivity, reciprocality, and defe-

nestration in Hitchcock’s Rear Window.” College Literature 35.1, 16–37.Ihde, Don (2000) “Epistemology engines.” Nature 406.21.Keane, Marian (1986) “A closer look at scopophilia  .  .  .” In Marshall Deutelbaum and

Leland Poague (eds.), A Hitchcock Reader. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press.Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Lee, Sander H. (2002) Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Linden, George William (1970) Reflections on the Screen. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.Mast, Gerald (1973) The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-

Merrill.Moustakas, Clark E. (1990) Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology, and Applications.

Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Pappas, John (2004) “It’s all darkness: Plato, the ring of Gyges, and Crimes and Misdemean-

ors.” In Aeon Skoble and Mark Conard (eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 203–217.

Pogel, Nancy (1987) Woody Allen. Boston: Twayne.Rascaroli, Laura (2008) “The essay film: Problems, definitions, textual commitments.”

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Recchia, Edward (1991) “Through a shower curtain darkly: Reflexivity as a dramatic com-ponent of Psycho.” Literature Film Quarterly 19.4, 258.

Roche, Mark (2006) “Justice and the withdrawal of God in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In Charles L.P. Silet (ed.), The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 268–283.

Stam, Robert (1985) Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

Vighi, Fabio (2002) “Beyond objectivity: The utopian in Pasolini’s documentaries.” Textual Practice 16.3, 491–510.

Vipond, Dianne L. (1991) “Crimes and Misdemeanors: A retake on the eyes of Dr. Eckle-burg.” Literature Film Quarterly 19.2, 99–103.

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9

It is impossible to perceive Allen’s films adequately without paying substantial atten-tion to those movies’ pervasive skepticism toward the very art of which they are a product.

(Peter Bailey 2001)

According to many critics, Woody Allen’s recent films do nothing his earlier works have not already done. Scott Tobias’s reviews of Allen’s latest works exemplify this perspective. Tobias (2008) writes of Cassandra’s Dream (2008), “Like so many late-period Allens, it leaves behind the feeling that he’s made this movie before, but better.” Tobias (2010) similarly opines that You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) “recycles character types from his previous work without inventing new reasons to summon them into existence.” Tobias (2008) laments, “Allen seemed to expend his last burst of creative energy on 1992’s Husbands and Wives.” This chapter contends, on the contrary, that Allen’s most recent films should not be dismissed as inferior imitations of his prior work. Rather, such films as Vicky Cris-tina Barcelona (2008) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger can be read as self-reflexive meditations on Allen’s cinematic oeuvre itself. Through both narrative and stylistic choices, these films call attention to Allen’s characteristic tropes and iconography in order to critique the normative influence of Hollywood conven-tions and Allen’s complicity in their perpetuation.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona chronicles the adventures of two friends, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), living in Barcelona for the summer. Engaged to marry a sensible, successful man, Vicky has come to Barcelona to

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Play it Again, Woody

Self-Reflexive Critique in Contemporary Woody Allen Films

Claire Sisco King

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pursue research for her master’s thesis in Catalan identity. Cristina, who fancies herself an artist, seeks romance and erotic pleasure outside of the traditional relational paradigms of marriage and monogamy. Vicky and Cristina meet Juan Antonio ( Javier Bardem), a brooding yet quixotic artist with whom they both have sexual affairs. Midway through the film, Vicky and Cristina also meet Juan Anto-nio’s ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), who is a tempestuous artist with a history of violence toward herself and others, especially Juan Antonio. Despite her tryst with Juan Antonio and her increasing doubts about marriage, Vicky marries her fiancé Doug (Chris Messina) who has joined her in Barcelona. Cristina develops a serious relationship with Juan Antonio, which evolves to include Maria Elena as well, before she tires of the arrangement and decides to move on to something new. The film ends with Vicky and Cristina leaving Barcelona, headed toward uncertain futures, both women unsure of the choices they have made regarding life and love.

The narrative of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (hereafter Stranger) focuses on the troubled relationships faced by the various members of one family. Alfie Shepridge (Anthony Hopkins) has recently left his wife Helena (Gemma Jones) after 40 years of marriage and married a much younger woman (and former prostitute) named Charmaine (Lucy Punch). Helena crumbles in the wake of her divorce and turns for support to alcohol and the guidance of an ersatz fortune teller named Cristal (Pauline Collins). Alfie and Helena’s daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), longs for a child and struggles in her unhappy marriage to Roy ( Josh Brolin), a once successful novelist who cannot seem to finish his second novel. Sally develops unrequited affection for her boss and tries unsuccessfully to open her own art gallery, while Roy begins an affair with a younger neighbor named Dia (Freida Pinto). As Alfie and Charmaine’s relationship wears thin and Alfie longs to return to his former marriage, Helena develops a fascination with her past lives and pursues a relationship with Jonathan (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), a fellow spiritualist desperate to reconnect with his dead wife, Claire. Roy leaves Sally for Dia and steals the novel of a friend, whom he wrongly believes to be dead, in order to misrepresent it as his own book.1 The film ends with Helena and Jonathan discussing reincarnation and deciding to commit to one another, having received permission from Jonathan’s deceased wife.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger are, in some ways, consonant with much of Allen’s earlier work, especially given their thematic interest in, as Foster Hirsch (1981) might put it, “love, sex, death, and the meaning of life.” These films also illustrate Allen’s characteristic emphasis on characters struggling with their identi-ties and with their life’s work as artists. Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger, however, also mark a significant departure from Allen’s prior body of work pri-marily because they do not take place in the director’s beloved New York City but are part of a series of films shot and set in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Beginning with Match Point (2005), which Allen filmed in London, this series of films includes Scoop (2006) and Cassandra’s Dream, which were also shot

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in London, and Midnight in Paris (2011), which was shot on location in Paris. This pattern will presumably continue, as Allen began shooting The Bop Decameron in Rome shortly after the release of Midnight in Paris.

Proving significantly more successful than Stranger, Vicky Cristina Barcelona won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in the musical or comedy genre, Cruz won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Maria Elena, and the film earned over $96 million in worldwide box office receipts. Stranger received no major award nominations and earned less than $35 million.2 Despite its success at awards ceremonies and global box offices, Vicky Cristina Barcelona nonetheless received mixed reviews. While Mick LaSalle (2008) describes Vicky Cristina Barcelona as the work of a “confident and mature artist,” both Lawrence Toppman (2008) and J.R. Jones (2008) call the film “lazy.” Andrew O’Hehir, writing for Salon (2008), asserts, “His new comedy ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ . . . has been widely acclaimed as one of his best in recent years, which is true but is also mighty faint praise. It’s literally difficult to believe that the person who made this pictur-esque, clueless, oddly misanthropic picture also made ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors.’ ”

Stranger fared even worse with most critics. Jones (2010) sardonically writes, “The paltry theme is that we can’t predict the future, but I spent part of the time calculating how many more feeble movies Allen will make, based on his produc-tivity rate (one per year), his batting average (four duds for every success), his current age (74), and his father’s longevity (Martin Konigsberg lived to be 100). Are you ready for 20 more remakes of Manhattan?” Roger Moore (2010) offers an equally strong critique, characterizing Stranger as “A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance,  mystery or justification for its existence, it joins ‘Hollywood Ending,’ ‘Anything Else,’ ‘Whatever Works,’ ‘Cassandra’s Dream’ and other recent clunky, tone-deaf Allen films that plainly should have remained weak, undeveloped ideas tucked inside [Allen’s] infamous desk.”

Without trying to assess whether Allen’s recent films do or do not live up to the legacy of their cinematic predecessors, this chapter argues that neither Vicky Cristina Barcelona nor Stranger is “clueless” or “undeveloped” as a text. Rather, the very devices about which many critics complain, including the use of recycled character types and voiceover narration, function rhetorically within Allen’s films; they may lessen certain viewers’ enjoyment of the films, but they also make criti-cal arguments about the pleasures and perils of film spectatorship. In fact, Moore’s complaint that Stranger offers no “justification for its existence” points, rather inadvertently, to what is useful and challenging about these films: they interrogate the worth of the cinema as an industry, art form, and aspect of everyday living, asking each imagined spectator to consider the personal, social, and cultural costs of a life spent at the movies. Like Hollywood Ending (2002), which satirizes the film industry and Hollywood’s rigid narrative conventions, these films operate as self-referential musings on Allen’s own body of work and as critical considerations of

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Hollywood as an industry where Allen remains both a canonical presence and something of an outsider.

Celluloid Memories

Evidence that we can interpret Allen’s choices in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger as strategic and self-conscious meditations on the cinema mounts when we consider these offerings alongside other films, for as Peter Bailey reminds us, “teasing artistic self-referentiality [is] never completely absent from Allen’s films” (2001: 3) and “there is little uncalculated about the making of his films” (15). Consider, for example, Allen’s recent work, Midnight in Paris, which David Edel-stein (2011) calls a “sly act of self-criticism” given its attention to themes of nos-talgia and repetition, especially in relation to art, film, and literature. Midnight in Paris depicts Gil as a successful Hollywood screenwriter struggling to write his first novel. While on vacation in Paris, Gil finds himself magically transported to the 1920s each night at midnight, where he encounters what he imagines to be an ideal artistic past populated by his literary and artistic heroes, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali. The film directly confronts questions about the merits of filmmaking as an art form, as Gil finds his work as a screenwriter to be less gratifying than that of writing a novel. When he feels himself falling short com-pared to past literary greats, he considers abandoning his dream of writing books to return to the more commercial work of writing Hollywood scripts.

We also find evidence for reading Allen’s recent films as self-conscious critiques of the filmmaking process by looking back to his earlier works. Ralph Tutt, for example, calls Stardust Memories (1980) “an energetic depiction of what Christian Metz calls the ‘cinema machine’ and a clear indication of Allen’s growing preoc-cupation with the possibility of film aesthetics vis-à-vis the film industry as a subject for filmmaking” (1991: 105). Daniel Green identifies a similar strategy in Allen’s Interiors, quoting Ron Librach’s description of Interiors (1978) as a “parody of itself ” that uses overwrought mise-en-scène deliberately to “reveal the fallacies on which it is based” (Librach qtd. in Green 1991: 72). As a result, Green concludes, “The film cannibalizes itself ” (72), making the very structures of its composition the subject of its central joke.

Green reads the self-reflexivity in Allen’s films as evidence of the director’s anxious belief that “ ‘serious’ themes such as sex, death, or identity are made prob-lematic by the artificial nature of all cinema” (1991: 75). Citing the hypermediated Zelig (1983) and Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Green argues that Allen negotiates this conundrum by attempting to “expose the artifice [of the cinema] deliberately, to explore the interplay of signifier and signified in the communication of meaning”

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(75). This assertion mirrors Bailey’s contention that “each Woody Allen film from Play it Again, Sam onward constitutes the director’s highly self-conscious reconfig-uring of the relationship between the chaos of experience and the stabilizing, controlling capacities of aesthetic rendering” (Bailey 2001: 5). While Green, writing in 1991, concludes that Allen’s “subsequent films have not built on the promise fulfilled” by Zelig and Purple Rose of Cairo (75), I argue that later Allen works do return analytically to the subjects of filmmaking and film spectatorship, although more obliquely. Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger lack the overt and sustained attention to film as an art, an industry, and an experience, but the texts deploy their own cinematic structures in critical and reflexive ways, as if to say, “You will see a film you have seen before – but for good reason.”

Thomas Schatz argues of Hollywood cinema that while “the medium’s tech-nological evolution has enhanced its capacity for representation, its narrative and thematic evolution has been toward codification, convention, and artifice” (1982: 180). Allen confronts this tension head on in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger by using both narrative and stylistic devices that call attention to not only their artificiality but also their staleness. Similarly to Annie Hall, as read by Schatz, Vicky Christina Barcelona and Stranger “foreground the process of narrativity” (Schatz 1982: 183), interrogate the mechanics of the cinema, and catechize the belief structures that underpin and are underpinned by Hollywood style and form. Given that the film spectator necessarily “negotiates the story in terms of his previous experience of the form itself ” (Schatz 1982: 180), Allen compels the imagined audiences of these films to think about how they and the myriad films from which they borrow have shaped not only Hollywood’s standard operating procedures but also the ways in which Hollywood spectators come to narrate their own life stories.

After making Hollywood Ending in 2002, Allen described his relationship with Hollywood not as “love-hate” but as “love-contempt.” He explained,

I’ve never had to suffer any of the indignities that one associates with the studio system. I’ve always been independent in New York by sheer good luck. But I have an affection for Hollywood because I’ve had so much pleasure from films that have come out of there. Not a whole lot of them, but a certain amount of them have been very meaningful to me (Weiss 2002).

As such, Allen’s films characteristically allude to and diverge from Hollywood’s filmmaking culture. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger, Allen invites his spec-tators not to reflect on his body of work as an insular or discrete oeuvre but to consider his films as they relate to the Hollywood norms and conventions that influence and are influenced by Allen as a filmmaker. Though neither film references Hollywood or filmmaking directly, each film bears traces of familiar Hollywood tropes and storylines that invite viewers to interpret these films in relationship to the culture of Hollywood cinema. In order to explore how Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger operate reflexively and critically, this chapter exam-

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ines three strategies at work within these films: the reliance on recycled or clichéd character types, the use of voiceover narration, and the thematic and formal emphasis on nostalgia and repetition.

Have We Met Before?

Critics have accused both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger of trafficking in hackneyed and predictable character types. Toppman (2008) writes of Vicky Cris-tina Barcelona, “All four main characters are stereotypes that deviate scarcely an inch from their templates.” Jones’s 2008 review for the Chicago Reader also censures Allen for “falling back on ethnic stereotypes ([by casting Latino actors] Bardem and Penélope Cruz as tempestuous lovers).” Carol Allen (2011) similarly describes the settings and characters of Stranger as borrowed from other times and generic contexts. While she describes the mise-en-scène of Sally and Roy’s flat as having a “distinctly odd ‘survival from the seventies’ look about it,” she contends that Cristal, the fortune teller, “is written like one of those pseudo working class char-women from a thirties or forties film.” She further critiques Charmaine, the former prostitute, as a “caricature” who is “so over the top that she seems like a refugee from the Catherine Tate Show or Little Britain.” Echoing Carol Allen’s senti-ments, LaSalle’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle (2010) describes the charac-ters in Stranger as feeling “recycled,” while Wesley Morris (2010) reviews the film in the Boston Globe as “shopworn to the bone.”3

These critics are not wrong. Both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger do exploit well-worn, if not threadbare, character types, but these stereotypes are not acci-dents or oversights. They are metatropes that operate critically within these films. From the outset, these films’ titles alert us to and invite us to think analytically about the clichés that will follow. For instance, consider the title Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which offers a laundry list of the film’s main characters and setting. It is neither descriptive nor alluring; it is, instead, a straightforward and dry inven-tory, reducing the complex people and places of this narrative to a series of objects in a catalog. The title, therefore, signals the ways in which the film will knowingly deploy similar reifications of various identity formations.

The fact that the structure and content of the title Vicky Cristina Barcelona – matter-of-factly listing names of principal characters – recalls the titles of earlier Allen films, including Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), also gestures toward this film’s insinuation that repetition is an inevitable part of human experi-ence and that true originality is impossible. Perhaps even more telling in this regard is the title You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. This well-known and oft-repeated phrase represents an outmoded romantic cliché associated with fortune tellers, on whom the film casts considerable suspicion. The title heralds the film’s self-conscious and tongue-in-cheek attitude toward its characters and subject

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matter and, even more importantly, toward its own status as an original work of art. This phrase is one that presumably most audience members have heard before; it is also a phrase in which most viewers likely have little faith. From the outset, then, Stranger invites its imagined spectators to remain critical, if not skep-tical, about what they see on screen; and, given the proclivity of Hollywood cinema toward the perpetuation of such romantic clichés, Stranger also induces viewers to take note of Hollywood’s limited capacity, or at least tendency, to offer audiences anything truly new or unexpected.

Other clichés implicitly structure the narratives of these films. Although the colloquial phrase never gets spoken in either film, both Stranger and Vicky Cristina Barcelona play on their imagined audiences’ familiarity with the clichéd assertion that “the grass is always greener on the other side.” Stranger depicts Roy as he develops an obsession with Dia, an exotic woman living in an apartment across a courtyard from the home he shares with Sally. He watches her play music, undress, and have sex with her fiancé, enthralled by the mystery and novelty she represents. As if to underscore the clichéd nature of the relationship that unfolds, Dia appears exclusively (and noticeably) in the color red. Just as the narrator calls her a “crea-ture in red,” the film makes a number of intertextual allusions to popular songs and films that link Dia to the “lady in red” (or, the “woman in red”). This costum-ing choice casts Dia as less a fully fleshed out subject than a caricature and hence illustrates what Green might describe as the film’s tendency to parody, or cannibal-ize, itself (1991: 72).4

Once Roy moves in with Dia, however, he finds himself gazing at Sally, his estranged wife. Sitting in his new apartment on the other side of the courtyard, Roy watches Sally as she undresses, feeling stirrings of longing for the woman to whom he was once married. This pattern echoes the experiences of Alfie in Stranger, who tries unsuccessfully to reunite with Helena after their divorce, as well as the many lovers in Vicky Cristina Barcelona who consistently long for what they do not (or no longer) have. As if to literalize the “grass-is-greener” cliché, many of the couples in these films embark on their new commitments while sitting in idyllic fields of grass (for example, Dia and Roy and Helena and Jonathan on park benches in Stranger and Cristina, Juan Antonio, Cristina, and Maria Elena in a meadow in Vicky Cristina Barcelona).

Compounding the use of clichés in the Roy–Sally–Dia love triangle is Stranger’s conspicuous allusion to another film text, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Now famous as a film that critiques the voyeuristic modes of spectatorship the cinema encourages, Rear Window depicts L.B. Jeffries ( Jimmy Stewart) as a man fascinated by the lives of others whom he glimpses through his apartment window. A photographer by trade, Jeffries has been immobilized by a broken leg and con-fined to a wheelchair in his apartment. He passes the days staring across his courtyard into the homes of his neighbors, voyeuristically fixating on the life stories he imagines as unfolding. In Stranger, Roy finds himself similarly entranced by what he sees in a window across the way. Although he is not literally immobi-

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lized, as is Jeffries, Roy does feel figuratively trapped. As indicated in voice over narration, “The thought of writing a new book paralyzed him.” Through this intertextual allusion, Stranger further implicates Hollywood movies and spectators in the perpetuation of reductive clichés used to describe human relationships.

This allusion makes it clear that Allen is not being entirely self-referential but is, instead, considering his films as part of a larger cultural formation: Hollywood cinema. Although his films operate somewhat outside Hollywood norms and sometimes break with its hegemonic conventions, Allen reminds viewers that no film, no matter what its stylistic modality or context, remains entirely unaffected by Hollywood’s influence. Even those films that consciously reject or combat Hollywood standards exist in relationship to its hegemonic standards. Making films in New York never fully insulated Allen from Hollywood’s pervasive impact and neither can removing himself to continental Europe or the United Kingdom. Further, this intertextual allusion addresses the constitutive role that Hollywood plays in the lives of spectators, for lived experience always remains mediated and never operates outside the influence of public culture and its artifacts, including (or especially) popular films.

Intertextual acts of recycling also connect Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger directly to one another, translating lines of dialogue from one film’s lothario to the next. When Juan Antonio first sees Vicky and Cristina eating dinner in Barcelona, he woos the younger women, inviting them to spend the weekend in Oviedo, the town in which he was born. When Vicky skeptically asks what this weekend will include, Juan Antonio replies, “I’ll show you around the city. We’ll eat well. We’ll drink good wine. We’ll make love.” Similarly, in Stranger, Roy works earnestly to seduce the young Dia away from her fiancé. After visiting Dia’s family home, Roy woos his would-be lover, regaling her with his vision of their life together with her as his “forever muse.” He promises, “I write. We open wine bottles. We make love.” Not incidentally, Roy’s enticement mirrors Juan Antonio’s language, replicating his words almost-but-not-quite exactly. While Juan Antonio’s words might sound alluring and seductive, Roy’s sound awkward and clumsy, as if he is barking orders instead of proffering an invitation.

Roy’s inferior imitation of Juan Antonio underscores the extent to which Hollywood films encourage mimetic reactions in spectators, who frequently use the narratives and iconography of popular cinema as what Kenneth Burke calls “equipment for living,” or cultural tools that offer strategies and attitudes for managing the experiences of everyday life (Burke 1937: 296–297). That is, specta-tors deploy mediated texts, such as films, as sense-making tools for translating and organizing the events of their lives. Despite the considerable influence Hollywood films may have on the identity formations and lived experiences of spectators, Allen’s cinematic caricatures and stereotypes remind us how limited and limiting Hollywood’s constructions of identity can be. So, while critic Kirk Honeycutt (2010) regretfully describes Allen’s recent characters as so redundant and unsur-prising that viewers can “all but predict lines and attitudes before a scene begins,”

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I understand this banality and staleness not as a textual flaw but as exactly Allen’s point.

Similar to his use of recycled character types, Allen’s treatment of narrative in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger also critiques Hollywood’s complicity in per-petuating reductive assumptions about identity. Critics have called the narratives of both films “lazy” ( Jones 2008, 2010) and “mechanical” (Groen 2010), disparaging as well their tendency toward loose ends and unresolved conclusions that leave “characters in the lurch” (Wilson 2010). But, as LaSalle (2010) argues, the supposed defects in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger’s character development and narrative structure might better be understood as strategic commentary on the film’s part. LaSalle (2010) ponders, “To make a movie about the essential futility of existence – to make it in earnest, not to play in the margins – isn’t it necessary to create a movie that is, in itself, pointless?” Rick Groen, writing for The Globe and Mail (2010), agrees with LaSalle’s assessment and interprets Stranger’s lack of resolution as “deliberate,” contending, “pointlessness is precisely the point here.” In other words, both LaSalle and Groen read Allen as echoing Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the message. As Schatz explains it, this strategy privileges “a concern for the how over the what,” foregrounding the “realization that in certain texts the how actually is the what, that the mediation is the meaning” (1982: 182).

At stake in such refusal of tidy Hollywood resolutions is Allen’s critique of the illusions and false promises offered by impossibly happy endings. Calvin Wilson, reviewing Stranger for St. Louis Today (2010), interprets Allen’s loose endings as declaring, “Neat Hollywood endings are as phony and dangerous as Cristal’s ram-blings.” As C. Morris argues of Allen’s longstanding tendency toward “ambiguous minor key endings,” these unresolved narratives and unfinished conclusions “parody the concept of reconciliation itself ” (1987: 176). Such endings, therefore, not only challenge the hegemony of classical Hollywood storytelling conventions; they also critique the ideological assumptions that undergird such narrative form, allowing Allen’s films to refuse “American myths of ‘normalcy,’ assimilation, and integration” (Morris 1987: 176). Just as Roy cannot live up to Juan Antonio’s legend, Allen’s endings remind us that lived experience cannot live up to the nor-mative expectations promulgated by Hollywood stories. People are not, in fact, templates with predictable life trajectories; life’s quandaries are almost never neatly resolved. By commingling recycled characters, intertextual allusions, and unresolved narratives, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger encourage spectators to be mindful of the impossibility of Hollywood’s fantasy structures.

Talking in Circles

Just as Allen’s unresolved endings underscore the arbitrariness of Hollywood’s promises of harmony, order, and meaning in everyday life, his films often use

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music and sound to make similar points. Morris argues that Allen’s soundtracks “use music ironically both to undercut such expectations and to provide artistic instances of the integrity and concord unavailable in life” (1987: 178). In some cases, for instance, music does not match the mood of the onscreen images; in other cases, music seems historically or culturally out of place in relation to the film’s setting. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger, Allen expands beyond ironic reliance on music and deploys voiceover narration to offer what Burke calls “perspective by incongruity,” a strategy that lends insight into an idea or experi-ence by “wrench[ing] it loose” from its usual context or “ ‘constitutional’ setting” (1937: 309).

Actor Christopher Evan Welch narrates Vicky Cristina Barcelona; actor Zak Orth, who also played a minor role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, provides the voiceover narration for Stranger. In both films, the actors deliver the narration with formal but pleasant tones and relatively unvarying inflection. Most critics did not respond favorably to these uses of narrators. Jones (2008) critiques Welch as “a bookish omniscient narrator . . . whose drily amused summations of the characters sound like Allen when he’s trying to write a funny New Yorker piece.” Reviewers have interpreted Orth’s narration in Stranger in varying, sometimes contradictory, ways but almost always in a negative light. LaSalle (2010) calls it a “crutch” that con-tributes to the film’s “logy demeanor” and Morris (2010) says it sounds as if it were “recorded in bathtub.” Michael O’Sullivan (2010) also calls the voiceover narration “incongruously chirpy,” suggesting that the tone of wry amusement that characterizes Orth’s narration does not fit with the film’s emphasis on loss and futility.

Critics also emphasize the ways in which the narration does not propel the narrative but instead acts as an unnecessary distraction. Regarding Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Toppman (2008) pronounces, “[Allen] uses a monotonous narrator to tell us what the characters think and do, though he then shows them perform-ing the actions that have just been described.” Lumenick similarly describes the “wall-to-wall narration” as “redundant,” and Christopher Orr (2008) sardonically describes Welch as “heroically committed to ensuring that even the most inatten-tive viewer won’t miss a thing.” As a result, Orr concludes, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the cinematic equivalent of a book on tape: a movie that watches itself for you and tells you what it sees.”

Once again, these critics are right – to a point. The narration does often feel out of synch with the images and action onscreen, but it does so in order to offer critical commentary about the film narrative, characters, and fantasy structures. To demonstrate, Welch’s pedantic tone conflicts with the spontaneity that char-acterizes the diegesis and the naturalistic style of the actors in Vicky Cristina Bar-celona. The rather monotone narration also seems incompatible with the romantic fantasies that lead Vicky and Cristina on their adventures throughout Barcelona. While the women seek wild and transformative experiences, the narration flattens out their erotic impulses, foreshadowing the unsatisfying ends they will reach and

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the banality of their seemingly exotic exploits. The film’s opening scene evinces this tension as the narrator introduces the best friends and explains their pursuits in Barcelona and their differing “viewpoints” on love. While he describes the women’s passions and inner conflicts (he describes Vicky as having “no tolerance for pain and no lust for combat” but casts Cristina as “having accepted suffering as an inevitable part of deep passion”), Welch’s voice remains unaffected, even disinterested, as if he is already unconvinced about the significance of these women’s beliefs or upcoming adventures.

The film’s attempts to satirize the women’s romantic fantasies as clichéd and naive get redoubled later when Cristina attempts to sleep with Juan Antonio for the first time. In his hotel room, she describes herself as wanting “something more” than what traditional relationships offer, which she refers to as a “counter-intuitive love.” Just as their encounter becomes amorous, however, Cristina becomes ill and has to flee urgently to the bathroom to vomit. She will spend the next several days in bed, her stomach ulcer having been exacerbated by her indul-gent eating and drinking in Barcelona. This (literally anticlimactic) scene pokes fun at Hollywood’s treatments of romance and sex and reminds viewers of the prosaic and sometimes unpleasant aspects of everyday living, in the same way that the plodding narration reminds viewers of the hackneyed nature of the diegetic world they are encountering.

The tone of the narration in Stranger also seems to be strategically at odds with itself and with the rest of the film, vacillating between staid, formal speech and colloquial natter. The film opens with Orth’s voiceover narration paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He explains, “Shakespeare said, ‘Life was full of sound and fury and, in the end, signified nothing.’ ” This formal speech immediately gives way to more colloquial language as Orth narrates Helena’s experiences in chatty, even gossipy, tones. He says, “Okay, let’s begin with Helena.” This admixture of high-toned literary reference and more lowbrow idiomatic speech gets redoubled within the diegesis. To demonstrate, in a flashback to Sally and Roy’s early romance, after Orth has already explained that their marriage is falling apart, Roy recites William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow” to Sally. After quoting the poem in its entirety (“so much depends upon/ a red barrow/ glazed with rain water/ beside the white chickens”), Roy adds the phrase “and Sally’s ass.” This recourse to colloquial speech and casual tone recurs throughout the film, even as the content of Orth’s narration emphasizes the characters’ very serious experi-ences of loss and sorrow. For instance, Orth describes the dissolution of Alfie and Helena’s decades-long marriage by remarking rather blithely, “Alfie dumped her,” and he casually characterizes Alfie as being taken advantage of by his young bride “every time she screws him.” Stranger’s refusal of a coherent or consistent nar-rational frame highlights the arbitrariness of human experiences and signifies the futility of human attempts to make sense of life as if it were a narrative. Its tonal inconsistencies enact the vicissitudes that characterize everyday living and counters Hollywood’s insistence on orderly, tidy storytelling.

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Additionally, the narration in both films does frequently feel redundant and unnecessary. In one of the opening scenes of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we see Vicky and Cristina eating lunch on a terrace with Vicky’s aunt, Judy, and uncle, Mark, in their Barcelona home. The camera follows a household employee as she walks on to the terrace carrying a tray of food to a table where Vicky, Cristina, Judy, and Mark are already seated and eating. The voiceover explains, “After the girls unpacked and Judy’s husband Mark got home from the golf course, lunch was served on the terrace.” This narration does nothing to advance the plot, offers gratuitous details (as in the fact that the “girls unpacked”), and provides almost no expository information (outside of naming Judy’s husband and his pastime), which could not be gleaned from the visuals in the scene.

In a later instance, voiceover narration explains that, while traveling with Vicky and Cristina, an intoxicated Juan Antonio broached the subject of sex with the two women. Most films would either depict this line of action (without any voi-ceover narration) or use voiceover narration in the stead of onscreen depictions of the event, allowing the narrative to move forward efficiently. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, however, represents this information doubly. Immediately after the voi-ceover ends, the scene depicts Juan Antonio, with drink in hand at a bar, as he asks Vicky and Cristina if either woman might like to sleep with him. Similar redun-dancy characterizes much of the narration in Stranger. A montage sequence depicts Alfie’s post-divorce transformation, including the acquisition of a new sports car, a new wardrobe, and a physical makeover. As shots depict Alfie receiv-ing a spray-on tan, the narrator explains, “After his divorce, Alfie had his teeth whitened and his skin darkened.” Once again, the voiceovers provide spectators with no insight or information not made visually available, and in these examples and several other similar moments throughout both films, the redundancy of the verbal cues and onscreen action is so acute that it feels analogous to the effects of overlapping edits, disrupting the continuity of the scenes.

The voiceover narration in both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger, therefore, encourages the films’ imagined spectators not to get lost within the narrative but to remain acutely aware that they are watching a film. The narration performs a much more understated version of the visual–aural gags Allen deployed in Play it Again, Sam, which function, according to Sam Girgus, to highlight “the materiality of film by bringing attention to the various elements of camera shot and sound-track that comprise the film” (Girgus 2002: 15–16). The narration literally “fore-grounds the tale, the teller, and the act of storytelling” (Schatz 1982: 183), while its potentially off-putting incompatibility with the images onscreen promotes a Brechtian distancing effect akin to breaking the fourth wall through direct address – another device used frequently by Allen in his films.

By asking his viewers to remain at a distance from the text, Allen’s films encourage these viewers to think critically about what they are watching, not only in relation to content but also with regard to form and medium. Specifically, this voiceover narration invites spectators to understand films as rhetorical, or

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persuasive, texts. As the voiceover narration details exactly what is being seen or forecasts exactly what will be seen, these films highlight and thus problematize the influence that the film text has over perception. Films necessarily position and persuade spectators to see in particular ways, but the alleged invisibility of Hol-lywood style typically obscures this fact. Allen, in contrast, emphasizes the ways that films show (or tell) us what to see (and think).

In the same way that voiceover narration in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger invites spectators to be attentive to the act of spectatorship and to remain at a distance from the film text, Allen uses editing in Vicky Cristina Barcelona to empha-size the artificiality and materiality of the film text. The conspicuous use of editing devices in Vicky Cristina Barcelona also belies Hollywood’s hegemonic insistence on invisible style. The film deploys almost every possible type of transition, featur-ing, in addition to the ubiquitous straight cuts, a split screen, a slow dissolve, numerous jump cuts, an iris in and out, and a fade to black. Most of these devices get used only once (with the exception of the jump cuts, which Allen uses in multiple scenes), making them seem all the more noticeable and inconsistent. These affected and sporadic transitions are misaligned with the film’s overall naturalistic and tranquil style and, therefore, stand out as visual oddities that disrupt the organic flow of the film, emphasizing the artificiality of the film text. These edits further alert viewers that what gets seen on screen is not the “whole story” but is the edited, or manipulated, version that Allen wants to be seen.

The Way They Were

Finally, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger reveal their self-reflexive impulses about their status as artifacts of a longstanding cinematic tradition through the-matic interest in and formal enactments of nostalgia, repetition, and return. The characters of these films incessantly try to recreate the experiences and/or accom-plishments of their past to little or no avail. Both films, thus, emphasize the con-current inevitability and folly of looking back to the past, maintaining a constant tension between the future and the past and juxtaposing the notions of “moving on” with “going back.”

Vicky Cristina Barcelona depicts old lovers who reunite and return to one another, hoping to build a better future together, but always repeating the mistakes of the past: Vicky returns to Doug, although she has come to doubt the validity of monogamy; Vicky also returns to Juan Antonio, despite having declared their affair a mistake; Juan Antonio and Maria Elena return to each other, although they know they are incompatible and combustible as a couple; Judy, Vicky’s aunt, returns to her loveless marriage despite finding passion with another man. Further, when Vicky and Cristina decide their adventure in Barcelona has come to an end (along

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with the various relationships they created there), they move on with their lives by returning home to New York. The narrative structure enacts this return liter-ally, beginning and ending as Vicky and Cristina walk together through the Bar-celona airport.

Despite the centrality of fortune telling within the narrative, Stranger is less a film about the future than one about the past. Allen populates the narrative with characters yearning to recreate bygone days. Alfie wants to relive his youth through marriage with a younger woman and by having a son; then, when this plan falls apart, he longs to return to the comfort of marriage to his first wife. Helena seeks the counsel of a fortune teller so that she might find a new love that replicates the joys of her past marriage; along the way, she becomes obsessed with the possibility that she lived past lives, and she falls in love with a new man fixated on finding the wife he lost. Roy wants to reproduce the success of his first novel, while he and Sally both long to recreate the magic of their early romance. After the novelty Roy once found in Dia begins to wear off, he longs to return to Sally.

Allen’s formal and stylistic choices redouble the nostalgia and tendency toward repetition manifested by the characters of these films. Allen’s soundtrack in Vicky Cristina Barcelona returns to Giulia and Los Tellarini’s chipper song “Barcelona” multiple times. Like the voiceover narration, the jovial tone of this song often feels incongruous with the events unfolding onscreen, and its conspicuous repeti-tion throughout the film calls attention to the characters’ tendencies to make the same mistakes over and over again. Like a character that impossibly longs to relive an aspect of his or her past, the film replays the song incessantly, even if its mood no longer fits with the reality of the diegesis.

Editing in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger also enacts the films’ preoccupa-tion with the subject of nostalgia. Both films, for example, rely heavily on the flashback – an editing device tied directly to notions of memory and the act of reminiscing. Further, the appearance of an iris in and iris out, an editing device primarily associated with early cinema and rather atypical in films produced since the second half of the twentieth century, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona illustrates this nostalgic impulse. In a contemporary film this device may appear antiquated and out of place, if not comical; and, as Garrett Stewart argues, the presence of the “old-fangled closural device of the so-called iris shot” can imply a film’s “meta-filmic nostalgia” (2007: 135). This anachronistic device brings to mind other char-acteristic strategies in Allen’s films such as the use of music that is historically inapt for the diegetic setting (as in the use of older jazz songs in Stranger), or Carol Allen’s description of the mise-en-scène and characters in Stranger as belong-ing to other historical and generic contexts. This metafilmic nostalgia marks Allen’s most recent films (like all films) as necessarily derived from prior texts and experiential frames. Allen reminds viewers that no film text or act of spectator-ship remains unaffected or influenced by the texts, conventions, and traditions that precede it.

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The emphasis on nostalgia and looking back in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger recalls others of Allen’s more recent films, including Cassandra’s Dream and Midnight in Paris. In Cassandra’s Dream, two brothers try to make their futures resemble their idealized memories of (or, more precisely, fantasies about) child-hood adventures with their Uncle Howard by buying a boat that they cannot afford. In Midnight in Paris, Gil literally returns to the past in order to make himself a better writer through contact with past literary greats. In these films, however, looking back proves to be unproductive, if not dangerous. In Cassandra’s Dream, the brothers embark on a life of crime and eventually die in pursuit of their past-perfect future, discovering along the way that Uncle Howard never was the man they remembered (or, imagined) him to be. In Midnight in Paris, Gil discovers every historical moment includes people longing for an imagined past that never existed, realizes nostalgia is nothing more than fantasy, and learns to embrace his own lived moment.

That’s the End?

In the end, then, Allen’s recent films suggest both the futility of looking back and the impossibility of not looking back. It is inevitable that humans try to recreate what has come and gone, but doing so gets them nowhere. This thematic critique of the nostalgic impulse cuts both ways for Allen as a filmmaker. On the one hand, the narrative indictment of these characters’ desires to relive their pasts implicitly chastises those critics who refuse to read Allen’s films as anything but inferior imitations of his earlier masterpieces. These films remind their imagined audi-ences and critics that no one can go back, no one can live in the past, no one can be what he/she once was – not even a filmmaker as prolific as Allen himself. On the other hand, these nostalgia-laden films do allow Allen to reflect on and offer commentary about his body of work and his role as a filmmaker who shapes and is shaped by Hollywood norms. Along with the films’ redundant voiceover narra-tion, recycled characters, and references to past films, the thematic emphasis on repetition signals the extent to which the film’s characters and storylines are neither novel nor original. It highlights the tendency toward repetition that typifies not only the lives of the characters within the diegesis but also the conventional-ized structure of Hollywood narratives.

It should be noted that these cinematic musings on the influence and persuasive authority of the film text do not remain abstract or generalized but specifically attest to Allen’s complicity in making films that shape the beliefs and experiences of their spectators. That is, the films seem to invite spectators not simply to think about how all films operate persuasively (or even manipulatively) but to consider how Allen’s films have done (and continue to do) so. To demonstrate, the split

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screen that Allen uses in Vicky Cristina Barcelona directly invokes one used in Annie Hall. In the earlier film, the split screen contrasts Annie with her lover Alvy. While Alvy complains to his therapists that the couple’s average rate of sex three times per week seems too little, Annie describes this frequency as too much in a con-versation with her own therapist. Placing the characters and their incompatible viewpoints side-by-side accentuates the conflicts that will create an impasse in their doomed relationship.

Similarly, the opening sequence of Vicky Cristina Barcelona frames the leading women in split screen, while the narrator describes their opposing viewpoints on love and relationships. Given the split screen’s resemblance to its use in Annie Hall (and given that Vicky and Cristina are sitting side by side in a taxi cab and could easily be captured in a straightforward two-shot), the device seems especially telling as a signifier of what Stewart might describe as the film’s “metafilmic nos-talgia.” At the same time that the shot looks directly at Vicky and Cristina, it looks back to Annie and Alvy. It also matters that when describing the two women, Welch’s narration frames Vicky’s and Cristina’s identities in rather clichéd and reductive terms, as if the split screen serves as a literalization of the artificiality of the gendered stereotypes – the serious monogamist and the wild romantic, the madonna and the whore – that construct these characters. Contrary to O’Hehir’s (2008) assertion that it is hard to believe that the same Allen who made Vicky Cristina Barcelona also made Annie Hall, this device works specifically to remind spectators of such intertextual lineages.

Allen’s repetitions of and references to prior film texts (both those within his oeuvre and those produced by other filmmakers) should not be dismissed as botched attempts at sleight of hand, in which Allen tries to recycle material without audiences noticing. Rather, these conspicuous acts of recycling may be understood more productively as tricks that succeed precisely by failing. Allen cannot create something entirely new; all aesthetic renderings bear intertextual traces (intentional or not) of what has come before. They are always reincarna-tions with past lives. Neither can spectators interpret a text (or their lived experi-ence) with innocent eyes; audiences are never free of interpretive frames that are shaped by public culture and its artifacts, including (or especially) the cinema. Like Roy, every author necessarily steals from someone else; and, like Helena, all humans interpret the present (and the future) through the lenses of the past. The endings of both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger thus position their characters to make the same mistakes over and over again. Vicky and Cristina return to their lives in New York harboring the same doubts and fears about love and commit-ment that lead them to Barcelona in the first place; and the final scene in Stranger ends with two characters who are pursuing new love by literally trying to recon-nect with and recreate the past. Humans can predict the future no less than they can escape or recreate the past, but, according to Allen, they will go on trying to do both.

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Notes

1 The issues of artistic originality and integrity also arise in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Both Juan Antonio and Maria Elena are painters, and Maria Elena accuses Juan Antonio of stealing his work from hers, asserting that he stifled his own creativity and chose the easier path of imitation.

2 These statistics were taken from the online box office reporting service, Box Office Mojo.

3 Terry Staunton’s (2011) review for Radio Times, the BBC’s online site for film, radio, and television news, similarly describes the narrative characters of Stranger as hack-neyed. He writes, “Allen’s script is littered with hollow clichés and predictable sce-narios, while his characters are so broadly drawn and speak with such banal voices that it makes it difficult for the viewer to care about what happens to any of them.”

4 The phrase “lady in red” has appeared in both music and film. Singer Allie Wrubel recorded the first “The Lady in Red” in 1935 for the soundtrack of the film In Caliente. The song would be used in a number of Warner Bros. cartoons and became the title of a 1935 Warner Bros. animated feature. In 1986, Chris de Burgh recorded a song called “Lady in Red” for his album Into the Light. This version of the song made a number of appearances in film and television, including the films Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988) and American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) and the television soap opera Days of Our Lives. In 1979, Lewis Teague also directed a 1930s-era gangster film called The Lady in Red. The phrase “woman in red” also has a richly intertextual cinematic history. In 1984, Gene Wilder directed and starred in The Woman in Red, a remake of An Elephant Can Be Extremely Deceptive (Yves Robert, 1976). In Wilder’s film, Teddy Pierce is a married man who becomes carried away with his desire for a model named Charlotte. Pierce develops his obsession with Charlotte when he sees her, dressed entirely in red, standing over a grate with her dress blown over her head. This scene is itself an allusion to a similar scene from The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955) in which Marilyn Monroe’s character, dressed entirely in white, stands over a subway grate outside of a movie theater.

Works Cited

Allen, C. (2011) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Close-Up Film (Mar. 17). www.close-upfilm.com/2011/03/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger-12a/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Bailey, P.J. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University of Ken-tucky Press.

Burke, K. (1937) Attitudes toward History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Edelstein, D. (2011) “A ‘Paris’ review: Woody Allen, in fine form.” National Public Radio

(May 20). www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136460594/midnight-in-paris-woody-allens-best-in-a-decade (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Girgus, S. (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Green, D. (1991) “The comedian’s dilemma: Woody Allen’s ‘serious’ comedy.” Literature/Film Quarterly 19.2, 70–76.

Groen, R. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Same old Woody Allen.” The Globe and Mail (Oct. 1). www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger-same-old-woody-allen/article1369842/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Hirsch, F. (1981) Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life: Woody Allen’s Comedy. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Honeycutt, K. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – Review.” Hollywood Reporter (15 Oct.). www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/you-will-meet-tall-dark-29599 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

LaSalle, M. (2008) “Review: ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona.’ ” San Francisco Chronicle (Aug. 15). www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Movie-review-Vicky-Cristina-Barcelona- 3199602.php (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

LaSalle, M. (2010) “Review: Woody Allen’s meandering ‘Dark Stranger.’ ” San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 1). www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Movie-review-Vicky-Cristina-Barcelona-3199602.php (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Jones, J.R. (2008) “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” Chicago Reader (Aug. 15). www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/vicky-cristina-barcelona/Film?oid=1055397 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Jones, J.R. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Chicago Reader (Dec. 5). www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger/Film?oid=2340370 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Lumenick, L. (2008) “Three’s company.” New York Post (Aug. 15). www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/item_YJ49qqEuEFKs2hXZJujs7J (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Moore, R. (2010) “Movie review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Orlando Sentinel (Oct. 13). http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_movies_blog/2010/10/movie- review-you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+entertainment%2Fmovies%2Fmovieblog+%28Frankly+My+Dear+-+Movies%29 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Morris, C. (1987) “Woody Allen’s comic irony.” Literature/Film Quarterly 15.3, 175–180.Morris, W. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Allen’s tale never rings true.” Boston

Globe (Oct. 1). www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/10/01/woody_allens_tall_tale_never_rings_true/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

O’Hehir, A. (2008) “Scarlett and Pen.” Salon (Aug. 15). www.salon.com/2008/08/15/vicky_cristina/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Orr, C. (2008) “The movie review: ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona.’ ” The New Republic (Aug. 29). www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/the-movie-review-vicky-cristina-barcelona (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

O’Sullivan, M. (2010) “A brooding and grim encounter.” Washington Post (Oct. 8). www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger,1167025.html (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Schatz, T. (1982) “Annie Hall and the issue of modernism.” Literature/Film Quarterly 10.3, 180–187.

Staunton, T. (2011) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Radio Times (Mar. 17). www.radiotimes.com/film/hjqps/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

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Stewart, Garrett (2007) Framed Time: Toward a Post-Filmic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tobias, S. (2008) “Cassandra’s Dream.” The Onion A.V Club ( Jan. 17). www.avclub.com/articles/cassandras-dream,3130/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Tobias, S. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” The Onion A.V. Club (Sept. 23). www.avclub.com/articles/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger,45535/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Toppman, L. (2008) “Yet another wooden Allen drama.” Charlotte Observer (Aug. 14). www.charlotteobserver.com/2008/08/14/127153/yet-another-wooden-allen-drama.html (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Tutt, R. (1991) “Truth, beauty, and travesty: Woody Allen’s well wrought urn.” Literature/Film Quarterly 19.2, 104–108.

Weiss, S.R. (2002) “Woody Allen: Does he hate Hollywood?” TV Guide (May 3). www.tvguide.com/authors/Sabrina-Rojas-Weiss/19 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

Wilson, C. (2010) “Woody Allen is in good form with ‘Tall Dark Stranger.’ ” St. Louis Today (Oct. 15). www.stltoday.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/woody-allen-is-in-good- form-with-tall-dark-stranger/article_553daf1c-fa9c-5a91-86ad-9be715168e0c.html (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

10

More than any other major filmmaker, Woody Allen has made the movies a subject of his films. Since Play It Again, Sam (1972), Allen has repeatedly depicted movies, filmgoing, and characters who work in motion pictures as writers, direc-tors, and actors. In doing so, he echoes the profound cultural ambivalence about the place of Hollywood movies in our culture, an ambivalence characteristic of literature and films about American moviemaking. In particular, Allen’s films have explored how the constraints and expectations of film genres undermine artistic authenticity, the complexities of how audience and filmmaker interact, and the ongoing modern negotiation between entertainment and art. These tensions shape his films that pay the most attention to filmmaking: Crimes and Misdemean-ors, Hollywood Ending, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Stardust Memories. Allen so frequently takes moviemaking as his subject that he has also become a master of the varied ways of using a film-within-a-film to exploit the self-referentiality of that subgenre and to examine the interaction between filmmaker and audience. Allen’s conflicted treatment of filmmaking within his work reveals how the unre-solved tensions between comic entertainment and artistic seriousness contribute to the vitality of his films.

Hollywood as a geographic place in southern California rarely appears in Allen’s films; even Hollywood Ending contains only a few California scenes and some of those only occupy half of a split screen. But Hollywood is both a geo-graphic place in southern California and a cultural institution without physical boundaries. As John Ford famously put it: “Hollywood is a place you can’t geo-graphically define.”1 In Woody Allen’s work, Hollywood is almost always treated

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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from afar as a complex of artistic productions and expectations. His most pro-found treatment of the experience of filmgoing, The Purple Rose of Cairo, explores how Hollywood came to Depression-era viewers through films in their local the-aters. Crimes and Misdemeanors, Stardust Memories, and Celebrity all feature charac-ters who are filmmakers or screenwriters outside of Hollywood. In Hollywood Ending, the film in question (The City that Never Sleeps) is being shot in New York and the title refers to the conventions associated with commercial filmmaking. This geographic fluidity has its counterpart in Allen’s loving treatment of New York, which he insists is based not on the real city but on the fantasy New York from Hollywood motion pictures: “The New York that Hollywood showed the world, which never really existed, is the New York that I show the world because that’s the New York I fell in love with” (Lax 2007: 266). Similarly, Woody Allen’s treatment of Hollywood is an engagement with the conventions and history of Hollywood filmmaking as it impinges on the consciousness of filmmakers and audiences, wherever they are physically located.

“The essence of life isn’t comic; it’s tragic. I mean, there’s nothing intrinsically funny about the terrible facts of human existence.” So says Sy (Wallace Shawn), the comic playwright in Melinda and Melinda, in the act of acknowledging that the tragic playwright’s work is deeper and truer to life than his escapist comedies. Woody Allen, in his interviews, could hardly be more explicit about his own belief that the comic film (and particularly the happy ending) is a lesser art form and a lie:

There’s . . . no question in my mind that comedy is less valuable than serious stuff. It has less of an impact, and I think for good reason. When comedy approaches a problem, it kids it but it doesn’t resolve it (Lax 2007: 66).

The paradox is that many of the reviewers and critics who celebrate Allen’s work tend to believe the opposite: that comedy represents a profound artistic engage-ment with the human condition and that Allen’s films reflect that. Sam Girgus notes that, for many critics, “Allen’s apparent need for artistic and creative recogni-tion in his alleged areas of weakness, drama and tragedy, sadly takes time and energy from his true genius and gift, comedy” (Girgus 2002: 132) Allen’s self-conscious engagement with this issue in his films – his thematization of the critical debates surrounding his own work – has emerged most sharply in how the endings of his films interact with the expectations of the Hollywood ending.

Moral and Aesthetic Blindness (Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hollywood Ending)

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) may seem an odd place to start, since it only engages filmmaking in its lighter subplot. But, as Peter Bailey argues, in Crimes

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and Misdemeanors, “Allen allowed himself to directly articulate the philosophical questions that arise elsewhere in his work in more fragmentary, tentative or self-parodic terms” (2001: 140). Thus it is a remarkably good touchstone for under-standing crucial recurrent themes in Allen’s work.2

The title of the film deliberately evokes Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the major plotline clearly echoes Dostoevsky’s exploration of the idea that, in the absence of God, anything is permitted. The substitution of “misdemeanors” for “punishment” has two suggestive implications. First, it underscores that the central character, Judah, does not get punished for his crime; he prospers and even tri-umphs over his guilt. Second, it acknowledges that Allen has paired a less serious subplot with the main story’s examination of murder and its consequences.

In the primary story, successful ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is worried that the mistress from whom he is trying to extricate himself will confront his wife and ruin his family and professional life. In desperation, he turns to his brother, Jack ( Jerry Orbach), who helps arrange her murder. After the murder, Judah is stricken with remorse but represses his urge to confess and finds himself settling into a comfortable life as his guilt recedes. Meanwhile, a rabbi, Ben (Sam Waterston), who is a patient of his, grows blind with an untreatable eye disease. Judah had confided in Ben about the affair (not the murder) and Ben had counseled him to confess his affair to his wife and beg her forgiveness. Ben speaks to Judah about the importance of a God-driven universe in which evil actions are punished, and admits that he couldn’t survive in a meaningless world absent such a faith.

In the subplot, Clifford Stern (Allen) is struggling to make a career as a docu-mentary filmmaker while his marriage to Wendy ( Joanna Gleason) deteriorates. Wendy’s brother, successful sitcom producer, Lester (Alan Alda), as a favor to his sister, hires Cliff to direct a documentary about him for the public television series, “Creative Minds.” Though Cliff loathes his commercial and successful brother-in-law, he accepts out of financial necessity and to save his marriage. While making the film, he falls for a producer working on the project, Halley Reed (Mia Farrow). When a rough cut of Cliff ’s documentary reveals that it is a mocking parody of Lester’s self-importance, Cliff is fired from the project. A few months later, Cliff ’s wife leaves him and he learns that Halley is engaged to Lester.

In relating these two plots, Allen is making a familiar Hollywood genre move: pairing a crime drama with a romantic comedy, a resilient genre running from films like North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief to Foul Play and Bird on a Wire. But the conclusion of the film, where the two plots converge at Ben’s daughter’s wedding (attended by both Judah and Cliff ), subverts the endings appropriate to each genre. In the crime drama, the murderer prospers with his crime undiscov-ered, his fortunes growing, and his family beside him. In the romantic comedy, Halley ends up with the wrong man, the shallow Lester, and protagonist Cliff is left unemployed, unsuccessful, and involuntarily single.

The subplot is full of references to the movies. Cliff is a documentary film-maker, Halley a television film producer, and Lester a successful Hollywood

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comedy producer. Cliff dotes on a teenage niece, whom he takes to old classic films, allowing Allen to quote from several Hollywood films and juxtapose them ironically with the Judah plot. It is tempting, of course, to identify the character Allen plays as a stand-in for Woody Allen himself, the vaguely autobiographical presence in so many of his films. But it may be more useful to see Cliff and Lester as comically exaggerated versions of two sides of Allen’s aesthetic nature: Cliff represents the serious filmmaker committed to topics of importance (he’s done documentaries on leukemia, toxic waste, and starvation), while Lester represents the side of Allen that is a highly successful comic entertainer. How these charac-ters become caricatures, how they interact, and how they form two sides of the romantic triangle with Halley reveal the complexity and unresolved nature of Allen’s attitude toward the film artist and his own work.

Each character is an exaggeration of a type. Clifford’s choice of decidedly grim topics for his small documentaries is at odds with the light Hollywood fare he delights in with his niece and with his owning a 16 mm copy of Singin’ in the Rain, which he screens privately for Halley. Why would someone who so clearly loves light Hollywood comedy eschew humor completely in his own work and ridicule his successful brother-in-law who creates shows that make people laugh? Against the multiple glimpses of Hollywood films we see with Cliff and his niece, we are treated to several extended glimpses of Cliff ’s big project, a documentary on a Holocaust survivor and philosopher Louis Levy. Though Levy offers a life-affirming philosophy, the footage Cliff has shot is extensive “talking head” material. If it were not uncommercial enough in its raw form, it is rendered unmarketable by news of Levy’s suicide, which belies his philosophy.

We never see any of Lester’s work, though we do see him advising writers as Clifford films his documentary. The scenes that Lester shoots reveal Lester as egotistical and self-aggrandizing, as he intones pseudo-wisdom about comedy and flirts shamelessly with an actress recently hired for one of his shows. The most important of the several framed films we glimpse in Crimes and Misdemeanors is the rough cut of Clifford’s profile of Lester. In it, he crosscuts between Lester’s pronouncements and clips of Mussolini, and puts some of Lester’s observations into the mouth of Francis, the Talking Mule. The result is, well, funny, and it is a startling contrast with what has been shown and implied to be the normal nature of Cliff ’s good cause documentaries. Ironically, Lester has unleashed Cliff ’s humor and wit. Of course, Lester fires him and takes control of the production, so the audience for this unfinished piece of Cliff ’s oeuvre is even smaller than it is for his documentaries.

Halley is attracted to Cliff, but he’s married. And she is not immune to Lester’s charm and attention. Ultimately, we shouldn’t be surprised that the woman whom Cliff wooed with Singin’ in the Rain chooses the successful creator of Hollywood comedies over the dour, resentful, and self-destructive documentarian. But Cliff is stunned; Halley’s marriage to Lester represents the ultimate injustice in the world, even if it is only a misdemeanor, and not a crime. To us in the audience,

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the resolution of the love triangle may suggest how Allen feels about the success of his comic entertainments over his more serious ventures, though in actuality Allen’s most critically successful work has been material that combines comedy with serious themes, as in this film and films such as Hannah and Her Sisters or Annie Hall, as opposed to the strictly screwball material (Bananas or Manhattan Murder Mystery) or the strictly serious (Interiors or Alice).

The two plots are brought together in the key final wedding scene in which Judah and Cliff meet by chance in a quiet room. Judah pitches the story of his actual murder of his mistress as a movie idea (though he later insists it is “real life”). Clifford criticizes the outcome of Judah’s story in which the killer gradually loses his guilt and prospers: “Then his worst beliefs are realized” (there is no justice in the universe). And he argues that it would be a better story if the murderer turned himself in. Judah responds, “If you want a happy ending, go see a Hollywood movie”: a tricky response, since Cliff assumed they were indeed discussing a movie scenario. The moment is fraught with multiple Hollywood ironies. The success of the main plot protagonist – that is, the apparent happy ending for Judah – is not conventional Hollywood because evil and crime must be punished (as the Production Code required in the classic Hollywood era). Meanwhile, Cliff, the realistic documentarian, is advocating for the Hollywood ending, perhaps because he experienced just the opposite in his real-life romantic disappointment. As Sam Girgus puts it, “What Cliff sees as tragedy, Judah describes as a happy ending” (2002: 145). As in a good Hollywood comedy, the ending brings all the characters together at a wedding celebration, but the festivity and Cliff and Judah’s drunken conversation reveal a world resolved counter to the genre expectations: murderer Judah thrives; virtuous Ben is now wholly blind; Louis Levy, philosopher of rec-onciliation and hope, is an unexplained suicide; pompous Lester gets money, fame, and girl; and the filmmaker with integrity is left broke, unrecognized, and alone.

The film seems clearly designed to show us the inauthenticity of Hollywood endings. The blindness motif, which some critics felt was overplayed, highlights the emphasis on movies. Judah makes his fortune correcting people’s sight, but he is unable to see clearly in a moral sense in his own life and is unable to restore the sight of rabbi Ben. The implication is that it is God who is blind (or absent). But to the extent that the film is about movies, it is about visual art and how people see the world presented to them on film by Hollywood. Seeing movies may create a blindness to the realities of the world, and yet Crimes and Misdemean-ors remorselessly returns us to cinematic visual images through the use of the framed screen: various of the films that Cliff and his niece see are used to comment ironically on the Judah plot; Cliff ’s films of Louis Levy and Lester are excerpted and shown, and, in the final moments of the film, scenes from Crimes and Misde-meanors itself run as a montage against the audio of Louis Levy. As one critic puts it, “What is important for us as the audience . . . is the possibility of seeing our-selves mirrored [in the film] and our becoming transfigured by it (Gilmore 2005:

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89). Richard Gilmore imagines the audience transfigured by Allen’s film, but Crimes and Misdemeanors, in its frequent inclusion of bits of films and film refer-ences, reminds us that this film exists within a universe of movies that affect our sensibilities and condition our expectations. Crimes and Misdemeanors depends on our familiarity with genre in order to shock us by refusing the resolutions tradi-tionally appropriate to the genres. But that very familiarity suggests that Crimes and Misdemeanors is limited to being a feeble protest against the Hollywood norms that collectively have much greater cultural weight. Ultimately, Crimes and Misde-meanors, with its emphasis on blindness, asks us to question what we are seeing. That Allen’s own characteristics and sentiments are divided between the portrayals of Cliff and Lester ensures that the ambiguity of the film’s stance on the role of moviemaking can never wholly be resolved.

Hollywood Ending (2002), made 13 years later, has a surprising number of reso-nances with Crimes and Misdemeanors. In fact, we can view Hollywood Ending as a romantic comedy made from the subplot of Crimes and Misdemeanors, played (appropriately) with broader comedy and a happy ending. The romantic triangle here is quite familiar: Val (Woody Allen), a film director known for artistic integ-rity, cost overruns, diminishing popularity, and hypochondria; Ellie (Tea Leoni), his ex-wife, working as a Hollywood producer; and Hal (Treat Williams) the ultra-successful Hollywood studio head for whom Ellie left Val. Ellie (like Wendy in Crimes and Misdemeanors) successfully lobbies her lover Hal to hire Val to direct a new film, The City that Never Sleeps, a remake of a noir crime drama set in New York, because it is just Val’s kind of movie and he has “the streets of New York . . . in his marrow.” The studio balks because, though once a successful direc-tor, Val is known now as a “raving incompetent psychotic.” Ellie responds in his defense: “he’s not incompetent” (Figure 10.1).

Once again, it is tempting to read Woody Allen wholly into the character he portrays, but more revealing, I think, to read him into both halves of the Val/Hal coin: the pessimistic director with artistic integrity and the successful filmmaker with multiple awards and profits. As the story develops, Val takes on the role of director, recognizing it as a last chance to regain stature in Hollywood. But as filming begins, he is struck with psychosomatic blindness. Fearing to blow his chance, he directs the film anyway, concealing his blindness through the coopera-tion of his agent and the interpreter for the Chinese cinematographer. Broad comedy ensues as expected, with the blind director tripping over things, looking the wrong way, and making odd decisions about camera angles, set designs and takes. Near the end of the film, Val is forced to take Ellie into his confidence, and they work together to complete the film while concealing the truth from Hal. Hal learns of their deceit and is horrified by the movie and aggrieved at his fian-cée’s deception. When he confronts her, she discovers that she has never stopped loving Val. She returns to him as the movie is released to terrible reviews. His blindness lifts, and they are reunited. Meanwhile, the film becomes an unexpected hit in France, and Val is invited to Paris to make a new movie. Val and Ellie head to Paris as they had always dreamed of doing.

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The film can thus be read in terms of what Stanley Cavell (1981) calls “the Hollywood comedy of remarriage,” the Philadelphia Story subgenre in which the happy ending is the reuniting of a husband and wife who have been separated or divorced. The comic disruptions of the romantic comedy work like Shake-speare’s “green world” to shake up the amorous arrangements that had seemed to make sense at the outset of the drama. As a result, the apparently good match for the woman is revealed to be not evil but boring and conventional, while the original husband is revealed to be genuinely valuable in spite of (or perhaps because of ) the flaws that undermined the marriage in the first place.

In this case, those flaws are broadly exaggerated forms of self-destructive hypo-chondria. Val is prone to suspect terminal diseases around every corner, having stopped production once to be tested for black plague and another time for hoof-and-mouth disease. Allen consistently undermines his serious filmmakers, like Clifford and Val, by ascribing to them comic neuroses that suggest their failures are not wholly the result of their artistic integrity. Certainly, Val’s psychosomatic blindness that results in the creation of a baffling and incoherent film suggests a critique of artistic pretension. We never see any of the film that Val has shot, but we do see others reacting very negatively to the screening of dailies. Given Val’s blindness, it is no surprise that the film would be visually incoherent, and the reactions of audience members at test screenings and American critics confirm this. The comic twist of having the film be a critical smash in France plays on another classic theme in Hollywood novels and films. The prototypical work of the accidental success is Merton of the Movies (original novel 1919, adapted for the

Figure 10.1 A split screen contrasts the New York filming location (left) with the Hollywood of the studio bosses (right), Hollywood Ending. (Executive Producers: Charles H. Joffe, Jack Rollins, Helen Robin, and Stephen Tenenbaum. Producer: Letty Aronson)

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stage in 1922, filmed in 1924, 1932, and 1947), in which a would-be serious actor is so bad that he inadvertently becomes a comic hit. The theme appears regularly throughout Hollywood literature and film, most recently in Peter Lefcourt’s The Deal (novel in 1991 and film in 2008). It reaffirms the belief that Hollywood success is arbitrary and capricious, or, as screenwriter William Goldman famously put it, that “Nobody knows anything” (1989). That Hollywood credo affirms an aesthetic nihilism. If Crimes and Misdemeanors is a world of moral blindness, a world in which God is blind, then Hollywood Ending depicts an aesthetic blindness, a world in which directors, producers, and audiences (at least French ones) are equally blind. One of the ironies of Hollywood Ending is that Allen never lets us judge the framed film for ourselves: he manipulates the reactions of others to suggest that the film is as incoherent as we would expect from a blind director. The French joke is a joke at Allen’s own expense, of course, since his own films enjoy a very strong reputation in France.

What are we to make of these two similar plots with antithetical endings in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hollywood Ending? The simplest response would be to align Allen’s values with Crimes and Misdemeanors, a work that explicitly criti-cizes Hollywood endings, as Allen himself does elsewhere. In that reading, Hol-lywood Ending is a deliberately silly movie that critiques the ending it offers through its very silliness. That is, Allen cannot bring himself to write the romantic ending that affirms human relationships and the role of the artist unless he subverts it by framing it consciously as light (and lesser) entertainment. The Hollywood ending of Hollywood Ending in which Val and Ellie are surrounded by blooming dogwoods as they depart for Paris leaves the audience uncomfortably uncertain whether the film is mocking its own romantic ending or mocking the audience’s desire that films end there, which is the idea (as we shall see) dramatized so effectively in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Yet, these implicit critiques of the Hollywood ending are dif-ficult to reconcile with the filmmaker who celebrates Singin’ in the Rain and Duck Soup or the filmmaker who makes the effort to create so many light entertain-ments in his work.

This interrogation of the Hollywood ending emerges more complexly in The Purple Rose of Cairo and Stardust Memories. These films also challenge the redemp-tive happy ending characteristic of Hollywood film, finding their authenticity in refusing that ending (as in Purple Rose) or complicating it (as in Stardust Memories).

The Framed Screen (The Purple Rose of Cairo and Stardust Memories)

The ultimate signifier of the self-referential movie about Hollywood is the scene in which a film is shown within the film. I use the term “framed screen” or “framed

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film” to discuss the cinematic uses of this kind of self-referentiality (Ames 1997). Over time, a fairly consistent cinematic syntax has developed that shapes how framed films are depicted. The director has available a set repertoire of shots that shows the movie-within-the-movie: a full-screen shot in which the framed film occupies the entire screen; a framed shot in which the framed film occupies most of the screen but a frame (such as a theatre curtain or the edge of a television or monitor) is visible; a shot which includes the viewers (often from the rear or the side) in the frame along with the framed film; and, finally, a reverse-angle frontal shot of the audience watching the film (often illuminated by the light of the pro-jector). To describe this menu of shots another way, the director can show us the content of the framed film, the content plus a frame image, the content plus a view of the audience, or only the audience.

Directors arrange these shots into a meaningful pattern that often allows the use of an eyeline match that connects viewer to scene viewed. Obviously, full-screen shots focus the external audience on the subject of the framed film, while reverse-angle shots focus us on the reaction of the internal audience. Directors can also create what I call a “reality cut,” in which we don’t know for certain that a full shot of a movie-within-a-movie is indeed a framed film until we pull back or cut into a “reality” which shows the frame or the audience. Films that begin inside of a framed film use this reality cut very dramatically.3 Allen uses the reality cut in Crimes and Misdemeanors in most of the shots of films that Clifford and his niece view. That is, we cut from a scene in the Judah plot to a full-screen shot of the movie Cliff and his niece are watching and only then pull back with a reality cut to reveal (or confirm) that the new scene is a movie being viewed in the theatre.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is practically a primer on the use of the framed screen, and Stardust Memories is one of the most complex and significant uses of the “reality cut” in film history. In both cases, Allen’s use of framing devices and movies-within-movies advances and complicates the view of Hollywood expressed by his films.

The Purple Rose of Cairo explores the familiar thesis that Depression-era film audiences were drawn to films representing elegant and sophisticated life as an imaginative way of escaping the limitations of their everyday lives of poverty, abuse, and frustration. The film shows both the effectiveness and the dangers of this kind of escapist or compensatory behavior. That the film is intended as a cautionary tale is indicated by the first line of dialogue – “Be careful, Cecilia!” – as a letter falls off the theatre marquee.

Allen builds a careful contrast between the life led by Cecilia (Mia Farrow) with her unemployed and abusive husband Monk (Danny Aiello) and the world depicted in the movies she watches. In the scenes of Monk and Cecilia quarrell-ing in their tiny apartment, Allen comes as close as he ever has to writing pungent working class drama in the mode of Arthur Miller. These finely crafted scenes emphasizing the characters’ financial and emotional poverty and overall

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helplessness are contrasted with the world depicted in the framed film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, a romantic comedy about an elite social set drinking champagne at jazz clubs and enjoying cocktails in evening dress in elegant apartments furnished with white telephones.

Allen manipulates the many and detailed presentations of the framed black-and-white film so as to make us always conscious of Cecilia’s reaction. We thus get a mediated view of the black-and-white Purple Rose, always aware that these images are feeding Cecilia’s dreams and illusions and compensating for the disap-pointments of her life away from the theatre. Cecilia becomes an obsessed viewer, an exaggerated figure of the ideal audience, an embodiment of “the gaze,” in the sense of the look of the viewer imprinted on and implied in the film (Doane 1987).

After establishing the Depression setting, Allen presents the first full scene of Cecilia watching the black-and-white framed film, The Purple Rose of Cairo. It is a masterful example of the dynamics of the framed screen, and it establishes the plot and ambience of the black-and-white Purple Rose and Cecilia as enraptured viewer. Allen communicates the experience of attending a full-length film in a crisply edited four-and-a-half minute sequence. A shot of the neon marquee advertising the film cuts to an unusual shot of ticket buyers viewed from inside the ticket booth, a parade of audience faces similar to the many such shots used in Stardust Memories. The presentation of the film-within-a-film begins with a shot of the audience (from the perspective of the screen) as they settle into their seats, the lights darken and the beam of light from the projector shoots out over their heads. This begins a sequence of 20 shots (not counting a handful of cuts that occur within the framed film). As the RKO logo of the framed movie appears, we see a shot that shows the theatre in color with the seated audience decked in muted reds and browns revealing the screen at the center of the frame in black and white. As the title card, Purple Rose of Cairo, follows the RKO logo, the camera cuts in to a full-screen shot of the framed film. This is followed by a reverse-angle shot of Cecilia watching the film illuminated by the glow of the screen and the projector beam. We will see this iconic shot of Cecilia watching throughout the film. In this sequence, Allen uses it five times. He mixes that with four shots that show the partial audience and the framed screen, seven shots of the framed film shown full screen, and four shots of other audience members. Twice he uses a fade out to communicate time passing to a later scene in the movie. Finally, we cut to Cecilia daydreaming at her waitress job, a shot that communicates the movie has ended, the night has passed, but Cecilia is still in the grips of her film viewing.

This economical presentation of the black-and-white Purple Rose and Cecilia as viewer establishes the key themes of the movie. We see the debonair and privi-leged lives of the characters in the framed film, a work that begins with a man in evening dress complaining, “I’m bored with cocktail parties and opening nights.” The clips take us to an Egyptian tomb and a New York nightclub where Kitty Haynes sings “Let’s Take It One Day at a Time” in Marlene Dietrich style (original

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song by Dick Hyman). Cecilia’s love for the film is underscored by the audio con-tinuity that pairs lines like “What’s life without a little risk taking?” with Cecilia staring at the screen. Allen uses the pattern of cuts to communicate Cecilia’s heightened interest when Tom Baxter ( Jeff Daniels) comes on screen, and the Kitty Haynes lyric, “Ours will be a different sort of love affair,” presages the com-plications that will follow Baxter walking off the screen and into Cecilia’s life.

Allen’s manipulation of the syntax of the framed film, aided by the contrast of color and black and white, prepares for the tour de force of the scene of Baxter walking off the film, a “screen passage” that owes a good deal to Buster Keaton’s brilliant use of the technique in Sherlock, Jr., an influence noted in many reviews and discussions of Purple Rose.4 In the first presentation of the framed film, the movement from full-screen shot of framed film to reverse-angle shot of Cecilia or others viewing creates a rhythm of expectation and fulfillment very like that created by the reverse-angle pattern of dialogue scenes (suturing). In the crucial scene that violates the boundary between screen and audience, that metaphorical dialogue becomes literal dialogue, as Tom Baxter and Cecilia talk across the two different realms. Cecilia is on her third consecutive tearful viewing after a terrible confrontation with Monk when Baxter’s gaze wanders away from his costars to catch Cecilia’s eye in the audience. “My God, you must really love this picture,” he says to her to begin their dialogue. After they exchange a few lines, Allen uses the partial audience-framed screen shot to show Baxter approaching the camera within the black-and-white film until he is in extreme close-up. Baxter then passes through the screen and becomes a color face in a shot showing the framed film full screen. Allen handles the size disparity (i.e., the images of the actors are bigger than real people) by cutting to the reactions of shocked audience members and then cutting back to the partial audience shot of the screen which shows Baxter, now human-sized in the center of the frame in color in the aisle of the theater while the black-and-white costars gaze out at him from the film with concern and Henry (Edward Herrmann) comments: “Listen, old sport, you’re on the wrong side.” The screen image entered into the real world becomes the comic device of this film, much as the blind director serves as the gag for Hollywood Ending. But this is a much richer trope, and Allen mines it for insightful humor about the rela-tion of actor to character, theatre to film, and, above all, of the world of Holly-wood to the real world of Depression America. Gags such as Baxter realizing that his money isn’t good in the real world and that things don’t fade out when he kisses Cecilia enrich the basic argument of the film that the conventions of elegant film adventure and romantic comedy are wholly at odds with the struggles of imperfect humans in an impoverished society.

Both Tom Baxter and the actor who portrays him, Gil Shepherd (also Jeff Daniels), become contenders for Cecilia’s affections and alternatives to her desper-ate life with Monk. The three men represent three different levels of artifice. Technically, of course, Baxter is a fictional character (within the world of the fictional framing film, the color Purple Rose of Cairo) and Shepherd and Monk are

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both real people. But Shepherd as a Hollywood actor is depicted as somehow less real or less genuine than Monk. He woos Cecilia in part to cajole Baxter back into the framed film and end the negative publicity. As a Hollywood star, he is accus-tomed (the film implies) to fleeting and shallow love affairs with women. The implication is that Hollywood actors partake of the unreality of the illusions they depict. So when the film actress of the black-and-white “Purple Rose” counsels Cecilia to go with Gil because, as film images, “we’re limited,” the counsel may also imply what the movie shows: that the lug Monk is realer than the Hollywood actor Gil. From Monk’s point of view (and the movie’s), Cecilia running away to Hollywood with a star actor is just as impossible as Cecilia having a love affair with a screen image. We see this implication in Cecilia’s articulate explanation to Tom about why she is choosing Gil: “In your world [the world of the movies], things have a way of working out right. I’m a real person and no matter how tempted I am, I have to choose the real world.” The argument for Gil becomes, devastatingly, an argument for remaining with Monk, which is her ultimate disap-pointing fate.

This grim conclusion is tempered by the fact that all the characters are, after all, part of a fiction film. But it is crucial to Allen’s vision that the framing color film has an ending antithetical to the implied ending of the framed black-and-white film. While the framed film presumably ends with the marriage of Tom Baxter and Kitty Haynes, the appropriate conclusion of a romantic comedy, the framing color film ends with Cecilia abandoned by both her romantic dream suitors and left to the abusive Monk to whom she must ultimately return. Allen fought for the “unhappy” ending of this film and reported that “The whole reason for Purple Rose was for the ending” (Lax 2007: 19).

But the ending is not so simple, because Allen returns Cecilia to the movie theatre and shows her engaging with the next film that has come to town. Under-standing the ambiguities of this ending is crucial to understanding Allen’s tortured relation to his own comedy. Cecilia learns that Gil Shepherd has jilted her from the theatre manager, who tells her also that the new Astaire and Rogers film begins that day. We cut to Gil Shepherd aboard his plane headed back to Hollywood but looking guilty for abandoning Cecilia. An audio overlap of the opening lines of “Cheek to Cheek” connects Gil and Cecilia: “Heaven, I’m in heaven.”

Allen cuts to a full screen shot of Astaire and Rogers dancing and then reverses to show Cecilia, utterly dejected, entering the theatre with her suitcase and ukulele. As the dialogue of shot/reverse shot continues, the lyrics of the song take on poignant significance: “I seem to find the happiness I seek.” We watch Cecilia go from her complete dejection with eyes on the floor, to lifting her eyes to view the screen, to the return of her enraptured gaze as the white light of the screen is reflected in her eyes, to the final opening of a smile as she becomes fully engaged with the transcendent fantasy of the dance number on film. This transformation is underscored by the audio overlap of the scene and the intercutting of the superb dancing of Astaire and Rogers as “Cheek to Cheek” comes to a climax.

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Cecilia is left in her miserable life and she remains grossly overinvested in the consolations of film. Yet the celebration of momentary happiness enveloped in the very jazz that backs this and almost all of Allen’s movies tempers that caution-ary tale. Excessive compensatory emotional investment in the movies occurs precisely because of their power to capture and preserve the moments of fleeting beauty and happiness we experience. As Cecilia explained to Tom before sending him back to the silver screen, “I loved every minute with you, and I’ll never forget our night on the town [when he brings her into the framed film].” That is, the emotional power of art and entertainment is real, even if the images and narra-tives that generate it are imaginary. In Purple Rose that paradox generates the pity of Cecilia’s plight and the emotional force of her imaginative engagement with movies.

The ending of Purple Rose of Cairo has strong parallels to Pennies from Heaven (1981) in which the characters played by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters flee their horrible Depression existence by actually entering an Astaire and Rogers scene (from Follow the Fleet) on the movie screen. Both directors – Herbert Ross and Woody Allen – pick an Astaire–Rogers dance number as the epitome of the imaginative escape offered by Depression-era musicals. Music and dance depicted on film embody the idea of artistic transformation. In Allen’s canon, the parallel moment for Purple Rose’s “Cheek to Cheek” is Louis Armstrong singing “Star-dust,” the moment that provides the touchstone and title for Stardust Memories. Stardust Memories – a film about a contemporary director much like Woody Allen – is tied to the film nostalgia of Purple Rose through its transformative title song. Stardust Memories shows us another side to Allen’s investigation of the significance of making movies.

It will take us a while to get to the “stardust” moment in Stardust Memories. Stardust Memories is Allen’s fullest examination of the role of the filmmaker in contemporary culture, and much of its clever magic comes from its repeated displacement of concluding and affirming moments. Like all the films discussed here, Stardust Memories is an exploration of how to end a film, but the movie itself gives us multiple endings, another strategy for presenting the ambiguity inherent in Cecilia’s sad smile.

An obvious homage to Fellini’s 8½, Stardust Memories casts Woody Allen as filmmaker Sandy Bates, struggling to find the right ending to the film he is making. While this struggle, which is both internal and a struggle with his producers, is going on, Bates attends a Sandy Bates film festival where several of his earlier films are screened and he deals with ardent fans, producers, and publicists. He recalls his love affair with a depressive girlfriend, Dorrie; he’s visited by a married roman-tic partner, Isobel, who reveals that she has taken her kids and left her husband to be with him; and he pursues a third woman, Daisy, whom he meets at the festival. The film is filled with “reality cuts,” in which a cut reveals that a segment we have been seeing is actually a film-within-the-film. The reality cuts are so numerous that the distinction between framed film and framing film (so clear in Purple Rose

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and reinforced by the color/black-and-white contrast) becomes obscured. Allen has asserted that the entire film after an early scene in which his housekeeper prepares rabbit for dinner is Sandy Bates’s dream – though this would hardly be apparent to viewers (Bjorkman 1993: 123).

There is a key moment very late in the film which I think clarifies, as much as possible, what is framing what. When the lights come up after a projected scene on board a train (a happier version of the “ending” the film opens with), two of the three women in Sandy Bates’s life discuss what it was like kissing him in the film (they didn’t like it). This scene reveals that Isobel and Daisy (and presumably Dorrie) were all actresses playing characters in the film within a film, and this seems to suggest that the entire movie, except for the brief final scene, is Bates’s framed film being screened in the Connecticut auditorium where the festival, depicted within the film, is held. Thus, if I am reading it correctly, all the framed films, including the debate over the ending of Bates’s film and the comic films screened at the festival and Bates’s Q&A after the films, and his memories of Dorrie and interactions with Isobel and Daisy, all are within the film he has just shown.

This unsolvable puzzle is the natural extension of filmic self-referentiality, the desire to make the film being made within the film identical to the framed film the final audience sees. As Robert Altman said of the highly self-referential film The Player, “The movie you saw is the movie you are about to see; the movie you saw is the movie we’re going to make” (Altman and Sterritt 2000: 163). As such, Stardust Memories participates in the rarified literary subgenre of the work about the difficulty or impossibility of making a work of art, a genre which cancels itself with its own achievement (and which ranges from Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” to John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse”).5

Appropriately, Stardust Memories begins with a fully framed film in which we see Sandy Bates on a silent train car filled with grim and scowling people. Across the tracks is another train car filled with lively and gay partyers. Bates wants to change trains, of course, but he can’t. Finally, the train car leaves its grim passen-gers off at a garbage dump, and they sadly progress by it as seagulls whirl noisily in the air. The image is a brilliant one: life as a sad and inexorable progression toward the garbage dump of death. It is as striking and powerful as the death personification in The Seventh Seal that Allen so admires. A reality cut takes us to a small audience silhouetted against the blank screen, and we realize that the ending of Bates’s new film has just been screened for his studio backers. They are not happy with it.

The scene that follows echoes the opening of Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, in which a successful comic film director screens the final scene of a movie about Depression poverty and homelessness to his stunned studio bosses. Bates’s backers complain that artists “document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” “His insights are shallow and morbid.” Another asks, “Doesn’t the man realize he has

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the greatest gift of all – the gift of laughter?” Sandy Bates stands firm: “I don’t want to make funny movies anymore. They can’t force me to. . . . I look around the world and all I see is human suffering” (Allen 1982: 283, 286). Sullivan ( Joel McCrea) in Sullivan’s Travels makes the same argument: “How can you talk about musicals at a time like this? With the world committing suicide . . . with corpses piling up in the street, grim death gargling at you around every corner?” His bosses suggest, “Maybe they’d like to forget that.” And they add that the movie Sullivan admires and wants to model his next film on, “Died in Pittsburgh. Like a dog.” Bates’s handlers mirror Sullivan’s: “Human suffering doesn’t sell tickets in Kansas City.”

This deliberate echo reminds us that Allen is continuing a conversation about the role of art and entertainment in people’s lives. Preston Sturges manipulates the story of Sullivan’s Travels toward a ringing affirmation of the power of comedy to lift the human spirit. Allen will give voice to that sentiment but undermine it and pose a more ambiguous and nuanced response to this debate between comedy and tragedy recast as the twentieth-century tension between popular entertainment and high art.

Stardust Memories is Allen’s most deliberately dialogic treatment of this recur-rent theme. By “dialogic,” I mean Allen’s placing of different voices in competi-tion, with one undercutting and undermining the other. In the films discussed here, the much compromised character of the artistic figure serves a complicating or dialogic function. We see this in the egotistical self-destructiveness of Cliff and Val. It also emerges vividly in Allen’s later film, Celebrity (1998), in which the familiar complaint of the Hollywood writer against his philistine bosses is under-mined by the shallowness and selfishness of Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh). In addition to depicting a self-indulgent film director, Stardust Memories remorselessly and masterfully pits one voice against the other in the cultural dialogue about the role of movies. Thus the opening of the film immerses us in one film experi-ence and cuts away to people criticizing it. Allen then responds to the criticisms, but those critical voices continue – and, as the movie shows, the critical voices continue inside Bates’s consciousness, too. More than a statement about the roles of art and entertainment, Stardust Memories is an unresolved dialogue about those issues.

The film offers us five distinct endings or ending moments. The first is the opening scene on the train to the dump. The next we see is one reshot or recut by the studio in which the characters end up not at a dump but in “jazz heaven” with a white-robed jazz orchestra serenading them in the clouds. Bates protests, as we would expect, and the scene comically mocks the traditional Hollywood ending (looking ahead to the pressure on Allen to give Purple Rose a happy ending and increase its marketability, a pressure so specific that the studio estimated the net difference in ticket sales should Allen retain the unhappy ending). The jazz heaven ending is ludicrous, but the studio defends it by saying to Bates, “You love

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jazz,” which is of course true of Woody Allen, too. Bates asserts: “I don’t want anyone going to jazz heaven; that’s a nitwit idea. You know the whole point of the movie is that no one is saved.”

As he leaves the scene, Bates protests further, “Jazz heaven – that is the stupidest thing I ever heard. You can’t control life; it doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only art can you control – art and masturbation, two areas in which I am an absolute expert.” Bates raises the familiar question about how the perfection of art relates to the imperfection of life: should art reflect the messiness of life or provide an artificially ordered alternative to that imperfection precisely because perfection and order are only wholly achievable within the artwork? Or does such a role for art render it inauthentic? Allen’s recurrent connection of art to masturbation suggests how both are tied to illusions and the rosy alternative to real life that imagination pro-vides. The comic link to masturbation proposes the artist as narcissist (especially if he is “Mister Bates”) and oddly jibes with the producers who criticize Bates’s work as self-indulgent. That same love of and suspicion of illusion animates Allen’s recurrent treatment of the young artist as magician, which recurs here when he levitates Daisy to an admiring audience at the UFO convention. But magic “couldn’t save Nat Bernstein,” its illusions powerless against mortality. Inauthentic art, Bates implies, works like magic to distract people from what is really going on (through misdirection), whereas genuine art confronts the viewer with the limitations of his existence.

But just how ludicrous is jazz heaven, especially if we look ahead to Purple Rose and its “Cheek to Cheek” conclusion: “I’m in heaven . . .”? And if there is another “jazz heaven” moment in Woody Allen’s work, it is the most luminous affirmative scene in Stardust Memories, the scene that gives the movie its title. This scene is complexly framed, as Bates has been shot by an adoring fan, or rather he imagines he has been shot by an adoring fan in a sequence within the framed film. He then imagines receiving a posthumous award and discussing this vision in his accep-tance speech from beyond the grave. Bates relates how, on the operating table, he searched for “something to hang on to . . . something to give my life meaning,” As he narrates this, the music of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” (lyrics by Mitchell Parish) begins and provides audio continuity to the dramatization of the remem-bered scene. The scene Bates recalls involves listening to Louis Armstrong’s version of “Stardust,” “music that I grew up with,” while the warm breeze of a spring morning comes through his apartment where Dorrie is reading the paper and he’s having breakfast. He thinks “how terrific she was and how much I loved her,” and for a brief moment experiences transcendence in which he feels “indestructible.” As Armstrong sings the song, the camera follows Bates’s gaze to Dorrie and she looks up a few times from the paper with ever-broadening smiles.

The scene is powerful partly because the music works on us as well as the characters. As Allen has said about his scoring, “The audience always has the pleasure of the extra evocation of the song” (Lax 2007: 308). It is a beautiful

Jazz Heaven: Woody Allen and the Hollywood Ending 223

song, and tying it to his sense of well-being and love aestheticizes the character’s emotional experience and also renders it potentially communicable. The song’s melancholy lyrics echo the themes of this scene; that is, the lyrics thematize the aestheticization of experience. The singer spends his nights alone because his great love is in the past. But he takes consolation in the song that reminds him of his love and that revives his feeling of being with his beloved, however evanes-cent, like stardust: “My consolation is the stardust of a song.” That is, “Stardust” is precisely about turning experience into art through memory. Since beauty and happiness are fleeting, it is art – here a song – that allows us to imaginatively recapture the feelings that have flown, “the memory of love’s refrain.” This phrase is doubly distanced from the real experience; that is, the song evokes not simply the “memory of love” but the “memory of love’s refrain,” love turned into a song that echoes itself.

The final verse (which Armstrong sings in the excerpt) invokes a nightingale very like Keats’s symbol for transient beauty: “The nightingale tells his fairy tale/ A paradise where roses bloom/ Though I dream in vain/ In my heart it will remain/ My stardust melody/ The memory of love’s refrain.” That the song celebrates an illusion as well as a memory is indicated by “fairy tale,” “paradise,” and “dream.” But the “melody” inspires the “memory,” and what is remembered is that mixture of emotion and music: “love’s refrain.” Read affirmatively, this moment and song in Bates’s movie become vehicles that capture what Allen wants to celebrate about life: transcendent moments of happiness and beauty accessible through the actions of memory and art.

There is an explicit parallel in Allen’s earlier work, when in Manhattan he lists the things that make “life worth living” and the list not only includes Louis Armstrong, it is heavily tilted toward aesthetic experience and spectatorship, placing his lover’s smile (like Dorrie’s in this moment) in the context of artistic experiences:

Why is life worth living? That’s a very good question. Um . . . Well, there are certain things I – I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? . . . Okay. Um, for me, oh I would say . . . what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing . . . uh . . . ummmm . . . and Willie Mays  .  .  .  and, uh, um  .  .  .  the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Sym-phony  .  .  .  and ummmm  .  .  .  Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Potatohead Blues”  .  .  . and, um .  .  . Swedish movies, naturally  .  .  . Sentimental Education by Flaubert  .  .  . uh  .  .  . Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra  .  .  . umm .  .  .  those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne . . . uh, the crabs at Sam Wo’s . . . tsch, uh . . . Tracy’s face . . . (Allen 1982: 267–268).

Jazz heaven does not sound so far off. Or, to put it another way, when Allen mocks the studio’s happy ending, he is mocking his own tendency to represent happiness and the value of life in an aesthetic or hedonistic way. Yet he is also affirming that very vision in the power of his presentation, creating what is for many the most memorable scene of Stardust Memories. He then immediately undercuts it with a

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reality cut as the scene fades to black and a reverse shot shows the audience com-plaining about Bates’s sentimentality: “Cop-out artist!” “Why do all comedians turn out to be sentimental bores?” The intellectual strength of Stardust Memories lies in this remorseless self-interrogation or dialogism. Allen seems to think that both sides of his artistic persona represent easy ways out or remain, by themselves, inadequate to the artistic vision he is seeking.

The “Stardust” scene leads, in a complicated fashion, to yet another ending in this interrogation of Hollywood endings. In the framed and imagined scene of Bates’s near death experience, he whispers Dorrie’s name and offends Isobel, who is by his side. She takes her children and departs, and Bates follows her to the train. As he boards the train with her, they find themselves in a set very like the original ending which began the film. In that context, Bates tries to woo Isobel back to him by describing the new ending he envisions, which includes her. The scene is a more sophisticated version of the joke in Annie Hall about rewriting scenes from life into art in order to have the endings come out right.

We’re on a train and there are many sad people. I have no idea where it’s headed; it could be the same junkyard. But it’s not as terrible as I originally thought it was because, you know, we like each other, and, you know, we have some laughs, and there’s a lot of closeness and the whole thing is a lot easier.

Once again, in dialogic fashion, Isobel resists and complains, “It’s too sentimental,” to which Bates replies, “It’s a good sentimental.” He then writes her into the scene, describing her life-affirming virtues. Like Cecilia and Dorrie, she begins to smile. Bates then writes in a kiss to close the movie, and she does kiss him, as the jazz score heightens and the framed movie fades out – for good this time.

The audience departs without the dialogic undercutting that greeted the “Star-dust” scene in the (apparently) framed film, though it is here that Isobel and Daisy discuss how Bates takes advantage of the screen kisses in a creepy way. Stardust Memories has come full circle to a revision of the initial bleak ending, a revision that, while not jazz heaven, celebrates the passing pleasures of life as worthy of artistic affirmation. But the interrogation of Hollywood endings is not quite com-plete. Allen shows us a shot of the now empty theatre that has been the scene of much of this movie and its framed films. Bates walks slowly into the empty theatre and retrieves his sunglasses (Figure 10.2). He walks out and the scene fades to black. As Peter Bailey has suggested, it is tempting to read this last figure as Woody Allen, not Sandy Bates, coming on Hitchcock-like to preside over the final ending. In any case, the long shot of the blank screen outlines the battleground of Allen’s movies about Hollywood: what will fill that white space and how it will interact with artist and audience and to what end? Picking up his sunglasses, Bates/Allen shows himself to be the celebrity he will ridicule in Celebrity, and the dark glasses hint at the themes of moral and aesthetic blindness developed elsewhere in his films. No matter how many endings Stardust Memories may proffer, one of them

Jazz Heaven: Woody Allen and the Hollywood Ending 225

will come literally at the end of the film before the final credits roll. Bates/Allen dons his dark shades, the white screen goes dark, the lights above it disappear – and only the insistent jazz music remains. This final gesture is as ambiguous and subject to multiple readings as the pattern of dialogic undercutting of the entire film: the sunglasses suggest the limitations of the artist’s vision while the score flirts with the “jazz heaven” Sandy Bates has already scorned.

Notes

1 John Ford quoted from a 1964 BBC television interview in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985.

2 When the journal Film and Philosophy devoted a special issue to the works of Woody Allen, 5 of 11 articles were devoted to Crimes and Misdemeanors (Lee 2000).

3 There are many examples of films that begin with a framed film and only reveal, a few minutes in, that we are watching a film-within-the-film. Among those mentioned here are “two of the film versions of Merton of the Movies” (1924, 1947), Play It Again, Sam (1972), and Sullivan’s Travels (1941).

4 I provide a fuller discussion of the trope of characters crossing over into a framed film in my discussion of “screen passages” in Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected (Ames 1997). Buster Keaton’s ability to enter the screen is eventually explained by revealing the film as his dream. Dreams and movies are often compared, and dreams and films framed within a movie can both be revealed by reality cuts.

Figure 10.2 Artist and canvas: director Sandy Bates facing the blank screen, Stardust Memories. (Executive Producers: Charles H. Joffe and Jack Rollins. Producer: Robert Greenhut)

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5 Stardust Memories is compared to Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” in Dunne (2006: 233).

Works Cited

Altman, R. and D. Sterritt (2000) Robert Altman: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Allen, W. (1982) Four Films: Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memories. New York: Random House.

Ames, C. (1997) Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Bailey, P. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Björkman, S. (1993) Woody Allen on Woody Allen. New York: Grove Press.Bordwell, D., J. Staiger, and K. Thompson (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style

and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press.Cavell, S. (1981) Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.Doane, M. (1987) The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press.Dunne, M. (2006) “Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the tradition of metafic-

tion.” In C.P. Silet (ed.), The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Scare-crow Press, 229–239.

Gilmore, R. (2005) Doing Philosophy at the Movies. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Girgus, S. (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldman, W. (1989) Adventures in the Screen Trade. New York: Grand Central Publishing.Lax, E. (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New York:

Knopf.Lee, S. (2000) Film and Philosophy: Special Issue on Woody Allen.Wilson, H.L. (1922) Merton of the Movies. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

PART III

Allen and His Sisters

Cultural Critiques

11

When Woody Allen first ventured into serious drama with Interiors (1978), New York Times critic Vincent Canby warned audiences that the film would be a “culture shock” (1978: 1). On the heels of Annie Hall (1977) and followed by Manhattan (1979), both critically acclaimed, Interiors – a brooding film about failed marriage, thwarted ambitions, and frustrated desire – appeared anomalous. Not widely acknowledged at the time beyond Canby, however, Interiors brings to the surface the same dark undercurrents of betrayal and despair, and the longing for things lost and a time impossible to regain running through Manhattan and Annie Hall, respectively – although in those films significantly leavened with humor. Interiors is as drained of humor as its characters are drained of vibrancy – all are gazing inward and finding little there to comfort or console, all “emotionally and psychi-cally disconnected from themselves and from one another,” as Canby pointed out (1978: 1).

Commenting on the critical and popular reception of that film and several of his other less than successful dramas, Woody Allen has said of Interiors, “it’s not the kind of drama Americans like, particularly”; of September (1987), “here in America, it’s not their cup of tea”; and of Another Woman (1988) it is “a kind of film which just isn’t popular here” (Björkman 1993: 95, 172, 194). A certain artistic cachet, of course, attaches to work perceived as more appreciated in Europe, with

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

“Here . . . It’s Not Their Cup of Tea”

Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies in Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice

Cynthia Lucia

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its implicitly superior sensibilities – an attitude Allen does not shy away from embracing, having remarked, as others have, upon the influence of Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman and of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov on this work. While these influences are certainly worthy of consideration, the powerful pres-ence of melodrama often is mentioned only in passing. Whether or not Allen consciously chose to incorporate, reference, and comment upon aspects of Hol-lywood melodrama of the past – including the 1930s and 1940s woman’s film and the 1950s domestic melodrama, generic strains he likely absorbed during his own youthful moviegoing – an examination of these underappreciated Allen films through the lens of melodrama and the scholarly work devoted to it opens them to enriched and nuanced readings. With the mainstream cinema demographic defined as decidedly male and creeping ever downward in age (now roughly between the ages of 10 and 25), it seems fair to argue as well that, in their intensive interiority, such strains of melodrama have been less popular in the last three or four decades than they had been with the primarily adult female audiences of their day. To reformulate Allen’s assessment, then, movies of this kind just aren’t that popular now.

While scholars and critics have noted Allen’s frequent attention to female characters, placing his work in a coherent feminist framework has proven difficult given his tendency to bracket female desire and ambition within an overarching trajectory of male desire (and angst) – something true of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories (1980), and Husbands and Wives (1992), to name a few of the most obvious examples. By contrast, however, Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice (1990) – the last of which Allen describes as “the comedy version of Another Woman” (Björkman 1993: 228) – while all acknowledging that men are an important part of the mix, provide an unwavering and nearly exclusive access to female subjectivity. Like many of his films, these four draw attention to their own construction and theatricality, with Allen’s reflexivity taking on not only a psy-chological but also a political dimension when viewed in the context of melo-drama and its female-specific subcycles. Although critics often characterize Allen as an apolitical filmmaker, his melodramatic tendencies open a portal to the complex interplay of dominant and mildly subversive elements in his work, insofar as women and their positioning within the culture and the cinema are concerned – something we will explore in all four films, with particular attention to Interiors.

Woody’s Melodramatic Tendencies

Although the stability of patriarchal authority is a more urgent concern in melo-drama of the post-World War II era (with Mildred Pierce [1945] as one key example),1

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it plays in equally interesting ways around the edges of all four Allen films. The women in these films are thrown into crises involving identity, whether in the personal, professional, or sexual fulfillment realms. These crises are rooted in “the assumed right of patriarchal authority to confer social and sexual identity” and “the difficulty of subjugating and channeling feminine sexuality according to the passive functions which patriarchy has defined for it; that is, heterosexual monogamy and maternity,” issues David Rodowick identifies as central to 1950s domestic melodrama (1987: 272). Whether through deep-focus shot composition, choreographed long takes, a tracking camera that draws attention to its presence as it scrutinizes or encircles characters, or various elements of mise-en-scène, including occasional stylized performances, Allen’s films ponder the very process of observing and assessing.2 Not unlike female characters in the paranoid woman’s film (see Doane 1987a: 123–154), the women in Allen’s films are exceedingly, if not excessively, self-aware, with the mobile camera simultaneously standing in for and offering critical commentary on the gaze of appraisal women are subjected to and can be said to internalize as they negotiate their roles in a largely male-dominated world – and cinema practice. Moreover, momentary departures from reality or from realism in style or substance in the films express the “ ‘condensa-tion’ of motivation into metaphoric images” that Thomas Elsaesser associates with the family melodrama, which “often works . . . by a displaced emphasis, by substitute acts, by parallel situations and metaphoric connections.” In their focus on middle class American families and in keeping with Freudian dream-work, Allen’s films, like the domestic melodrama, place “stereotyped situations in strange configurations, provoking clashes and ruptures which not only open up new asso-ciations but also redistribute .  .  . emotional energies” (Elsaesser 1987: 59–60). In these films and most reflexively in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Allen represents what Jeanine Basinger identifies as the paradox of the woman’s film that both “held women in social bondage and released them into a dream of potency and freedom.” In so doing, the films offer commentary on the overall function of the woman’s film, which, according to Basinger, “drew women in with images of what was lacking in their own lives and sent them home reassured that their own lives were the right thing after all” (1993: 6).

Allen does not necessarily offer reassurance. Even when his endings appear to be “happy,” as in Alice, to offer resolution as in Another Woman, or some degree of closure as in September and Interiors, rich ambiguities remain that tap into those of the earlier film cycles. At the same time, the ambiguities in Allen’s films under-mine or expose the “function” the earlier films may have served (or were intended to serve) within their historical time and place. Allen’s shot composition, for instance, illustrates this double-edged approach. In refraining from intensive use of the close-up, particularly in the context of conventional point of view sequences that are designed to invite viewer identification and empathy, Allen places the viewer at something of an observational, if not an alienating distance. (In this

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he probably is correct in his assessment that “here” this sort of approach may not appeal.) While we do become engaged with his characters – their emotional dissatisfactions or distress, their psychological uncertainties or instability, their creative accomplishments or frustrations, their philosophical angst – Allen refrains from positioning viewers in the emotional thrall of these experiences as 1940s “weepies” do, preferring instead to adopt the paradoxical approach of more gen-eralized melodramatic forms that simultaneously distance as they draw in.3

In the ensemble films Interiors and September, especially, Allen invites viewer identification with multiple points of view, as characteristic of female forms like the soap opera (Williams 1987: 315). The interplay of these multiple per-spectives allows both empathy and distance as true of the domestic melodrama, which focuses on “the victim,” but “present[s] all the characters convincingly as victims  .  .  .  by emphasizing  .  .  .  an emotional dynamic whose correlative is a network of external forces directed oppressingly inward,” as Elsaesser observes of Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli (1987: 64). Also like Sirk, Allen creates situa-tions in which “alienation is recognised as a basic condition, fate is secularized into the prison of social conformity and psychological neurosis” – in Allen’s case, the issue often is intellectual conformity – “and the linear trajectory of self-fulfillment so potent in American ideology is twisted into the downward spiral of a self-destructive urge seemingly possessing a whole social class” (Elsaesser 1987: 64–65). Allen’s ensemble narratives are structured around parallel longings and frustra-tions, “a series of mirror-reflections,” as Elsaessar (1987: 63) describes Minnelli’s 1960 film, Home from the Hill, a structure operating, as well, in Another Woman and Alice, though these films focus more exclusively on a single character.

At the same time, insularity and interiority are defining qualities of Allen’s characters and the worlds they inhabit, as in the family melodrama in which characters

regardless of attempts to break free, constantly look inwards.  .  .  . The characters are, so to speak, each others’ sole referent, there is no world outside to be acted on, no reality that could be defined or assumed unambiguously (Elsaesser 1987: 56).

Allen’s films simultaneously employ a reflexive overlay. While insularity and interiority are very much present, his characters are (or become) hyperaware of their conditions, which they consciously and continuously contemplate yet seem unable to correct or control (at least initially), intensifying the “downward spiral” into deeper levels of entrapping self-involvement. The title of Interiors could not be more explicit in announcing this condition. As in the family melo-drama (and its literary precursors), Allen’s films present “distinct overtones of spiritual crisis,” with an “emphasis on  .  .  .  fissures and ruptures in the fabric of experience” (Elsaesser 1987: 49, 48), a condition also present in the maternal melodrama, another cycle of melodrama that Allen fruitfully references and re-envisions.

Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies 233

Motherhood, Family, and Its Complications: Inscriptions and Revisions of the Family and Maternal Melodramas in Interiors and September

A woman in her early sixties, Eve (Geraldine Page) is a successful interior decora-tor (another dimension of the title Interiors) who has suffered a breakdown for reasons unnamed. Her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall) in voiceover explains, “out of nowhere an enormous abyss opened up, and I was staring into a face I didn’t recognize.” The initial breakdown occurred years earlier, and Eve has been in and out of hospitals ever since, the most recent episode prompted by Arthur’s desire for a “trial separation.” As in the family melodrama, “the feeling that there is always more to tell than can be said” permeates Interiors, resulting, similarly, in a “consciously elliptical narrative, proceeding often by visually condensing the char-acters’ motivation into sequences of images which do not seem to advance the plot” (Elsaesser 1987: 53) – a tendency Allen reflexively foregrounds in an opening montage of static images of the family’s Long Island beachfront home that Eve has decorated to perfection.

The elliptical quality of both the film’s content and structure heightens the feeling of a disjointed, not quite real world governed by the “reality of the psyche,” as true of the family melodrama (Elsaesser 1987: 48) – here, the collec-tive psyche of the family: Eve, Arthur, and their three daughters Renata (Diane Keaton) (a successful poet now suffering from writer’s block), Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) (an intelligent woman floundering for self-expression through work that will give her life meaning), and Flyn (Kristin Griffith) (an actress, mainly for television, whose career keeps her away for long periods). Also part of the family are Renata’s husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) (a novelist whose writing fails to earn the critical acclaim Renata’s does, resulting in marital tensions) and Joey’s partner Michael (Sam Waterston) (a political filmmaker whom we first encounter dictating his thoughts on Marx into a tape recorder, with some irony on Allen’s part, given Michael’s bourgeois surroundings in a perfectly designed New York apartment, the creation of Eve as part of her recovery effort – this time from the imbalance Arthur’s departure has caused). The film’s title evokes the insular fabric Eve has woven around her family – the perfectly designed interiors, all spare, cool, and elegantly simple, “an ice palace,” as Arthur describes their world. Perfection in Eve’s art, in her interiors – and the control she exerts over others through it – has eclipsed emotional intimacy and warmth, a condition her daugh-ters now also struggle to negotiate or overcome. The interiors she designs and inhabits are expressive of her “spiritual crisis,” a sickness of spirit arising from her deep-rooted fears (of loss? of abandonment?) – fears with social/ideological roots in the expectations and position demanded of middle class women of Eve’s generation.

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September presents us, similarly, with an insular world, though less intensively so – a country home in Vermont, where family, neighbors, and friends gather just before summer’s end, with crisscrossing patterns of desire resulting in “fissure and ruptures” along with “sudden change, reversal and excess,” as true of domestic melodrama (Elsaesser 1987: 48) – all elements present in Interiors, as well. Such ruptures in September also work to convey the “inevitable mistiming or disphasure constitutive of feminine sexuality in a patriarchal culture” that Mary Ann Doane associates with the woman’s film (1987a: 92) – a situation also present in Another Woman and Alice. In September it is the daughter, not the mother, who has suffered a breakdown. While recovering in Vermont, Lane (Mia Farrow) grows close to her neighbor Howard (Denholm Elliott), a much older widower who falls in love with her. She falls in love with her tenant Peter (Sam Waterston), while Peter falls in love with Lane’s married friend Stephanie (Dianne Wiest), who is there to sort out her feeling that “I just started going through the motions of my life” in regard to both her marriage and her children. Although structured around parallel long-ings and frustrations, the same “series of mirror-reflections” as in Interiors, Sep-tember is more unified in temporality, with strictly linear narrative events that transpire over a period of several days.

Like Joey in Interiors, Lane is searching for meaningful work and, also like Joey, she seems completely adrift, having no clear notion about what that work might be. When Howard asks what she will do, Lane replies, “I don’t know. Maybe my photography again. Or, um, sometimes I think about writing. I don’t know. It’s awful, isn’t it, at my age to be floundering around so? I just don’t know what I want.” Lane’s mother Diane (Elaine Stritch), a former actress with a colorful past, including marriage to a gangster and a tabloid murder case to go with it, sparks Peter’s interest in writing her biography – a book that, in theory, anyway, seems easier than the novel based on his father’s life that he has spent all summer struggling to create. Peter’s interest in her mother ignites Lane’s resentment and surprise that he would find Diane’s “frivolous existence” so fascinating. To her, Diane’s memoir threatens to exploit both a painful and “ugly” situation. Although Diane is vibrant and vivacious – on the surface completely unlike Eve in Interiors – she is precisely like Eve in her all-consuming self-involvement. Yet both films, drawing upon the tropes of melodrama, invite an understanding of the contingencies shaping the lives of these women.

As is often true of melodrama, a family secret will emerge. At a moment of deep emotional distress for Lane – she has just walked in on Peter and Stephanie passionately kissing, and Diane has temporarily derailed her plans to sell the house and start anew – Lane reveals that Diane pulled the trigger killing her gangster husband who was beating her, when for years in the press and among family and friends, Diane has allowed Lane to take the blame. As a child, Lane confessed to the shooting, following the instructions of lawyers invested in protecting Diane and her image. As is typical of Sirkian melodrama, this scene of heightened emo-tional trauma expresses the “principles of continuity and discontinuity,” with plot

Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies 235

rhythms building “to an evidently catastrophic collision of counter-running senti-ments” (Elsaesser 1987: 60). Diane has been content to live out the deception, willfully ignoring the damage it has caused her daughter and refusing to acknowl-edge her own sickness of spirit as a result – something that surfaces only when she’s been drinking and alone with a Ouija board, invoking the spirit of Lane’s father to explain why Lane dislikes her so. In contrast with the fluid long take style of so much of the film, Allen adopts a percussive editing rhythm, dramatically heightening the moment of Lane’s revelation. At the same time, Diane’s responses here and throughout the film work to deflate the emotional excess considered typical of melodrama. In response to Lane’s ongoing psychological stress, Diane off handedly remarks, “You have to learn to put the past behind you. What’s done is done,” an attitude defining her as “a survivor,” in Peter’s eyes.

As Mary Ann Doane explains, the maternal melodrama “bring[s] into play the contradictory position of the mother within a patriarchal society – a position that she focus desire on the child and the subsequent demand to give up the child to the social order” (1987a: 74). Diane and Eve are women, like those in the maternal melodrama, who are permitted “no access to a comfortable position of modera-tion” (82). They are either too excessively present or too egregiously absent. At the same time, through structure and visual design, Allen provides critical “markers” that draw attention to the contradictory demands placed on these women.

In order to understand just how and to what extent Allen engages with themes of the maternal melodrama, we must take an unlikely though brief detour to Alfred Hitchcock and The Birds (1963). A horror/domestic melodrama hybrid, The Birds presents us with the near hysteria of Lydia, a mother who attempts to sub-stitute her adult son Mitch for her deceased husband, whether by joining him in weekend chores with the easy intimacy of a spouse, or in subtly undermining his romantic relationships. While writings on the film offer a range of theories about the seemingly random bird attacks, one of particular interest holds that the attacks are an expression of maternal rage and excess, directed mainly at children and at Melanie – the woman Mitch has invited for dinner so that he, and his mother, can get to know her better. Mitch and Melanie discuss their mothers – his too present and hers completely absent, each one embodying one half of the contradiction that Allen explores through Eve and Diane, figures simultaneously too present and too absent in the past and present lives of their daughters. Cold, distant, and controlling, like Eve, Lydia is not a particularly sympathetic character, yet Hitch-cock invites us to understand her. In a scene with Melanie after a horrifying attack on Lydia’s neighbor, Lydia confides her feelings of purposelessness and inade-quacy now that her husband has died. In this scene, Hitchcock inscribes a critique of the patriarchal order that has shaped and deformed women like Lydia, whose identities are grounded entirely in their husbands and families. Left without her husband and with the threat of losing her son to another woman, Lydia is high-strung, helplessly passive, and a clinging, smothering presence. As birds gather outside to attack, Lydia cowers beneath the looming portrait of her husband, to

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whom Mitch bears a striking resemblance. This visual inscription of the absent father speaks volumes about the state in which Lydia lives, and it provides access to an understanding of her contradictory position and confinement within the patriarchal order.

Like Hitchcock, Allen in Interiors, especially, provides visual and narrative details that allow for an understanding of Eve’s condition as a function, in part, of her role as wife, mother, and woman of talent and aspiration conforming to demands of a patriarchal order. Also like Hitchcock, he complicates our understanding of her position while avoiding the pathos typically associated with the traditional maternal melodrama.

Interiors, as noted, opens with images of the Long Island beach house. Five empty vases, all pale in color, line the mantle; the deserted dining room and table, where Arthur announces his plan to separate, is shot through a doorway, creating a rigid sense of confinement. These images provide no clear temporal anchor, even on multiple viewings; they appear frozen in time. This absence of temporal-ity infuses the opening with a vague, though undeniable tone of crisis. Is what we’re seeing linked to a time after Eve’s suicide, to a time immediately before, or to the years before her death with the multiple breakdowns that led up to it? Reflected in the glass covering of a picture frame is the ghostly movement of a figure that turns out to be the adult Joey, the daughter most conflictingly tied to her mother both psychologically and emotionally. Joey moves toward the staircase and, once upstairs, gazes out of a window that opens to a view of the beach and ocean below. We enter her point of view as she sees three young girls playing on the sand. The very faint sound of the ocean heightens a sense of the atemporal. It is only a bit later when this image is repeated during Arthur’s narration that we recognize it as a flashback – a subjective vision of Joey’s own childhood.4 To borrow Doane’s perfectly apt words in reference to the 1944 maternal melodrama, Since You Went Away: “The scene activates the construction of a loss which haunts the entire narrative” (1987a: 80).

A cut to Renata, also standing at a window and pressing her hand against the pane, is followed by a jarring shift in location as Arthur faces the window of his Manhattan law office, his back to the camera, with the cityscape spread out before him. We hear his words in voiceover, though he never does turn to face the camera. This detail and the film’s structure, placing this single narrational moment against the more extended narration of Renata as she faces the camera when speaking to an offscreen therapist – like those small moments in The Birds – pro-vides an underlying critique of Arthur’s sense of privilege and entitlement, even as he casts himself as something of Eve’s victim.

While it is tempting to take Arthur’s words at face value, Allen’s visual and struc-tural choices tell a different story – or a more complicated one. Arthur says that when he met Eve, he had “dropped out of law school,” implying some level of sacrifice. He never acknowledges that, in fact, Eve put him through law school and financed the start of his practice – something Renata’s monologue reveals.

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Arthur goes on to say of Eve that, “she created a world around us that we existed in,” again implying his own passive acquiescence as someone acted upon within the “ice palace” she had constructed. Far from feminizing Arthur as might be expected, his words, narrated from a position of power and privilege made literal by the image, are stilted and drained of emotion, as if self-consciously chosen to evade the complete truth and the culpability potentially attached to it. Arthur’s elision (or denial) of Eve’s significant role in what would become his successful career speaks powerfully in a manner typical of Allen’s writing, which often invites reading between the lines – a quality Roger Ebert praises in September, saying that, “by the precise words that they do or don’t use, his characters are able to convey exactly how much of what they say is sincere, and how much is polite” (1987: 2).

Here, what Arthur chooses not to say implies his view that Eve’s very real sac-rifice was something to be expected – so much so that he feels no need to remark upon it (and for his generation it was not unusual for a woman to give up her education to finance her husband’s professional studies). In providing this informa-tion, Renata says, “in a sense it was like he was her creation” – words that resonate powerfully in the context of the maternal melodrama. Unlike Lydia in The Birds, who interchanges or misrecognizes her son as husband – a trope common to earlier mother/son melodramas – Eve, to some degree, misrecognizes her husband as son. If one accepts a blending of Freudian and Lacanian theories, this misrec-ognition is, perhaps, her means of gaining access to the phallic power a son would appear to confer. Implicitly claiming his success entirely as his own – as a post-Oedipal son would – Arthur relegates Eve to silence and marginality. Moreover, in presenting himself in several scenes as the one who “foots the bills,” Arthur assumes that through his position as patriarch, alone, he has more than made up for whatever Eve may have sacrificed (a sacrifice, once again, that the film brings to our attention but that he fails to acknowledge). This detail, along with a scene in which Joey off handedly though pointedly refers to Arthur’s affairs during times when Eve was hospitalized, provides access to another view of Eve – and of Arthur.

The medical theme so common in the woman’s film, which places the female body and psyche as objects of institutional interrogation, also allows access to a more sympathetic understanding of Eve, especially when Renata explains that Eve was subjected to a series of electric shock treatments. The two scenes in which Arthur disentangles himself from Eve are particularly telling in this regard. When, over breakfast, he announces his desire to separate, he does so in the formalized language of the boardroom, with Renata and Joey present, denying all respect for Eve as his wife, as a human being deserving the bonds of privacy and intimacy accorded in marriage:

I feel for my own self, I must come to this decision, though I don’t take it lightly. I feel that I’ve been a dedicated husband, and a responsible father, and I haven’t regret-ted anything that I’ve been called upon to do. Now, I feel I’d like to be by myself for a while, and consequently, I’ve decided to move out of the house.

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Through Arthur’s language, Allen suggests that the ice palace may not have been entirely of Eve’s construction, something Renata also implies when she says (again, rather off handedly) that as kids they would spend “some time with Dad, mostly Mom’s Sunday breakfasts,” thus hinting at the impact of her father’s physi-cal and emotional absence from their lives. Arthur’s passive voice construction when referring to “anything I’ve been called upon to do,” as well as the curt for-mality of his presentation creates the image of an emotionally distant husband and generally absent father – an absence compounded for the daughters by Eve’s hospitalizations during which time they were “shuffled around to aunts and cousins,” as Renata explains.

Later, announcing his intention to remarry, Arthur’s words again are quite telling. When he says of Eve, “She’s such a fragile thing,” Joey replies, “She’s not a thing. We all treat her like a patient in a hospital – she’s a human being.” Meeting with Eve to talk about finalizing their divorce, Arthur offers humiliation in the guise of concern: “I talked with your doctor; he feels you can handle this.” Eve, of course, is mortified at his having spoken to her doctor without her permission. Arthur’s reply, “Not behind your back, discreetly,” is a form of equivocation we find among other men in Allen’s films, most notably the husband in Another Woman who says calmly, “I accept your condemnation,” when his ex-wife painfully confronts him with his infidelities and again when his current wife questions their lack of sexual intimacy (which we later learn is connected with yet another infidel-ity). When Joey several times says of Eve, “she’s a sick woman,” she does so as an appeal for acknowledgement of her humanity, not as a license to patronize her.

It is through these small but telling details that Allen offers “a picture of woman’s ambivalent position under patriarchy,” as Linda Williams argues mater-nal melodramas often do (1987: 320). Eve’s entire sense of identity and stability is tied to Arthur (“her creation”), despite her own career success, which seems to count for little in the face of losing her husband – a further expression of this ambivalence. Arthur’s evocation of Eve’s excess of control – in his opening nar-ration and when he says of his plans to remarry, “I just want to relax” – elides his own absence from the family, a normative condition in a world (as it is in the maternal melodrama) where men exert agency in the public sphere and remain above reproach, as long as they “foot the bills.” Eve and Arthur’s mutual misrec-ognition of the husband/son positions presents the “maternal as the site of the collapse of all oppositions and the confusion of identity” (Doane 1987a: 82), a position the film to some degree adopts. At the same time, however, the film exposes the cruel irony of Eve’s having secured for Arthur literal access to “pater-nal law as the site of separation, division, differentiation” (Doane 1987a: 82) and thus having unknowingly contributed to her own marginalized position.

The film’s representation of the relationship between Eve and Joey taps into and offers commentary on aspects of the maternal melodrama in even more interesting ways. Joey is the middle daughter who “can’t stand” her mother, according to Renata, and who tries to cover the guilt attached to those feelings by

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catering to Eve’s every need. Complaining of being stuck with all the “dirty work” as the daughter who lives closest to Eve in Manhattan, Joey responds in disbelief at Renata’s assessment of her feelings. “I can’t believe this,” Joey says, “For the longest time, I wanted to be her.” Renata’s rejoinder – “Well, for a while you were her, weren’t you?  .  .  .  All those headaches when she was coming home from the hospital. You never wanted her to come home” – reflects the condition of the daughter who feels entrapped and “doomed to assume the mother’s place, to repeat the configuration in relation to her own daughter” (Doane 1987a: 82). Joey expresses this fear (and desire) in terms of having children of her own. While she claims possibly to want a child, she terminates a pregnancy, terrified that she will never find her own sense of self or meaningful work in her life – a conflict central to so many maternal melodramas that either praise maternal sacrifice, as in Stella Dallas (1937), or condemn maternal ambitions directed outside the home (often read in terms of unmitigated selfishness), as in Mildred Pierce (1945). Yet, as noted, it is within the cracks and fissures of these narratives that one can locate interesting ambiguities in tone concerning the role that women are relegated to play.

In a fascinating moment, Interiors reimagines the final scene of Stella Dallas in which Stella, alone on the street, watches through a window as her daughter Laurel is married – having sacrificed Laurel and Laurel’s love to ensure her daugh-ter’s future happiness. Shortly after his divorce from Eve is finalized, Arthur weds Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) – an earthy, unaffected woman much the opposite of Eve – at the Long Island beach house. That night, Eve appears at the house, first as a disembodied presence and later as a ghostly figure cast in deep shadow, with only pinpoints of light illuminating her eyes. Unlike in Stella Dallas, where we share Stella’s point of view and her emotions as she watches and reacts, heart-broken yet proud as her daughter is married, we never see Eve as she stands outside the house – only in retrospect do we recognize the inscription of her presence there. As Pearl dances (and accidentally shatters one of Eve’s vases), she circles by the window momentarily and gazes out, looking directly at the camera searchingly, as if aware of something or someone she cannot quite make out. The camera is positioned outside the window, strongly inscribing an unseen pres-ence in the night. In these few eerie seconds, we come to realize that when Pearl stares into the camera, she is locking eyes with Eve – the woman she is replacing. The gaze of the camera is the gaze of the present Eve who remains absent from the frame, thus perfectly literalizing the maternal contradiction that is central to the position of the mother in patriarchy. As the woman who has in part “created” Arthur, she does, in one way, stand in a position similar to Stella’s but for very different reasons and evoking a very different emotional register. Whereas Stella’s self-effacing presence is an affirmation of love and sacrifice so common to the maternal melodrama, Eve’s is a claim for acknowledgement of sacrifice and of the contradictory, if not impossible, position to which she is assigned. Her suicide that follows is a claim on the guilt and duty of others. Her presence, then,

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is a bid for recognition. In a doubly ironic move, the camera embodies her sub-jectivity while erasing her from the frame – thus also literalizing the enforced obliteration of the mother as theorized by the Lacanian mirror: “The mother . . .  grants an image to the child” as Jacqueline Rose points out, “which her presence instantly deflects” (1985: 30). Hence Mulvey’s penetrating observation that woman is “the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning” (2009: 712). Allen captures this condition of Eve’s nonidentity by denying access to her face, her pain, her longing as she stands on the far margins of the family and the home she has created.

In this small moment and in a longer scene in which Eve actually appears to Joey and to the viewer, Allen presents a further paradox of the maternal: through physically giving her daughters life and sustenance, the mother also threatens to subsume them. “In overinvesting her desire in the child,” or in the husband, I would add, “the mother becomes herself the perverse subject of the oral drive – the agent of an engulfing or devouring process which threatens to annihilate the subjectivity of her child,” as Doane points out (1987a: 83). Cloaked in black and shot in extremely deep shadow, almost vampiric in appearance, the completely silent Eve embodies what Julia Kristeva defines as the abject maternal – “the focus of a combined horror and fascination, hence subject to a range of taboos designed to control” (Doane 1987a: 83). The “horror of nondifferentiation,” that Doane, following Kristeva, sees as the “problem” of motherhood in the context of patri-archy, is that it “automatically throws into question ideas concerning the self, boundaries between self and other, identity” (1987a: 83). The film would seem to address the notion of maternal abjection as Joey sits alone in darkness after the wedding celebration has ended. Her words – “Mother? Is that you? You shouldn’t be here. Not tonight” – at first take on the quality of an internal monologue or dreamlike fantasy in the absence of a reverse shot. In this visually and verbally eloquent sequence, Joey’s words intersect with those of Luce Irigaray in “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other,” a meditation on the positioning of mother and daughter in both the psychoanalytic and patriarchal contexts. Irigaray’s opening lines – “With your milk, Mother, I swallowed ice. And here I am now, my insides frozen” (1981: 60) – find uncanny expression (right down to diction) in so much of Interiors. Even the “paralysis” Joey, in particular, experiences echoes Iri-garay’s language – a word Renata also uses to describe her difficulty in writing that has set in, it seems, after Arthur has announced his desire to separate.

Imagining the paradoxical circularity of her connection with her mother and what her growing up and leaving will mean to her mother’s life, the daughter who narrates Irigaray’s monologue reflects:

you’ve lost the place where proof of your subsistence once appeared to you . . . You wanted me to grow up, to walk, to run in order to vanquish your own infir-mity. . . . Imprisoned by your desire for a reflection, I became a statue, an image of your mobility (1981: 64).

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Joey expresses a similar circularity when she says to Eve (also in the form of a dramatic monologue, given Eve’s silence),

I feel like we’re in a dream together. Please don’t look so sad. It makes me feel so guilty. I’m so consumed with guilt. It’s ironic because, uh, I’ve cared for you so, and you have nothing but disdain for me, and yet I feel guilty.

It is when Joey speaks of her guilt that we first see an image of Eve, engulfed in darkness, hugging the wall – personifying the very concept of the abject maternal. Again, Iragaray’s words resonate within this image of Eve, silent and entrapped, facing her daughter who feels equally entrapped:

And I can no longer race toward what I love. And the more I love, the more I become captive, held back by a weightiness that immobilizes me . . . I want out of this prison. But what prison? . . . I see nothing confining me. The prison is within myself . . . (1981: 60).

With words strikingly evocative of Irigaray’s in their mixture of sadness, loss, and anger, Joey says to her mother,

I think you’re really too perfect to live in this world. I mean all the beautifully fur-nished rooms, the carefully designed interiors – everything’s so controlled. There wasn’t any room for any real feelings – none, between any of us, except Renata, who never gave you the time of day. You worship Renata; you worship talent. Well, what happens to those of us who can’t create? What do we do, what do I do, when I’m overwhelmed with feelings about life? How do I get them out?

Fearful that as a woman she is destined to share in her mother’s abjection, the daughter in Irigaray – like Joey, whom we learn was her father’s favorite – embraces the word and law of the father in order to escape, without realizing that this ulti-mately relegates her to an even deeper state of abjection:

I’ll turn to my father. I’ll leave you for someone who seems more alive than you.  .  .  . He leaves the house, I follow in his steps.  .  .  .  I shall never become your likeness (1981: 62).

Looking through the eyes of patriarchy and its institutions, Irigaray’s daughter defines the maternal as a “disorder,” now addressing her mother from a position of alignment with her father:

Aren’t I good now? A nearly perfect girl?  .  .  .  I’m beginning to look like what’s expected of me. One more effort, a little more anger against you  .  .  .  and I’ll step out of the dream. Out of my disorder. Out of you in me, me in you (1981: 62–63).

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Joey’s words of anger toward Eve take on an even richer resonance when consid-ered in light of Irigaray, powerfully expressing the impossible position of the daughter and the mother:

I feel such rage toward you. Oh, mother, don’t you see? You’re not just a sick woman. That would be too easy. The truth is, there’s been perverseness, and willfulness of attitude in many of the things you’ve done. At the center of a sick psyche, there’s a sick spirit.

In response to these words, Eve turns toward the camera, her terrified face now even more obscured by shadow. Allen cuts back to Joey, as she speaks her final words – words that Eve presumably does not hear, that are spoken after she has begun moving toward the churning sea. (Her death, in recalling Virginia Woolf ’s, also inscribes a feminist awareness of the condition of woman in a male-dominated world.) Joey’s words, “But I love you, and we have no other choice but to forgive each other,” followed by Eve’s suicide, resound strongly in light of Irigaray’s closing:

When one of us comes into the world, the other goes underground. When one carries life, the other dies. And what I wanted from you, Mother, was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive (1981: 67).

In Eve, Allen presents us with an image of the abject maternal. He admits that she is one of the characters in his work with whom he most strongly identifies (Bailey 2001: 80), yet he also describes Arthur as “the poor man who has been living with her for years” and Joey as “a victim of this terrible mother” (Björkman 1993: 98), thus, in some ways corroborating her abject state. His representation captures the very contradictions haunting feminist theory. On the one hand, feminist works exposing the abject maternal as defined by patriarchy and its institutions can have the effect of “reclaim[ing] misogynistic depictions of women as abject.” On the other hand, such works may unwittingly adopt attitudes that “reproduce rather than challenge the cultural production of woman as abject,” as Imogen Tyler argues (2009: 82, 84). Some reviews and essays on the film, including Pauline Kael’s review at the time, tend to confirm Tyler’s point. They pass judgment on Eve as abject without acknowledging the film’s exposure of those conditions that shape and define her as such.5 The problem in this film, as in The Birds, may be linked also, in part, to the narrative centrality and powerful performances of Geraldine Page as Eve and Jessica Tandy as Lydia, which tend to eclipse the critical “markers” of patriarchal molding and negation of the mater-nal figure.

By contrast, on the surface at least, Diane in September refuses to efface her own identity or to embrace the demands that Eve has seemed to absorb. Yet, as in Interiors, the film wavers in tone – inviting viewers both to appreciate her vibrant

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defiance of patriarchal demands and at the same time to regard her as simultane-ously too present and too absent in her role as mother, thus defining her, to some degree, as abject. Allen articulates this contradiction when he says that he “wanted the mother in September to be a character who is shallow and selfish, egotistical. But even at her age, she dresses and thinks of herself as beautiful and feminine and sexy” (Björkman 1993: 180). On the one hand, Diane embodies what Irigaray’s daughter wishes for: a mother who, at the same time as giving life to her daughter, remains very much alive herself. On the other hand, this life-affirming mother, in her vivacious excess, threatens to annihilate her daughter, bringing Irigaray’s daughter again to mind: “You feed me/ yourself. But you feed me/ yourself too much, as if you wanted to fill me up completely with your offering. You put yourself in my mouth and I suffocate” (1981: 60). The first words Lane speaks in the film are about her mother and express a similar sense of suffocation: “God, I can’t believe my mother. She’s out there; she’s made friends with Peter and she’s trying to get him to write her biography. Her stupid life, ‘as told to . . .’ ”

Lane feels overwhelmed by Diane’s vibrancy, against which she sometimes protests, sometimes retreats. Indirectly echoing the sentiments of Irigaray’s daugh-ter, Lane complains of her mother’s extended stay in the Vermont house, “Time passes and she’s still here.” In a scene between mother and daughter as Diane dresses for the evening – often distracted by the details of her own appearance – her words seem to waver between genuine concern for her daughter and barbed belittling. Diane’s concern for Lane, though real, is framed by narcissism, recalling aspects of Irigaray’s meditation. She says to Lane, while gazing at her own image in the mirror,

You were such a promising young girl, so bright. You had my looks. You had better bone structure than I did. You lacked my height. You had your father’s intelligence. You’ve got to do something about all that. I mean, you’re young; you’re lovely. Of course, you dress like a Polish refugee.

To which Lane replies, “Well, I don’t feel so attractive these days.” In apparent encouragement, she advises Lane in regard to Peter:

You have to be cool about it. The one thing you shouldn’t do is let your desperation show. . . . I always thought there was a fatal element of hunger in your last affair. . . . I don’t think Jeff would have run quite so quickly back to his wife if he didn’t feel a certain pressure. . . . You’re probably doing something to stand in your own way.

At this point Lane, defeated, visibly appears to shrink into herself: “I probably am.”Diane demoralizes Lane – sometimes without thinking, sometimes purpose-

fully, sometimes in the process of trying to express concern – which raises unset-tling questions. Is she simply insensitive or does she consciously mean to undermine Lane? She off handedly says to Peter of her daughter,

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I hadn’t seen her, ya know, since she took the pills. God, that had to be six, eight months ago. Boy, what some people will do for love, or the lack of it. Of course, I understand; I understand. If you’ve never had something, then you experience it, and it’s taken away, wow! Poor kid.

As she glances downward and fiddles with the pieces on a backgammon board, there is something disingenuous, not merely indiscreet in her words and actions, which editing patterns corroborate through close-ups of Peter and Diane’s husband Lloyd ( Jack Warden) that reveal their discomfort. Although in Allen’s own view Diane “doesn’t act maliciously. She just does what she does because she doesn’t know better” (Björkman 1993: 180), the film itself adopts a more ambivalent attitude.

In divorcing Lane’s father, Diane plunges her daughter into a situation in which (following Lacan) the law of the (good) father and truth about the shooting of the (bad) “substitute” father has been distorted. Diane acts in self-interest, and in this sense is excessive in her maternal absence. In describing Diane as shallow, selfish, and egotistical, Allen aligns her with the pre-Oedipal Imaginary. Her actions, by extension, seem aimed at preventing Lane’s entry into the Symbolic realm that the father represents – associated with language, law, and rational thought. Viewed in this light, one that the maternal melodrama often adopts, Lane’s inability to find herself and to find something meaningful to do with her life is a manifestation of arrested psychological development rooted in the absence of the father, as well as both the excessive presence and excessive absence of the mother.

Dreamscapes and Realities: Paranoid Spaces and Female Agency/Passivity

Female passivity in the family melodrama and woman’s film is expressed and contained by “the claustrophobic atmosphere of the bourgeois home” (Elsaesser 1987: 62), the space to which women traditionally have been consigned and con-fined. In Interiors and September, especially, the literal space of the home stands in metonymically for Eve and Lane who, as emotionally fragile, suicidal figures, create or escape to these spaces for refuge. As a space that each one, but Eve especially, has “constructed” to the measure of her own desire, to borrow Laura Mulvey’s now famous observation about conventional cinema as shaped by male desire (1975), the home becomes a kind of stage or performance space over which Eve, Lane, and Diane attempt to assert their agency. The homes in both films stand in many ways as characters or works of art expressing multiple ironies and contradictions. Eve decorates her home for visual consumption, in some ways substituting it for her own body as an object of desire. Lane hopes to acquire

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agency and control by selling the Vermont house to start anew, now that it has served its purpose as a refuge during her recovery. Diane, as former actress, com-mandingly occupies the space of the house with her bold entrances and assertive physical and vocal presence that threaten to upstage Lane in her bid for Peter’s attention and “unstage” Lane in her claim on the home as economic asset. Yet these acts of agency centered on the home make clear the complications women as narrative agents must confront, not unlike those of the paranoid woman’s film in which the protagonist, in asserting agency when investigating the space of the home (“as the one for whom the ‘secret beyond the door’ is really at stake”) exposes herself to potential harm and reveals “the potential danger of the female look” (Doane 1987b: 286, 287).

Eve approaches an unsuccessful suicide attempt – an ironic act of agency with the goal of self-annihilation – in her New York apartment as if an actress occupy-ing her space on the stage, ceremoniously positioning herself on a couch to breathe in the gas she has turned on after methodically sealing the doors and windows. In a reflexive touch, Allen implies that Eve herself may have seen too many woman’s films, that she has internalized the image of a decorous death and the alluring, diaphanous female passivity it represents. And even Diane’s seem-ingly lighthearted entrance into the living room in September – “How do I look? Don’t anyone say old and fat” – resonates darkly with her lines spoken earlier to Lane while sitting before a mirror:

It’s hell getting older, especially when you feel twenty-one inside. All the strengths that sustain you all your life just vanish one by one. And you study your face in the mirror and you notice something’s missing. And then you realize it’s your future.

Such instances offer reflexive commentary on the complications of female agency, reinforced, in September, by the mise-en-scène of the aging actress sitting before the mirror, making clear the more forceful cultural impact of aging on women – both in life and on the screen.

Her seaside family home and the New York apartment Eve occupies after Arthur’s separation are neutral in color, spare and painstakingly balanced in decor, a feature given further emphasis by the balanced compositional frame of Allen’s images. Both spaces express Eve’s obsession with order and her need to gain or to assert control. The static camera and the editing patterns used to present inte-rior images of Eve’s Long Island home in the film’s opening convey a sense of space “frozen” in time – the “ice palace” Arthur refers to in his narration. And, just as she projects her needs onto her surroundings, Eve uses her art to “freeze” the lives of others – as if in doing so, they will remain static, unchanging, and always within her possession, in keeping with a “characteristic attempt of the bourgeois household [in melodrama] to make time stand still, immobilize life and fix forever domestic property relations as the model of social life and a bulwark against the more disturbing sides of human nature” (Elsaesser 1987: 61–62). As

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Arthur further says in voiceover about Eve and their surroundings, “she created a world around us that we existed in, where everything had its place, where there was always a kind of harmony, great dignity.”

As in the 1950s domestic melodrama, in Interiors “objects .  .  .  invade . .  . per-sonalities, take them over, stand for them, become more real than the human relations or emotions they were intended to symbolize” (Elsaesser 1987: 61–62). In Interiors, however, these objects do not create the “clutter” Elsaessar identifies with the family melodrama but rather its absence – the few carefully placed vases on her mantle and the $400 vase Eve wishes to place in Joey and Michael’s foyer communicate an inert artistry devoid of uncertainty or human volatility. The implication of Eve’s always-empty vases could not be more obvious. The lone vase that contains a single white rose, Eve’s favorite flower, is the same vase that Pearl shatters when dancing at the seaside home during her wedding celebration with Arthur. In her desire for stasis, Eve is very different from Pearl or from the “warm and vital” Diane, as Lloyd describes her in September. Much as Diane wishes she could remain young forever, she does not attempt to stem the flow of time. “There are things that I probably would do differently if I had them to do over,” Diane says, “but I don’t” – a paradoxical expression of agency. While her words suggest a life affirming if resigned sense of realism, they are spoken at the moment Lane reveals Diane’s role in pulling the trigger on her gangster husband. Her words, then, also reveal a form of solipsism not unlike Eve’s.

Eve and her daughters frequently stand at windows or are framed by windows or doorways, a visual trope in Interiors adopted from the woman’s film and domes-tic melodrama, where they convey the “enforced passivity of women – women waiting at home, standing by the window in a world of objects into which they are expected to invest their feelings” (Elsaesser 1987: 62). The women, figuratively entrapped, gaze longingly beyond that realm for something more in their lives. Whether a conscious intervention or not, Allen presents us, in Eve, with a woman who genuinely has invested the objects of her home and her art with her deepest feelings – and he reveals just how damaging this has been for her and for her daughters. While we hear that Eve is recognized as an accomplished interior deco-rator, this public dimension of success, it would seem, poses a problem, with her breakdowns as both the manifestation and the solution. When hospitalized, she is relieved from the pressure of embracing an active, creative role – even though she claims this is what she wants and loves; when recovering, she says she is reluc-tant to jump back into her career full-force because “I’m not going to accept anything until I’m sure I can maintain the level I expect of myself.” Viewed in the light of the woman’s film, her perfectionism, centered on home and family, is a contradictory expression of agency and also a capitulation to culturally enforced female passivity.6

In September the country home belongs, legally, to the mother – Diane and Lane’s father owned it, but Diane hasn’t been there in years until she visits with Lloyd. Just as she has left Lane with the public mark of guilt in the shooting of

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her gangster husband (for whom she divorced Lane’s father), Diane leaves Lane with the responsibility of the home – its upkeep and expenses – tacitly implying that it is Lane’s place to do with what she chooses. It becomes the contested space where mother and daughter vie for agency. In contrast to the house in Interiors, with its spare, stark artistry that reflects Eve’s ill, empty spirit, the house in September, with warm colors in mostly sunlit rooms, signals Lane’s recovery. A mobile camera explores the space in long takes as the film opens, in contrast to the static camera and staccato editing rhythms at the start of Interiors. Composi-tions emphasizing rooms and spaces yet to be explored in September, however, also imply a paradoxical interplay of agency and paralysis, with an openness that promises hope and opportunity for Lane’s future but also that suggests her unan-chored state, with no concrete plans and a longing for meaningful work that she is unable to define.

While not a claustrophobic space as in the family melodrama (Allen in fact says that he wanted the cinematographer to “provide . . . sufficient angles, so that you wouldn’t get bored with the house, or claustrophobic”: qtd. in Björkman 1993: 174), the house nevertheless does have its claustrophobic dimension. In his review of the film, Ebert cleverly captures the effect, saying that, “each character moves restlessly from room to room, trying to arrange to be alone with the object of their love – and away from the person obsessed with them” (1987: 1). The house, moreover, functions somewhat as houses do in the female gothic or paranoid woman’s film. With “sufficient angles,” shots are composed to expose portions of rooms not fully visible. Though neither threatening nor gothic in architectural style, the space nevertheless captures a certain paranoia Lane experiences, whether in regard to her mother’s intentions, which she perceives as bearing some ill will through careless abandon, in regard to Peter’s sudden, inexplicable distance from her after they had been quite close, or in regard to her own uncertain future. The home of the paranoid woman’s film, as Doane explains, “is yoked to dread, and to a crisis of vision . . . it asserts divisions, gaps . . . There are places which elude the eye” (1987a: 134), something most palpable in terms of Lane’s sexual angst – illustrated both in a small moment when she enters her mother’s bedroom, interrupting her mother and Lloyd’s affectionate embrace and the more dramatic moment when she enters the kitchen pantry to find Peter and Stephanie kissing.

Because “paranoia demands a split between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen” (Doane 1987a: 134), it finds expression in the spaces of Interiors and September, as well as in Another Woman, in which the walls seem to “speak” the protagonist’s submerged fears. Echoing Diane, who believes simply that, “You have to put the past behind you,” Marion (Gena Rowlands) in Another Woman, says simply in voiceover, “If something seems to be working, leave it alone.” A philosophy professor on sabbatical in order to write a book, she sub-leases a one-room studio to “shut myself off from everything.” Her insularity at this moment reflects a larger pattern in her life – her avoidance of passion and desire, her fear of the vulnerabilities and unpredictability those feelings may incite.

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Much like Eve in Interiors, she prefers an orderly “exterior” surface to an emotion-ally cluttered, complicated interior. As the film opens, Marion in voiceover confi-dently proclaims, “If somebody had asked me when I reached my fifties to assess my life, I would have said that I had achieved a decent measure of fulfillment, both personally and professionally.” As we hear these words, Marion appears at the end of a long, narrow hallway, fractured by several doorframes – a claustro-phobic space and visual frame that work in ironic opposition to her words. Embed-ded in her assertion of agency is a paradoxical attitude of willful denial that the space reinforces as she continues: “Beyond that I would say that I don’t choose to delve.” What she primarily wishes to “leave alone” is something the female pro-tagonist in the paranoid woman’s film also wishes to deny – emotional need and sexual desire that will render her vulnerable (see Figure 11.1).

In his review of the film, Roger Ebert describes Marion as “fearsomely self-contained, well-organized, sane, efficient and intelligent,” adding that she has made “the emotional compromises . . . to earn that description” (1988: 1). Marion begins to acknowledge these compromises only when she hears the voice of a young woman filtering through the ventilation duct of her workspace, an apart-ment next to a psychiatrist’s office. The woman (Mia Farrow), unnamed in the narrative but listed as “Hope” in the closing credits, pours out her misgivings and

Figure 11.1 Shot composition contradicts Marion’s assertion of agency in Another Woman. (Producer: Robert Greenhut)

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self-doubt, the very feelings Marion willfully has submerged in her own life but no longer can deny. The woman confides,

I began having troubling thoughts about my life. There was something about it not real, full of deceptions, and these, these deceptions had become so many and so much a part of me now, that I couldn’t even tell who I really was.  .  .  .  It was if a curtain had parted and I could see myself clearly, and I was afraid of what I saw. And what I had to look forward to. And I wondered, I wondered about ending everything.

The words haunt Marion, pushing her toward her own state of crisis.Marion revisits her past, confronting realities she has failed to acknowledge: the

core of resentment her brother Paul (Harris Yulin) bears, having sacrificed his own future to help finance her college education at the insistence of their father ( John Houseman), and that of her former friend Claire (Sandy Dennis) over a years-earlier stolen boyfriend. Marion’s crisis takes on a symbolic quality consistent with melodrama through an ongoing pattern of seemingly chance encounters, con-frontations, and dreams in which she is told directly or overhears the impression of others who conclude that she is emotionally cold, distant, judgmental – revela-tions coming from her stepdaughter, her sister-in-law, and her husband’s friend Larry (Gene Hackman), a novelist who confesses his love for her. These encoun-ters and the disembodied voice of the young woman with her therapist evoke the dreamlike displacement, the “substitute acts,” the “clashes and ruptures” Elsaesser associates with melodrama (Elsaesser 1987: 59).

Although Marion occupies the narrative center of Another Woman in a way that no single character does in Interiors or September, the film nevertheless extends its concerns to those around her, in keeping with the “myth-making function” of melodrama (Elsaesser 1987: 66). Here and less directly in September, for instance, Allen gives some attention to father/son relationships. Sons of college professors, Peter and Marion’s brother, Paul, admire their fathers but feel weakened or intimi-dated by their fathers’ accomplishments. In September, even in his desire to pay tribute to the memory of his deeply admired, blacklisted father, Peter is blocked. The circumstances in Another Woman, especially, echo those of 1950s family melo-dramas, like East of Eden, that feature powerful patriarchs. Although Allen adopts a less judgmental tone, he explores the damaging effect of a father who has relent-lessly disparaged Paul as less motivated and less intelligent than Marion.

Marion is close to her father, having been the child in whom he invested his strongest interest. Like her father, Marion is a professor; her work is the defining feature of her identity and her life. She has embraced the Symbolic world of the father, with seemingly little comfortable access to the Imaginary maternal world of emotional plentitude, something signaled by costuming – she consistently wears suits of heavy, wooly fabrics with her hair pulled back from her face (in one scene, in fact, she and her husband appear costumed almost identically). Marion

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feels the presence of her recently deceased mother most strongly through her mother’s favorite book of poetry, a collection by Rainer Maria Rilke. Through Rilke, Allen inscribes an understanding of the mother who lived in a household rigidly dominated by the father. Although she doesn’t quote lines from Rilke’s “The Panther,” Marion does, in voiceover, mention the image of the panther staring from its cage, an image that flashes in one of her dreams. (The poem reads: “It seems to him there are/ a thousand bars; and behind the bars no world.”) After speaking the final lines of her mother’s favorite Rilke poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in voiceover – “for here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life” – Marion observes, “There were stains on the page which, I believe, were her tears.” Although she has lived her life in the footsteps of her father, as Irigaray’s daughter at one moment asserts that she will do, the film presents Marion with another view both through the voice of the psychiatrist’s patient, who is about to become a mother, and through the unrequited longing of her own absent mother, as captured in the poem and in her tears. Both women, physically absent yet highly charged in their emotional presence, seem to admon-ish Marion: “You must change your life.”

While Marion’s psychological state is of central narrative concern, it is the action she takes in response to her crisis that matters. This is true even more so of Alice, a lighthearted version of Another Woman, but a film that nevertheless reflects the serious concerns of the domestic melodrama. Alice’s insularity is largely a product of her wealth – or the wealth she has married into: she lives in a lavish New York penthouse; she employs nannies, cooks, personal trainers, and chauffeurs; she sends her two young children to an expensive private school. Yet, like Eve and Joey in Interiors and Lane in September, Alice (Mia Farrow) feels a sense of malaise – a vaguely defined dissatisfaction and the longing for something more meaningful and expressive in her life. She experiences physical aches and pains, strongly reflecting the medical discourse present in the woman’s film, as we have seen (see Doane 1987a: 38–69; Elsaesser 1987: 59, 65–66). Alice’s ills are more directly related to sexual angst than are those of Eve, Lane, Marion, or of Hope, the psychiatrist’s patient in Another Woman, although this is an underlying issue in their lives as well. Whether identified as the “paranoid woman’s film” (Doane 1987a), the “female gothic” (Modleski 1982, 1988), or the “Freudian feminist melo-drama” (Elsaesser 1987), “the projection of sexual anxiety and its mechanisms of displacement and transfer” central to that subgenre also are present in Allen’s films, especially in Alice. Those films often cull suspense from uncertainty about possible “murderous designs” of the female protagonist’s husband (Elsaesser 1987: 58). Although the husbands of Alice, Eve, and Marion hardly have murderous designs, their serial infidelities – even if initially unbeknownst to their wives – have had damaging effects, and the revelation of an affair serves as the narrative turning point for both Alice and Marion. Only when she visits a Chinatown acupuncturist who hypnotizes her does Alice confront the possibility that her sickness lies within her spirit, or as Dr. Yang (Keye Luke) says, “problem is not back, problem is here

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[pointing to his head] and here [pointing to his heart].” Much as Marion is prompted by the voice of the young woman, so Alice is prompted by Dr. Yang to examine a life “full of deceptions.”

Like Marion, Alice fails to acknowledge the emotional distance that has crept into her marriage, in which daily routines, social plans, and material purchases form the focus of conversation and existence. Alice’s stockbroker husband Doug (William Hurt) is as self-sufficiently distant as Marion’s husband Ken (Ian Holm), but, like Ken, he adopts the guise of caring solicitousness. Ebert’s apt description of Ken as “a man who must have a wife so that he can be unfaithful to her” applies equally to Doug (1988: 2). Also like Marion when confronted by Larry’s declara-tion of love, Alice is thrown into emotional crisis mere moments after crossing paths with a man she desires – a divorced father she briefly encounters when taking her children to school. The depth of Alice’s angst is made clear when Joe ( Joe Mantegna) simply hands her a book she has dropped while walking her chil-dren up the stairs to their classroom – an act that instantaneously sparks thoughts of infidelity and intense feelings of desire she never has experienced in her mar-riage, though she has been afraid to admit it. Alice’s emotional tizzy is played in part for comic effect, heightened by her world of insular innocence. Her difficul-ties are less the result of willful blindness, as in Marion’s case (though there is a degree of that), and more the result of a certain naive (or sheltered) trust in her husband and faith in the stability of her privileged world – itself a form of denial, signaled in part by her Catholicism. It seems no accident that Mia Farrow’s physi-cal appearance as Alice oddly echoes her signature role in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), in which she also played a Catholic whose faith and trust are manifested in a mad-dening passivity – the same “victimization and enforced passivity” central to the family melodrama (Elsaesser 1987: 62) – that itself becomes a subject of the film’s interrogation. Whereas Roman Polanski’s film is a female gothic firmly grounded in the domestic melodrama, Allen’s film is a comic melodrama with strong inflec-tions of the female gothic.

Low-key lighting, a stylistic marker of the female gothic or paranoid woman’s film, also adds resonance to several important scenes in all four films. In Interiors on the night that Arthur first introduces Pearl to his daughters in Renata’s home, he, Joey, and Renata argue about his intentions in an upstairs bedroom where chiaroscuro lighting obscures faces and creates enormous, grotesque shadows. Joey rejects her father’s wishes to marry Pearl, calling her a “vulgarian” and saying that his marriage “is going to sink mother.” Renata, whose shadow is particularly jarring, offers her best wishes, though this is the same disingenuous strategy of least resistance she often chooses, appeasing others rather than honestly leveling with them (whether with her husband about his writing, Joey about her photog-raphy, Flyn about her acting, or Eve about the chances of a reconciliation with Arthur). Lighting here conveys that unpleasant truths remain submerged beneath her words – truths she has neither the courage nor depth of commitment to others to articulate. Lighting also implies the “hidden” text of Arthur’s past. For the first

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time, we learn he has had a series of affairs – “We knew about your affairs when mother was in the hospital,” Joey says, “but your choices were a little more dis-creet.” Visual style underscores the darkness of patriarchal entitlement looming over the daughters and the absent Eve in the form of this family secret. This moment recalls the damaging, potentially murderous husbands in the paranoid woman’s film. The destructive dimension of male entitlement spills out and over here, the narrative barely able to contain it.

A long sequence in September, when a nighttime thunderstorm rages and the electricity fails, recalls the female gothic in visual effect and theme, if not in content and mood, with action taking place in candlelit rooms. Perhaps Elsaesser’s “Freudian feminist melodrama” is the most appropriate term to describe this sequence, which stages parallel scenes of unrequited desire, and, in the case of Stephanie, like Marion, desire that elicits her fear of no longer knowing or feeling like herself. “I just long to hear certain things said to me again,” she confesses to Peter, “I long so much to respond, but I can only run.” The female protagonist in the paranoid woman’s film often discovers a secret hidden within a labyrinthine gothic space, her investigation ultimately one of self-revelation that stabilizes her sense of fractured, divided identity. Here a similar situation plays itself out in Stephanie’s journey away from her family to the Vermont home, where she con-fronts powerful emotions for Peter, as well as in Lane’s dual struggle for Peter’s love and for legal control of the home as her own.

Marion and Alice embark on nighttime journeys in the city – part real, part dream – in which they also must face and seek to repair their sudden sense of fractured identity. In flashbacks as well as in dreams, Marion is shown as literally divided from herself as she observes others who take on her identity in actual or fantasized moments from her past. In a dream, she watches as imagined and real moments of her life are acted out on stage. Certain scenes gain even greater reso-nance when Marion’s role is divided between two actors – Gena Rowlands, who plays the present-day Marion in her fifties, and Margaret Marx, who plays Marion in her early twenties. As Marion looks through old family photos and describes them to her stepdaughter Laura (Martha Plimpton), it is the older Marion who returns in flashbacks to her teenage years, while her father, brother Paul, and friend Claire are played by much younger actors. In a pivotal flashback to a moment with her first husband Sam (Philip Bosco), her former professor some years older than she, Marion confesses that she was pregnant and has had an abor-tion without consulting him, inciting his rage and presumably ending their mar-riage. Marx as Marion begins and ends the scene in silent tableaux, yet it is Rowlands as Marion in the main part of the scene who speaks: “I’m just starting out, I want to make something of myself.” This splitting of Marion echoes the Imaginary/Symbolic division of identity, following Lacan, as expressed in the paranoid woman’s film, in which the young protagonist paradoxically stabilizes her identity under the gaze of patriarchal approval (see Modleski 1988: 43–55). Although Marion’s choice of self over Sam and motherhood would seem to over-ride the need for patriarchal approval, there remains an element of wistful regret

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as she observes and reenacts this scene. This splitting of the self, further intensified when Marion overhears her own submerged fears and longings articulated by the psychiatrist’s patient, expresses “a woman’s desire to be something else,” a trope common to the woman’s film (Basinger 1993: 105).

Alice takes a different approach but with similar effect. Mia Farrow’s costuming, hair, makeup, and manner combine to evoke her much earlier role in Rosemary’s Baby, as noted, in which Rosemary pours her energies and desire into becoming pregnant and decorating her new apartment in an imposing gothic New York apartment building. Alice shares Rosemary’s childlike trust, particularly in regard to her husband Doug (see Figures 11.2a and 11.2b). Although Doug hardly pros-titutes his wife to Satan, as Rosemary’s husband Guy does, his patronizing manner, like Guy’s, is his duplicitous means of controlling her actions and desires. On Alice’s first visit to Dr. Yang, she reveals her feelings about Doug while under hypnosis: “I love him but . . . I want to be more.” Doug appears in her hypnotic dream as lawgiver: “But you have children to raise.” In their real lives, Doug subtly undermines Alice’s desire to “be more,” especially her desire to write. He ques-tions her ability, suggesting that, instead, she should help out in the boutique a friend has opened. As in the paranoid woman’s film, “marriage and violence are both associated with an intensification of anxiety linked to the muteness of the woman, her exclusion from language” (Doane 1987a: 148) – something evident in Alice’s frustrated attempts to write, in the physically violent argument between Marion and Sam, framed by the mute, younger Marion, and in Interiors when Eve appears as a mute, spectral figure in the scene preceding her suicide. Alice’s words at the conclusion of her first visit to Dr. Yang – “I’m at a crossroads. I’m lost, lost” – could just as well be spoken by Eve, Joey, Lane, Stephanie, Marion, or the psy-chiatrist’s patient – all women caught within the contradiction of living in a world dominated by men.

Like the voice of the psychiatrist’s patient who reveals the truths of Marion’s life in Another Woman, the magical mixture of herbs prescribed by Dr. Yang gives Alice the courage to act on her desire for Joe and later the power to become invisible – to enter spaces where she sees and hears the truth about her husband’s infidelity, Joe’s continuing desire for his ex-wife, and her friends’ opinions of her. This power granted both Alice and Marion – to voyeuristically eavesdrop and look into the lives of others as a means of finding themselves – confers an agency that ultimately defeats an imposed or embraced passivity, yet not without ambiguity. Marion ultimately finds confirmation of her own passionate nature only by reading Larry’s novel and his assessment of the character she has inspired; Alice has left Doug, lives in a modest apartment, and takes care of her children by herself, having just returned from India where she has worked with Mother Teresa. Both women are liberated yet continue to exist within the same inescap-able ideological/cultural context as before. Perhaps this is why Allen says of Alice, “now that she’s changed she will lead, I think, a more fulfilling life. But that life will change.” Referring to the fact that she will age and her children will eventu-ally grow up to lead their own lives, Allen says, “at some point she’s going to be

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faced with a very, very bleak end . . . ” (Björkman 1993: 231). In this, he captures quite clearly the state of the abject maternal, echoing Doane’s words concerning the position of the mother in patriarchy – she must sublimate her desires and identity for the sake of her children but also must give up her children to the “social order” in the end.

Throughout Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice, Allen selectively invokes many of the thematic and visual tropes so common to the domestic melo-drama and variations of the woman’s film – both challenging and reproducing the

Figures 11.2a and 11.2b Mia Farrow’s appearance in Alice (a) recalls her childlike pas-sivity and absence of power in her earlier role in Rosemary’s Baby (b). (Alice (1991) Producer: Robert Greenhut; Rosemary’s Baby (1968) Producer: William Castle)

(a)

(b)

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patriarchal unconscious that informs them. It is, of course, a question of degree. Viewing these films through the lens of melodrama and its female-specific subcy-cles allows greater access to the cues in dialogue, structure, characterization, and visual composition that, I contend, place the films more firmly on the side of exposing the ways in which patriarchal entitlement and its imperatives have shaped and distorted the lives of his female characters, whose talents, frustrations, long-ings, and feelings of fractured identity, Allen entreats us to experience and understand.

Notes

1 See Mary Ann Doane (1987a) and Janet Walker (1987) for discussion of additional films of the period that negotiate issues of patriarchal authority and stability.

2 See Sam B. Girgus (2002) on Allen’s reflexivity (especially 11, 33–37, 89–107).3 Speaking about his departure from Bergman, for instance, who makes frequent, pow-

erful use of the close-up – though most certainly not in the manner of the Hollywood woman’s film – Allen explains: “Bergman developed a grammar, a vocabulary, to express  .  .  .  inner conflicts very brilliantly. And part of this grammar was the use of the close-up in a way that it really hadn’t been used before. Very close and very long, long, long static close-ups.” In his own work, Allen claims to use close-ups “very spar-ingly,” saying that, “there’s almost an artificial quality about them.” He admits to feeling “less at ease with the close-up,” observing that in films other than Bergman’s “the enormous use of the close-up can be barbaric” (Björkman 1993: 196–197).

4 On multiple viewings one looks for clues – in costuming, for example – to determine whether these opening shots “bookend” the closing image of the three sisters imme-diately after Eve’s funeral. Costuming of Joey and Renata is not consistent in these sets of images. We must assume, then, that the opening shots are set at some other undefined time; they do, therefore, in a sense, stand outside of time.

5 In reference to the film’s final image – with the three daughters posed in front of a window, echoing the opening images of Joey and then Renata standing at windows – Pauline Kael concludes: “ ‘After the life-affirming stepmother has come into the three daughters’ lives and their mother is gone, they still, in the end, close ranks in the frieze-like formation. Their life-negating mother has got them forever’ ” (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 82–83).

6 Peter Bailey takes a different approach to the film’s reflexivity, viewing Eve’s perfec-tionism as parallel with that of Allen, himself, as a “committed artist . . . chronically dissatisfied with his cinematic achievements who routinely subordinates human rela-tionships to that work” (2001: 80).

Works Cited

Bailey, Peter J. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Louisville, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

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Basinger, Jeanine (1993) A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Björkman, Stig (1993) Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Björkman. New York: Grove Press.

Canby, Vincent (1978) “ ‘Interiors,’ a departure for Woody Allen: Culture shock.” New York Times (Aug. 2).

Doane, Mary Ann (1987a) The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Doane, Mary Ann (1987b) “The ‘woman’s film’: Possession and address.” In Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is. London: BFI Publishing, 283–298.

Ebert, Roger (1987) “September.” Chicago Sun Times (Dec. 18).Ebert, Roger (1988) “Another Woman.” Chicago Sun Times (Nov. 18).Elsaesser, Thomas (1987) “Tales of sound and fury: Observations on the family melo-

drama.” In Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is. London: BFI Publish-ing, 43–69.

Girgus, Sam B. (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Irigaray, Luce (1981) “And the one doesn’t stir without the other.” Signs, 7.1 (Autumn), 60–67.

Modleski, Tania (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.

Modleski, Tania (1988) The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge.

Mulvey, Laura (1975) “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.” In Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 711–722. (Original work published 1975.)

Rodowick, David N. (1987) “Madness, authority and ideology: The domestic melodrama of the 1950s.” In Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is. London: BFI Publishing, 268–280.

Rose, Jacqueline (1985) “Introduction – II.” In Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacque-line Rose. New York: Pantheon Books, 27–56.

Tyler, Imogen (2009) “Against abjection.” Feminist Theory 10, 77–98.Walker, Janet (1987) “Hollywood, Freud and the representation of women: Regulation and

contradiction, 1945–early 60s.” In Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is. London: BFI Publishing, 197–214.

Williams, Linda (1987) “‘Something else besides a mother’: Stella Dallas and the maternal melodrama.” In Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is. London: BFI Publishing, 299–325.

12

Dianne Wiest once said of Woody Allen’s affinity with women, “There’s some kind of relish, some kind of cherishing. It’s complicated, really” (qtd. in Lahr 2006: 133). Allen’s comedian-centered films traditionally seem to appeal to men more than women, reinforcing an idea expressed by Steve Seidman that solo comedians tend to be misogynistic and consequently have a limited appeal to female audi-ences (Seidman 1981: 13). Yet, with respect to content, Allen likes to make films about women (a number of which are not comedies), and his “nebbish” persona might be seen as a critique of the idealized masculine images of patriarchy. He often tries to give voice to female desire, and his play with the medium, his film’s self-consciousness, might even evoke a feminist challenge to narrative conventions – what Claire Johnston (1976) called a “counter-cinema” created to defy the seam-less illusions of classical Hollywood cinema. When Laura Mulvey writes about the difficulties women have “being articulate and putting emotion or thought into words,” she is herself attempting to be articulate about the cultural silence of women living in a world defined by male language. Her film, Riddles of the Sphinx, tries to deal with this silence and to explore ways of giving voice to female desire by fracturing language and breaking the conventions of narrative (Mulvey and Wollen 1979: 24). Her sphinx spoke with a “voice off,” not in the language of patriarchy, not in a “voiceover,” as Allen so often does, but in a voice that has been repressed by patriarchy and is not understood by men. Allen, obviously, cannot use such a voice. His narrators, even when female, such as Marion in Another Woman (1988), articulate his films from a male perspective, as will be discussed below. “It’s complicated, really,” because whatever their content, the center of Allen’s films, by his own admission, is always in some way himself – his moods, his fears, his fantasies, and his “escape into a life in the cinema” (Lax 2007: 366). In an interview in 1998, he said simply that, “the dividing line between life, my own life and art” is “indistinct” and “fine” (Ciment and Garbarz 2006: 171).

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

“It’s Complicated, Really”

Women in the Films of Woody Allen

Joanna E. Rapf

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Inez Hedges has suggested that, “In films made by men, the strategy of present-ing the world as an extension of a female personality is often used as a metaphor for the filmmaker’s artistic persona” (Hedges 1991: 90). In this light, the women in a female-centered film such as Interiors (1978) are “thinly veiled portraits of Allen himself ” and Annie Hall (1977), whose title suggests its subject is Annie, is in fact about the creative process of the narrator, Alvy Singer, an Allen stand-in (Feldstein 1989: 80). Richard Schickel observes that Gina Rowlands in Another Woman (1988) is very much like the filmmaker: “She’s trying to lose herself in – in her case – intellectual activities” (Schickel 2003: 147). Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), while ostensibly about Hannah and her sisters, can be read as a film that explores men’s fear of sisterhood, a bond between women unavailable to men.

It is probably a truism of psychology that, in describing someone else, we can really only describe ourselves, and Allen should not be criticized for this. Given Allen’s complicated personality, his creativity allows for expression of unresolved conflicts, unfulfilled desires, and the need for continual growth and change. Because his primary genre is comedy, where nothing is sacred, he has been able to express these conflicts and desires from the perspectives of both men and women, commenting on and often ridiculing the socially constructed aspirations of his characters.

Critics are mixed as to how successful he has been in his portrayal of women. Richard Feldstein argues that Allen’s women become “specular icons in a circuit of desire” (1989: 69). Sam Girgus, on the other hand, is enthusiastic: “While some see only self-centered sexism in his work, one also can discern ‘sexts,’ a term used by Helene Cixous, the radical-feminist critic, to expound the need for revealing, regarding, and revolutionizing woman’s body, voice, and place” (Girgus 2002: 28). This chapter looks at Allen’s portrayal of women in five films over his career since Annie Hall in 1977: Manhattan (1979) with a male voiceover narration that, as in Annie Hall, deliberately sounds like Woody Allen himself; Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), the first film after Annie Hall that identifies its subject as women; Another Woman (1988), with a female voiceover; Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), again with a male voiceover, but this time more about women than about its dispassionate, uncritical, and anonymous narrator; and, finally, Whatever Works (2009), originally written in 1976–1977, again with a male narrator that sounds a lot like the film-maker himself. While the men in these films change very little, the women strug-gle, not always successfully, to learn from their relationships and to grow as human beings.

Manhattan: Three Types of Women

Manhattan is about Allen’s character, Isaac Davis, a 42-year-old TV writer, and his relationships with three distinct female stereotypes: (1) the lesbian, Isaacs’s

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ex-wife, Jill (Meryl Streep) who has left him for another woman; (2) the insecure, heterosexual, pseudo-intellectual, Mary (Diane Keaton); and (3) the child/woman, 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). As the film opens, Isaac is in a seemingly inappropriate relationship (because of the age difference) with Tracy, whom he calls “the essence of art,” his ex-wife is writing a book about the failure of their marriage, and his married friend, Yale (Michael Murphy), is involved in an extramarital affair with Mary. Clearly, the focus is on dysfunctional relationships, but the point of view on them is male. Isaac, in his voiceover, says, “When it comes to relationships with women, I get the August Strindberg award.” Strindberg, who also influenced one of Allen’s filmmaking idols, Ingmar Bergman, is a writer with whom he has a close affinity, both in terms of ques-tioning the existence of God and the regimentation of society, and whose trou-bled relationships with women have led critics to call him, like Allen, misogynistic. Tracy exists for Isaac on the surface. He gestures towards her as he comments that in a world full of ugliness and pain, God “can also make one of these,” a statement that denies Tracy’s human complexity and turns her into an object. He also calls her the “essence of art,” an idea reiterated at the end of the film when he muses on what makes life worth living and lists, among other people and things, Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Swedish movies, “those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne, “the crabs at Sam Wo’s,” and “Tracy’s face.” He has broken up with her for Mary, but Mary and Yale have resumed their extramarital affair. Finding himself alone, he impulsively runs to Tracy’s apartment, only to find her in the lobby, ready to leave for London and the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, as he had earlier urged her to do. He asks her to stay, fearful that if she leaves she will change: “I just don’t want that thing I like about you to change.” The lines are significant – not just the reference to the inanimate idea of “thing” in connection with Tracy, but also change. As Allen’s films evolve, but even as early as this one, the importance of people changing in order to stay alive and to be creative will be crucial. Tracy will change, but the dark side of Manhattan is that there is no indication that this will be the case with Isaac or any of the other characters. Isaac’s entrenched male chauvinism, a characteristic Jill applies to him in her tell-all book, is apparent in that he does not offer to change his life and go with Tracy to London, which, because of his resignation from his job in TV produc-tion, he could easily have done.

Sam Girgus argues that the most interesting woman in this film is Mary. She follows a pattern established initially in Annie Hall, of a relatively uneducated, unsophisticated woman who has been tutored in the intellectual arts by a “supe-rior” man. Mary, like Lee in Hannah and Her Sisters, has married her professor. She tells Isaac that Jeremiah “was brilliant” and “taught her everything,” but that she left him because she was “tired of submerging my identity in a brilliant man.” As writer and director, Allen undercuts the superficial idea of dazzling intellectual power by having the diminutive Wally Shawn plays the ex-husband, Jeremiah, and

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he uses Shawn similarly in Radio Days (1987) to emphasize that intellect and sexual power are not in surface appearance.

As a reflection of the late 1970s, Manhattan gives us a portrait of the uneasy situation facing women at the end of a period known as “second-wave feminism.” Yale’s wife, Emily (Anne Byrne), embodies a pre-feminist woman, caught in her domestic sphere, denying the infidelities of her husband, and wanting only to move to the suburbs and have children. Her more recent incarnation is probably the dissatisfied wife, Judy (Patricia Clarkson), in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, discussed below, who is too scared to leave her unfaithful husband and warns Vicky (Rebecca Hall) not to make the same mistakes she did. Mary, on the other hand, has tried to break away from the conventions of marriage. We learn from Yale that she has been “active in the feminist movement,” although we don’t see any evidence of this in the film itself, and Mary’s inability to live independent of a relationship with a man indicates a problematic connection to feminism. It has been suggested that a truly feminist film is about women who search for an independent existence beyond and outside of the discourse of the male. This is not the case in Allen’s films, in part because his women are often extensions of himself and are seen through male eyes. But many of his female characters do genuinely reflect the struggles of women to deal with the social changes of their era. Mary is a case in point. It is significant that she and Isaac begin their relationship at a party in support of the Equal Rights Amendment at which Bella Abzug is speaking (Figure 12.1).

Abzug, an activist lawyer known for her hats, but more significantly, a strong supporter of the ERA, was, with Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, one of the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus. This establishes the film’s social, political, and sexual context as transitional for women, and Mary’s unstable

Figure 12.1 Diane Keaton, as Mary, at the party in support of the Equal Rights Amend-ment, Manhattan. (Producers: Robert Greenhut, Charles H. Joffe, Jack Rollins)

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identity is very much a product of this time. She denies that women should be judged on the basis of their appearance, yet she comes back to the importance of her own beauty over her intelligence when dealing with her insecurities. During the planetarium sequence, she tells Isaac: “Of course I’m gonna be all right. What do you think I’m gonna do, hang myself ? I’m a beautiful woman, I’m – I’m young, I’m highly intelligent, I got everything going for me. The point  .  .  .  the point is – is that, uh, I don’t know. I’m all fucked up.” Yale’s attraction is to her appearance. “God, you’re so beautiful” he says during the seduction scene in Bloomingdale’s, an expression of possibly inappropriate lust that is also echoed at the beginning of Hannah and Her Sisters with its first title card, “God, she’s beauti-ful,” as Elliot’s voiceover expresses his desire for his wife’s sister: “She looks so sexy.” As a filmmaker, Allen’s perspective is an honest one about how men look at women. But in Manhattan he allows his women to struggle with their specular identity, giving Mary, as Girgus notes, “a voice and presence” that Diane Keaton’s character in Annie Hall lacks. He writes, “Mary emerges as an important character who embodies a serious dilemma in a world that still resists the social and personal challenge to construct serious alternatives for the independence of women” (Girgus 2002: 82).

Hannah and Her Sisters: Pregnant Women and Controlling Men

Allison and Curry sardonically remark that in Hannah and Her Sisters, “Allen gives birth to a plethora of women characters, but he cannot allow them to develop.”

He seemingly wants to create a world of women and to invigorate cinematic space with female action, but these women once again exist as mere backdrop for male action. The point-of-view shot keeps these women as “looked-at” figures, rather than as explored characters (Allison and Curry 1996: 127).

As noted above, the film begins with the point-of-view of Hannah’s husband, Elliot (Michael Caine) in both the voiceover and in his look at Hannah’s sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey). In the closing sequence, he again looks at Lee and says the same thing: “She looks very beautiful.” But this time, Lee has “fulfilled” herself by marrying her college professor, so Elliot adds, “Marriage agrees with you.” Lee has been a “looked at” character throughout the film and even a nude model for her older artist lover, Frederick (Max von Sydow). Lee is another of Allen’s “Pygmalion women,” educated by intellectually superior men (Figure 12.2).

Before her college professor husband, her artist lover, Frederick, was her mentor: “I’m trying to complete an education I started on you five years ago. When you leave the nest, I just want you to be ready to face the world.” And Lee

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does leave the nest, telling him, just as Mary told Jeremiah in Manhattan, that she is “suffocating.” She feels inferior to Frederick – “You’re so superior to me in every way.” She wants “a less complicated life – a husband, a child before it’s too late.” Torn between the conventional expectations for a woman and a desire for some-thing else (the dichotomy epitomized in the contrast between Vicky and Cristina in Allen’s 2008 film), Lee blurts out, “I don’t even know what I want” (recall Mary’s “I’m all fucked up”), and she leaves Frederick – not to establish her own identity, but for a passionate affair with Elliot.

Hannah and Her Sisters is not really about its title subjects, but about their rela-tionships with men. The Woody Allen character, Mickey Sachs, seems tangential to the main narrative, but his episodes looking for the meaning of life are the funniest. The women, on the other hand, look for their meaning through their relationships and ultimately, perhaps, through having children. Hannah (Mia Farrow) says she has had a lot of “luck” (twins while married to Mickey through his best friend, Norman, played by Tony Roberts, as sperm donor), but she wants another baby with Elliot. Lee has already said she wants a child, and the third sister, Holly, married to Mickey at the end of the film, announces that she’s preg-nant. But the final two-shot of Mickey and Holly is done through a reflection in a mirror. Does this suggest duplicity, two sides to this situation? Mickey echoes Elliot’s words about Lee at both the beginning and end of the film – “You look so beautiful” – emphasizing the specular identity of the woman. It is Mickey who

Figure 12.2 Lee, one of Allen’s Pygmalion women, stands next to a nude painting of herself while Elliot looks at them both. Lee wants a “less complicated life.” Hannah and Her Sisters. (Producers: Robert Greenhut, Charles H. Joffe, Jack Rollins, Gail Sicilia)

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narrates what has happened, in essence, telling the story of what we have just witnessed from his perspective. It is “topped” with Holly’s announcement of pregnancy, which should be a “warm and fuzzy” ending, but it was not the ending Woody Allen wanted. To Eric Lax he said, “Hannah and Her Sisters is a film I feel I screwed up very badly,” that the happy ending “was the part that killed me” (Lax 2007: 359). He told Richard Schickel:

I, myself, found the biggest weakness with a film like Hannah and Her Sisters was the ending of the picture. The original ending was supposed to be that Michael Caine has been in love with Hannah’s sister all the time, and Hannah’s sister gets tired of waiting around for him, and she marries some other guy. And he is despondent, but goes back to Hannah to live his life out with Hannah in a way that is a second choice, and he’ll always long for the sister, and see her at little family parties, but never be able to have a relationship with her again, and always stuck with his second choice for life.

That was my original ending. When I put that picture together, and that ending was as I just described it, it was such a downer. It was like the picture . . . just fell off the table.

And so I had to put a more upbeat ending on the picture, because I had not justi-fied that level of a sort of Chekhovian sorrow (Schickel 2003: 139).

For Girgus, Allen intended this “structured and compact film” to be about women rather than himself (Girgus 2002: 118, 125). But it is the Allen character, Mickey, who has the authorial and structuring final words – and they are about a man who marries his first wife’s sister – while the opening of the film also is from a male point of view as Elliot looks at Lee. From the interview with Schickel, we know that Allen originally intended to end with Elliot, so even as the film exists now, the title character, Hannah, is largely absent and ineffectual. Allison and Curry may well be right that Hannah and Her Sisters is less about the women, who tend, as Laura Mulvey observed about women in Hollywood films, to react rather than act, than a film about “men trying to infiltrate a group of sisters” (Allison and Curry 1996: 129). Female bonding, the world that can only be articulated with what Mulvey described in Riddles of the Sphinx as “a voice-off,” remains a threat, and both Elliot and Mickey disrupt it. Although the women may get together and share experiences with each other as the men never do, even the self-conscious camerawork that slowly encircles them as they have lunch together calls attention to the controlling and disruptive male eye of the filmmaker.

The seemingly upbeat ending of Hannah and Her Sisters may not have been a part of Allen’s initial vision for the film, but he concedes to Richard Schickel that, “in general, you know, there is a modicum of hope someplace” (Schickel 2003: 139). And that hope seems to lie in people’s capacity to change. The character that changes the most in Manhattan is Tracy; in Hannah it is Holly. Even though both these films are structured around a male point of view, it is the two women who embody a positive perspective on the world.

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Another Woman: “You Must Change Your Life”

Another Woman, which is not a comedy (although Allen originally conceived it as comic), is clearly told from the point of view of a woman, although critics have seen the Gina Rowlands character, Marion Post, as an extension of Allen himself, struggling between the familiar conflict of mind versus body. Allen told Eric Lax that “I put all I felt about turning fifty” into the main character, Marion Post, a professor of German philosophy at a women’s college (Lax 2007: 72). He described the plot simply to Richard Schickel:

What that movie is about is a woman who is cold and intellectual and bright, and doesn’t want to know the truth about her life, is not interested in the truth, and has blocked it out. Her husband’s cheating on her. She has blocked that out. She’s cold. She’s cold to her brother. She’s not had a close relationship with her father. All of this she doesn’t want to know about and doesn’t want to face. And finally she reaches a point in life where she gets to be middle-aged, and the truth encroaches upon her (Schickel 2003: 147).

Like her father, like Yale’s deluded wife, Emily, in Manhattan and like Judy and Vicky in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, she made some wrong choices. Allen says, “She made safe choices and cold choices, but never the right ones” (Björkman 1993: 195). Married for the first time to one of her professors (recall Mary in Manhattan and Lee in Hannah, women who are attracted to men who can seduce them intel-lectually), she has an abortion when she becomes pregnant rather than finding fulfillment in children like the women in Hannah and Her Sisters. For Marion, her career and “the life of the mind” take priority. Her older husband, Sam, who had wanted children, kills himself. Marion then marries Ken, a successful cardiologist, whom she describes as “cultured and honorable,” resembling Vicky’s fiancé, Doug, in Allen’s 2008 film. Neither is the type to make passionate love on the living room floor. Marion’s true love, Larry Lewis (Gene Hackman), whom she rejects for Ken, describes him, as Marion herself is described: “cold and stuffy.”

There is no question that, unlike Annie in Annie Hall or Hannah in Hannah and Her Sisters, Marion is the center of this film. This time, Allen’s familiar voiceover narrator is a woman who uses a mirror to muse reflectively:

If someone had asked me when I reached my fifties to assess my life, I would have said that I had achieved a decent virtual fulfillment both personally and profession-ally. Beyond that, I would say I don’t choose to delve. Not that I was afraid of uncovering some dark side of my character, but I always feel if something seems to be working, leave it alone.

By the end of the film “decent” personal and professional fulfillment will prove to be unfulfilling and she will uncover a dark and unspoken side to her character.

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Here, she anticipates Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) who, in Whatever Works, is another unfulfilled professor who has failed in love.

She rents a small apartment apart from the home she shares with Ken in order to work without distraction on a new book. But the vent in the wall – that pro-vided the original impetus for the film – proves to be a major distraction as she is able to overhear a psychiatrist with his patients. Some of what she hears is simply an excuse for gags, such as a man who has sexual fantasies of males while mas-turbating. The patient that compels her serious attention, however, is a suicidal pregnant girl played by Mia Farrow. The title, Another Woman, suggests there is “another” woman, but who this woman is remains ambiguous. She might be the Mia Farrow character. Allen told Björkman that “Mia was in some way an incarna-tion of (Marion’s) inner self ” (Björkman 1993: 195). “Another woman” might simply be the woman with whom Marion discovers her husband is having an affair. Or the “other” woman may be another side to Marion, a side capable of feeling and passion that she discovers at the end of the film. The multiplicity is deliberate, set up by the fact that Marion is looking at herself in a mirror during that opening voiceover. Mia Farrow’s character, we learn only in the credits, is named “Hope.” Since she is a catalyst for Marion’s journey of self-discovery, it is hard to believe Allen when he says that it was a coincidence that “Hope” is also the name of the painting of a despairing pregnant woman by Gustav Klimt that Marion and Hope discuss in an antique store (Björkman 1993: 200).

Another Woman is about a woman learning to feel. The last line of Marion’s voiceover, after reading the novel by her rejected lover, Larry Lewis, is, “For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace.” A passage in the novel about Helinka, a character based on Marion, describes her life, her repressed passion for Larry, the man she should have married, and the wall she built up around her feelings:

Her kiss was full of desire, and I knew I couldn’t share that feeling with anyone else. And then a wall went up, and just as quickly I was screened out, but it was too late because I now knew that she was capable of intense passion, if she would one day allow herself to feel.

The film seems to end abruptly at this point, as Marion closes Larry’s novel. Maria del Mar Asensio Arostegui believes she has become “another woman,” independent, creative, with a true sense of self (Arostegui 2006: 266). But the abrupt ending may belie such a positive tone. Allen has described Marion as “mal-adjusted, unbalanced,” leading “an existence of a vast emptiness, very cold” (Ciment and Garbarz 2006: 176). This is close to how he once described life itself, as “a cold, empty void we live in and art won’t save you – only a little human warmth helps” (Lax 2007: 358). The affirmation that seems to bring Marion peace comes from a character’s passion in a novel. We don’t know that she has actually found “a little human warmth.” There have been several catalysts leading her in

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that direction. One involves her own memories and dreams, including one of her father (played by John Houseman) telling her that the woman with whom he shared his life, her mother, was not the woman he loved most deeply. Another is the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. Then there are the conversations she overhears between Hope and her psychiatrist, and her meeting with Hope. And, finally and perhaps ironically, there is her response not to an event in life itself, but to a novel. But is Marion capable of changing her life?

In one of her voiceovers, she recalls reading from her mother’s book of Rilke’s poetry, and tearing out the last line of “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” with its famous injunction: “You must change your life.” It is a message that seems to reso-nate for the women in many of Allen’s films, much more than for the men. Allen has said to Stig Björkman that he is very fond of Rilke, and that, as a philosophical poet, “he was interested in some of the same existential things” (Björkman 1993: 198). Shortly after tearing out the Rilke line, Marion walks the streets of New York aimlessly, as Allen characters are wont to do, and ends up at her brother Paul’s office. She and Paul have been estranged, but she confesses to him, “I need some-thing, but I don’t know what it is,” a remark that is very similar to what another unsettled woman, Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), tells Juan Antonio ( Javier Bardem) when he asks her, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, what she wants in life: “I don’t know, but I won’t settle until I find what I am looking for.”

In the next episode in Another Woman, Marion is at a restaurant with her husband and friends on their anniversary when a former student comes up to her to say that she was an inspiration for every woman in the philosophy depart-ment of her institution: “You changed my life.” We never hear how, but the importance of growing and changing, of avoiding structure, stasis, and sterility, are key concepts in Allen’s films beginning with Annie Hall (1977) all the way up to his recent Midnight in Paris (2011). Allison and Curry emphasize this idea when they write: “Woody Allen explores the terrain of relationship risks in order to extol the importance of risk and change” (1996: 122). We never learn explicitly what Marion needs (nor do we with Cristina), but Allen, like Rilke, uses women and art to reflect on human beings in general.. In a section of the Duino Elegies entitled “The Great Lovers,” Rilke writes that what speaks to him of humanity, “unconditionally, purely, inexhaustibly” is “THE WOMAN WHO LOVES” (Rilke 1939: 119). In Marion’s case, of course, it is the woman who fails to love. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Juan Antonio’s poet father won’t publish his poems because he hates the world, expressing his anger at the human race “because after one thou-sand years of civilization, they still haven’t learned to love.” Marion also has not learned to love. Like her academic father before her who shared his life with the wrong woman, she has been afraid to take risks. She overhears Hope describing her to the psychiatrist as a “lost” woman who leads a “cold cerebral life” and cannot allow herself to feel. The revelation about Marion has been a catalyst for Hope, too, in that she does not want to look up when she is Marion’s age and find that life is empty.

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But what is it that fills a woman’s life, and is it different from what fills a man’s? For both, Allen seems to suggest, it is giving in to passion, taking risks, not being overscheduled, and loving art, literature, music, and poetry. But for women, their creative outlet also seems to involve motherhood. Marion regrets her abortion and now thinks, “maybe it would be nice to have a child.” In Hannah and Her Sisters, Holly gets pregnant. Although the prospect of fatherhood is also rewarding for Mickey, most of the men in Allen’s films, such as Larry, Isaac, and Alvy Singer, are creatively fulfilled by writing novels, plays, and movies. This would also seem to be the case with Gil (Owen Wilson), the successful but unsatisfied screenwriter in Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), a film that continues to explore familiar Allen themes and conflicts, such as the difference between stultifying and emancipating love. In this case, it is the man who changes, who takes risks, who grows. Recalling Allen’s award-winning short story, “The Kugelmas Episode,” Midnight in Paris fantastically brings its main character in touch with famous artistic figures from the Lost Generation of the 1920s. From these men and women, he learns about new creative possibilities in the present. At the end, unlike Vicky in the film dis-cussed below, he rejects his bourgeois fiancée, takes up with a young French girl who shares his interest in art, and it is to be hoped will finally write the novel he has been dreaming of rather than the formulaic screenplays that have made him rich.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: “Chronic Dissatisfaction”

Allen’s most interesting film to date about women is Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which encapsulates and expands on many of the ideas in the three movies previously discussed. Lighter in tone than Another Woman, it lacks the comic elements of Hannah and Her Sisters. Vicky and Cristina are the yin and yang of Allen’s women – the stable, repressed one, seeking security, and the adventurous, unsettled one, unafraid of her feelings and taking risks, but not knowing what she wants. This time, the male narrator is unidentified – an anonymous but all-knowing voice that functions as a factual storyteller, accepting of the quotidian routine that is rees-tablished in the characters’ lives at the end of the film. Over a split screen of the two women that emphasizes their differences, he tells us that what Cristina didn’t want was “what Vicky valued above all else.” Vicky is grounded and realistic, pos-sessed of little tolerance for pain, similar to Marion Post before she succumbs to change through her encounter with the aptly named Hope.

Vicky is engaged to Doug (Chris Messina), who, like Marion’s second husband, Ken, is “decent,” “successful,” and believes in the abstract “beauty of commit-ment,” rather than making love on the living room floor. Basically, he is boring, discussing golf, houses in the suburbs, and finance. Tempted by intense, irrational sexual desire for the painter Juan Antonio, Vicky, again like Marion, represses her

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feeling by burying herself in work. Her superficiality is emphasized in that she is in Spain to complete an MA thesis on Catalonian identity, although she does not speak Spanish. Her best friend, Cristina, on the other hand, follows her instincts. When Juan Antonio, after a chance meeting in a restaurant, invites them both to fly to Oviedo to see his favorite sculpture and make love – “life is short, life is dull, this is a chance for something special” – Cristina blurts out she would love to go, while Vicky says the decision is impulsive. They go nonetheless, and when Cris-tina’s ulcer acts up and prevents her from making love with Juan Antonio, it is Vicky who experiences passion. After sharing the beauty of some Spanish guitar music, they kiss and slip from view at the bottom of the frame in a moment of fulfilled desire. It is an experience that transforms Vicky in a way she does not understand. She can only feel it, the “desire” and “intense passion” that Marion Post read about in Larry Lewis’s novel, and Vicky’s reaction is to repress it. Her fiancé comes to Barcelona, where they get married, but she is unhappy. At a Spanish language class, she is attracted to a fellow student, Ben (Pablo Schreiber). He knows she is married, but also that she is unhappy. They go to a movie whose title suggests Vicky’s inner struggles, Shadow of a Doubt, one of Allen’s favorite Hitchcock films (Björkman 1993: 194).

While in Barcelona, Vicky and Cristina stay with an older American couple, Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and Mark (Kevin Dunn), friends of Vicky’s parents, who seem settled and happy. Mark, in fact, would seem to be Vicky’s fiancé, Doug, in about 30 years. But when Vicky accidentally sees Judy kissing another man, her doubts about the life she has ahead of her are intensified. Judy confesses that she too is unhappy, her marriage is boring, but that her shrink has told her she is “too frightened” to do anything about it. Not wanting Vicky to make the same mistake, she tries to get her back together with Juan Antonio, but it doesn’t work out. In some ways, then, the ending of the film might seem to complicate Woody Allen’s usual affirmation of passion. Vicky announces to Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, “You people are crazy!” and conservatively settles for Doug and a carefully deco-rated house in Bedford Hills. She does not take risks; at 50, she may be Judy, if not Marion Post. But is security and stability better than “crazy?” The answer is not necessarily simple.

The matter-of-fact male narrator describes Cristina, who does take risks, as lacking direction, moving from relationship to relationship, accepting “suffering as a component of deep passion” and “resigned to putting her feelings at risk.” She has made a 12-minute film about why love is so hard to define, another Allen theme, but the filmmaker’s perspective on her is not unqualifiedly positive. In an interview he describes her character this way:

she knows what she doesn’t want, but doesn’t know what she wants, and probably will never know what she wants. And she kind of goes through life and has a rela-tionship no matter what it is, and thinks, “This is the one that’s going to give me a sense of fulfillment.” And then over time it palls, because there’s a discomfort in her, there’s an anxiety inside her that she attaches to every relationship sooner or

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later, and thinks that it’s the relationship, when in fact the shortcoming is in her. And she’ll never really find exactly what she’s looking for (Tobias 2008).

The shortcoming may be that she looks for fulfillment outside of herself. Juan Antonio’s ex-wife, the inspiring and passionate Maria Elena, says of her, “You have chronic dissatisfaction,” a term Allen used previously, in Deconstructing Harry (1997), when Richard Benjamin refers to Harry’s reluctance to give up “sportfuck-ing” and “chronic dissatisfaction.” But just as Woody Allen may only be able to create characters that reflect himself, so Maria Elena can only speak words about others that describe herself: she too, like Harry and Allen, has chronic dissatisfac-tion, reflecting her awareness that “only unfulfilled love can be romantic.” She is the most unique woman in the film, and perhaps, unique for Woody Allen up to this point. She seems to spring, full-blown, out of nowhere, a glorious incarnation of passion, genius, creativity, beauty, and uninhibited energy. “Energy is Eternal Delight,” wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a poem that resonates with what Maria Elena is all about, “an improvement of sensual enjoyment”:

He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.Expect poison from standing water.Exuberance is Beauty (excerpts from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

The film is half over by the time she appears, but the moment that Juan Antonia brings the suicidal woman back to the house he and Cristina are now sharing, new life is breathed into the narrative. The fact that Maria Elena keeps trying to kill herself may indeed indicate chronic dissatisfaction on her part, but her suicidal tendencies, never fully explained, are not because of failed relation-ships. She is, rather, another one of those Allen characters – usually male, creative types, sometimes described as geniuses – who try to kill themselves because they cannot find meaning in life. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey tries to kill himself when confronted with the truth of Tolstoy’s maxim, presented as an intertitle in the film: “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaning-less.” He is rescued through his enjoyment of the Marx Brothers. In Another Woman, Marion’s first husband kills himself, apparently also confronted with Tol-stoy’s thinking, while Hope, who threatens suicide, seems to be swayed from that course, although it is unspoken, through her encounter with Marion and a realization of the meaning of having a child. Suicide will be carried to an absurd point in Whatever Works, discussed below, but in Vicky Cristina Barcelona it is Maria Elena’s artistic energy that pushes her to moments of overwhelming despair as well as moments of overwhelming passion and beauty. She has been told she is a “genius.” Both Juan Antonio and his father express their love for her long before we ever meet her. Juan Antonio admits, as an artist, he stole her vision, and he quotes her: “only unfulfilled love can be romantic.” Maria Elena is initially repulsed by Cristina, but the repulsion turns to attraction, and she inspires the American girl not simply “to experiment” with photography, but to

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take it seriously, using an old-fashioned, light sensitive camera, rather than a cold, impersonal digital device (Figure 12.3).

They build a darkroom, take beautiful pictures together (mostly of Maria Elena as specular object), and they make love. Juan Antonio joins them, and for a brief period they are, like the English romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dorothy, “three persons and one soul.” Maria Elena calls Cristina the missing ingredient that makes things all right between her and Juan Antonio. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena feed off each other. They are volatile, violent, and need a third person – in this case, Cristina – to mediate their tempers. For art to flourish, there must be some stability. In his New Yorker review of the film, David Denby compared Maria Elena to the passionate Mexican artist, and wife of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, but without the discipline to work (Denby 2008: 96). Cristina seems to supply a struc-ture that allows for work, and all three function at a high level of art. But it is not sustainable. As Blake reminds us, reason and energy must be in conflict in order to have progression, and so one day, seemingly out of the blue, Cristina starts feeling restless and as she sits by the sea, her “thoughts begin to take precedence over feelings.” They are her own “shadow of a doubt,” and this is when Maria Elena tells her she has “chronic dissatisfaction.” She leaves for France – “I gotta get out of here for a few weeks and clear my head” – just as Allen’s angst-ridden urbanites walk the Manhattan streets to clear their heads.

Denby asks if Allen means for us to understand that the art that emerges from all this craziness is worth it and suggests that, “the answer Allen offers is a tenta-

Figure 12.3 Maria Elena and Cristina take beautiful pictures together, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. (Producers: Charles H. Joffe, Javier Méndez, Jack Rollins, Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, Gareth Wiley, Helen Robin)

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tive yes” (2008: 96). In the struggle between security (Vicky) and passion (Cristina and Maria Elena), dependency (Vicky) and anarchic freedom (Cristina and Maria Elena), there may be no resolution, but the struggle itself can be fruitful, a source of creativity and art.

It may be that the only character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona who is portrayed as functioning somewhat successfully as both an artist and a human being is Juan Antonio; however, he works best only when Maria Elena is with him. His impul-sive, free spirit is enormously attractive, but it does not lead to the change that is so important for Allen’s characters in order to grow. Graham Fuller also observes that feminists might well criticize the film and Juan Antonio for the ease with which he collects women: “He is clearly not Allen’s alter ego” because he seems to regard most women as malleable objects rather than self-determined subjects (Fuller 2009).

But with three passionate women costarring with the seductive Juan Antonio, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, unlike the other Allen films discussed so far, suggests that women share an equality with men and that they too are capable of being frus-trated and erotically disappointed. However, at the end, none of the characters has followed Rilke’s dictum about changing your life. They are essentially at the same point they were at the beginning. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena are again at each other’s throats, and there is every reason to believe she will leave him once more: romantic love forever unfulfilled. Cristina is still lost, and, as discussed above, Vicky has capitulated to convention, although it’s possible in her confron-tation with mortality (Maria Elena inadvertently shoots her in the hand), she has discovered something significant about herself and life. But this is never articu-lated. Of the five films discussed here, this one – full of color, energy, beautiful people, and the pictorial majesty of parts of Spain – is the only one that essentially ends as it began, coming full circle with its characters still stuck in the routines that have defined lives. Compared to Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Another Woman, Vicky Cristina Barcelona does not offer its women a path to growth. Jill, Mary, and Tracy are all in slightly different places at the end of Manhattan than they were at the beginning. This is also true of Hannah and her sisters and Marion in Another Woman. The emotional entanglements we have witnessed in these three films, painfully human and frustrating, still yield some sense that life is more than a repetitive pattern of hope and disillusionment. Not so in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. No doubt this is why Allen has said “it’s a very pessimistic picture, and sad” (Tobias 2008).

Whatever Works: It’s a Matter of Luck

Although originally written in 1976–1977 for Zero Mostel, who died in 1977, and rehashing a number of familiar Allen themes, Whatever Works (2009) does allow

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one of its female characters a dramatic and delightful change. Melody St. Ann Celestine’s mother, Marietta, played by Patricia Clarkson, goes from an alcoholic, faded Southern belle who thinks she has found salvation in Jesus, to a sexually liberated free spirit, a Maria Elena without suicidal tendencies, whose “arty” and very nearly pornographic photographs take New York by storm. Juxtaposed with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the Marietta character is particularly interesting because it was Patricia Clarkson who played the trapped, repressed Judy in that film, the woman who was too scared to break free of the boring, conventional life offered by her husband. In Whatever Works, a playful film all about risk and change, she breaks free.

We begin with a pattern established in Annie Hall, where the Woody Allen sur-rogate, in this case, Boris Yellnikoff, moves in and out of the diegesis, sometimes part of the narrative, sometimes speaking directly to the audience, explaining his beliefs – “it’s a fallacious notion that people are decent” – explaining himself – “I’m not a likeable guy” – and telling us about his life before the point at which the film begins. Like so many other Allen characters, he has tried to commit suicide when his first marriage failed. He’s a genius; his wife, Jessica, was also brilliant, and two brilliant intellectuals are clearly not compatible, any more than Juan Antonio and Maria Elena are compatible. Successful relationships, both onscreen and off for Allen, seem to involve people who are different. Like Marion Post, Boris is dissatis-fied with his life as a professor and he has quit his job at Columbia and now sup-ports himself teaching chess to children. This allows him to continue to have nothing but contempt for his students, and to learn nothing new about chess. He has no desire to have another relationship with a woman and believes that love does not conquer all and does not last.

We pick up a pattern established in Manhattan, the attraction between a younger girl and an older man when Boris meets Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), a homeless runaway from Mississippi who stops Boris on the street to ask for food and ends up going home with him and staying. With Melody we repeat the familiar Pyg-malion routine where an older, wiser man tutors a young innocent in the ways of the world, the mind, and the body. Melody, whom Boris calls a “brainless twit” and a “sublimated baton twirler,” gradually absorbs his ideas and convinces him to marry her. Boris becomes less inclined to kill himself now that he is in a com-fortable relationship with a young woman who is cheerful, undemanding, and who waits on him hand and foot. It is Tracy and Isaac all over again, although Tracy, who goes to Dalton, a fashionable private school in New York, is probably more of an artistic, intellectual type than the mindless Melody, who never dis-proves Boris’s estimation of her brainpower.

The first half of Whatever Works moves along in familiar Allen fashion until Melody’s dysfunctional parents enter the story. Just as Vicky Cristina Barcelona is energized when Maria Elena appears, this one too comes to life when Melody’s mother, Marietta, shows up unannounced at the apartment her daughter shares with Boris. Melody’s father (played by Ed Begley, Jr.) enters later. His resurrection

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from a National Rifle Association-loving Southern bigot to a man who discovers he is really gay allows Allen to play with and critique socially expected norms, but Marietta is less of a caricature and more interesting. In this film, Allen gives us an older woman who embodies risk, change, artistic expression, and just plain fun. Like Cristina in Allen’s previous film, Marietta discovers she is good at photogra-phy. She is encouraged by Boris’s friend, Leo Brockman (Conleth Hill), a philoso-phy professor like Marion Post, and with her creative energies unleashed, she is transformed from a pitiful Blanche Dubois to a colorful hippie descendant of the Woodstock counterculture of peace and love. She moves in with Leo and another of Boris’s friends, Morgenstern (Olek Krupa) and the three enjoy a happy sexual ménage à trois. Her photographs of nude men are exhibited in a prominent New York gallery to great acclaim. Marietta, at the end of Allen’s film, is a truly happy and fulfilled woman, or, perhaps, a parody of one.

However, if the upbeat ending of Hannah and Her Sisters did not please Allen, he surely would be even less pleased with Whatever Works, unless we look at the ending as a deliberate parody of the happy endings of different forms of comedy. Hannah was not a parody, but Whatever Works is more in line with Allen’s comic roots and the earlier parodies of the 1970s, which is when this script was originally written. In the main love story, Melody finally leaves Boris for a man more appro-priate to her age, who defines himself as a “romantic” and who believes in love at first sight. It is the conventional, too-perfect pairing at the conclusion of roman-tic or screwball comedies where the heroine starts out with the wrong man but is united with the right one at the end. Melody tells Boris, “I’ve grown because of you,” but this does not help the existentially empty Boris, who attempts suicide again. This time, he lands on a psychic walking her dog who turns out to be the “totally right person” for him, the deus ex machina generating the too-perfect ending of a slapstick comedy. In a more modern twist, Melody’s father John finds happiness with his new partner, Howard (Christopher Evan Welch), and the liber-ated Marietta has two lovers: “Whatever works.” Life is a matter of “luck,” Whatever Works insists, a theme Allen has reiterated many times. In his interview with Richard Schickel, he said, “I feel that luck is the chief component in a good rela-tionship between a man and a woman” (Schickel 2003: 131). Luck determines all the relationships in Whatever Works, but the two characters who are allowed the most screen time to develop and change are Melody and Marietta, in part because Boris can’t even conceive of the possibility of change, growth, transformation, since he’s never experienced either.

Conclusion: “It’s Complicated”

The fact that the majority of scholars writing on Woody Allen are men (more than half the contributors to this volume), would seem to indicate that his films

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do offer men more than women an engaging perspective of the trials and tribula-tions of living. But current theories of spectatorship emphasize that one of the great pleasures of watching films is that they allow spectators to identify with a range of subject positions. Allen, in fact, illustrates this gender-flexible identifica-tion by showing both a male (see Play It Again, Sam) and a female (Purple Rose of Cairo) totally absorbed in and obsessed by the films they are watching.

In looking over the selection of Allen’s work covered in this chapter, it is clear that Dianne Wiest is right: his affinity with women is “complicated.” In terms of content, he likes to make films about women, and he does attempt to give voice to female desire. But more often, women serve as surrogates for himself, his desires, his needs, his fears, reaffirming the idea that we all have a good deal more gender flexibility within us than is often acknowledged. This is reflected in both the content of his films and in how they are received.

Allen would not call himself a feminist, but it is undeniable that he often explores issues with which women struggle in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century America, and, more often than not, it is the women who take risks, who grow and change, rather than the men. Neither Boris in Whatever Works nor Juan Antonio in Vicky Christina Barcelona changes significantly in their films. Maria Elena astutely observes that Juan Antonio will never realize his potential without her, but he cannot live with her. Boris attempts suicide again at the end of What-ever Works, lands on the woman who is now “totally the right person” for him, but there is no reason for us to believe it. He is the same misanthrope he was before who, right from the beginning of the film, told us, “I’m not a likeable guy.” In their essential stasis, Boris and Juan Antonio carry on a pattern we saw in Isaac and Mickey. Whereas Laura Mulvey once described women in film as passive and men as active, the reverse tends to be true for characters in Allen films (Mulvey 1989: 20). And, like his male characters, Allen denies that his basic outlook on the human condition has changed greatly over the years. He still doesn’t believe in the existence of God and, as he said in “My Speech to the Graduates”: “We have never learned to love. We lack leaders and coherent programs. We have no spir-itual center. We are adrift alone in the cosmos wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain” (1980: 61). But with Annie Hall in 1977, after he met Diane Keaton, he did begin dealing with this existential angst and darkness from a woman’s point of view. “It became fun for me to write from the female point of view. I had never done it before, so it was fresh. It also didn’t carry with it the burden of a central comic persona that had to see everything the way a wit sees everything” (Lahr 2006: 156). He was able to get away from Seidman’s misogynistic comedian-centered comedy and, indeed, to laugh at it. This would seem to be what he is doing with Boris, where the upbeat ending of Whatever Works can be seen as a parodic version of “happily ever after.”

Both the men and women in Allen’s films embody sides of himself ranging from the victim to the creative artist. But there is no easy dichotomy to his char-acters, or to his outlook on how to live life. We have men who talk and write about life, like Isaac and Alvy, but do not live it, and women who live it, like Maria

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Elena and Cristina, but cannot find a stable relationship. By definition, the artist seems to be the more complicated and miserable character. Lee’s reclusive artist/lover, Frederick, in Hannah and Her Sisters, watches shows about the Holocaust on television and tells her that she is his “only connection to the world.” Like the dispassionate professor, Marion, in Another Woman, or Paul (Michael Sheen), the pedantic professor in Midnight in Paris [who is, however, apparently a good dancer], the artist as well as the academic can lead a cold, cerebral life and needs someone to inspire desire and feeling. On the other hand, the fully passionate life, such as Maria Elena’s, can lead to the same frustrations that drive Mickey and Boris and company to attempt suicide. Ideally, there must be some kind of balance between reason and energy for both art and human relationships to evolve productively. Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human exist-ence.” In Allen’s films, men seem to turn to forms of art and women to relation-ships, but, for both, it is crucial to maintain the capacity to take risks and be open to change and not to let one contrary overcome the other. The women may be more successful in this area than the men, Gil Pender excepted – Tracy off to London, Holly writing and pregnant, Marion on the verge of “hope,” Cristina on her unfulfilled quest, and the wonderful Marietta cavorting sexually and artisti-cally in New York City.

In Hannah and Her Sisters, the quotation from Tolstoy, “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless” is juxtaposed with a cut to a statue of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” suggesting that the artist strives, but often comes up empty. And in relationships, it may be that “only unfulfilled love can be romantic,” to quote from Vicky Cristina Barcelona. If human beings inevitably face emptiness and the loss of love, then “the only absolute knowledge” may be our ability to laugh at our dreams and failures, and Allen’s brilliance at parody allows us this gift. Although his subjects are invariably white, “middle class” – depending on how that term is defined – and usually educated and urban, as he has matured, Allen has given us more complex characters, with a greater variety in terms of gender, age, and sexual identity. Perhaps this simply reflects the maturing of the artist, and an acceptance of the fact that life is full of irresolvable contradictions that are fun to explore. He once told John Lahr that, “if you write something from the heart, it’s full of truths that you never had to cerebrally impose on it” (Lahr 2006: 156). And those felt truths are “complicated.”

Works Cited

Allen, Woody (1980) Side Effects. New York: Random House.Allison, Terry L. and Renée R. Curry (1996) “Frame breaking and code breaking on Woody

Allen’s relationship films.” In Renée R. Curry (ed.), Perspectives on Woody Allen. New York: G.K. Hall, 121–136.

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Arostegui, Maria del Mar Asensio (2006) “Hlenka regained: Irony and ambiguity in the narrator of Woody Allen’s Another Woman.” In Charles L.P. Silet (ed.), The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 256–267.

Björkman, Stig (1993) Woody Allen on Woody Allen. New York: Grove Press.Ciment, Michel and Frank Garbarz (2006) “Woody Allen: ‘All my films have a connection

with magic.’ ” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 169–178.

Denby, David (2008) “Young loves.” The New Yorker (Aug. 11), 96.Feldstein, Richard (1989) “Displaced feminine representation in Woody Allen’s cinema.”

In Marleen S. Barr and Richard Feldstein (eds.), Discontented Discourses: Feminism/Textual Intervention/Psychoanalysis. Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 69–86.

Fuller, Graham (2009) “No city for old men.” Sight and Sound 19.2 (Feb.).Girgus, Sam (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Hedges, Inez (1991) Breaking the Frame. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Johnston, Claire (1976) “Women’s cinema as counter-cinema.” In Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies

and Methods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Lahr, John (2006) “The imperfectionist.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.),

Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 143–168.Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Mulvey, Laura (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Mulvey, Laura and Peter Wollen (1979) “Interview.” Millennium Film Journal 4.5, 24.Rilke, Rainer Maria (1939) Duino Elegies. Trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. New

York: W.W. Norton.Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Seidman, Steve (1981) Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film. Ann Arbor, MI:

UMI Research Press.Tobias, Scott (2008) “Woody Allen: Interview.” A.V. Club (Aug. 13). www.avclub.com/

articles/woody-allen,14292/ (accessed Oct. 1, 2012).

13

The Barcelona captured by Woody Allen’s lens in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) is a white-centered landscape, shot with young white women at the core of its composition. In response to an invitation from Vicky’s white aunt Judy (Patricia Clarkson), Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) travel to Barce-lona for a vacation/study adventure. And so it begins, another year, another Allen film.

For those of us who have awaited, viewed, and critiqued many or all of Allen’s films, the advent of a new one is exciting, both from an entertainment perspective and a scholarly perspective. We’ve grown used to the strengths and weaknesses of his films, and we’ve also grown to expect the ebb and flow of his artistic sen-sibility, but what one might expect or anticipate from an Allen film varies among different viewers. Allen has long been known as a comedic director with deeply cerebral interests. Film scholars David Desser and Lester Friedman (2004) note,

Allen has evolved into one of the few “public intellectuals” . . . in America, a person working in the popular arenas of film, television, journalism, and literature who transcends the merely popular and transitory, but who never loses touch with his mass audience (34).

Although it is debatable how “in touch” Allen remains with his mass audience since the Allen/Soon-Yi/Mia Farrow scandal, audiences do have expectations that philosophical explorations and intellectual playgrounds be depicted in Allen films. In 1986, the French critic Robert Benayoun described Allen as “the first to found a reputation on an instantaneous reaction to the great problems of our times”

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Woody Allen’s Grand Scheme

The Whitening of Manhattan, London, and Barcelona

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(Benayoun 1986: 71), and, yes, many of us did feel throughout the 1970s and 1980s that Allen had a deeply witty and uniquely sharp insight into the changing con-temporary relationships between men and women. Film scholar Sam B. Girgus points out it is no coincidence that Ike and Mary in Manhattan (1979) meet “at a party in support of the Equal Rights Amendment at the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden,” which demonstrates for Girgus – correctly, I think – that Allen wanted Manhattan situated “during a time of social and sexual transition when definitions of gender and patterns of relationships” were in flux (Girgus 1993: 61). Indeed, there were worrisome tensions even then, such as the vast age difference between Isaac Davis (Allen) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan, but the overarching ability of Allen to play both seriously and humorously with the femi-nism of the times was mostly well received.

In the last few decades of Allen’s career, the great problems of our times have changed, and for some, our expectations of Allen’s abilities to react to, participate in, and guide us through these problems, with wit and intellectual insight, have also changed. In addition, our understanding of film, media audience, and audi-ence response has also flourished. Film scholar Inez Hedges writes,

As we look at a film, perception occurs on many levels. On the one hand the medium itself has a certain relation to reality. Except in animated and abstract films, the movie image is a photographic rendering of objects that have existed in the real world. . . . Even narrative, or story-telling is a way of structuring information that occurs in real life as well as in art. On the other hand, a film spectator relies on his or her knowledge of other films when encountering a new work.  .  .  .  Most spectators will walk into a movie theater already expecting a certain type of film (1991: xiv).

Some spectators of Allen films expect, and may have always expected, that his films adhere, at least somewhat, both to the changing material world as well as to the changing social aspects of the world. He enticed viewers to want this from him by virtue of his previous ability to react to the issues of the times, but viewers themselves have grown along with the times and bring their cultural and social expectations with them to the movies.

Long before Hedges suggested in her 1991 book, Breaking the Frame: Film Lan-guage and the Experience of Limits, that film viewers do not simply accept the limits of the framed composition offered to us by film, sociologist Robert K. Merton made claims in 1946 for a “uses and gratifications” approach to understanding audiences; this approach found that “different audiences use the same media to meet different needs according to their own wants”; such audiences are “ ‘active’ and/or discriminating in their engagement with the media,” and “they may read or use the media in different, surprising or even ‘aberrant’ ways” (Merton 2003: 9). The types of information and expectations that viewers might bring to a movie include information received from previously viewed films, lived experiences,

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scholarship, discussion with friends and colleagues, and more. In terms of viewing a new film that depicts a place, geography scholar Christina Kennedy tells us that

The degree to which place portrayal in film affects our mental image depends upon a variety of factors: whether we have had personal experience with that place, the skill with which it is portrayed, the context of the media representation, the purpose of the director, as well as the filters that director and audience bring to the filmic event (1994: 163).

Thus, although film directors may wish to control the place and characters inside the frame of their film portrayal, many viewers are going to map onto the film their own desire for a modicum of adherence to reality, their personal experience with the people or the place, as well as sundry other filters that may cause them to stay within the frame or to break the frame of the film.

Of course, filmmakers and certain viewers may contend that any director has the right to frame the place, characters, and setting of his/her choice without concern for an adherence to reality; these would argue that such is the purview of auteurism, imagination, and creativity. Although viewers do want to see vision-ary, imaginative, and creative films, the field of audience studies suggests that viewers have a difficult time curtailing the information pressing on them from outside the frame of the film. In particular, some audiences of films about differ-ence seek a balance of aesthetic aspects and political aspects in their films. Film scholar Sheldon Schiffer tells us that, “The balance between the political and the aesthetic is a defining hinge in the argument toward a process of filming differ-ence.  .  .  .  What makes ‘good cinema’ is a film that strives to develop a reality-seeking experience for the audience” (2009: 235). Schiffer is not prescribing one type of “good cinema”; rather, he is suggesting that filming difference invites less viewer resistance when it admits to the facts of a preexisting reality.

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen is filming difference, but it is unclear whether he understands himself to be involved in this type of work. He presents the char-acter of Vicky (Rebecca Hall) as a young white graduate student whose thesis is on Catalan identity. We might assume from her research that she should have some passion for her topic, some fluency with Spanish and/or Catalan, and that this visit to Barcelona should permit her to verify some of her research findings. Once in Barcelona, however, the only evidence she demonstrates of interest in the surrounding culture is her enjoyment of Spanish guitar. Her friend, Cristina (Scar-lett Johansson), has no knowledge of the culture or the place. Thus, viewers originally perceive Allen’s Barcelona through the eyes of two unknowledgeable white women, as well as from the perspective of the offscreen white voice of the narrator. The limitations of these perspectives cause us to question the Barcelona of the film framed by Allen, especially in regard to his ability to film difference and to resist his urge toward racial insularity. These questions also pertain to his previous and subsequent films of the large, global, multicultural cities of

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Manhattan and London. Explorations of these cities and their peoples in Allen’s Manhattan and Match Point (2005) allow us to examine this filmmaker’s sensibili-ties and largely unconscious assumptions regarding white privilege.

As told to us by the unseen, but ever-present, narrator of the film, Vicky quickly views Barcelona as fraught with overly sexualized Latinity; Cristina experiences a landscape and a people whose only value is to facilitate her personal and sexual experimentation. Vicky Cristina Barcelona has been praised for the return of Allen’s storytelling strengths, and it’s true, the characters are strong – they have incredible chemistry with each other – and the architectural backdrop of Barcelona is mes-merizing. However, upon reflection we realize that the Barcelona framed by Allen does not satisfy fully because it doesn’t reflect the differences many viewers know to comprise the city and its people, and it also doesn’t address any of the real problems of the times. Certainly, he can make the film he wants to make, but viewers can also want things from the artist that the film inside the frame doesn’t provide. Audiences don’t want these things because of mere resistance or arbitrari-ness, but because Allen is a capable, intellectual artist who once seduced us with his films into believing that he had his lens aimed at the pulse of change. We want this brilliant man to grow with the times; in particular, if he is going to take us to Barcelona, we want him to grapple with global ideas about race and place. We have trusted his intellect, his wit, and his knowledge before, and we are willing to travel to this new country with him to see what he has to say. But what Allen provides in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a fulfillment of his own decades-old fantasy of being a European filmmaker:

I always wanted to make the kinds of films that I saw in the 1950s. The Truffaut films and the Godard films and the Bergmans and Fellinis, and those are the films that always influenced my work. And I’ve always copied them and been influenced by them. Vicky Cristina Barcelona looks to me, when I see it, like one of those films (qtd. in Baylen 2008: 2).

Yes, perhaps to him and others it does look like one of his fantasy 1950s films, but the Barcelona he projects is also a contemporary one, and the characters flaunt contemporary values, which puts Allen in the position of risking that his viewers begin to yearn for the environment of Barcelona outside his frame. Allen ignores the complex multiculturalism of modern-day Barcelona and thus risks defining himself as locked into white privileged behaviors. Philosopher Shannon Sullivan claims that

one of the predominant unconscious habits of white privilege is that of ontological expansiveness. As ontologically expansive, white people tend to act and think as if all spaces – whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise – are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish (2006: 10).

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Unfortunately, it seems that Allen participates in just such a white privileged idea by utilizing the landscape of contemporary Barcelona as a mere space onto which he can paint his own white American characters and tell their story. It’s difficult to know whether Allen would intentionally whitewash Barcelona for his own purposes, whether he would simply be unaware of how his actions could be per-ceived as white privilege, or whether he would be indifferent to issues of white privilege when it came to making the film he wanted to make. But, all in all, it does appear that for Allen, “the world presents no barriers  .  .  .  to engagement” (Sullivan 2006: 103); the complex realities of contemporary Barcelona do not give him pause as he frames his film. And so, Allen delivers to his audience a Barcelona bereft of its people from Ecuador, Peru, Morocco, Columbia, Argentina, Pakistan, Africa, and China, whose population has grown throughout the city over the past 25 years. He frames Barcelona through the lens of white privilege and lodges whiteness as the centrality and authority of Barcelona.

According to the work on whiteness of film scholar Richard Dyer, white power “reproduces itself regardless of intention, power differences and goodwill, and overwhelmingly because it is not seen as whiteness, but as normal” (1997: 10). Allen seems unable or indifferent to self-reflecting about white privilege. It might seem difficult to imagine why a long-time liberal, public intellectual such as Allen would be averse to, indifferent to, or unaware of issues related to white privilege, but perhaps, even unconsciously, his perceived detachment from these concerns is related to the fact that questions have been raised throughout history as to the whiteness of Jewish people. “The rise of European racism frequently focused specifically on Jews: in the European context the Jews were the defining opposite of what is now called ‘white’ ” (Biale 1998: 27). In their book, Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel claim that Jewish peoples in America have benefited from the “historical process of enlarging the definition of ‘whiteness’ to include groups like the Jews who were initially con-sidered ‘non-white’ ” (1998: 2). David R. Roediger, a scholar of critical whiteness studies, writes, “Not only were many Jews identified and victimized partly on the basis of their dark skins in Europe, but also  .  .  .  [t]he category ‘Jew’ was itself singled out for racial hatred” (2005: 116). Even as a renowned Jewish American filmmaker, who has built a large part of his film oeuvre around characters and topics relevant to the Jewish situation in America, Allen doesn’t seem to want to entertain the idea that when depicting other characters who represent peoples who have had discordant relationships with whiteness, these characters, regardless of authorial intent, still represent complex filmic sites of long-standing racial dif-ficulty. Allen may simply not want his representations to be that complex or, as Biale and colleagues (1998: 4) claim, sometimes once some Jewish Americans are able to participate in all realms of American society as white people, they became more willing to forget that they are now “part of a majority whose very self-definition as a majority was based on the exclusion of those termed ‘nonwhite.’ ” It may also be the case that Allen has likewise “forgotten,” or never has fully felt

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the burden, to represent peoples of color in terms of their particular historical exclusions. For viewers who have invested many decades in viewing and/or study-ing Allen’s films, and perhaps even for those who are new to his films but who have heard about Allen’s remarkable fearlessness as regards lifelong psychoanalysis and addressing the pulse of the times, it is difficult to resolve the seemingly con-tradictory idea that Allen would not be able or willing to reflect upon his own white privilege.

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen does offer us the Spanish characters of Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz) and Juan Antonio ( Javier Bardem); these two characters play secondary roles in relationship to the two white women. Allen also portrays a few people of color as minor cast members and extras: a black woman is cast as a prostitute, a black man lingers in a bar, two Indian men pass by Juan Antonio and Maria Elena in an alley, and an Asian man shops at a market. But Allen’s camera minimizes and makes extraneous the multicultural facts of Barcelona; he controls the filmic frame so that whiteness centers and prevails over the story taking place in this city, which could, in fact, be any city erased of its authentic population.

In retrospect, the critique of Allen’s inability to capture the true social land-scapes and real peoples of the cities he films has been available. In Allen and Stig Björkman’s 1995 book, Woody Allen on Woody Allen, Björkman interviews Allen regarding the use of people of color, particularly black peoples in his films, even as extras in the background. Allen responds:

Well, usually there are two different situations when it comes to extras. One is that we just call up the extra people and say, “Send over a hundred extras or twenty extras or something.” And they usually send over a mixture of people. I mean, if it’s a street in New York, they usually send over a mixture of Hispanics, black and white people. But that’s just something we call up and order for background. I mean, we don’t buy them by the pound. Then for principal roles, I don’t know the black experi-ence well enough to really write about it with any authenticity (46).

Allen tries to divert the question of attaining appropriately diverse extras for films located in multicultural cities by shifting the problem to a choice made by a busi-ness office over which he has no control: “we just call up the extra people.” It is difficult to believe that this infamously independent director has no ability to make specific requests about the “extra people” when designing the background popu-lace of his global cities, but in terms of his suggestion that he doesn’t know the black experience well enough to film it, it is easy to believe that he might feel uncomfortable writing stories and filming stories about people with whom he doesn’t identify. However, many filmmakers feel this way, and many make the decision to overcome such limitations. For instance, film director Alejandro González Iñárritu conducts significant amounts of research on the location he

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decides to use for his films. When asked about the research on Barcelona for his film, Biutiful, in an interview for New York Magazine.com, Iñárritu answered,

I interviewed hundreds of Chinese immigrants, I went to the real places. . . . Some of the places that I shot the film are places where these things really happened. Ninety percent of the Chinese guys that are in Biutiful are people who have actually been in those conditions. The Africans live in those houses. So all that research I did. Then to cast all these people and use all these non-actors, I wanted to use all these hyper-realistic elements (qtd. in Bennett 2010: 2).

Like Allen, Iñárritu did not feel comfortable writing these unknown peoples into his film, but he faced his limitations head on and decided that a better film would come from engaging with the real peoples of Barcelona. Iñárritu and Allen make different types of films: Iñárritu favors the hyperreal and Allen favors the nostalgic film style of the 1950s; however, both filmmakers moved their filmmaking endeav-ors to Barcelona, chose to make their films in and of contemporary Barcelona, and only Allen believed that just as in American productions of the 1930s and 1940s, cities could be depicted “as neutral backdrops for the antics of the stars” (Ford 1994: 119). It is an unconscious habit of white privilege to think that one is not compelled to account for the people who live in the environment one wants to film. As Shannon Sullivan reminds us,

Both within the United States and without, the racialization of space and habits of lived spatiality often enforces racism and white privilege. Yet the connection between race and space often is not seen because space is thought of as racially neutral (2006: 154).

Allen’s unconscious participation in white privilege becomes starkly apparent through his sense that the only authenticity he has to address is that of his own experience: he admits that he has received a great deal of criticism regarding his depictions of black peoples in his films, but he asserts, “I’m just trying to depict the reality as I experience it, my own authenticity” (Allen and Björkman 2005: 47). When Allen’s own reality delivered material relevant to the realities of his audi-ence members, the relationship between this filmmaker and his audience was more aligned, such as when he critiqued and explored feminism in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. But Allen is not merely delivering a commodity to a group of consumers; his audiences are actively bringing to bear on the film their additional experiences and information. Communication scholar John Fiske tells us that audiences do not always treat popular culture as commodities; instead, they treat such cultural products not as “a completed object to be accepted passively, but as a cultural resource to be used” (2003: 112). Fiske continues this argument by saying that the “commodity-consumer approach puts the power with the producers of the commodity” (112). The cultural resource-user approach

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concerns itself with “constructing meanings of self, social identity and social rela-tions” (112). These approaches relate to Allen’s films in the sense that while his own experience is certainly of interest to some audiences, some other audi-ences are constructing meanings about his films with information from outside of his frame in which only white women are permitted to tell a story in and of Barcelona.

In 2009, actor Angela Bassett lambasted Allen for his lack of black people in Vicky Cristina Barcelona: “I mean, to have one black cast member for the whole film seems rather strange, and, oh yes, she’s a prostitute, of course” (Eden 2009). Although Bassett fails to address the fact that both Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz have major roles in the film portraying the brown-skinned peoples of Spain, her point remains an astute one regarding Allen’s insularity. Accepting Allen’s racial and cultural insularity is very difficult for audiences who have deemed him to be a public intellectual; we want him to have grown in his knowledge of white privilege; we want him to have globally inclusive sensibilities when he makes films about racial and ethnic differences; and, we feel disappointed when he demon-strates a lack of awareness about the topics and concerns of our times. Yes, he says he wants to make films about his reality, but it is sad to believe that Allen’s reality really includes walking through the streets of Barcelona without meeting any people of color. When realities such as the one Allen depicts in Vicky Cristina Barcelona are put forward to viewers, viewers may react as if something is “amiss” or “strange.” “When things appear strange to the viewer,” Bobo argues, “she/he may then bring other viewpoints to bear on the watching of the film and may see things other than what the filmmakers intended. The viewer, that is, will read ‘against the grain’ of the films” (2003: 310).

Just such viewing against the grain occurred when Penélope Cruz won an Oscar for best supporting actress in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Some critics pointed out that her role was one that “lampooned her foreignness” (Parkinson 2009). They warned Cruz to beware of having her American film career become like Carmen Miranda’s, one in which she is asked to portray attributes of Latin peoples that are amplified for the purpose of being ridiculed and laughed at by white American and European viewers. “In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, by having Javier Bardem consistently remind her to speak English so that Scarlett Johansson can understand her, Allen lampooned Cruz’s transatlantic dichotomy” (Parkinson 2009). Although Allen provided Penélope Cruz with a role that won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, it is the case that, in order to create Maria Elena, both Bardem and Cruz had to agree repeatedly to their characters’ silencing of Maria Elena’s Spanish, her authentic language, in her own country so that the white, English-speaking, Cristina could feel comfortable. Not to sound too zealous about the overarching argument, it is important to note that the film is a comedy, and that Juan Antonio’s silencing of Maria Elena whenever she speaks Spanish is very funny for a variety of reasons. Maria Elena is an extremely verbal and sexually powerful woman, prone to hysterical, passionate, and violent out-

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bursts; when Juan Antonio insists on silencing her Spanish, we laugh because we know that putting any kind of lid on Maria Elena, although it may work in the short term, is bound ultimately to entice her to explode. As viewers, safe in our seats, we laugh because we are vicariously thrilled by Juan Antonio’s courageous provocation, and we secretly want to witness Maria Elena fly into a rage – it makes for great cinema. We also laugh because Allen has used this silencing trope to great effect in his previous films. In Bullets Over Broadway, for instance, when David Shayne ( John Cusack) professes his love for Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), she puts her hand over his mouth and tells him, “Don’t speak, don’t speak, oh no, no, don’t speak.” Silencing another person strikes us as humorous because the act directly tackles issues of power and decorum among human beings. As it’s used in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the silencing of Maria Elena invites laughter because it is a provocative action and because it is a well-known comedic trope, but the laughter can occur simultaneous to recognizing that a reductive racial insult is also at play.

In fact, it seems that every part of Barcelona must reduce itself to what Cristina is capable of understanding. Cristina’s whiteness provides a vast erasure to all that has come before her in Barcelona, and sadly, both Juan Antonio and Maria Elena capitulate to her unspoken power as the representation of whiteness. Dyer reminds us that

In Western tradition, white is beautiful because it is the colour of virtue. This remarkable equation relates to a particular definition of goodness. All lists of the moral connotations of white as symbol in Western culture are the same: purity, spirituality, transcendence, cleanliness, virtue, simplicity, chastity (1997: 72).

Viewers know that Cristina is not necessarily pure, virtuous, simple, or chaste, but as a white symbol, she is quite powerful. Throughout the initial scenes that include both Maria Elena and Cristina, Maria Elena is even dressed in white, a symbolic erasure of her Latinity. When director Allen moves into a city, he brings white privilege with him; he lampoons and minimizes that which isn’t white, and in the case of casting Vicky Cristina Barcelona, he persuades Spanish actors Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, two powerful and admirable talents acclaimed across the globe, to succumb to his script and his vision of their own homeland, and their language.

The questions raised by the notable absence of people of color in Allen’s films run straight to the core of what responsibilities a director has to the material he or she presents on screen. Scholar Henry Louis Gates writes, “Common sense says that you don’t bracket out 90% of the world’s cultural heritage if you really want to learn about the world” (qtd. in Greene 1993: 13). Similarly, Hermes and Adolfs-son claim that filmmakers undertake a significant “burden of representation,” whenever they depict an unrepresented group (2007: 256), or, I would argue, a location that has a complex multicultural history. Allen may not agree to this

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burden of representation, but nonetheless, the privileged white aesthetic upon which he insists for his films does serve to represent the world in a way that mini-mizes the presence of racial others. Although he may not want to be held account-able for such a burden, the images and representations he frames with his camera “serve particular social interests” (Dyer 1997: 82), such as an investment in main-taining white power and white privilege. His art participates and contributes to the continuance of white privilege, regardless of whether he is conscious of this fact or indifferent to it. The work itself represents a particular way of thinking about whiteness.

The Allen template for centering whiteness on a city landscape has been prob-lematic throughout his career. In the films that have used Manhattan as backdrop, critics have long pointed out that Allen’s New York was decidedly and excessively white, upper class, and insular. And Allen has never seen this critique as part of his “burden of responsibility” as an artist. As recently as 2009, he defended his portrayal of New York:

My memories of New York are unrealistic. The New York that I grew up loving was, ironically enough, the New York of Hollywood parties, where people lived in penthouses with white telephones and came home at five in the morning . . . people popping champagne corks and making witty banter and elevators that open into your apartment directly. I never knew New York as it really existed. For that, you have to speak to Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese (Nguyen 2010).

Allen constantly acknowledges a willingness to reflect an idealized New York derived from Hollywood movies he saw in his youth, which clearly demonstrates how little interest he has in depicting the actual landscape and people of the city. He thinks that responsibility for depictions of a multicultural New York belongs to directors essentially defined, in his mind, by their racial and ethnic backgrounds, directors such as African American Spike Lee or Italian American Martin Scorsese. He may see Lee and Scorsese as realists, while he defines his work differently; however, Sheldon Schiffer claims that whenever difference exists to be filmed, “the balance between the political and the aesthetic is a defining hinge” (2009: 234). Schiffer argues that audiences want filmmakers to attempt such a balance while developing a “reality-seeking experience for the audience” (235). The end result of filming difference in this balanced way increases the possibility “that viewers will engage intellectually, will have assumptions challenged, and will experience complex contradictions inside characters and themselves” (235).

In Allen’s 1979 film, Manhattan, the opening street scenes do portray a few African American extras as menial workers in the background. At Elaine’s restau-rant, while the white and Jewish people eat and converse, a black waiter makes an appearance. The white and Jewish characters mingle only among white peoples on every city street. They venture into a bookstore, which also presents only white people as potential customers. The white and Jewish people attend fundraisers

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and roam around New York’s safe and romanticized streets at night. True to form, Allen’s white and Jewish characters live out his privileged white vision of Manhat-tan; Allen claims, “To me, people who lived in Manhattan would go from the Copa to the Latin Quarter; they’d hear jazz downtown, they’d go up to Harlem, they’d sit at Lindy’s until four in the morning” (Lax 1992: 21). Even the department stores of the film contain all white customers except for one black female shopper. On another occasion, African shoppers dressed in pseudo-African costumes leave a specialty shop. When the main character, Alvy Singer (Allen), has to move to a new apartment, two black men with a white supervisor come to move him. When the characters go to see a foreign film, as the camera captures all the audience members exiting the theater, not one single person of color is included.

It is difficult to imagine that the intellectual circles of Manhattan in the late 1970s would not have included significant numbers of peoples of color frequent-ing galleries, fundraisers, and foreign films. Allen has whitewashed Manhattan and significantly diminished the population of its peoples of color. Allen makes it clear that the framed world of the film is the activities of intellectual New Yorkers, but his depictions reveal an unconscious sense that New York intellectuals did not include any peoples of color.

Likewise in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), which also takes place in Manhattan, the only people of color portrayed in the entire film are entertainers and servants. Hannah’s black maid wears a complete maid’s uniform including a cap over the course of three separate Thanksgiving celebrations at Hannah’s home. The black pianist, Bobby Short, and his black bass player accompanist make an appearance in the film. And, as Hannah (Mia Farrow) discusses her plans to play Desdemona in a public television production of Othello, her mother says she will be great, “You and some big black stud.” The centrality of Allen’s vision of whiteness diminishes people of color to their most offensive stereotypes: mere entertainers, servants, and oversexed male studs.

When Allen moves from filming Manhattan to portraying London in Match Point, not much changes in terms of the centrality of his white vision and his failure or indifference to bearing responsibility for accurate depictions of the loca-tions he chooses. He takes Scarlett Johansson with him to portray the sexy, Ameri-can character, Nola. Film critic A.O. Scott writes that Match Point’s setting is “modified Henry James (wealthy London, with a few social and cultural outsiders buzzing around the hives of privilege” (2005: 1). And a critic for Slate writes, “Like Henry James before him, Allen has gone to England to make a comedy of someone else’s manners” (Metcalf 2006: 2). Just like the cities of New York and Barcelona, and in accordance with Allen’s usual framing, the backdrops of the London land-scape are filled with white extras, except for one black man dining at an upper class restaurant. Interestingly, in 2002, director Stephen Frears filmed Dirty Pretty Things in London and pointed out that London’s streets are filled with Nigerian, Turkish, Somalian immigrants, and more. The characters in Frears’s film under-stand themselves to be “the people you do not see.” Regarding Dirty Pretty Things,

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scholar Ted Hovet (2006: 4) writes, “Far from remaining tucked away in their neighborhoods, the inhabitants of this new London are fully integrated into the economic life of the city.” Although Allen might argue, as he does when discussing Manhattan, that his “memories” and “experience” of London are unrealistic and informed by a set of film portrayals, his memories and experiences are white and privileged experiences as he has portrayed them on the screen.

In Match Point, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), a struggling actress who comes from Boulder, Colorado, becomes engaged to Tom Hewitt (Matthew Goode), a wealthy upper class Britisher. Chris Wilton ( Jonathan Rhys Meyers) described in the film as the “poor boy from Ireland come to London,” is a working class Irishman who attained a bit of professional acclaim as a tennis player. Metcalf writes, Chris Wilton is a “bootstrapper – tennis was his way out of the lace-curtain poverty of his Irish childhood” (2006: 1). Chris and Nola serve as the off-whites of the film; neither of them has the status nor the heritage of the Hewitt family into which both of them hope to marry. In fact, when Chris first meets Nola, she is wearing a white dress to emphasize her cleanliness, value, and hopeful acceptability as a bride. Dyer writes, “As a day-to-day ideal, the image of the glowingly white woman no longer has the currency it once had. . . . Yet the language of this image remains powerful, and particularly at those radiant moments of adoration: the man’s first sight of his first or great love” (1997: 131). Both Nola’s legitimate claim to the privileged white Hewitt family and her fitness for radiant adoration are emphasized and symbolized by her white dress. But, in London, Chris and Nola’s whiteness is skin-deep only, in that the power that extends from their whiteness is not central and can easily become marginalized, as evidenced by Nola’s situation once Tom breaks off the engagement. As Dyer points out,

Colour distinctions within whiteness have been understood in relation to labour. To work outside the home  .  .  .  [i]s to be exposed to the elements, especially the sun and the wind, which darken white skin. In most hierarchical social systems, however much the toiler may be lauded in some traditions, the very dreariness and pain of their labour accords them lowly status: thus to be darker, though racially white, is to be inferior (1997: 57).

When Nola’s living conditions change dramatically, so does the status of her whiteness. She moves into a flat in an area of London known for its drug-related crime, near other flats that have been burglarized and are infested with mice. Black men come in and out of her building, and she actually befriends one black man, Ian (Colin Salmon), who lives in her building. She is described by the Hewitts as having taken on a “hard” look.

Chris Wilton, on the other hand, fares a bit better regarding his movement from “ethnic white” into the more well-developed world of London white privi-lege. He marries Tom’s sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), although he does still desire Nola. As Chloe’s husband, his status changes drastically, too. He and Chloe

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move into a glorious apartment with floor to ceiling glass windows that display a panoramic view of London. They marry in a country church, and Chris goes to work for Chloe’s father, the Hewitt patriarch. Chris, however, still has an unre-solved desire for Nola, so when he happens to see her at a gallery, he approaches her, and the two begin a sexual affair. Consequently, Chris is able to revel in the elevation of his white status while he participates in the ethnic white affair that reminds him of his roots. But once Nola becomes pregnant and threatens to tell Chloe of the affair, Chris determines to end not only the affair but also Nola’s life. By ending her life, any connection he had to his former white ethnic past would be severed once and for all. He ends Nola’s life with a hunting rifle from the Hewitt family gun collection, thus symbolically blowing her away with the power of his new found white status.

After the shooting, Chris goes to see a play, The Woman in White, a darkly remi-niscent moment that permits viewers to reflect on Nola in her white dress when we first met her in this film. After the murder is discovered, we view a black police investigator as well as Nola’s black neighbor in discussion outside of Nola’s build-ing. So the greatest number of black people apparent in this Allen film are viewed once a crime has been committed, thus stereotyping the roles that black people can play in a film. Allen seems aware of the role of whiteness in Match Point, but he treats it stereotypically, and he plays with whiteness as a mere motif of inno-cence lost rather than as the recreation of white authority, power, and social status.

At the end of the film, Nola’s ghost and the ghost of Mrs. Eastby, the neighbor that Chris also murdered, visit Chris. In response to their questions about why he murdered them, Chris replies, “The innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme.” Chris Wilton’s grander scheme is to remain snugly ensconced in the English white upper class, to revel in all the white privilege that his newfound class affords him – especially the privilege of annihilating all of the dingier, ethnic whiteness that threatened to hold him back.

When Allen then takes his camera, his script, and his Scarlett Johansson to Barcelona to film, he once again brings his own “grand scheme” with him and thrusts it upon the landscape of Barcelona. The landscape and representative face of Barcelona had just been emerging from a form of ethnic homogenization as dictated by Franco from 1939 to 1975. Since the late 1980s, numerous immigrant populations have moved to Spain, making Spain both an international and multi-ethnic society. “The new democracy turned its back on the previous monolithic notion of Spanishness and sought to replace it with renewed versions that could acknowledge internal differences” (Santaolalla 2003: 44). For Spanish film directors such as Pedro Almodovar, the burden of representation of the real Spain looms large.

Almodovar works to deliver a Barcelona to the screen that is truthtelling in its “geographical, genealogical, and cultural intricacy” (Amago 2007: 16). Contem-porary Spanish filmmakers such as Almodovar and Cedric Klapisch investigate in their films “how Barcelona’s African communities are represented cinematically.”

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They’re emphasizing the “multicultural fabric of contemporary Barcelona by drawing explicit attention to African Spaniards and African culture” (11). Film director Alejandro González Iñárritu, when asked in an interview how he was able to capture a more ethnically diverse Barcelona than others have recently been portraying, responds,

I literally just moved the camera to the right and it was all just there. It’s an immense community which is diverse and powerful.  .  .  . There’s a very big and important part of the city that’s integrated by those people who are in a very limited existence by being ignored, by being invisible, by nobody wanting to see them (Bennett 2010: 2).

Klapisch’s film, L’auberge espagnole, is shot in at least “four main languages: French, English, Spanish, and Catalan, with snippets of other languages thrown into the mix (Danish, Italian, and German)” (Amago 2007: 19). Barcelona is a landscape bursting with its own stories to tell, and they are intricately multiethnic.

And yet, even with this movement afoot in Spanish cinema, Allen feels com-pelled to bring the white Allen tale to whatever location will have him. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen captures the white women’s sexual experimentation as it plays off of the myth of overly sexualized Latinity. In many ways, this is not surprising. Girgus (1993: 116) has reminded us throughout Allen’s career that “The testing of taboos and prohibitions and the craving for impossible love have been pervasive.” In Match Point, Chris wants Nola, then murders her to remain married to Chloe, who is whiter. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Vicky and Cristina both come to desire Juan Antonio. Cristina explores lesbian love and a ménage à trois with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, a situation which scholars Yancy and Ryser refer to as white women wanting to “play in the dark” (2008: 739), a clause that suggests Cristina is perhaps more curious about the sexual lore associated with Latin lovers than she is with the actual people with whom she is toying.

Cristina comes to realize that she loves neither Juan Antonio nor Maria Elena, but she is satisfied with the fact that she was courageous enough to further her sexual experimentation with them. Cultural Studies researcher Aimee Carillo Rowe writes that when white people move into different locations, they will behave in ways that permit them to add to their own internal sense of personal growth; in other words, indulging their sense of entitlement and dominance permits them to use the people they meet as opportunities for their own growth. Peoples of color provide white characters with opportunities “to struggle in their complexities and to grow, to become wholly human” (Rowe 2007: 126). Clearly, Cristina uses Juan Antonio and Maria Elena to work out her sexual needs, her relationship journey, and her sexual identity. She views the nonwhite bodies of Juan Antonio and Maria Elena as part of an exotic story to share with Vicky and her husband, but the story is hers alone; it is not told from the viewpoint of Juan Antonio or Maria Elena. Yancy and Ryser discuss characters such as Cristina as participants in a

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chaotic and exotic natural landscape in need of being ordered, properly identified and categorized, and subdued by those (whites) who thought of themselves as the very expression of a teleological order that privileged whiteness as the quintessence of beauty, intelligence, and cultural and historical progress (2008: 732).

True to form, Cristina’s presence in the love triangle does subdue Maria Elena’s melodrama and excess. But the moment Cristina announces that she’ll be leaving the relationship, Maria Elena becomes outraged and screams at both Cristina and Juan Antonio that Cristina never loved them. Once Cristina actually leaves the relationship, the two Latin lovers cannot save themselves from the chaos and madness of their tumultuous love for one another. Maria Elena claims that Cris-tina provided the balance that she and Juan Antonio had always needed and that without her, their relationship was too unstable. Maria Elena symbolically sheds the white clothing she wore when with Cristina, and she returns to wearing her original black clothing. Dyer writes that while multiculturalism may provide opportunities for people of color to claim agency and express their voices, it may also provide “a side-show for white people who look on with delight at all the differences that surround them” (1997: 158).

In the films of Allen, the overall worldview is white. Allen sees white people (who are sometimes also Jewish people) as the central characters worthy of story on his landscape. He views all landscapes as bearing primarily white people, with an occasional supporting actor of color; and all of his background peoples are white save the rarest person of color walking by. Moving from one location to another – Manhattan to London to Barcelona – changes none of this in his films. All landscapes, once envisioned by the Allen eye, become white regardless of the location’s actual history, populace, or social intricacy. Allen’s eye domi-nates, and Allen’s eye envisions whiteness. For this filmmaker, the grand sche-matic landscape of these cities is a white landscape that dominates, threatens, and ultimately obliterates any existence he deems not pertinent to his white worldview.

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Metcalf, S. (2006) “London calling: In Match Point, Woody Allen finally leaves Manhattan.” Slate ( Jan. 3). www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2006/01/london_calling.html (accessed Oct. 15, 2012).

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Nguyen, K.N. (2010) “Whatever works for Woody.” The Washington Diplomat (Nov. 18). http://washdiplomat.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6210:whatever-works-for-woody-&catid=979:july-2009&Itemid=254 (accessed Sept. 27, 2012).

Parkinson, D. (2009) “Hollywood loves foreigners, so long as they’re not the stars.” Guard-ian (Feb. 27). http://guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/feb/27 (accessed March 6, 2010).

Roediger, D.R. (2005) Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books.

Rowe, A.C. (Spring 2007) “Feeling in the dark: Empathy, whiteness, and miscegenation in Monster’s Ball.” Hypatia 22.2, 122–142.

Santaolalla, I. (2003) “The representation of ethnicity and ‘race’ in contemporary Spanish cinema.” Cineaste (Winter), 44–49.

Schiffer, S. (2009) “Performing to perform the other: Developing roles different from oneself.” In D. Bernardi (ed.), Filming Difference. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 223–246.

Scott, A.O. (2005) “London calling, with luck, lust and ambition.” (Dec. 28). http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/movies/28matc.html?_r=0 (accessed Oct.15, 2012).

Sullivan, S. (2006) Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of White Privilege. Blooming-ton, IN: Indiana University Press.

Yancy, G. and T.A. Ryser ( 2008) “Whiting up and blacking out: White privilege, race, and White Chicks.” African American Review 42.3–4, 731–746.

14

The well-worn truism that Woody Allen films are all about Woody has long shaped scholarly accounts of Allen’s work. The sense that we know Allen well accounts for his popularity among cinephiles as well as critics. As Maurice Yacowar explains, “Allen’s distinctive persona is an invention based on the pretense that he is openly confessing his private fears and failures. His remarkable success may be due to the intimacy that his audiences have felt with this persona” (1991: 9). For the last few decades, this habit of attending to the biographical Allen has meant that scholars and critics have grappled with the more uncomfortable aspects of the director’s persona, notably his ugly break from Mia Farrow and relationship with adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. Allen scholar Sam B. Girgus opens the second edition of his comprehensive The Films of Woody Allen (2002) with an intro-duction titled “The Prisoner of Aura: The Lost World of Woody Allen,” in which he helpfully glosses the phenomenon:

For many, Allen’s personal life has overshadowed the ongoing documentary of his achievements. The unique aura that emanated from Allen’s cinematic image of a self-embodied blend of character, oddity, integrity, and genius became confused and somber while remaining ambiguous (16).

Allen’s films, particularly his output in the 1990s, provide their own meditations on celebrity and fame. In films like Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity, and even Mighty Aphrodite, Allen appears critical of celebrity and the way his image has circulated publicly. But there is also a gentler Allen, who appreciates bygone eras in Sweet

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris

Remembering Modernism, Remembering Woody

Katherine Fusco

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and Lowdown, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Radio Days. In Midnight in Paris, a meditation on fame and nostalgia, the two Allens come together through the director’s expression of love for modernist Paris and the expatriate artists who populated the city. Critics have embraced the film as Allen’s comeback, not only from the murky moral unpleasantness Girgus (2002) addresses, but also from a string of dark and misanthropic films in the 2000s. Given this acclaim, Allen’s cita-tions of modernism in the film are surprisingly flat. Played by Owen Wilson, the protagonist Gil travels back in time and meets a Cole Porter who sings “Let’s Do It,” a Hemingway who wants to drink, and a Picasso who collects mistresses.

In my examination of Midnight, I ask, what is the value of citation when that citation is depthless? Through an analysis of the film’s historical attitudes, its par-ticipation in modernist practices of citation, and its critical reception, I argue that citing modernism depthlessly serves multiple functions in Midnight in Paris. First, Midnight’s citation of modernist figures places the Allen character among the ranks of the twentieth century’s most important artists. The exemplary figure of modernist difficulty, T.S. Eliot, argued in his 1921 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that artistic value emerges when a contemporary art work is placed in relation to great work and “fits in” coherently (Eliot 2002a: 101). In Midnight in Paris, Allen, through Gil Pender, quite literally joins the company of the greats, including some, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked in the movie business. Second, by citing the modernists in a shallow way, the film simplifies modernist authors’ biographies and “forgets” the more unpleasant aspects of their lives. While it is true that the film’s Zelda seems edgy, and Hemingway a bit combative, Midnight’s look back at the expatriate community is a rosy one, and darker aspects of figures like Gertrude Stein, for example, go unremarked. If the first function of Midnight’s peculiar citation places Allen in the company of American writers undervalued by their time and culture, and the second works to encourage historical forgetfulness, it is the third function that explains the perplexing popu-larity of this seemingly depthless film: within the film’s diegesis and also the reviews that surround the film, Midnight in Paris’s depthless citation offers a model for appreciating artistic lives.

A frequent chronicler of ages gone by, Allen presumably knows the depthless-ness of his citations, and reviewers acknowledge the triviality of the film. However, it is difficult to determine precisely how well Allen knows the period because, in typically self-effacing fashion, Allen has described his repeated filmic returns to the 1920s as mere set dressing. In “Interview with Woody Allen: ‘My Heroes Don’t Come from Life but from Their Mythology,’ ” Allen describes his choice of setting for Bullets Over Broadway:

It could have happened just as well against the background of the movies, but the period I chose – the twenties – and the place – New York – seemed to me to be suited to the theater of the period, to Broadway, with its mix of gangsters, chorus girls, nightclubs. I liked the ambience (Ciment and Tobin 2006: 130).

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When pressed about the accuracy of the film’s style, Allen responds, “For my part, all I know about the twenties comes from photos of the era and the movies that evoke the period” (131). While promoting Midnight at Cannes, Allen made similar remarks: “I wanted to show the city emotionally. The way I felt about it. It didn’t matter to me how real it was or what it reflected. I just wanted it to be the way I saw Paris. Paris through my eyes” (Bagnetto 2011). Allen’s comments predict the teasing shallowness of the film, which simultaneously presents the depth of Allen’s feelings about Paris and withholds a depth of knowledge of these artistic lives.

As a comic homage to Paris’s glories past and present, Midnight does not concern itself with serious historical issues. Instead, the film takes its place among Allen’s “early, funny films” (Stardust Memories), eschewing more serious political or historical comments. It is in this gap – between emotional appreciation for Paris and a factually “real” Paris – that I will explore Midnight in Paris’s account of artistic appreciation. Though it is clear that Allen’s intention with Midnight is not to reckon with the personal and political failings of modernist artists, the film’s avoidance of this material nonetheless produces a very particular model for under-standing the relationship among artistic reputations, artworks, and biographies.

By discussing a film that Allen never made, this chapter produces its own speculative fiction out of historical fact. Outlining the biographical details and historical connections Midnight in Paris leaves unilluminated by its nostalgic glow, I argue that through its citation of modernist artists and their works, Midnight in Paris builds a model for remembering artistic lives – Allen’s in particular. By first placing Allen, through Gil, in the modernist pantheon, and then encouraging a Vaseline-lensed gaze at the modernist artists, the film demonstrates the final func-tion of shallow citation is to create recuperative nostalgia. Thus, while Allen’s account of Stein ignores her literary output, it also ignores her admiration for fascism. The film manages to ignore the anti-Semitism of several of its figures, thereby recuperating the good names of important artists whose bad views have rendered them politically and morally suspect. But beyond recuperating the repu-tations of long-dead modernist anti-Semites, the superficiality of these citations serves a pedagogical function for Allen’s viewers, who use the film as an oppor-tunity to take a similarly rosy, if shallow, account of the director’s celebrity persona.

Film critics appear to have taken up the film’s light approach to artistic lives. Reviews of Midnight in Paris are remarkably consistent: the reviewer begins by acknowledging the too-favorable account that he or she will offer and then pro-ceeds to speak in glowing but qualified terms. Dana Stevens’s (2011) review opens in exemplary fashion:

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (Sony Pictures Classics) is a trifle in both senses of the word: a feather-light, disposable thing, and a rich dessert appealingly layered with cake, jam, and cream. It’s the first Woody Allen movie in a long time that feels good going down, even if it doesn’t stay in your stomach for long afterward.

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Like Gil and Allen, who remember the avant-garde as charmingly bohemian, Stevens and other critics find a respite in Allen’s latest from the darkness that has characterized Allen’s personal life and his artistic output of late. Nostalgia, then, functions for Allen and his spectators as the opposite of cynicism. In reviews of the film, critics express a desire to stay with the Allen they see in Gil as well as relief that the biographical Allen is no longer getting in the way of their desire to view him nostalgically.

With each instance of citation – Allen’s citation of modernist artists and review-ers’ citation of other Allen films – the film viewer, whether watching Midnight in Paris or reading any number of reviews, is asked to forgive an analytical light touch. The excuse offered in each case is love. In Midnight in Paris, Allen’s modern-ist fantasy is indeed sweet, causing viewers to resurrect a softer image of the director. Through Allen’s citational practice, love for bygone Paris transforms into love for the director, and the nostalgia the film generates for modernism morphs into nostalgia for Allen.

Shoring up Fragments: Allen, Eliot, and Modernist Citation

The modernists Allen cites in Midnight in Paris relied upon citation within their own works as well. Modernist citation thus has two prongs in Midnight in Paris: first, the film cites modernist artists and their works, and, second, its citational practice draws from the tradition of modernist referentiality, which built mean-ing through citation of other works, from high culture and low. The modernist figure most famous for his citations appears only briefly in the film when Gil greets a man who introduces himself as Tom Eliot. Though Eliot receives less screen time, it is his theory of artistry that most significantly resonates with Allen’s own artistic practice. In particular, Eliot’s use of the past both within his poetry and his literary criticism resonates with Allen’s citation of individuals ranging from Gertrude Stein to Cole Porter and art works ranging from Rodin’s “The Thinker” to Eliot’s own “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Like Eliot, who crafted lines such as “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag” (Eliot 2002b: 42), Allen here refers to both avant-garde art and popular culture, as he has done throughout his career – as with Marshall McLuhan and The Sorrow and the Pity in Annie Hall and the homage to the musical comedy, Everyone Says I Love You. Midnight in Paris retains this mixture of high and low, but with a difference. While Eliot’s use of closing-time songs in The Waste Land invokes the grittiness of 1920s pub culture, Gil finds all culture he encounters in the film elevated through its relationship to modernist art. Though he finds the current-day laundromat in the film disappointing because it replaces his 1920s dream café, Gil, we might imagine, would be thrilled with a laundromat, so long as it was a 1920s Parisian laundromat.

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All aspects of the Parisian 1920s are part of a beautiful and interesting past. Perhaps invoking Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” the first line of Gil’s novel explains and even excuses this attitude towards the past: “Out of the Past was the name of the store and its products consisted of memories. What was prosaic and even vulgar to one generation had been transmuted by mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp.” And though some references, like Hemingway bellowing “Who wants to fight?” take on the status of camp, the film also reveals a deeper knowledge with less stereotyped images of Parisian modernity. Not content with the kind of heavy-handed historical citation that marks middlebrow cinema – as an example, we might take Forrest Gump – Allen peppers his film with references to works that the lay-viewer will not recognize. Though most will know Fitzgerald, not all Allen viewers will be familiar with lesbian novelist Djuna Barnes. And even if viewers are familiar with Un Chien Andalou, only true film buffs or modernist aficionados will likely recognize Gil’s passing reference to Buñuel’s El Ángel Exterminador.

Because the film both showcases Allen’s deep knowledge of modernist art-works and privileges naive artistic appreciation as authentic love, Owen Wilson must breathe with incredulity the name of each figure he meets to ensure the audience is in on the joke. When Gil takes his first midnight ride in the Peugeot, he first stops at a crowded party where strains of “Let’s Do It” fill the air before Allen reveals Porter himself at the piano. With a marked departure from the rela-tively fixed camera positions of the present day scenes, the camera pans the room, following Gil’s confused scanning of tuxedoed and drop-waist-dressed party goers. Finally, Allen’s camera comes back to rest on Gil’s face, which the approaching Zelda Fitzgerald notes looks “lost,” “stupefied,” and “stunned.” This look charac-terizes Wilson’s performance: when the Fitzgeralds whisk Gil off to Brick Top’s, he again has that stupefied look as he watches the sashaying dance of a black woman with feathers in her hair, thus cuing spectators to recognize Josephine Baker as an important someone, even though she goes unnamed in this scene. Repetitive naming accompanies this pattern of stunned recognition. When Gil meets Zelda and Scott, the author of Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby shakes Gil’s hand, introducing himself as “Scott Fitzgerald.” Gil says, “You have the same names as . . .” Yes, Fitzgerald confirms, “Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The Fitzger-alds.” Acts of naming and renaming recur throughout the film – the modernists, it seems, are forever introducing themselves. And Gil is remarkably good at picking up on clues and translating them for the film’s audience. When Gil boards the Peugeot for the last time, the cab’s other passenger introduces himself as Tom Eliot. What follows is something like a declension of Latin nouns as Gil runs through various permutations of the poet’s name: “Tom Eliot. Tom Stearns Eliot. T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot.” Then, in a laugh line, he exclaims “Prufrock’s like my mantra,” clarifying that these days life in Beverly Hills is measured out in coke spoons, rather than coffee spoons. Through this multiplicity of citations and Wil-son’s enthusiastic performance, Midnight makes the pleasure of recognition acces-

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sible to all the films viewers, creating the experience, if a bit disingenuously, of democratic access to artistic appreciation.

But in addition to citing modernist poetry, Gil, whom his fiancée Inez accuses of thinking his life “would be happier if [he] lived in another time,” very nearly enacts T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as he makes his midnight sojourns. Gil, like Eliot, sees the past as alive. Repeating Hemingway’s declaration that the city is “a moveable feast,” Gil expresses that the loveliness that character-ized Paris at other times is still alive, enriching his present. At one point in the film, Gil quotes Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951), explaining that the past isn’t “even past,” but Gil’s relationship to the past is more in line with what Eliot describes when he writes,

Tradition  .  .  . cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet past his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence (Eliot 2002a: 100).

While Eliot’s proclamations may be ponderous, they are nonetheless resonant for a director whose representation of art, scholars have argued, “is somber, even when he deals with good art” (Hösle 2007: 77). Though Midnight in Paris’s engage-ment with the past is not somber, it nonetheless takes seriously the matter of appreciating past art works.

Against Gil’s authentic but untrained appreciation of Paris and modernism, the film offers two counterexamples. As Midnight establishes Gil’s fit with the artistic 1920s, it also distances Gil from his American companions, his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams), her professor friend Paul (Michael Sheen), and her parents John (Kurt Fuller) and Helen (Mimi Kennedy). While Paul takes an academic approach to appreciating artworks which renders them lifeless, Inez and her family appreciate the past and art in economic terms, a form of aesthetic valuation that the film shows to be equally deadly to artistic life. A series of shopping trips are illustrative. The morning after Gil’s first visit to the 1920s, he attempts to explain his fantastical journey to Inez, but she has no patience for such chatter because she wants to go shopping for antiques using her mother’s decorators’ discount. Though Gil wants to discuss the lively past he has just encountered, the only encounter with the past in which Inez and her mother are interested is one of consuming reified antiques, like the very expensive chair Helen announces would be perfect for “a Malibu beach house.” This is a far cry from the nostalgia shop of Gil’s novel, where objects become more magical and beloved as they age. Instead, for Inez and Helen, Paris’s past becomes mere decor, wrested from its context and transportable to sunny CA.

Midnight makes clear that the consequences of Inez and Helen’s lack of histori-cal appreciation are artistic. On another shopping trip, Helen tells Gil and Inez

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that she saw a “wonderfully funny American film.” When asked who was in the film, Helen cannot remember. “Wonderful but forgettable,” Gil responds, “sounds like a picture I’ve seen. I probably wrote it.” Helen defends the film, saying that she knows that it was “Moronic and infantile and utterly lacking in any wit . . . but John and I laughed in spite of ourselves.” In the context of modernist citation, we can understand one of the flaws of the forgettable American films and of the audiences that consume them is a lack of historical perspective. The ugly Ameri-cans’ treatment of historical artifacts as interior decor prepares audiences to understand Inez’s family as poor artistic appreciators, who consume the type of inane Hollywood blockbusters Gil has been churning out. In contrast, to make work that is good, Gil feels as though he needs to get back in touch with the Paris-ian past that he abandoned as a young man – perhaps as a 25-year-old. Building from the past, the process of artistic accretion, holds for Eliot and for Gil a promise of stability in the face of worlds that consume arts frivolously, quickly, and vul-garly. Engagement with the canon gives work weight, as we see in Gil’s enthusi-astic work on his novel that follows his midnight rambles.

But in addition to adding seriousness and permanence to artistic work, citation shows one’s relationship to the canon. As Eliot argues, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists” (2002a: 101). When Allen invites Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Dali, and Picasso to the same party, he reveals the relation of the dead artists, one to another, in the way a textbook of modern-ism might. Into this scene, Gil arrives, bringing with him not only the novel of which we hear only a few lines, but also the weight of Allen’s artistic output. Although Owen Wilson’s Gil shares little of Allen’s physiognomy, several clues announce him as the Allen figure in the film. In recent years, Allen’s lessening ability to cast himself in his films as he ages has led the director to cast new actors as the Allen character. In addition to Allen’s interview comments that the film is his own fantasy of Paris, as well as Gil’s, Gil wears the characteristic Allen uniform of khaki pants. Resemblances on the level of plot include Gil’s involvement in Hollywood as a comedy writer, his self-effacing style, and regrets over not moving to Paris in his twenties. During Allen’s early Paris experiences, he enjoyed encoun-ters with similarly significant artistic figures, including Beckett and Bardot (Lax 2000: 209). Given audiences’ habit of reading Allen into his protagonists, and the film’s narrative style of creating parallels between past and present, the film allows audiences a model for thinking about Allen in relation to modernist art work.

By introducing, like an alien from space, a new artist into the modernist world, Allen hyperbolizes Eliot’s idea about the reciprocal structure of influence between artworks past and present. The film’s play with influence is a dual one, operating through science fiction plotting in which an aspiring novelist plants seeds for art works to come as well as audiences’ extradiegetic sense that one of America’s most distinctive filmmakers is also having a time travel adventure with his idols. In an interview with Ken Kelley, Allen lists Buñuel with Bergman, Renoir, and

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Antonioni as one of the only directors he has “any interest in at all” (Kelley 2006: 12). Thus when Gil gives Buñuel the throwaway suggestion to make a film about bourgeois guests who deteriorate into primal animalistic states when they discover they cannot leave a dinner party, Allen puns on modernist accounts of artistic influence. While Gil gets credit for a time travel joke, Allen acknowledges his filmic predecessors while also putting himself into their company through his film’s use of modernist practices of citing, playing with time, and bringing to life painterly recreations of modernist artworks. The canon of past works is central to making artistic judgment, as Eliot explains:

The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are read-justed; and this is the conformity between the old and the new (2002a: 101).

For Eliot, this matter of conforming relates to the new work’s value: “we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value” (101). This matter of artistic fit plays out on the level of plot when Gil visits a present day bookstall, purchases a copy of Adriana’s diary, and learns that the muse and lover of Picasso, Modigliani, and Hemingway has now fallen for him. The film establishes Adriana’s track record for selecting artistic greats early on. In a scene set in Gertrude Stein’s parlor, Adriana rehearses for Gil her Paris career of bedding the vanguard of modernist visual artists. When Adriana chooses Gil as her newest beau, the beautiful art groupie puts Gil into the good company of her previous lovers.

At the same time the film signals the importance of artistic appreciation, its insistence on naïve or untrained appreciation as authentic love means that Mid-night hollows out much of the complexity of modernist artworks that make them worthy of appreciation in the first place. Gil’s ability to fit into his artistic sur-roundings requires Midnight in Paris to take a simplistic view of the arts and their history. Given Gil’s backstory and his companions in the present day scenes, it is nearly impossible to believe that our protagonist would be familiar with the figures he meets unless we read him as a Woody Allen stand-in. After his second trip through time, Gil retires to his present day hotel bed. Wondering over his luck, he thinks about what a magical circumstance it is for someone as undeserving as the little Gil Pender from Pasadena who “failed freshman English” to meet these literary greats. The film’s conceit that Gil, a hack film writer, is a talented novelist waiting to break through is almost as make believe as his ability to travel through time. The strain on credulity is not that Gil is a fine writer – he’s just getting started, after all – but that he is a fine modernist writer. Or, put the other way, that being a fine modernist writer would make Gil any good in the present day. Stein’s writing style, which would eventually evolve into her experiments with lan-guage poetry, exemplifies modernist experiments with nonreferential artworks.

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In contrast, it is hard to say whether Gil’s novel about a curiosity shop owner illustrates the tenets of any modernist manifesto.

The film’s only attempt to account for this stylistic anachronism comes when Gertrude Stein tells Gil that his novel is good, but reads “like science fiction.” We can assume the joke is a superficial one, likely referring to the presence of twenty-first-century technologies or patterns of speech in Gil’s novel, but not, for example, the influence of postmodern literature on the budding novelist. Rather than writing like a Don DeLillo or a David Foster Wallace, Gil writes like someone about whom Stein can claim: “you have a clear and lively voice.” Rather than treating writers as artists with serious commitments to their styles, Midnight in Paris offers a romantic account of artists who transcend their times to such a degree that a postmodern fellow fits in quite comfortably among modernists who notice nothing strange about his writing style. After all, it is hard to imagine any strong writer for whom Stein’s comment would not be applicable. Importantly, because Stein’s compliment concerns personal voice, rather than stylistic experi-ment, we can understand Gil’s work fitting in not just in terms of Eliot’s canon-test, but in also terms of Stein’s strange sense of eternal personalities.

Gil’s writing, which he carries with him back in time to show his idols Hem-ingway and Fitzgerald, and which Stein edits, fits in with modernists less literally than merely measuring up as stylistically comprehensible to readers of the 1920s. As Kirk Curnutt has argued, the matter of being true to one’s artistic soul was something that very much occupied Stein, particularly in the wake of the writer’s block she experienced after publishing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “Claim-ing that her popularity momentarily distracted her from her literary program, she inoculates herself against the self-deceptive dangers of publicity by dedicating herself to her craft, thus remaining true to her inner essence” (Curnutt 1999: 293). This is the true expression of self that Stein encourages Gil to let forth: personal and also free of whatever twenty-first-century literary trends might disguise what Stein might call his “bottom nature” (Stein 1995: 152). Stein’s indifference to historical specificity is perhaps what saves Midnight’s eschewal of time travel’s typical philosophical problems. Allen has explored the conundrum of changing the past in both Zelig and Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Tom Baxter’s escape from the silver screen wreaks tremendous havoc in the Depression-afflicted real world. Gil’s journey back through time does not produce the time travel paradox – the only art works he inspires are those that are to happen anyway, as when he plants the seed for El Ángel Exterminador. As it sets more complicated issues of artistic influence aside, Midnight in Paris relays the moral that being a modernist artist is really just a matter of being yourself. But the eternal and authentic artistic value that modernist artists Stein and Eliot championed, and which allows Gil to slip seamlessly back through time, also served as a cover for the modernists’ ugly and historically rooted commitments – a cover that Gil and Midnight leave undisturbed.

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No Warts, Not At All: Historical Blindness and Modernist Biographies

Near the end of the film, Midnight in Paris’s Gil delivers a message that seems rather banal and, given the loving depictions of 1920s Paris that precede it, a bit insincere. When Gil accompanies Adriana back to her ideal time period, Paris’s belle epoque, he realizes that each culture idealizes the bygone past. He lectures her that he is having the insight, “a minor one,” that everyone wants to live in the past because the present, like life, is “a little unsatisfying.” This lesson serves to return Gil back to the present day, back to where he belongs. But in the context of modernist citation, the question of belonging in Midnight in Paris is a bit more complicated than Gil’s second-act musings would have it.

In truth, not even modernist artists belong in Midnight in Paris’s thin historical world. Their time was more complex and frequently much darker – a history to which Midnight in Paris turns a blind eye. In the past, Allen’s films have taken up modernism’s darker aspects, with references to the Shoah, death, and existential dread. One of Allen’s earlier historical films, Zelig, offers a remarkable account of modernity’s ugly side, even as it shares jazzy Charleston scenes with Midnight. Additionally, some of Midnight in Paris’s modernists show up in Zelig’s tale of the human chameleon Leonard Zelig’s travails from the 1920s through World War II. The actual Brick Top is featured during one of the present day interviews, and she recalls a tale of Cole Porter trying to include the line “You’re Leonard Zelig” in his “You’re the Top” and eventually cutting the phrase because it doesn’t rhyme. Additionally, the narrator invokes both Fitzgerald and Hemingway, claiming that Fitzgerald modeled Gatsby after Zelig’s changeable nature. Finally, the film ends abruptly and happily with Zelig’s upside-down stunt flight over the Atlantic, a spectacle which endears him to the US public.

The conflict that Zelig’s spectacular flight solves is a sinister one. At the film’s midpoint, the US populace has turned against Zelig in the wake of his scandalous polygamy, and the problem of mob mentality and faddishness run connected together throughout the film. Zelig thus casts American mob behavior in uncom-fortably close proximity to the groupthink of the Nazis, whom Leonard joins during a particularly low moment in his chameleon career. The American popu-lace that welcomes Leonard back from his German adventure is the very same one that had chased him abroad. One of the artifacts Zelig’s “archival” footage showcases is a political cartoon of a many-headed Leonard Zelig about to meet the gallows. The necks that are to be hung are ethnically marked – a black Zelig, a Chinese Zelig, and a Jewish Zelig. Even without this cartoon, one of the film’s various warnings is that to be Jewish in America is to internalize racial violence: the most consistent theory about why Leonard changes is that he wants to fit in.

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Failure to fit in results in physical or psychical danger. Recalling his childhood during one of his therapy sessions, Leonard remembers beatings at the hands of his family as well as neighborhood anti-Semites. Confused by the hatred he experi-ences, Leonard seeks a lesson on the meaning of life from a rabbi, but it is in Hebrew and he cannot understand it. His parents also fail Leonard; when he complains about the beatings he receives from neighborhood bullies, little Leonard learns from his father that “life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering.” In Zelig, traditional sources of wisdom are not powerful enough to inoculate against the dangers of a Jewish boyhood in early twentieth-century America. Later, the night-mare of suffering and the film’s nightmare scenario of changeable public opinion come together in the voice of an old woman on the radio, who tells her listeners that Americans do not tolerate the kind of scandals Zelig has wrought. She offers her audience this advice: “Lynch the little Hebe.” Zelig’s lessons of terror and unfairness are a far cry from Gil’s statement that “Life’s a little unsatisfying.” The nightmare options of either self-effacing conformity or dangling at the end of a rope are totally absent from any discussions in Midnight in Paris.

Perhaps the historical blindness to 1920s nativism and clannishness can be explained by casting. As played by Owen Wilson, Gil is a physical departure from the typical Allen figure. With his athletic build, blond hair, and blue eyes, Owen’s Gil can perhaps better assimilate with the modernist expatriates than an Allen-played Gil. One can speculate that to have an explicitly Jewish protagonist compet-ing with the other modernists for Adriana’s affections would have produced a very different film. More specifically, such a speculative film would be titled The Sun Also Rises. Featuring Jewish boxer Robert Cohn’s pursuit of the shiksa Lady Brett Ashley, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) epitomizes a strand of anti-Semitism omnipresent in the modernist works Gil so admires. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued, Hemingway demonstrates the inappropriateness of Cohn’s place among the American expatriates by showing the untranslatable nature of his name (Michaels 1995: 74). Because Cohn, as a Jew, is from nowhere, he cannot give up his status as American as can the Anglo expatriates Jake Barnes and friends. Even as an expatriate, Cohn doesn’t fit. In the uncomfortable scenes at the bullfights, Hemingway suggests that Cohn lacks the necessary aficion (appreciation) for native cultures, and therefore cannot assimilate into the European artists’ scene. In Hemingway’s novel, only the white characters are free to sample French and Spanish culture with authenticity and ease. Nor is Hemingway’s racism restricted to Jewish Americans. Given the white modernist’s representation of black speech as blank speech – “ ‘. . . .’ the drummer shouted and grinned at Brett” (Hemingway 1926: 71) – perhaps it is just as well that Midnight’s Hemingway does not accom-pany the Fitzgeralds and Gil to Brick Top’s. Although we might expect, even then, that any potential racial discomfort could simply be sidestepped by the film’s revisionist tact.

Just as Hemingway’s novel reveals the author’s investment in demarcating racial difference, even in the accepting world of Paris between the wars, so too did the

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friendly college boy Scott Fitzgerald share in the era’s casual racism and anti-Semitism. In his most famous work, Fitzgerald clearly delineates visual difference between races. In Gatsby’s fourth chapter, Nick Carraway encounters a limousine containing “three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl.” Nick narrates that he “laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry” (Fitzgerald 2004: 69). This stereotyped description of racial conflict on the Queens-boro bridge sets the stage for Nick’s coming encounter with the shady character Wolfsheim, whose “nose flashed  .  .  .  indignantly” (70) and who eats with “fero-cious delicacy” (71), and gazes at “the Presbyterian nymphs” on the restaurant ceiling. Wolfsheim is, of course, the novel’s figure of corruption, having fixed the 1919 World’s Series and entangled Gatsby in a gangster’s world. Given Allen’s well-documented (even by himself ) obsession with anti-Semitism, and his casual quotation of Fitzgerald in Zelig, Midnight in Paris’s muteness on the subject of modernism’s representational ugliness is striking. As Sander Lee has argued, exis-tentialism based in the horrors of the Holocaust shapes the attitudes of Allen’s most important films (Lee 2001: 60). One way of accounting for Midnight’s silence in the face of its characters’ anti-Semitic writings is that Midnight is a film, like Celebrity, Purple Rose of Cairo, or Sweet and Low Down, more interested in exploring the lives and the myths around celebrity personas than their works.

Though it might be possible to overlook the racism and anti-Semitism of mod-ernist artworks in favor of their aesthetic achievements and larger-than-life perso-nas, the biographical creators of modernist artworks had nasty fights and ugly allegiances in their lives off the page as well. Though Hemingway’s hatred for Zelda Fitzgerald rears its ugly head briefly, and though Zelda, in her turn, threat-ens to drown herself, there are few signs of rancor in the modernist community, which circulates, in satellite fashion, around Gertrude Stein’s parlor. The New York Times’s Joseph Berger (2011) notes, for example, that the film’s casual conversation between Stein and Picasso about the work of Matisse belies the rancorous rela-tionship between the two painters. As Yve-Alain Bois has demonstrated, the artists had a tense relationship early in the century, from the time Picasso mocked Mat-isse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre with his Les Demoiselles D’Avignon to the painters’ jealous-ies over having to share the pages of Cahiers d’Art, which fed their rivalry by pushing the two “toward each other” (Bois 1998: 29, 37). The film, however, doesn’t take this bait; instead, Gil merely gives the laugh line that he’d like to order six or seven of Matisse’s works.

In particular, Stein, the mistress of ceremonies has been sanded down until she appears as a kind of earth-mother artists’ doula as played by Kathy Bates. The generosity Stein shows her fellow artists and writers in the film remains untainted by any account of her investment in her own work and celebrity. After all, Stein’s relationship with Picasso went two ways. Earlier in the century, the same year that Picasso painted Stein, the author’s Three Lives attempted to render the painting styles of her friends in language. In the portrait “Melanctha,” Stein drew on Picasso’s example to narrate the subjective and repetitive tale of a sensual woman

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who “did not know how to tell a story wholly” (Stein 1990: 70). Moreover, at the time Gil shows up in Stein’s life, she would have finally been reaping the fruits of The Making of Americans, her massive tome written over a decade earlier. In the 1925 novel, Stein gives an experimental account of temporal relations, collapsing past and present into “existence . . . everlasting” (1995: 103). It is possible that Allen has not read Making, but its temporal play aligns Stein with Gil and the film more generally. Stein’s concept of personalities “everlasting” resonates with the film’s portrait of the modernists, which collapses the known details of their entire lives into its mythologized characters. The Stein “everlasting” aside, the 1920s mark a particular shift in the author’s career and artistic attitudes. Having finally found a publisher for The Making of Americans, having backed Picasso, and having made her home with Alice Toklas a center for artistic activity, Stein had established herself as an important light of the modernist avant-garde. However, Making would never be widely read and Stein was concerned with maintaining her reputa-tion as the one-woman modernist vanguard. It was in this context that Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the work that cemented her reputation as artistic genius and most strongly demonstrated her commitment to preserving her own celebrity, competitively if need be. One of the implications of Stein’s self-promotion was that she often downplayed other artists’ participation in shaping her work and the culture more largely. Recent studies of modernism and celebrity have focused on Stein because of her paradoxical investment in cultivat-ing her fame and her insistence on being famous for being difficult. Timothy Galow, for example, cites one of Stein’s letters in which she had “given the literary agent William Aspinwell Bradley the explicit directive to make her rich and famous” (Galow 2010: 324). In this context, Stein’s “to thine own self be true” advice to Gil may ring hollow. Although she built her reputation as a promoter of the new, Stein was as savvy a reader of the market – both in promoting herself, and in building her art collection – as she was a Macleishian promoter of art for art’s sake.

More problematic, however, than the Stein of the 1920s, with her ambitious egotism, is the Stein “everlasting.” In our speculative account, shifting the film’s setting 10 or 20 years ahead in time reveals a very different Paris, and different modernists as well. Like Pound and Eliot, Stein supported Franco. And though she and Alice Toklas were Jewish, they did not speak out against the Nazis and indeed maintained relationships with Nazi collaborators during the period of German occupation. Wanda Van Dusen’s “Portrait of a National Fetish” docu-ments Stein’s relationship with the German occupiers as well as the novelist’s ugly racial attitudes. In her article, Van Dusen analyzes Stein’s 1942 introduction to the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy government, exe-cuted after the war for his collaboration with the Germans. Pétain’s collaboration included passing laws against Jews and imprisoning members of the Resistance. Van Dusen understands Stein’s work with Pétain as a new lens for interpreting debates over whether Stein should be understood as a bohemian feminist or as a

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self-hating Jewish anti-Semite and misogynist. Among the claims Van Dusen makes in her essay are the two important arguments that Stein’s valuing of “lit-erature over history and politics” led her to aestheticize and trope figures of the regime and that her commitment to pacifism led her to express the perspective that “history in the form of political defeat can be forgotten, but death cannot be reversed” (Van Dusen 1996: 81). These, among other commitments, allowed Stein to turn a blind eye to history even as she was also serving as a propagandist for Pétain.

Stein’s problems with historical truth resonate throughout Midnight in Paris as it turns its own blind eye to Stein’s history. When Stein describes Pétain and Allen describes Stein, the resulting portraits privilege aesthetic values over historical truths. Stein’s 1926 essay “Composition as Explanation,” in which she explains “[n]othing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition” (Stein 1993: 497), is exemplary. Stein here expresses her sense that truths are unchanged by historical events and places importance on the artist, who, looking at the world, holds out new details, produces new composi-tions and new ways of seeing. In interviews, Allen has spoken about his disinterest in politics. In a 1976 conversation with Ken Kelley, Allen describes his lukewarm engagement with the anti-war movement and also explains that his “heroes are all pure heroes. They’re not diluted with the problem of politics” (Kelley 2006: 18). Elsewhere, Allen has noted that his “heroes don’t come from life, but from their mythology” (Ciment and Tobin 2006: 131). In light of Allen’s preference to stay out of politics, the historical blindness of Midnight may be understood as protecting the reputations of the film’s modernist heroes by keeping their politics out of the way of their mythologies and as consistent with the modernists’ own preferences for aesthetics over politics. Midnight extends Allen’s preference for “pure heroes” as he imagines a naive protagonist who peoples his fantasy world with inspiring, if flat, artistic models. Historical blindness thus acts as a style as well as a method for keeping one’s artistic heroes “pure.” As exemplified by Stein as well as Gil, commitments to artistic purity run the risk of transforming histori-cal and political naivety, or blindness, into an admirable mode of artistic apprecia-tion – modernist New Criticism at its most problematic extreme.

It’s Delovely: Depthless Citation

With their troublesome politics and difficult artistic styles removed, the denizens of 1920s Paris become lovely company to keep. Warm, welcoming, and offering generous feedback to their compatriots, Stein et al. make up an ideal artist’s community. Hemingway enthuses about Stein’s helpful feedback, and when Gil first arrives at her home, she pauses to greet him and then returns to offering Picasso a critique. In other scenes, Allen places his viewers at the scene of the

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collaborations that lead to great works. In a cafe, the charmingly bizarre surrealists plan their film: Dali, his rhinoceros sculpture, and the beginnings of a film col-laboration. The only sense one gets of any competition among these artists comes from tension between Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald – it is interesting to note that when Gil reports back to present day, he takes Hemingway’s side in the matter. But on the whole, the characters are bohemians in the best sense, sharing their wine and their lovers, and defying social convention to party the night away with Josephine Baker in Paris’s black clubs, where black proprietors like Brick Top are most welcoming to their white customers, even if these African American cultural arbiters never appear on screen. With its emphasis on rich cafe culture as the birthplace of the twentieth century’s most important artworks, Midnight in Paris produces a near causal relationship between the environment and artistic output.

Through this rosy, if superficial, citational practice, Midnight in Paris becomes a kind of modernism’s greatest hits album: all the film reveals about Fitzgerald is that he is married to Zelda. Viewers learn that Zelda is crazy; she tries to commit suicide and Gil gives her a Valium. The Surrealists are nutty and Djuna Barnes leads. Gertrude Stein helps other artists, sits in her salon, and lives with a woman named Alice who opens the door. Most caricatured is Hemingway, whose dia-logue, when not in the form of bellowing challenges to drink or to fight, seems lifted from the pages of A Farewell to Arms. One particularly over-the-top scene invokes every familiar Hemingway cliché as the author stumbles up to Gil and Adriana, clearly drunk, with one arm around a bullfighter named Belmonte. He looks Adriana over, calls her a “moveable feast,” and then asks whether she has “ever shot a charging lion.” Apparently dissatisfied with this relatively mundane chitchat, he shouts, “Who wants to fight?”

As the film goes on, the historical references and jokes grow broader and sillier. During Gil’s final journey through time, he experiences double time travel, accom-panying Adriana to Maxim’s and the Moulin Rouge during the belle epoque. In this last trip through time, and before dumping viewers back into the present, the film explores new shallows of artistic citation. A compliment that doubles as a flip joke frames the episode: alighting from a carriage in front of Maxim’s, Gil com-ments, in his typical “gee whiz” fashion, “I don’t know what it is about this city. I gotta write a note to the chamber of commerce.” At the Moulin Rouge, Adriana spies Toulouse Lautrec sitting alone, and she chides Gil into approaching him, explaining, “We know he’s a lonely man.” As the two time travelers sit with Lautrec, two additional artists approach, introducing themselves as Degas and Gauguin. The artists explain that they have been discussing their opinion that it would have been “better to have lived during the Renaissance.” This is, of course, not a co-equal jump in time: Degas and Gauguin skip the Romantic period and Enlightenment in favor of the more recognizable Renaissance. Adriana refuses to accept that the belle epoque is not the most wonderful time, and insists that she wants to stay. Delivering the lesson of the film, Gil attempts to explain to her that

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everyone idealizes another era: “the present is a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying.” Gil’s insight here is somewhat sophisticated, but the evidence he provides is not: “To them, their golden age was the Renaissance. They’d trade the belle epoque to be painting alongside Titian and Michelangelo. And those guys probably imagine life was a lot better when Kublai Khan was around.” At this moment, Gil’s dialogue merely signals historicity, deploying a shallowness of refer-ence more akin to postmodernism as Frederic Jameson describes it than to mod-ernism’s recuperative engagement with past artworks ( Jameson 2003: 281). One might object that such scenes reflect Gil’s nostalgia for a past that never was, and that the increasingly superficial knowledge the film communicates as it moves backwards through time mirrors Gil’s incrementally decreasing lack of knowl-edge, such that he imagines Renaissance painters fantasizing about Genghis Khan’s fabulous empire. But, as Allen indicates in his Cannes interview, Gil’s fantasy is the director’s too (Bagnetto 2011). And, to use Hemingway as an example, Allen hints at his knowledge even in inane depictions. With his declarations about manli-ness, boxing, and being pure and true, Hemingway is, as Boston Globe critic Ty Burr (2011) puts it, “a ripe, macho, adverb-free punch line of a young Papa.” But it is equally the case that his dialogue reveals Allen to be a close reader of modern-ism’s macho man. To be sure, Hemingway sweeps Adriana off on a trip to Africa (“Mt. Kilimanjaro’s no Paris,” Stein observes), but he also speaks in a remarkably accurate depiction of Hemingway’s coordinating sentence structure: “The assign-ment was to take the hill, there were four of us, five if you counted Vicente, but he had lost his hand when a grenade went off, and he couldn’t fight as he could when I first met him, but he was young and brave and the hill was soggy from days of rain, and it sloped down toward a road, and there were many German soldiers on the road, and the idea was to aim for the first group, and if our aim was true we could delay them.” Midnight thus has it both ways, giving audiences a pleasurable encounter with some of literature’s most difficult figures by hinting at Allen’s deep knowledge of his modernist heroes while simultaneously produc-ing a world in which they are encountered in their most familiar and accessible forms.

The film’s superficial engagement with culture and politics extends to Gil’s present day as well. In Midnight in Paris’s contemporary scenes, shallowness func-tions in a different fashion, producing clichéd images of ugly American tourists and professors. Indeed, the only pleasant characters Gil encounters in his twenty-first-century world are beautiful French women. Allen thus recreates the mod-ernist writer’s journey abroad, away from a mercenary American culture that neither understands nor appreciates his work. This is a journey Allen himself has taken, both through his long-term allegiance with European audiences – in an interview with Stig Björkman, Allen explains that “Europe has saved [his] life.  .  .  .  If it wasn’t for Europe, I’d probably not be making films” (Björkman 2004: 82) – and by shooting on location in films such as Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. By positioning Gil against Inez’s father, and by characterizing

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Gil as the one who “side[s] with the help,” Allen casts his own flight to Europe, as the same type of refusal of American capitalistic concerns that the bohemian modernists embraced.

In contrast to the romantic Americans abroad in the 1920s, the version of American travel culture Gil encounters in the twenty-first century is dry, “pedan-tic.” Wine is appreciated, rather than swilled, and pieces of the past are snapped up in antique markets. Instead of appreciating art, Inez, Carol, and Paul breeze efficiently through the sun-dappled gardens at Versailles, and ignore the views of the Eiffel Tower at night. In the Versailles scene, Allen begins with a long shot, which presents a beautiful view of the gardens’ landscaping. When the four tour-ists enter the frame, the camera begins to move, tracking to follow them until they stop, with their backs turned to the beautiful landscapes behind them. Two scenes later, Allen again frames Paul and Carol so that their backs are turned to a beautiful Paris sunset. As they enjoy a rooftop wine tasting, during which Paul criticizes the wine – “I prefer a smoky feeling to a fruity feeling” – Allen positions the Eiffel Tower between the two, as the tip of the pyramid shape formed by the three figures. Though the characters ignore the beauty of their environments, the film’s spectators do take in the views to which the characters turn their backs. Because much of this beauty is also due to Allen’s presentation of it – his framing and his blue and gold color palette – spectators come to simultaneously appreciate Paris’s beauty and Allen’s skill and also to distance themselves from the film’s ugly Americans.

Played by Michael Sheen, professor Paul is characteristic and the worst of the bunch. Arguing with the lovely French docent, played by Carla Bruni, he renders artistic life in dry-as-dust academese. He also, importantly, gets it wrong when the topic is passion, arguing with the docent about Rodin’s lovers. Paul is also the character who makes the most pointed critique of Gil’s nostalgia, but the people of the present day have a bad relationship to the past, criticizing, rather than enjoying, wine, and collecting past artifacts without engaging. When Gil first sees the Peugeot, for example, he says, “I have a friend who collects these in Beverly Hills.” It is in this context of an artistically struggling but materially successful screenwriter that the film elaborates a desire for protection from the present through the talismanic powers of great artists past. The twenty-first century’s culture of one-upmanship and materiality appears to have poisoned even Gil’s creativity: having left Paris as a young man to write sequels to sequels, he has lost touch with passionate creation – as he notes to Inez from behind his novel’s pages, “I’m missing some chances to let my imagination to kinda go crazy.” Even if Gil can’t go live in another time, he can, as Allen does, inoculate himself against an ugly world through artistic immersion.

Midnight in Paris echoes a common theme in Allen’s work: that there is nothing new under the sun, and that citation and quotation are the best methods for dealing with the pressures of the present moment. In the famous monologue that opens Annie Hall, Allen faces directly into the camera and rehearses his view on

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life as both too short and also “full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness.” He then goes on to imagine three possible visions of himself in old age: guessing he won’t be “distinguished gray,” he hopes he’ll be the “balding virile” type, but also admits to a fear that he’ll be “one of those guys with saliva driveling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag, screaming about socialism.” With his anxieties about the future, it is this Allen, who shares with Eliot a desire to shore up cultural fragments against his ruin. When walking through the Paris streets with Adriana, Gil gives a neat gloss on this view, which says as much about Allen’s perspective on the rest of the world as it does about Paris. Gil tells Adriana that it’s a “cold, violent, meaningless uni-verse,” but he goes on to describe the way the city compensates for such existential darkness: “the cafes, people drinking and singing. I mean, for all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.” The idea of a cold world to which art may bring warmth is an old modernist one; Eliot sees the Waste Land of London as a spiritual and cultural desert that needs renewal through revitalized religious prac-tice and meaningful cultural production. Allen, who looks back throughout his films to the richer days of radio, of Broadway, and the early cinema, likewise sees art – particularly the art of the past – as a way of dealing with the emptiness of contemporary life.

While Allen has lingered in the dark abysses of modernism in other films, Midnight in Paris hints at those murky depths only briefly. Building a vast star network of modernist figures in order to trip only lightly across its surface may seem a strange project. To return to this chapter’s opening question, if the mod-ernists are only set pieces for a meditation on the ugly Americans of the present, why go to so much trouble citing artworks both obscure and familiar? Further, given Allen’s career-long interest in the first half of the twentieth century and knowledge of the period (as demonstrated by Sweet and Low Down’s homage to Django Reinhardt, Zelig’s Fitzgerald quotations, and The Purple Rose of Cairo’s references to Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr.), what purpose does it serve to give a very flip account of very complex artists?

The answer is that historical blindness serves an important pedagogical func-tion in the film. A kind of new critical impulse – by way of Cleanth Brooks – informs Midnight in Paris, as it encourages audiences to let go of historical and biographical details that might interfere with artistic appreciation. Appropriately, then, Midnight attributes a too intense focus on detail to the pedantic university professor, for whom the recitation of facts substitutes for aficion. Thus while Paul’s purview is the fact, Gil’s is the feeling. And, ironically, because of his immersive experience in the moment of modernist artistic creation, Gil is able to better appreciate modernist art works as they are; he approaches them without the cynical attitude of an expert who has the benefit of hindsight. In this way, both within and without its diegesis, Midnight eschews academic accuracy, cri-tique, and detailed knowledge in favor of authentic, enthusiastic, and first-hand artistic appreciation.

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“Very Pretty Lyrics”: Midnight in Paris’s Modernist Tour Book

If Midnight in Paris’s Americans abroad have turned ugly, France remains a place of beauty. Allen has fetishized France before, as in Deconstructing Harry, in which Harry declares that in France he could “run for office” on the slogan, “Nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm – and win.” While Allen’s invocation of France is sarcastic in Deconstructing Harry, France features prominently in Hollywood Ending (2002) as well. In this recent film, Allen plays the filmmaker Val Waxman, whose films get rough reviews in the United States but are much beloved by French film critics and audiences. A moment of life imitating art, in an interview with Eric Lax about the film, Allen expresses dissatisfaction with audiences who “didn’t show up,” while also acknowledging that “it was successful but nothing big – in France” (Lax 2007: 56). Though Midnight is a far less cynical film than Harry, and less self-referential than Hollywood Ending, Allen’s idea of France as the artist and intellectual’s last best place remains. Ironically, this is the kind of fondness for a place that only someone who doesn’t live there can experience. At one moment, Adriana casually remarks that she “keep[s] forgetting [Gil is] just a tourist.” But the tourist’s view is the view of the entire film. For spectators, seeing contempo-rary Paris through Allen’s lens is much the same as seeing 1920s Paris – Allen portrays the city as an extravagantly beautiful fantasy. The beautiful, postcard-like views of Paris come from the impossible perspectives only technology can provide; crane shots and wide angle lenses show more of Paris than the naked eye could ever take in. In this way, the film’s lovely cinematography mirrors the admiring and monumentalizing gaze of the appreciative tourist.

Nostalgia and tourism are thus two sides of the same coin, as Allen’s film par-ticipates in what Jameson describes as the postmodern project of producing nos-talgia for the present (2003: 288). The growing Paris suburbs, for example, with their immigrant presence threatening French commitments to liberté, égalité, and fraternité, and whose presence the lovely Ms. Bruni’s increasingly unpopular husband chooses to ignore, do not appear. Not even in background, as chez Brick Top does in the 1920s scenes. Nor does the presence of tourists, or the increased crowding of Paris as a twenty-first-century city, disturb Allen’s mise-en-scène. Even at midnight, one might be surprised to find Gil able to take his night walks undis-turbed by traffic or other pedestrians, but the film’s contemporary Paris streets are clean and clear. When the old Peugeot arrives, the 1920s car does not jar the viewer’s sense of place and time; it is right at home, another quaint detail. In this way, Gil’s Paris and Hemingway’s Paris are indistinguishable. The continuity in setting allows for Allen’s movie magic, which portrays modern day Paris as sur-prisingly unmarked by change or development.

Although Allen could not have known this during production, the summer of Midnight in Paris’s release saw a very public demonstration of one of France’s less

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admirable characteristics. While Midnight played in theaters, a reminder of con-troversial French attitudes towards women, sexuality, and misogyny playing out across an international stage as the international news media made hay over France’s ambivalent reaction to hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo’s allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn (then managing director of the International Monetary Fund). In this context, much analysis of the case reminded readers that France has played host to other important men with controversial sexual histories: “Is Polan-ski haunting the Strauss-Kahn case?” one BBC story asked (2011). With its light treatment of morally complex artists, these are not the types of comparisons Midnight in Paris invites. Instead, by encouraging viewers to think about modernist figures as icons, rather than as biographical persons, Midnight provides a lesson on how to view Allen’s career. This is a lesson that reflects a preference for ways of viewing celebrities in the 1920s as opposed to in the contemporary era. Aes-thetician Daniel Herwitz has outlined this difference, explaining:

The star in the old sense was about unapproachability. . . . Craving anecdote, scandal, images of ordinariness, the public, given free reign, consumed the star, got closer and closer to her. What the studios grasped was that, unchecked, too much close-ness would be a failure through victory, since the aura of her distance, which prompted the desire for intimacy, would be lessened, reducing her star value and producing ultimate disappointment (2008: 15).

In this way, we can understand Allen’s treatment of the modernists as similarly protective and as offering a model for understanding artistic careers.

Léa Seydoux, a young French actress making a career of starring in historical mash-ups (Inglorious Basterds, The Mysteries of Lisbon, and even Robin Hood), plays a shop girl named Gabrielle who gets the closing word in the film and shows the way that remembering, like tourism, gives a depthless if magisterial encounter with cultural artifacts. Like Gil, Gabrielle loves Cole Porter and Paris in the rain. In her day job, Gabrielle works in a vintage market, surrounded by phonographs, fainting couches, and antique rugs that echo the color scheme of Gertrude Stein’s apartment. Unlike pedantic Paul, Gabrielle has an authentic and respectful appre-ciation of Porter, uncluttered by biographical detail: “Very pretty lyrics,” she comments, before being interrupted by Inez, who swoops Gil up to “get some culture” from Paul who is “an expert in Monet.” Allen’s casting of Seydoux, who is the young relative of French cinematic royalty, is its own artifactual reference; the actress’s grandfather Jérôme Seydoux is Pathe’s chairman and her granduncle Nicolas Seydoux is Gaumont’s chairman and CEO. It is no wonder that Gabrielle understands Gil. Through Seydoux’s lineage, Gabrielle carries film history in her very blood. As she joins Midnight’s Allen figure for a stroll, Seydoux’s ancestry gives the film’s final scene of Paris in the rain art historical significance as well as narrative closure.

From its postcard beginning to its watercolor close, Midnight in Paris reminds viewers not just of Allen’s other nostalgia or historical films, but also of his best

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films. In particular, Midnight in Paris recalls his homage to another city, Manhattan. With Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue overlaying a series of short-take shots of Man-hattan, which Allen renders in aestheticizing and distancing black and white, the 1979 film provides a model for Midnight’s golden Paris vignettes. Indeed, on Mid-night in Paris’s official website, the Sony Classics write-up points viewers to the old Allen: “It’s about a young man’s great love for a city, Paris, and the illusion people have that a life different from theirs would be much better” (Sony Classics 2011). This excessive and romantic love for a city is the way viewers think of Allen’s relationship to New York. Touring Paris thus becomes a way of touring Allen’s Manhattan; put another way, touring Paris of the 1920s becomes a way of touring the Allen of the 1970s. On a tour, of course, travelers visit monuments, the greatest works a culture has to offer. Engaging Allen’s biography only shal-lowly, like a tourist or a time traveler, thus allows viewers to solve seeming con-tradictions about the auteur, who encourages audiences to identify him with his protagonists, but also asks audiences to see the protagonists as loveable innocents bumbling their way through a world of middlebrow barbarism.

Just Desserts: Upon Midnight, Recalling Woody

Film reviewers have taken the bait. “Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write again” Los Angeles Times’s Kenneth Turan reports in 2011, “Woody Allen has made a wonderful new picture, ‘Midnight in Paris,’ and it’s his best, most enjoyable work in years.” And though Ella Taylor’s review for National Public Radio (2011) reminds readers that Allen’s misogyny is still present, she leads by informing would-be viewers that the film is “a sweet and lively story, and a nicely packaged new outing from a past master who has done little more than repeat himself for at least two decades.” The film’s various weaknesses, reviewers conclude, can be overlooked because of the director’s return to a playful and sweet perspective.

Sweetness being the key term. Particularly strange is the consistency with which reviewers describe the film as a dessert. In the Boston Globe, Ty Burr (2011) writes that the film “is a sweet-natured trifle, as flavorful and as thin as a crepe.” He goes on, “it’s a delicious conceit.” Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post (2011) reports that he film, though light, “provides a profiterole or two for thought.” For Claudia Puig (2011), “Midnight in Paris is as light as a soufflé, and almost as sweet.” For Kenny Lengel (2011), it is “a delicious trifle,” and Joel Morgenstern (2011) writes, “In Woody Allen’s beguiling and then bedazzling new comedy, nostalgia isn’t at all what it used to be – it’s smarter, sweeter, fizzier and ever so much funnier.” Desserts, as a matter of course, come last. Thinking about the progres-sion of a meal as analogous to the progression of a career helps to explain why critics have gone along with Allen’s project. They, too, are building Allen’s legacy,

Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris: Remembering Modernism, Remembering Woody 315

and critics unanimously agree that recent films like Cassandra’s Dream, Match Point, and even Vicky Christina Barcelona have left a bad taste in the moviegoing public’s mouth. After years of films Turan (2011) describes as “tainted by misan-thropy and sourness,” critics see again the Allen who they themselves grew up on, the man who made smart, dialogue-driven films with an attention to formal art-istry – a critic’s filmmaker. Midnight in Paris is thus important to critics invested in making the case to younger generations that Allen still matters to the American cinema. This is a case that has been harder to make in the last two decades because, as Salon critic Andrew O’Hehir notes, Allen’s recent films have been flavored by “often-caustic misanthropy, half-comic fear of death and anti-American bitter-ness.” In their reviews of Allen’s most recent film, critics extend Midnight in Paris’s vision of great artists. In this way, film critics engage in their own form of new critical judgment as they argue that this sweet film is in keeping with the best artistic spirit of the director because it “fits” with his greatest works. Conversely, using the positive example of Midnight, critics such as O’Hehir have positioned Allen’s output of the last decade as an anomalous and unfortunate departure from his canon of great works – the works that we should, upon the occasion of Midnight, remember.

Works Cited

Bagnetto, Laura Angela (2011) “RFI’s Laura Bagnetto Reports from Cannes.” RFI (May 29). (Radio.)

Berger, Joseph (2011) “Decoding Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” The New York Times (May 27).

Björkman, Stig (2004) Woody Allen on Woody Allen, rev. edn. London: Faber and Faber.Bois, Yve-Alain (1998) Matisse and Picasso. Fort Worth, TX: Flammarion.Burr, Ty (2011) “Midnight in Paris.” Boston Globe (May 27).Ciment, Michel and Yann Tobin (2006) “Interview with Woody Allen: ‘My heroes don’t

come from life but from their mythology.’ ” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 130–142.

Curnutt, Kirk (1999) “Inside and outside: Gertrude Stein on identity, celebrity, and authen-ticity.” Journal of Modern Literature 23.2, 291–308.

Eliot, Thomas S. (2002a) “Tradition and the individual talent.” New York: Modern Library. (Original work published 1921.)

Eliot, Thomas S. (2002b) The Waste Land. New York: Modern Library. (Original work published 1922.)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2004) The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner. (Original work published 1925.)

Galow, Timothy (2010) “Literary modernism in the age of celebrity.” Modernism/Modernity 17.2, 313–329.

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Girgus, Sam (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hemingway, Ernest (1926) The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner.Herwitz, Daniel (2008) The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption. New York:

Columbia University Press.Hornaday, Ann (2011) “Midnight in Paris.” Washington Post (May 27).Hösle, Vittorio (2007) Woody Allen: An Essay on the Nature of the Comical. Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame Press.“Is Polanski haunting the Strauss-Kahn case?” (2011) BBC News (May 18). www.bbc.co.uk/

news/world-europe-13440765 (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).Jameson, Fredric (2003) Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.Kelley, Ken (2006) “A conversation with the real Woody Allen.” In Robert E. Kapsis and

Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 7–28.

Lax, Eric (2000) Woody Allen: A Biography, updated edn. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Lee, Sander H. (2001) “Existential themes in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors with

reference to Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters.” In Kimball King (ed.), Woody Allen: A Casebook. New York: Routledge.

Lengel, Kenny (2011) “Midnight in Paris.” Arizona Republic (May 26). www.azcentral.com/thingstodo/movies/articles/2011/05/25/20110525midnight-paris-movie-review. html?nclick_check=1 (accessed Oct. 8, 2012).

Michaels, Walter Benn (1995) Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Morgenstern, Joel (2011) “We’ll always have Allen’s ‘Paris.’ ” Wall Street Journal (May 20). http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704904604576332953513849220. html?mod=WSJ_ArtsEnt_LifestyleArtEnt_2 (accessed Oct. 8, 2012).

O’Hehir, Andrew (2011) “Cannes: Midnight in Paris a time-travelling delight.” Salon (May 11). www.salon.com/2011/05/11/midnight_in_paris/ (accessed Oct. 8, 2012).

Puig, Claudia (2011) “Let Woody Allen be your guide through ‘Paris.’ ” USA TODAY (May 19). http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/reviews/2011-05-19-midnight-in-paris_n.htm (accessed Oct. 8, 2012).

Sony Classics (2011) Midnight in Paris. Official web site. www.sonyclassics.com/midnightinparis/synopsis.html (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).

Stein, Gertrude (1990) Three Lives. New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1909.)

Stein, Gertrude (1993) “Composition as explanation.” In Gertrude Stein, A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 493–503. (Original work published 1926.)

Stein, Gertrude (1995) The Making of Americans. Normal, IL: Illinois State University Press. (Original work published 1925.)

Stevens, Dana (2011) “Midnight in Paris.” Slate (May 20). www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/05/midnight_in_paris.html (accessed Oct. 8, 2012).

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Taylor, Ella (2011) “For inspiration, Allen always has ‘Paris.’ ” National Public Radio (May 19). www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136287239/for-inspiration-allen-always-has-paris (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).

Turan, Kenneth (2011) “Midnight in Paris.” Los Angeles Times (May 20).Van Dusen, Wanda (1996) “Portrait of a national fetish: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Introduction to

the speeches of Maréchal Pétain’ (1942).” Modernism/Modernity 3.3, 69–92.Yacowar, Maurice (1991) Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen. New York:

Continuum.

PART IV

Influences/Intertextualities

15

The protagonists created by filmmaker Woody Allen have been characterized as born losers, fast-talking promoters, sweet nebbishes, unlucky-in-love writers, innocuous little guys, and as shy, incompetent neurotics who are fearful of women (Crews 2010: 1–2). As one of these characters might say about himself, “Stop me if I left anything out.” But a more compelling character type of Allen’s is the postmodern incarnation of French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur (Baudelaire 1964; Benjamin 1983, 1999). The postmodern flâneur is an ambling creature of the urbanscape, on an existential search for the meaning both of life and death, often through an examination and critique of contemporary culture. Flânerie in Allen’s films is epitomized by a limited portion of his output, principally five films produced between 1977 and 1992: it arises in Annie Hall (1977), Manhat-tan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), and Husbands and Wives (1992), the films in which we can best observe “the traits that mark the flâneur . . . wealth, education and idleness” (Crickenberger n.d.). In his most recent film, Midnight in Paris, Allen’s protagonist morphs rather quickly from a nascent flâneur to something quite different, but this film provides the classic locale for the flâneur and is useful to this discussion as well.

Allen functions as a flâneur in at least two ways: as a filmmaker taking his audi-ence along with him on a walk through contemporary culture and, more explicitly, offering through his protagonists as they “educate” their respective female naïfs, lessons ranging from existentialism to popular culture, from the meaning of life and death to the relative merits of “the crabs at Sam Woo’s” (Manhattan). It is through the latter – Allen’s protagonists – that I will illustrate the flânerie of his films, his “seeking to make meaning out of the fragmented labyrinth that is the postmodern urban setting” (Wilson 1995: 73), and presenting “an image of move-ment through the social space of modernity” ( Jenks 1995: 148). Allen wants to

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Taking the Tortoise for a Walk

Woody Allen as Flâneur

William Brigham

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offer a coherence – his coherent, male gaze anyway – to a fragmentary contem-porary culture; a gaze steeped in nostalgia, certainty, and gender-specificity: “It is this flâneur, the flâneur as a man of pleasure, as a man who takes visual pos-session of the city, who has emerged in postmodern feminist discourse as the embodiment of the ‘male gaze’ ” (Wilson 1995: 65).1

In my analysis I examine the flâneur absent the context of plot, without regard to motivations or actions that might evolve and change as the story unfolds. Akin to the detail of a painting offered to illustrate some small element of a larger, greater work, I choose here to pluck the flâneur from Allen’s filmic landscape and study him. Additionally, that key element of virtually all Allen’s films – humor – is also in large part set aside. Some of the examples I provide of flânerie are setups by Allen for a punch line, or are presented by him in a highly ironic style. But I have chosen to operate the equivalent of Mrs. Bates’s “chicken deflavorizing machine” (Stardust Memories 1980) and extract the humorous “flavors” that might cast the flâneur in a light that detracts from the importance I wish to impute to him.

Allen uses flânerie as a narrative device because it allows him through his pro-tagonists to examine and critique the postmodern landscape, to affect a gaze that peers at both mundane and existential aspects of contemporary urban life. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey Sachs (Allen) searches for the meaning of life by examining, among other sources, great philosophers and various religions. As he leaves Philosophy Hall at Columbia University, passing Rodin’s “The Thinker,” his voiceover captures the unique comic flavor of Allensque flânerie:

And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we live we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.

Allen’s flâneur asks us to adopt his gaze, examining the most pressing questions of humankind, bemoaning the banality and cruelty of life, but at the same time complaining that it is too short. In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Allen) says of life: “Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.” Allen echoes Baudelaire, who writes:

Lost in this mean world . . . I am like a weary man whose eye, looking backwards, into the depth of the years, sees nothing but disillusion and bitterness, and before him nothing but a tempest which contains nothing new, neither instruction nor pain (qtd. in Benjamin 1999: 153–154).

Allen’s flânerie is born as it must be of idleness and leisure but, in the end, it is representative of a serious existential search. It is akin to Baudelaire’s allegorical style in which he was “on the lookout for banal incidents in order to approximate them to poetic events” (Benjamin 1999: 99).

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Before Baudelaire, the flâneur of Paris in the 1800s was seen as a different sort. A mid-nineteenth-century definition of flâneur offers few words of praise, with the 1843 Nouveau Dictionnaire de la Langue Française suggesting dawdling, wander-ing, and fooling around as the principal activities of the flâneur. Indeed, an illustra-tion for the 1841 Physiologie du Flâneur captures a dandified gentleman with a walking stick and cigar, casting a look to the side that makes it clear he is quite sans souci (Huart 1841; Figure 15.1). Baudelaire (1964) brought a renewed and

Figure 15.1 Le Flâneur (Huart 1841).

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more becoming focus to the flâneur in his 1859 paean to the French artist Con-stantin Guys, “The Painter of Modern Life.” For Baudelaire, the flâneur is “not precisely an artist, but rather a man of the world . . . a man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses” (1964: 6; emphasis in original); Tester calls him “a man driven out of the private and into the public by his own search for meaning” (1994: 2). Allen has a penchant for showing his char-acters sauntering by the East River – as if by the Seine, usually with a bridge in the background, musing over love lost or found, or struggling with some existen-tial crisis. In Midnight in Paris, the nascent novelist Gil (Owen Wilson) does stroll across a bridge over the Seine, struggling with his ongoing search for himself and his place in the arts. Baudelaire says of the flâneur, “So out he goes and watches the river of life flow past him in all its splendor and majesty  .  .  . He delights in fine carriages and proud horses . . . the sinuous gait of the women . . . happy to be alive” (1964: 7). The voiceover of Isaac Davis (Allen) introducing Manhattan provides us with his view of the “river of life” in his city. Isaac, struggling with his attempts to begin his novel, offers an encapsulating of the flâneur’s view of Manhattan, from Central Park to the garment district to the port, from Lincoln Center to Madison Avenue to Elaine’s restaurant. He muses on “a town that . . .  pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin,” and his thriving “on the hustle  .  .  . bustle of the crowds and the traffic  .  .  . beautiful women and street smart guys” (Allen 1982: 181).

The context for Baudelaire’s views on flânerie was the burgeoning modernity of Paris, specifically Georges Eugene Haussmann, Napoleon III’s appointee, “tearing up many of the old, twisting streets . . . and replacing them with the wide, tree-lined boulevards and expansive gardens which Paris is famous for today” (Mount Holyoke College 2001). Of additional and considerable importance were the arcades, venues which provided a social, cultural and economic “place” within which the flâneur could amble, observe and consume. The arcades of Paris, devel-oped between 1822 and 1840, were glass-roofed rows of shops, precursors to department stores and the now ubiquitous enclosed shopping malls of America. Allen occasionally situates his flâneur in one of Manhattan’s “arcades” – Bloomingdale’s department store. Allen draws attention to what he sees as the crass commercialism of contemporary American society, either with comic refer-ences such as in Annie Hall when Alvy says to Annie (Diane Keaton), “If the Gestapo would take away your Bloomingdale’s charge card you’d tell ’em every-thing” (Allen 1982: 17) or by physically placing a character in the store (Keaton again as Mary Wilkie in Manhattan).

As evidence of the leisure time and idleness of the nineteenth-century flâneur, around 1840 it became the fashion in Paris to take a tortoise for a walk through the arcades, letting the tortoise set the pace for flânerie. This idleness Benjamin labels as “a demonstration against the division of labor” (1999: 427) and the arcades, as well as the leisurely behavior of those who regularly inhabit them, represented for Benjamin the epitome of capitalism, industrialization, and modernity.

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But the flâneur was of the streets as well:

The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enameled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done (Benjamin 1983: 37).

As in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 short story, the flâneur is “The Man of the Crowd” (2005), not the man in the crowd. “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of the birds and water of the fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd” (Baudelaire 1964: 9). He strives to be incognito; if seen, Baudelaire believes, he is unable to observe. In Annie Hall, to relive or perhaps rewrite his childhood, Alvy takes Annie and Rob (Tony Roberts) to the Brooklyn home in which he grew up. The three of them stand as time travelers amidst Alvy’s family of decades before, observing, commenting, and even talking to, but not being heard by, family and friends. Conversely, in Midnight in Paris, Gil is “present” as he time travels to the 1920s, engaging directly with the likes of Fitz-gerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. However, because he actually engages with those around him, Gil is more an alien than the prototypical flâneur.

Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, concludes that the flâneur was an artifact of a bygone era because “the rationality of capitalism and, especially, commoditization and the circulation of commodities, itself defined the meaning of existence in the city so that there remained no spaces of mystery for the flâneur to observe” (Tester 1994: 13). Benjamin focuses here, however, only on the physical wanderings of the flâneur, forgetting that the “flâneur does not need to travel vast physical spaces to cover vast imaginative spaces” (Tester 1994: 9). The flâneur, Baudelaire believes, is a philosopher; he is seeking existential completion: “Completion requires an escape from the private sphere. The hero of modern life is he who lives in the public spaces of the city” (Tester 1994: 4). Thus, Allen situates significant portions of each of his films in public spaces, his protagonist a man of the crowd, if not the people, as if he could draw from those around him the answers he so assidu-ously seeks. Girgus speaks to this in his discussion of Hannah and Her Sisters: “In his wanderings through the streets of New York, Mickey replicates the search for completeness and psychic unity that also motivates the other characters” (Girgus 1993: 101).2 Thus, Allen’s island of Manhattan itself might be seen as an arcade in which we observe the flâneur: “[S]uch an arcade is a city, indeed a world, in mini-ature” (Benjamin 1983: 58).

Cosmopolitanism and urbanity are central to the place and character of the flâneur and Allen lays the foundation for the flânerie of his films to come when, in Annie Hall, Alvy rejects his friend Rob’s plea to move to Los Angeles by arguing that he doesn’t “wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light” (Allen 1982: 10). It is only in New York,

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specifically the borough of Manhattan, where Allen can simultaneously celebrate and bemoan contemporary culture. It is in the familiar setting of Manhattan where his protagonists can most easily examine the meaning of life, peruse the myriad stores and galleries, and take the tortoise for a walk. Wilson states that “the flâneur . . . could exist only in the great city, the metropolis, since provincial towns would afford too restrictive a stage for his strolling and too narrow a field for his observations” (1995: 62). Alvy says,

The country makes me nervous. There’s . . . You got crickets and it–it’s quiet . . . there’s no place to walk after dinner, and  .  .  .  uh, there’s the screens with the dead moths behind them, and  .  .  . uh, yuh got the–the Manson family possibly, yuh got Dick and Perry (Allen 1982: 29; emphasis added).

Elsewhere, Allen has made it plain and direct: “I am two with nature” (Lax 1991: 39). In Hannah and Her Sisters, Elliot (Michael Caine) says about his wife Hannah (Mia Farrow), “Yeah, she loves to go out in the woods but I go nuts. It’s a conflict.” A similar dichotomy in the flâneur’s character is cited in Ernst Robert Curtius’ analysis of Balzac: “Always, for him, nature signifies something other . . . [a] move-ment he does not recognize: the immersion of the human back into nature. . . . He was far too engrossed by the tensions of human existence” (qtd. in Benjamin 1999: 436). In Husbands and Wives, Gabe Roth (Allen) is challenged when Rain ( Juliette Lewis) questions his worldview: “Are our choices really between chronic dissatis-faction and suburban drudgery?” For Allen, life – as miserable as it might be – must be lived in the city. As Judy Roth (Mia Farrow) tells her husband Gabe, “You couldn’t survive off the island of Manhattan for more than 48 hours.”

The flâneur, in his search for meaning, is an observer and a student of all that surrounds him, but he does not become an object himself. Again, in the earliest of Allen’s films under discussion here, Annie Hall, we are presented with such observations as Alvy and Annie sit on a bench in Central Park viewing the passing parade of New Yorkers. Alvy narrates the passing of “Mr. When-in-the-Pink, Mr. Miami Beach there, you know?  .  .  .  Just came back from the gin-rummy farm last night  .  .  .  He placed third.” Two male lovers: “They’re back from Fire Island . . . they’re sort of giving it a chance – you know what I mean? . . . He’s the Mafia. Linen Supply Business or Cement and Contract.” “And there’s the winner of the Truman Capote look-alike contest” (portrayed, in fact, by Truman Capote) (Allen 1982: 46). These observations of a tiny slice of New York life are an attempt to capture the zeitgeist that any flâneur seeks: who are these people and how do they fit into my understanding of the world and my place in it? Who am I in rela-tion to them? As Benjamin puts it, “the flâneur has made a study of the physiog-nomic appearance of people in order to discover their nationality and social station, character and destiny, from a perusal of their gait, build, and play of fea-tures” (1999: 430). In a rare appearance by persons of some ethnic distinctiveness, in Annie Hall two swarthy men in leather jackets (portrayed by Bob Maroff and

Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flâneur 327

Rick Petrucelli, actors born in Brooklyn and the Bronx, respectively – not Manhat-tan) accost Alvy with exclamations about his celebrity. A distressed Alvy tells the tardy Annie that she has left him in the front of the movie theater “with the cast of The Godfather . . . I’m dealing with two guys named Cheech!” (Allen 1982: 12). It is with disdain and dismissal that he walks away from them with Annie, showing his distress about this ethnic, lower class encounter.

In Manhattan, Isaac (Allen) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) act as observers of cultural life even while lying in bed eating Chinese food and watching television, noting and critiquing people as they “walk by” on the screen. Earlier, Isaac con-sidered the city as “a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture . . . a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage” (Allen 1982: 181). In doing so, he exemplifies Tester’s flâneur “with his fruitless if not actually futile search for satisfaction through the deconstruction of dissatisfaction” (1994: 8). It is, after all, our only life and there simply is not enough time to come to under-stand it. Yet, while the flâneur’s search may be futile, it also is a heroic one. Baudelaire sees the flâneur as the hero of modernity and his heroism consists “in the fact that ‘All of us are attending some funeral or other’ . . . the funeral of dis-satisfaction in the quest for satisfaction” (Tester 1994: 6). In any event, although attempting to disassemble the dissatisfaction of modernity and find a core of satisfaction in life, the flâneur is often unsuccessful.

The intellectual dimensions of the flâneur are widely represented in Allen’s films; they are key to the appeal of his films to a like-minded audience. As Spignesi says about the principals of Manhattan, “These people dwell in a world of books, writing, teaching, the arts, concerts, and all the extraneous niceties that go with the lives of highly educated, fairly well-to-do people living in the most important city in the world” (1992: 168). Within the first five minutes of Husbands and Wives, we are introduced to Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, deconstructionism, and psycho-therapy. Before long, references to Don Giovanni and Rilke are added and, by the end of the film, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Simone de Beauvoir, Kurosawa, Shakespeare, Mahler, Puccini, the Bauhaus school, Byron, T.S. Eliot, and Ingmar Bergman have been added. Benjamin, in his critique of capitalism, concludes that key to the nineteenth-century flâneur was the act of consuming: “As flâneurs, the intelligent-sia came into the market-place” (1983: 170). It is as if Allen takes us shopping through a supermarket of ideas and cultural forms in his search for meaning, asking us to assess the wares he displays. When it suits him, he looks to intellec-tualism for the answers to questions that continually dog him; in moments of exasperation he belittles it all, as in Annie Hall when Alvy tells his wife Robin ( Janet Margolin) while in a bedroom at a party: “It’ll be great, be–because all those Ph.D.’s are in there, you know, like . . . discussing models of alienation and we’ll be in here quietly humping” (Allen 1982: 28). Allen often belittles an intellectual-ism that cannot laugh at itself. Alvy says to Robin at the same party, “I’m so tired of spending evenings making fake insights with people who work for Dysentery.”

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ROBIN: Commentary.ALVY: Oh, really, I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed

Dysentery (Allen 1982: 27).

In addition to intellectualism, popular culture often is subject to Allen’s harsh flânerie. Alvy’s demeaning take on Los Angeles and what he sees as its principal cultural attribute of laissez faire traffic laws is borne out by his ill-fated and feeble cross-country attempt to retrieve Annie: the out-of-his-element motorized flâneur barely managing to navigate the roadways (“Geez, my feet haven’t touched pave-ment since I reached Los Angeles,” Alvy declares earlier in the film), the comic relocation of the flâneur from the sidewalk cafes of Paris to the outdoor deck of a Sunset Boulevard health food restaurant and, finally, his exasperation over Annie’s boyfriend being stressed about the upcoming Grammy ceremony (“Awards! They do nothing but give out awards! I can’t believe it. Greatest, greatest fascist dictator, Adolf Hitler!”: Allen 1982: 100).

Allen has made claims of not being an intellectual: “Basically I am a low-culture person. I prefer watching baseball [presumably on television] with a beer and some meatballs” (Internet Movie Database n.d.). However, he lampoons such people in Hannah and Her Sisters through the misanthropic rants of Frederick (Max von Sydow):

It’s been ages since I sat in front of the TV . . . just changing channels to find some-thing. You see the whole culture . . . Nazis, deodorant salesmen, wrestlers . . . beauty contests, the talk shows . . . Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling?

In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Cliff Stern (Allen) considers his brother-in-law’s work in television as “sub-mental”; in Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey quits his television writing job out of disgust for the banality of his own product; and, in Annie Hall, Alvy belittles Rob’s new found television success, which is reliant on a recorded laugh track.

In a case of what might be called crass flânerie, in Whatever Works (2009), Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) takes his tutee from Mississippi, Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), on a tour of those sites he believes she is worthy of, such as Grant’s tomb and the Statue of Liberty. When Melody’s mother Marietta (Patri-cia Clarkson), comes to New York, the two of them take a Grey Line Bus tour of Manhattan and stroll through the Wax Museum in Times Square. As non-New Yorkers, they presumably are not worthy of that which the flâneur could show them. As Anke Gleber says, “if the fláneur would indeed choose to ignore any aspect of the city, it most certainly be those sights specifically prepared for tourism” (qtd. in Meyer 2000: 132).

Allen’s use of music in his films reflects a rather eclectic appreciation for com-positions spanning centuries. This eclecticism is perhaps best illustrated in Hannah and Her Sisters through Holly (Dianne Wiest) and David (Sam Waterson) enjoying

Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flâneur 329

Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the Metropolitan Opera, Elliot (Michael Caine) and Lee (Barbara Hershey) filling an awkward moment listening to a recording of Bach’s F Minor Concerto, Mickey and Holly listening to Bobby Short sing Cole Porter songs (following an ill-fated outing to a punk music club), Holly and April (Carrie Fisher) auditioning for a Broadway show singing old standards, and Mickey and Holly browsing the jazz section of a record store. In Manhattan, Mary tears up tickets to a Jean-Pierre Rampal concert and tosses them at Yale, and Isaac includes Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony on his list of things that make life worth living, along with Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues.” In Husbands and Wives, Judy, a willing participant in separation from her husband but distressed that he is seeing another woman, struggles to pull herself together sufficiently to attend the opera with her increasingly anxious suitor, Paul (Timothy Jerome):

JUDY: I’m looking forward to tonight. What are we seeing?PAUL: Don Giovanni.JUDY: A Don Juan story.PAUL: I can only think of it as Mozart.JUDY: Fucking Don Juans. They should have cut his fucking dick off.

She later enjoys a much calmer experience at a Mahler concert with the more self-assured Michael Gates (Liam Neeson).

This journey through music that spans two hundred years (and ends, not sur-prisingly given Allen’s tastes, in 1942) is classic flânerie, bespeaking a leisurely examination of Italian, German, Austrian, and American composers. It is an ambling typical of the flâneur, and presented in a physical sense by the propensity of characters in Allen’s films to do just that: amble, stroll, walk the streets of Manhattan; to be, as Berger said, on “the outside” (1985: 64). It is, in many instances, the stroll of lovestruck or lovesick characters. Alvy and Annie walk briskly to the restaurant after Annie’s dismal singing performance, they later stroll in sight of the 59th Street Bridge, reveling in the realization of their love for one another, and Alvy walks alone, slowly, by the pier after his breakup with Annie. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Lee walks by a similar pier, musing first over her illicit affair with Elliot (carrying the copy of E.E. Cummings poetry Elliot gave her) and, later, focusing on her new found love, a literature professor from Columbia. All of this seems evidence of Baudelaire’s claim that “love is the natural occupation of the idle” (1964: 27). Also in Hannah, Mickey relies on the “solitude” of the crowd, the comfort of the streets after the accidental firing of his rifle: “I had to get out of the house. I had to get in the fresh air. . . . I walked the streets, I walked and walked .  .  . I wandered for a long time on the Upper West Side .  .  .  it must have been hours  .  .  .  I went into a movie theater.” In Manhattan, the flâneur is often walking: Isaac, Tracy, Yale, and Emily walk home from Elaine’s restaurant; Isaac and Mary walk home from the Equal Rights Amendment gathering at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then walk Mary’s dog, and end up at the foot of

330 William Brigham

the 59th Street Bridge at dawn; Isaac and his son Willie (Damien Scheller) walk and window shop, ending up at the Russian Tea Room; Isaac and Mary start off on a purportedly leisurely Sunday walk in Central Park but are thwarted by a thunderstorm and retreat to the Hayden Planetarium; and, in the new configura-tion of Isaac, Mary, Yale, and Emily, the four of them stroll and window shop on the pier in Nyack. In Midnight in Paris, Gil wanders the back streets of Paris without a destination, peering into restaurants and shop windows.

In Allen’s films, art is as central as music and literature, just as Baudelaire’s attraction to the artists or caricaturists of nineteenth-century Paris is central to his essay of the painter Constantin Guy that Baudelaire immortalizes as the flâneur (1964). Two icons of the Manhattan cultural world, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, are often featured in Allen’s films and it is flânerie of the purest kind in Manhattan when Isaac and Tracy wander leisurely through the Guggenheim only to run into Yale and Mary doing the same; the conversation that then ensues seems to both celebrate and mock contempo-rary art:

ISAAC: We were downstairs at the Castelli Gallery. We saw the photography exhi-bition. Incredible, absolutely incredible.

TRACY: Oh, it’s really good.MARY: Really? You liked that?ISAAC: The–the photographs downstairs . . . Great, absolutely great. Did you?MARY: Huh? No, I–I really felt it was very derivative. To me it looked like it was

straight out of Diane Arbus, but it had none of the wit . . . ISAAC: Really? Well, you know, we didn’t like ’em as much as the Plexiglas

sculpture.MARY: Really, you liked the Plexiglas, huh?ISAAC: You didn’t like the Plexiglas sculpture either . . . It was a hell of a lot better

than that–that steel cube. Did you see the steel cube?TRACY: Oh, yeah. That was the weirdest.MARY: Now that was brilliant to me, absolutely brilliant.ISAAC: The steel cube was brilliant?MARY: Yes. Uh, to me it was–it was very textural. You know what I mean? It was

perfectly integrated and it had a–a–a marvelous kind of negative capability. The rest of the stuff downstairs was bullshit (Allen 1982: 191–192).

Later in the film, when he and Mary are a couple, they return to the Guggenheim and Isaac now mocks Mary’s earlier poseur attitudes about “negative capability” and “a certain otherness,” although doing so in a museum only underscores the value placed on art by Allen’s protagonists. In Midnight in Paris, the pompous Paul (Michael Sheen) holds forth about Rodin’s muse while the principal characters stroll the Musée Rodin gardens, but Gil corrects him in a flâneur-like argument akin to that of Isaac and Mary. Art is neither dismissed nor diminished in these challenges or confrontations between flâneurs but rather remains in focus as Allen’s characters amble through high culture.

Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flâneur 331

The flâneur of nineteenth-century Paris enjoyed, among other pleasures, the sight of the beautified or newly constructed buildings that were part of Hauss-mann’s revival of the city. Strolling on the new wide boulevards, with the leisure and time available only to those of the upper class, one could stop to admire, for example, a decorative cornice or other architectural detail, and Allen’s flânerie includes such gazes. In Husbands and Wives, Gabe waxes romantically to Rain about living in Paris some day: “I just find it very romantic, you know, because I like café life. I would like to write, maybe get a small flat or something. Just walking the streets is fun in Paris.” The opening segment of Midnight in Paris is a visual paean to Paris, several minutes without title credits or the principals of the film, accompanied by a jazz era instrumental. It is a romanticized and somewhat artificial depiction of a day in Paris, from sunrise to sunset, the camera scanning museums, the opera house, the Seine, haute couture shops, sidewalk cafes, and more. The protagonist Gil does as Gabe imagines, just walking the streets of Paris. One of the artists Gil encounters in his time travel is Ernest Hemingway who, in 1922, established himself and his wife in a Paris apartment but who also “rented a room around the corner to write, something like the ‘attic with a skylight’ Gil craves” (Berger 2011: C7). But it is primarily in the streets of Manhattan where Allen’s camera acts as a docent exclaiming the virtues – and deficits – of New York architecture.

This focus is to be expected both because of Manhattan, the place itself, as well as the predilections of the flâneur. As to the former, Berger – in referring both to the structures and the inhabitants of Manhattan – points out that “What one expects to happen on the inside, happens here on the outside  .  .  .  Each soul is turned inside out and remains alone” (1985: 64). As to the latter, the gaze of the flâneur, Sontag argues that photography emerged as an extension of the eye of the flâneur: “The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker recon-noitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discov-ers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes” (1977: 55). The filmmaker as photographer, as this extension of the flâneur, frames our understanding of the city and its structures. Allen wants us to see these “voluptuous extremes”: from the Fulton Fish Market to the penthouses of the Upper East Side. But only the balcony of the penthouse; virtually all of the images we encounter in the opening sequence of Manhattan are exterior shots. Following Berger, Allen wants us to see the “outside,” the province of the flâneur.

Virtually all of the buildings and structures on which he focuses are, of course, of the pre-war era so valuable in New York real estate. Allen’s nostalgia is evident in many aspects of his films – most obviously in his choice of the music played over his opening and ending credits – but also in those parts of the city he allows us to “see” and which he walks us through. Baudelaire celebrates modernity, and indeed wants the bourgeois to get their due as having contributed to a better, modern world through their enterprise and industry, while Allen bemoans the change and crassness that has altered the cultural landscape since World War II.

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Judy tells Gabe in Husbands and Wives, “You don’t like change,” to which he replies, “That’s right. Change is death.” Nostalgia is the central theme of Midnight in Paris, even the occupation of the protagonist in Gil’s novel, and it is what drives Gil to search the streets of Paris for the past he romanticizes. Paul unsuccessfully attempts to dissuade Gil from this search by telling him that “nostalgia is denial.”

One of the more explicit examples of Allen’s architectural flânerie is in Hannah and Her Sisters when David, the architect both April and Holly are pursuing, takes them on a late-night tour of the buildings in Manhattan he most admires. This is a departure from flânerie per se because not only do they not walk, they don’t even take a cab (the fiacres or carriages of nineteenth-century Paris were not com-pletely foreign to the strolling flâneur).3 Instead, David drives them around the city, pointing out to them the classic design of buildings such as the Sherry-Netherland, the Chrysler Building, the Dakota, the Graybar Building, and Poman-der Walk – all built before World War II and one, the Dakota, built only 20 years after the Civil War. At one point, he extols a building that April says makes her feel like she is in France: “It–it is. It’s romantic.” says David. “And it’s got a hand-some partner sitting right beside it . . . And your eye goes along, lulled into com-placency, and then  .  .  .” We have strolled along with them as the camera has panned from one building to the next, until the shock of the “ugly, ultra-modern structure covered with tiny, diamond-shaped motifs.”

This assessment is akin to the drive through the residential streets of Beverly Hills in Annie Hall, where Alvy points out to Annie and Rob the inconsistency of the architecture: “French next to  .  .  .  Spanish, next to Tudor, next to Japanese” (Allen 1982: 83–84) Again, Allen seems unable to accept a plurality of tastes, espe-cially those that have emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, as aesthetic sensibilities have moved beyond those of Western Europe and have encompassed the cultural attributes of people of color, as well as postmodern approaches to architecture and design. It is a parochialism not unlike that of the nineteenth-century flâneur of Paris, who had disdain for life in other European, as well as American, cities.

Hannah and Her Sisters, in its way, is more representative of a flâneur’s tour of Manhattan than his eponymous paean to the city. David’s architectural tour is supplemented, in a less explicit way, by several shots of other landmark buildings, including the St. Regis Hotel, the Carlyle Hotel, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the redbrick Philosophy Hall at Columbia University. Of course, it is not only the buildings that Allen’s flâneurs gaze upon but what they represent: sophistica-tion, elegance, culture, and, although he eschews any explicit discussion of this, wealth. In fact, the almost complete absence of people of color (the majority of the residents of Manhattan), the poor, or the less educated (half of Manhattanites do not have a bachelor’s degree: City Data n.d.), illustrates well the elitism of Allen’s flâneurs, especially as compared to Baudelaire.

Baudelaire, who celebrated the coming modernity of Paris and the beauty of its cultural life, as well as its newly constructed wide boulevards and new cafes,

Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flâneur 333

was simultaneously troubled by the plight of the dispossessed, the poor who were both cast from the slums that were destroyed by Haussmann and denied access to the niceties and finery that replaced those slums. While the flâneur in the Paris-ian café enjoyed the “blinding whiteness of the walls, the expanse of mirrors, the gold cornices and moldings,” a family in rags stops to gape at the wonder of the café, and the young son has a look in his eyes that says “it is a house where only people who are not like us can go” (Baudelaire 1970: 52). Allen’s filmic cel-ebration of New York and its brightly lit cafes only rarely references these “families in rags” and only then as punch lines: the man in the stocking cap selling comic books outside Bloomingdales or the woman with the shopping bags screaming in Central Park. For Allen, it is the wont of the flâneur to avoid such people and to revel in the best that contemporary culture has to offer.

Kruth’s (1997) analysis of the shooting locations of Allen’s and Martin Scors-ese’s New York films is telling in the divergent understandings of the city that we can take away from these two filmmakers, and it underscores the differences between the postmodern flâneur as represented by Allen’s films and that of Baudelaire’s Paris. In Allen’s films I examine here, there are several sequences in each that are shot in SoHo, Greenwich Village, Midtown, Central Park, and the Upper West and East Sides of Manhattan (Figure 15.2).

There are none in Harlem, Little Italy, Queens, or Staten Island, and only two in Brooklyn (both in essence flashbacks, not contemporary journeys by the char-acters) and one in the Bronx. The farthest uptown Allen ventures is to Morning-side Heights, but only to visit Columbia University.4 By confining his shooting to these locations only, Allen’s films most certainly will be devoid of people of color

Figure 15.2 Annie Hall. (Producer: Jack Rollins)

334 William Brigham

or apparent ethnic diversity. Most certainly, there will be no “families in rags.” Allen, filming what he knows, seems to seek the comfort of a particular “arcade,” one that provides the elitism and homogeneity of the world in which his charac-ters and he function most easily.

References to literature and writers are as common in Allen’s films as those to art, music, and film and are representative of a European perspective with which a nineteenth-century flâneur could easily identify. Any nineteenth-century reader might have encountered the same writers Allen provides for his characters to celebrate, including Shakespeare, Dickinson, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Tur-genev, Byron, and others. There ordinarily is a degree of flippancy that accompa-nies Allen’s references to these renowned artists, as when Gabe suggests to Rain in Husbands and Wives a gastronomical categorization of great writers: “Tolstoy is a full meal. Turgenev is a fabulous dessert. Dostoyevsky is a full meal, with a vitamin pill and extra wheat germ.” Cliff can accept that his love letter to Halley in Crimes and Misdemeanors was in vain by admitting that he “plagiarized most of it from James Joyce.” References to literature are also used by Allen in his usual slights of young women, such as Sam (Lysette Anthony) in Husbands and Wives being “no Simone de Beauvoir,” or Annie Hall’s assessment of Sylvia Plath’s poems as “neat.” Alvy belittles Plath’s legacy by saying that she was an “interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.”

Midnight in Paris offers a buffet of cultural icons when Gil finds himself trans-ported to the Paris of the 1920s. It is, again, a testament to the intellectual bent of Allen’s films – and their intended audience – that very little introduction or explanation is offered when Gil encounters the Fitzgeralds, Cole Porter (identified for some time only by virtue of the tune he is playing at a party as Allen trusts his audience to know it), Picasso, Bunuel, Dali, and many others.

Citing Les bohémiens de Paris by Adolphe d’Ennery, Benjamin observes that the flâneurs in that 1843 drama “arise in the morning without knowing where they are to dine in the evening” (1999: 428). Like the protagonists in Allen’s films, their days are dictated by the choices they make as they move through the city, spring-boarding from one cultural touchstone to another. Allen’s characters, Blake points out, do “what brings gratification at the moment. Life is a story told exclusively in the present tense” (2005: 126). Elliot and Lee browse in Pageant Book & Print Shop, discussing the Caravaggio exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Alvy and Rob walk apparently without destination until Alvy remarks that he is going to be late meeting Annie at the Beekman Theater; Annie and Alvy go for a drink after a midday tennis game because Alvy has “nothing till my analyst appoint-ment”; Gabe, Judy, Jack, and Sally shop leisurely for coffee and ginseng; Gabe reminisces with Judy about the day when, after seeing a Bergman film, they were “walking downtown . . . Remember that? And suddenly we decided not to go to the dinner [party] . . . and we just walked into Central Park”; and Isaac and Tracy run into Yale and Mary at the Guggenheim, all four leisurely browsing the galleries

Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flâneur 335

and decide to move on to another venue to “see the Sol LeWitts” (Allen 1982: 192). This aimlessness is usually brought to a halt by Allen in order to advance the narrative and he often then takes up another aspect of Baudelaire’s flânerie, the examination of life and its meaning, but until that point is reached “the inhab-itants of Allen’s island of Manhattan, and indeed of much of his opus, create obsessions, fixations, and intellectual preoccupations in order to distract them-selves from the fundamental alienation of modern existence” (Fallon 2001: 54).

The artistic interests of the flâneur in mid-nineteenth-century Paris did not of course include motion pictures; it would be a few decades before the Lumière brothers captured moving images of workers leaving the Lumière factory. Allen’s flâneur, on the other hand is, not surprisingly, often directly associated with the making, critiquing or viewing of films. Film is presented as a very normal part of the lives of Allen’s protagonists, only one of several autobiographical touches in his films, and just another act of leisure. Meyer suggests that Gleber, in her analysis of cinema in Weimar Germany, identifies “a number of parallels that can be drawn between the fláneuristic gaze and the movie camera’s eye: both the flâneur and . . . cinema display an interest in the visual spectacles of the modern cityscape” (Meyer 2000). For Allen, whose nostalgic vision of Manhattan is whittled away every day by both the physical and cultural changes in the city, cinema – specifi-cally the dark interior of the movie theater – provides both an escape from these changes as well as a reassurance that the past – as represented in classic American film – will never be lost to him. The films Allen chooses to feature in these scenes are always black-and-white representations of two worlds he yearns for: Manhat-tan of the 1930s and 1940s, and Hollywood films he could admire.

In speaking about Midnight in Paris, and his postcard representation of the city, Allen acknowledges that he

learned about Paris the same way that all Americans do, from the movies. That’s the same New York City that I’ve shown to people around the world in a picture like “Manhattan.” It’s the Manhattan that I don’t see around me but the one that I recognize from movies. And this is the same thing in Paris. I wanted to show the city emotionally, the way I felt about it. It didn’t matter to me how real it was or what it reflected (Dargis 2011).

Often, movies and movie theaters are mere props, background in the life of a flâneur or other character: when Alvy, Annie and Rob drive through Los Angeles, the camera pans past a theater marquee reading “House of Exorcism and Messiah of Evil. Rated R. Starts at 7:15,” a not too subtle slight at the crassness of Angeleno popular culture and the Hollywood film system; in Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey walks down the street with a movie marquee in the background announcing a Hitchcock film; Marietta and Leo (Conleth Hill) walk out of a theater playing a Japanese film in Whatever Works (this being a part of the acculturation of Marietta, the Mississippian, by her urbane artist lover); Dolores (Angelica Huston), in Crimes and Misdemeanors, unwittingly heading to her death, walks home from the liquor

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store with the Beekman Theater in the background; and Jack (Sidney Pollack) and Sam (Husbands and Wives) are seen exiting a theater playing Kurosawa’s Ran. Jack, as yet another mentor to a vacuous younger woman, says to Sam, “Trust me on this, will you. It’s Lear, King Lear. Shakespeare never wrote about a King Leo.”

More explicit representations of film are presented in these same movies, all with Allen portraying the central character. One of the more imaginative sequences in Annie Hall, a film that included breaking-the-fourth-wall monologues, flash-backs, fantasy sequences, and animation, was a cameo appearance by Marshall McLuhan. While Alvy and Annie stand on line at the movie theater, the two of them fighting again, Alvy is subjected to pontifications about Fellini by a Columbia media studies professor standing behind them, who is given his comeuppance by McLuhan, magically produced by Alvy. While Allen takes this opportunity to undermine academics who impute their meanings to others’ works, he also takes a swipe at grand theory exemplified by some of McLuhan’s work. As McLuhan admonishes the professor for his incompetence, he tells him “You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.” This double negative – provided by Allen as dialogue for McLuhan – allows Allen to square the circle of academia and public intellectuals by suggesting no one really knows what they are talking about. The character of Cliff in Crimes and Misdemeanors is more clearly immersed in a world of film by virtue not only of his profession (documentary filmmaker), but also by his predi-lection for going to movie theaters in the middle of the day, most often accom-panied by the niece he – of course – believes he needs to educate. In addition to the four trips they take to the theater during this story, Cliff also finds himself at a midday showing with Halley (complete with cheeseburgers). This moviegoing extravaganza culminates in Cliff and Halley watching Singing in the Rain on 16 mm reels in Cliff ’s apartment workshop.

Our first Allen flâneur, Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, is self-admittedly very “anal” about most aspects of life, but most particularly about never entering a movie theater if the film has already begun, even if it means – as a backup plan – sitting through the four hours of The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) yet again. But the search must continue; the answers must still be sought. The flâneur must be doing in order to understand what it is to “be,” and as viewers we walk with Allen’s char-acters through a landscape of his construction, one that is rooted in the past and, therefore, unchanging but which he examines again and again anyway. Baudelaire says “that nothing at all that issues from man is frivolous in the eyes of a philoso-pher” (1964: 148). Allen in his flânerie takes this to heart as he uses the Marx Brothers and the zaniness of Freedonia (Duck Soup, 1933) to help climb out of the abyss of suicidal despair in Hannah and Her Sisters, or in having Cliff employ both Mussolini and Francis the Talking Mule to mock the pomposity of his romantic rival, Lester (Alan Alda), in Crimes and Misdemeanors. His most recent protagonist, Gil, in Midnight in Paris, perhaps advances the search for meaning when his new found love Adriana (Marion Cortillard) tells him she is not going “back” to the 1920s but is staying in the Golden Age of Degas and Gauguin. Gil realizes at that

Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flâneur 337

point that he can confidently return to the early twenty-first century and cope with the postmodern era. “The present,” he realizes, “is unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying.” As flâneur, Allen continues to meander slowly through both high and low culture, taking the tortoise for a walk in order to understand, as Baudelaire said, “the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses” (1964: 7).

Notes

1 The matter of gender must be addressed at the outset because the flâneur as character-ized by Baudelaire was exclusively male. As Elizabeth Wilson (1995) has pointed out, the public sphere in mid-nineteenth-century Europe was largely closed to women, and the female was the “invisible flâneur.” While the development of the department store, and before that the arcades of Paris, eventually provided a semi-public venue for the flâneuse, because of my source material and the principal subject at hand – the pro-tagonists of Allen’s films – my discussion here will be almost exclusively limited to the male flâneur.

2 It is not only the male protagonists of Allen’s films who seek these answers and this feeling of completion. Annie (Annie Hall) seeks her voice – both as a singer and as a woman; Holly (Hannah and Her Sisters) stumbles and crashes her way through life striving for the “psychic unity” of her sister Hannah; Judy (Husbands and Wives) knows herself to be a caretaker but only needs to find the right man to look after; and Tracy (Manhattan) attains a degree of maturity that seems to escape Isaac.

3 Allen, whose flâneur ordinarily is afoot, celebrates the nostalgia of the fiacres by having Isaac take a Hansom cab ride through Central Park with Tracy in Manhattan. In Mid-night in Paris, the ultimate time travel by Gil and Adriana – from the 1920s to the belle epoque of the late nineteenth century – is via horse and carriage.

4 The recent gentrification of this area, as well as of Harlem, might today lead Allen to include these neighborhoods in a film. His most recent New York-based film, Whatever Works, includes a sojourn to Grant’s tomb in the same area but this visit is presented as the kind gesture of a native New Yorker showing an out-of-town rube the sights.

Works Cited

Allen, W. (1982) Four Films of Woody Allen: Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memo-ries. New York: Random House.

Baudelaire, C. (1964) The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. New York: DaCapo Press.

Baudelaire, C. (1970) Paris Spleen. New York: New Directions.Benjamin, W. (1983) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London:

Verso.Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

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Berger, J. (1985) “Manhattan.” In John Berger, The Sense of Sight. New York: Vintage International.

Berger, J. (2011) “Decoding Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” New York Times (May 28), C1–7.

Blake, R. (2005) Street Smart: The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

City Data (n.d.) “Manhattan, New York.” www.city-data.com/city/Manhattan-New-York.html (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).

Crews, L. (2010) “10 Best Woody Allen Characters.” www.mademan.com/mm/10-best-woody-allen-characters.html (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).

Crickenberger, H.M. (n.d.) “The lemming.” www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/flaneur.html (accessed Oct. 8, 2010).

Dargis, M. (2011) “Paris (and Cannes) in the spring, through Woody Allen’s eyes.” The New York Times (13 May), C6.

Fallon, L. (2001) “The nebbish king: Spiritual renewal in Woody Allen’s Manhattan.” In K. King (ed.), Woody Allen: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 47–54.

Girgus, S.B. (1993) The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Huart, M.L. (1841) Physiologie du Flâneur. Paris: Aubert.Internet Movie Database (n.d.) “Woody Allen biography.” www.imdb.com/name/

nm0000095/bio (accessed Oct. 7, 2012).Jenks, C. (1995) Visual Culture. London: Routledge.Kruth, P. (1997) “The color of New York: Places and spaces in the films of Martin Scorsese

and Woody Allen.” In F. Penz and M. Thomas (eds.), Cinema and Architecture: Mélies, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia. London: British Film Institute.

Lax, E. (1991) Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: DaCapo Press.Meyer, E. (2000) “Anke Gleber, The art of taking a walk: Flanerie, literature, and film in

Weimar Culture.” Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 2.1. www.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/winter2000/gleberreview.html (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).

Mount Holyoke College (2001) “France in the age of Les Miserables.” www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/mapping-paris/Haussmann.html (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).

Poe, E.A. (2005) “The man of the crowd.” PoeStories.com. http://poestories.com/read/manofthecrowd (accessed Sept. 28, 2012).

Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Spignesi, S.J. (1992) The Woody Allen Companion. Kansas City, KA: Andrews McMeel.Tester, K. (1994) “Introduction.” In K. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur. London: Routledge,

1–21.Wilson, E. (1995) “The invisible Flâneur.” In S. Watson and K. Gibson (eds.), Postmodern

Cities and Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell, 58–79.

16

 . . . it seems as if the only trials that turned out well were those that were destined to do so from the very beginning . . . 

(Franz Kaf ka, The Trial)

Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog (1992) invokes and channels the nightmarish liter-ary worlds of Franz Kaf ka and German expressionism into his critique of moder-nity, from the early twentieth century towards the Holocaust and beyond. Echoes abound from Kaf ka’s Metamorphosis to The Trial, to the mad doctors/murderers Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) and Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1922, 1933, 1960), and especially to Lang’s first sound film M (1931) with its child murderer haunting the streets of Berlin. Brechtian and expressionist alienation techniques – so evident in the fog and shadow symbolism – underscore the decadence of the Weimar Republic and hint at the menace of Nazi fascism lurking in the shadows. In the tradition of the old masters of the expressionist film noir, Allen’s chiaroscuro film exposes lights and shadows in early twentieth-century European cultural history. Haunted and trapped by these shadows from the past, his protagonist, “little (every)man” Kleinman wakes up to a Kaf kaesque nightmare. He is pressured to join a vigilante group’s “plan” to trap a killer who “always strikes at night,” and thereafter Kleinman stumbles into a world where nothing is concrete and every-thing is blurred. We realize “It was no dream” (Kaf ka 1996: 3; henceforth M) when later we hear the ominous warning of a prostitute on “Karl’s Bridge”: “You know what’s lurking in this fog?” A greater understanding of the historical and cultural context, of the textual and cinematic artistic influences on Shadows and Fog, will reveal how Kleinman follows in a line of similar figures who, despite many warnings, hints, and wake-up calls, move along like cogs in the wheel of history, unable to remove themselves from their predicament or to change the

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Lurking in Shadows

Kleinman’s Trial and Defense

Iris Bruce

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course of events. Through his creative adaptation of icons of modern art, Allen exposes the individual’s victimization in twentieth-century capitalist society, its consequences for art and the artist, and at the same time champions the power of art which enables artists to interact across time and place to combat the absurd-ity of modern existence.

Kafkaesque Wake-up Calls and Trials: The Spectre of Anti-Semitism

Throughout Shadows and Fog, Max Kleinman finds himself in an absurd situation, having agreed to be part of a “plan” to capture a murderer, without knowing anything about this “plan,” not even how or why he is connected to it. During the entire film, we see him trying to determine what role he is playing but receiving no answers. Soon it appears there is no longer only “one” plan when different plans pop up with various groups of vigilantes whom Kleinman encounters on his vigil: plans which serve entirely contradictory purposes and help these groups not only to hunt the killer but also to turn individuals against (and murder) each other. All of a sudden, Kleinman finds himself wrongly accused of being the killer. As the mob turns to catch him, and Kleinman starts running – not knowing where to go or whom to trust – he comes face to face with the killer and turns around his life. Within this typically noir plot of crime and detective story, there are many echoes of Kaf ka. For one, critics have drawn attention to the resemblance between Kaf ka’s Prague and the film’s cityscape – appropriately naming it “Kaf kaland” (Spignesi 1992: 227; Fox 1996: 220) – and pointed out that “Kleinman (Woody Allen) is caught up in a Kaf kaesque plan to catch a brutal murderer who strikes randomly and without mercy” (Conard 2004: 20). The film begins in the middle of the night with a Kaf kaesque wake-up call when “little man” Kleinman, a clerk, is rudely awakened by vigilantes and commanded to dress and come with them – a scene which resembles Josef K’s “arrest” in Kaf ka’s The Trial. Moreover, in Allen’s earlier play, “Death” (upon which the film is loosely based), Kleinman seems to be a businessman or salesman like Kaf ka’s Gregor Samsa in The Meta-morphosis, who wakes up as “a monstrous vermin” (ungeheure[s] Ungeziefer) one morning (M: 3). Like Samsa, Kleinman who is “asleep in his bed at two A.M.,” immediately looks at the clock when he wakes up: “My God, it’s two-thirty . .  .  Coming, wait a minute!” (Allen 1975: 41–42; M: 4). In fact, Kleinman’s “wake-up call” contains a plethora of allusions to the trials of both protagonists in The Meta-morphosis and The Trial, many of which evoke the spectre of anti-Semitism stretch-ing from Kaf ka’s lifetime into the future. According to Champlin, “Anti-Semitism is an implicit theme in Allen’s film, which with all else is a parable on mob psy-chology and mob violence as ingredients of anti-Semitism” (1995: 20–21). Kaf ka, too, was concerned with “mob psychology and mob-violence as ingredients of

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anti-Semitism” in his personal life (Bruce 2007: 60–61, 142–143), and like Allen, his focus is on the individual little man’s dehumanization in modern society.

The vermin metaphor in The Metamorphosis is an obvious allusion to an anti-Semitic stereotype, and Joseph K.’s trial also originates in the anti-Semitic environ-ment of the time. The immediate historical context preceding and during the conception of these texts was a time of heightened racism in Europe. In fact, several well-known anti-Semitic trials around the turn of the century left imprints on Kaf ka’s literature, the most famous being the Dreyfus affair.1 Like Dreyfus, Joseph K. faces slanderous charges during his arrest, as the very first sentence of The Trial makes clear: “Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested” (Kaf ka 1998: 3; henceforth T). K. is arrested for a crime he has not committed, spends all his time trying to clear himself of the charges, and in the end dies “Like a dog!” (T: 231) – a racial slur like “vermin.” Moreover, Joseph K.’s ritualistic death in the quarry, when the “long, thin, double-edged butcher knife” is ceremonially passed back and forth over K.’s body before he is slaughtered (T: 230–231), has long been seen as an allusion “to contemporary associations of ritual murder with ritual practice” (Gilman 1995: 102–103, 154–155).2

What was typical of these anti-Semitic trials was the random choice of a victim and the blatant arbitrariness which violated the lives of ordinary, innocent people. Significantly, in real life, none of the accused in these high profile trials actually died a violent death like Joseph K.’s; they were eventually proven innocent by the “gentile” courts and freed. Yet, this outcome was far from certain and the threatening shadows of discrimination lingered. Any Jew could be charged: once arrested or accused, it really did not seem to matter whether an individual was innocent or not, and a whole trial or process of interrogation was set in motion, often for years on end. Given this historical backdrop for Kaf ka’s fiction, it is not surprising that his protagonists are rarely offered a “way out.” For Allen’s protago-nist, on the other hand, the Kaf kaesque world is only the beginning of his journey through twentieth-century cultural history, and Allen eventually makes use of his artistic freedom to allow him to escape.

Despite numerous parallels, Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis literally “becomes” what Kleinman is only “said” to be: a “stupid vermin” or “filthy vermin.” Before Samsa woke up transformed into vermin, he had been a hard-working (sales)man like Kleinman. We hear from Samsa himself that he was always travelling, “constantly seeing new faces,” and that he [had] “no relation-ships that last[ed] or [got] more intimate” (M: 4) According to his mother, he “ha[d] nothing on his mind but the business” (M: 8). He never went out for fun and his only “distraction” was when he was “busy with his fretsaw” carving a “little frame” (M: 8). In “Death,” the play which is the basis for his film, Allen makes the con-nection to Samsa quite explicit, for Kleinman is said to be “too busy with work – and [his] hobbies” (Allen 1975: 52). Like Gregor Samsa, he is unable to stand up to his boss, Mr. Paulson, whom he calls “Your Majesty” and “Your Grace” – and

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his landlady says this shows he is “cring[ing] in front of him like a worm.” Klein-man is obsessed with his promotion, fears he might lose his job, and in the end he does get fired. Samsa, too, is afraid of “losing his job” (M: 9), and the people he works with resemble spineless Kleinmans, “creatures of the boss” (M: 5, “eine Kreatur des Chefs”; my translation). Unlike Gregor Samsa, Kleinman is an amateur magician who seeks escape from time to time through magic and visiting the circus. The circus is a very important metaphor in Shadows and Fog, not only because it offers a means of escape for the public, but also, as we will see later, because it contains an allusion to Wiene’s Caligari film (1920). At the same time, the artists at the circus lead a very unstable existence that is reminiscent of Samsa and Kleinman. When the clown Paul ( John Malkovich) complains that the company is “completely mismanaged,” his girlfriend Irmy (Mia Farrow), the sword swallower, regrets that they have to travel all the time; she wishes they could quit, settle down, and have a baby – to have, in other words, a meaningful exist-ence “where it’s not such a grueling life.” If circus artists find it difficult to keep afloat (and, at this latest performance, hardly anyone showed up and the few that did “sat there stonefaced”), this indicates the soul-destroying experience of capital-ist exploitation that leaves no space for art and spiritual/creative regeneration, and which also characterizes Gregor Samsa’s vermin existence. After his metamorpho-sis, the first thought that crosses his mind is “what a grueling job I’ve picked! Day in, day out – on the road” (M: 3–4). All these individuals are typical victims of capitalist society.

Kaf ka’s vermin metaphor has produced many creative adaptations and com-mentaries, which Stanley Corngold (1973) aptly described as The Commentators’ Despair. What makes the metaphor so adaptable is its ambiguity, for complex is the fact that Kaf ka plays with its literal and figurative meanings. Gregor Samsa is only at the very end of the story explicitly reduced to vermin by his family and called “it” (M: 38): otherwise, for the most part, he seems more human than the humans around him, though he is imprisoned in the body of a vermin. Corngold (1996) therefore proposes that Gregor Samsa exists “in a solitude without speech or intel-ligible gesture, in the solitude of an indecipherable sign” (89), which invites many possible interpretations, something which is also suggested by Walter Benjamin’s (1968) insight that Kaf ka creates “a subject for reflection without end” (122).

Kaf ka’s “trial” metaphor is equally ambiguous, because it means both a trial in the legal sense and also “a ‘process’ of whatever sort” (Corngold 1988: 222). Not only can the trial be read literally as legal proceedings against K., where no cause for the arrest is given, and no explanation, it can also be interpreted figuratively as the “process” of getting to the truth of the matter, which is a trial in itself for Joseph K., as it is for Kleinman. Sometimes, echoes of The Metamorphosis merge with echoes of The Trial, as when Kleinman is described as a “clerk” who works for a “firm” and feels himself imprisoned by the verminlike/spineless mentality of a “clerk.” Kaf ka’s Joseph K. is a clerk who is totally absorbed by his work for a bank. He is also afraid of losing his job and very anxious not to draw attention

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to himself after his “arrest”; like Gregor and Kleinman he is fearful they might want to “damage [his] public reputation, and in particular to undermine [his] posi-tion at the bank” (T: 48).

Yet, Joseph K. is not spineless but is a fighter – K. “had sought to do battle” (T: 64) because his arrest does run counter to all “common” logical expectations, since he is such a correct and hardworking, ordinary person. K., like Kleinman, does not understand what he is up against. This is no ordinary arrest for a crime, because in the original German only the narrator in the very first sentence of the novel reports that K. was “arrested.” Later on, K. is informed by the warden that he was “caught”: “Sie sind ja gefangen” (you’ve been caught, to be sure; my trans-lation).3 In fact, throughout the novel, Kaf ka’s linguistic playfulness satirizes the so-called “legal” proceedings against K. With the original law, the central authority, unknown and out of reach, words take on and carry new and arbitrary meanings, and K. is continually caught in casuistry: the trial is no legal trial, the arrest no real arrest, the representatives of the law do not know the law, they are in charge and not in charge, the “Court of Inquiry” is not a “real Court of Inquiry” (T: 29, 30; my translation).

Linguistic playfulness as a means of coping with absurd situations is typical of Kaf ka and Allen, as all three protagonists accept their new situation and go along with it. Gregor Samsa, for instance, literally “plays” along, as if it is a game, rocking himself out of bed which was “more of a game than a struggle” (M: 7). Until the characters realize the severity of their situation, they are still able to see it as a comedy. Samsa attempts to ignore his condition, tells himself to stay calm, focuses on calming everyone down around him, and even convinces himself that he needs to get to work (as a human-size vermin?). Joseph K. is similarly inclined to see his arrest as “a joke, a crude joke” or “if this was a farce, he was going to play along” (T: 6–7). We know from Max Brod that when Kaf ka read out the first chapter of The Trial, all his friends laughed and he himself laughed so much that sometimes he could not read on (Brod 1954: 156). Consider the following passage, which parodies the prime commentator Josef K.’s loss of authority:

You’re no doubt greatly surprised by this morning’s events?” asked the inspec-tor . . . “Of course,” said K. . . . “of course I’m surprised, but by no means greatly surprised.” “Not greatly surprised?” asked the inspector . . . “Perhaps you misunder-stand me,” K. hastened to add. “I mean–” . . . “I’m of course greatly surprised, but when you’ve been in this world for thirty years and had to make your way on your own, as has been my lot, you get hardened to surprises and don’t take them too seriously. Particularly not today’s.” “Why particularly not today’s?” “I’m not saying I think the whole thing’s a joke, the preparations involved seem far too extensive for that . . . So I’m not saying it’s a joke.” “That’s right,” said the inspector . . . “But on the other hand,” K. continued . . . “it can’t be too important a matter. I conclude that from the fact that I’ve been accused of something but can’t think of the slightest offense of which I might be accused. But that’s also beside the point, the main ques-tion is: Who’s accusing me?” (T: 13–14).

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We have just witnessed K. losing control over language in a humorously ironic verbal exchange. Kaf ka here “uses [verbal] ambiguity intentionally . . . by incor-porating suggestive openings for the questioning of meaning” (Stern 1991: 15). We can see this in the play on the word “surprised,” when the inspector presumes that K. must be “greatly surprised” about his arrest. K. in his response inadvert-ently qualifies this individual utterance and turns it into its opposite meaning, so that “greatly surprised” (with the stress on “surprised”) suddenly becomes “by no means greatly surprised” (with emphasis on “greatly”). This leads to a complete misunderstanding, for the inspector now concludes – mischievously – that K. does not take his arrest seriously at all. The harder he attempts to clarify the situation, the more he gets trapped in his own discourse, as when he wants to show how little he is affected by the events of the morning – “particularly not today’s.” The dialogue between K. and the Inspector is marked by continual reversals, antithesis following antithesis, answers leading away from questions and creating new ones, all of which creates ambiguity – and, suddenly, K. begins to question the meaning of clichéd expressions which he used without thinking, such as whether he was “greatly surprised” or “not greatly surprised” or by considering whether the “arrest” is actually an important matter or not.

Kleinman’s response to his wake-up call is not as philosophical as Joseph K.’s, but it is equally ludicrous. Woken up from a deep sleep, Kleinman is trying hard to concentrate on what is going on around him and all of a sudden his previous worries about his job, his promotion, are not as important as he thought and channeled into an entirely different direction: towards the killer who is about to strike again tonight. Having just been told that the maniac is a strangler, the same speaker continues to tell him that the “Quilty sisters” got killed “because they didn’t lock the door, throats cut from ear to ear,” and Kleinman cannot help but point out the logical inconsistency:

K: You said he was a strangler.–Does it matter how he kills?!

K: What is he getting so angry for? OK, OK.K: There’s no motive?

–So you know about it?K: Well, you know, I hear, now and then, a drib and drab.

–He hears what he wants to hear. Get dressed.. . .

–You’re one of us, aren’t you?K: I’m definitely one of you.K: What do you want me to do?

–We have a plan to trap him.K: What kind of plan?

–It’s Hacker’s. He should tell it. You’ll find out your assignment. Get dressed.

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Like Joseph K., Kleinman has fallen into the language “trap” several times, and his lack of backbone and loss of authority are parodied as well. Kleinman’s next response is equally pathetic, when he insists on “dressing up” in “a suit and a tie” to go out into the night. No one can see him, and he is not doing this just out of habit, but in case he might run into Paulsen, his boss, which is highly unlikely, as Kleinman’s landlady is quick to point out. However, irony of ironies, the unlikely encounter with the boss eventually comes about, and no tie or suit could have prevented the course of events that follow.

From the very outset, Kleinman has no control over anything. As soon as he steps into the street, we see him stumbling along alone, literally and metaphori-cally in a fog, in the middle of the night, trying to find someone who can explain to him what is going on. Like Joseph K., Kleinman finds himself in an absurd no-win situation. Not only has he not been informed what part he is playing in the “plan”; there is no particular place assigned to him where he might be told, nor a particular time when he could find out. In addition, no one knows where he is and he doesn’t know where anyone else is: “How are they going to find me to assign me my instructions? (Allen 1975: 64). Worse, the only one who seemed to know, Hacker, is murdered and takes the secret to the grave. Similarly, the people in charge constantly elude Kaf ka’s Joseph K. When he is summoned to the law courts, they forget to tell K. the time (T: 37); his appearance at court is a fiasco; and the seriousness of the entire proceeding is disrupted by a couple making love in the back rows, right in the open, and totally undermined when K. discovers that the law books of the revered judges are really sordid pornography books (T: 57). Moreover, as in Shadows and Fog, there is a “foglike haze in the room” (T: 49) when Joseph K. is facing the court, and “no direct source of light” where the law offices are located, though it is also “not completely dark” (T: 68). The air is “terribly thick and stifling” (T: 73), so stifling that Joseph K. almost faints and has to be carried out into the open to get fresh air.

Gregor Samsa, Joseph K., and Max Kleinman all try to pretend that their lives continue to be “normal” and logical, when the situations they face are clearly absurd and require radically different responses. They all believe that reason must prevail. Perhaps this is their downfall: that they cannot see or imagine an alterna-tive response. For even Joseph K., the fighter, “is determined to read his Prozeß . . . through the common metaphor of a civil trial,” and the narrator literally “forces” this response on both K. and the reader:

the narrator erects legal thinking as the only legitimate sort of interpretation. He connects an arrest with a charge, as its condition, and defines an arrest in the absence of a charge, according to the logic of civil law, as a comedy parasitic on the norm (Corngold 1988: 222–223, 224).

One could indeed argue that Joseph K.’s faith in reason makes him ill equipped to deal with his situation, and that the same is true of Kleinman, who remains just

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as insistent on understanding his world through logic and reason until he is given an escape route at the end.

As the trial drags on, Joseph K. becomes increasingly desperate and even longs for a compromise. At this stage, he would be happy to bypass the trial altogether, wishing for some kind of advice “that might show him, for example, not how to influence the trial, but how to break out of it, how to get around it, how to live outside the trial. Surely that possibility existed  .  .  .” (T: 214). Yet, Kaf ka did not intend this alternative for him. As the narrator puts it: “it seems as if the only trials that turned out well were those that were destined to do so from the very begin-ning . . .” (T: 120). Kaf ka’s logical consistency and lucid realism in The Metamor-phosis and The Trial leave no such room for escape, and his protagonists – almost prophetically – become victims of their times. In contrast, Woody Allen’s parodic comedy of twentieth-century cultural history, with the advantage of hindsight, sends Kleinman on to face and overcome the shadows of the future.

Kleinman’s Expressionist Nightmare

“There is something frightful in our midst . . . when the shadows lay darkest . . .  Help! Help! It’s he, the killer.” With these exclamations from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, we arrive in the expressionist nightmarish world of Shadows and Fog. The frightful maniac is a focal point not only in Allen’s film, but also in Lang’s M, Wiene’s Dr. Caligari, and Lang’s Mabuse films. In an interview, Woody Allen states how his film is a response to the film noir of the first half of the twentieth century:

Magic is the key factor in Shadows and Fog, because what I wanted to make was a kind of German expressionist movie, where this homicidal figure was wreaking havoc and causing various reactions to him–the scientific reaction, the intellectual reaction, the overreaction by mobs of vigilantes, the religious fanatic reaction–all, all reactions that we use to cope with death and evil and violence, none of which really work out very well (Schickel 2003: 143).

Magic is the key factor in the end, because none of the various reactions to the maniac will eventually prove to be successful in controlling or trapping him. The magician Irmstedt calls him the “evil one,” thereby turning him into a shadowy allegorical figure. Allen parodies in particular the various elusive “plans” to trap him, or the strategies people invent to deal with evil and violence in society. The “plan” is also an important theme in M, Dr. Caligari, the Mabuse films, and the Threepenny Opera. Just as Kaf ka’s “vermin” metaphor invites many associations, so the “plan” in Shadows and Fog takes on further meanings. Initially designed to catch the killer, it evolves into the vigilantes’ plans for gaining power, which, in turn, echo previous plans in the expressionist movies. Here we see various elabo-

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rate plans concocted by the police and the criminal underworld in order to catch the child murderer in M, or the (in)famous plans for power, control, and world domination forged by the masterminds of Drs. Caligari and Mabuse. Moreover, Allen invokes G.W. Pabst’s film of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1930/31), with its corrupt underworld of crime and prostitution, presided over by gangster, rapist, murderer, Mac the Knife. The plans and strategies of Mac the Knife and Peachum, the King of the Beggars, only serve these criminals’ own selfish pleas-ures, power games, and opportunistic gains, while the police look on, since the police chief is corrupt and friends with Mac the Knife. Pitted against each other, all of these ineffectual plans are parodied in the Threepenny Opera song, “The Song about the Insufficiency of Human Striving,” sung by Peachum, the corrupt beggar king who exploits the poor and swindles his way into riches:

So make your little planYes, be a shining lightThen make yourself a second planNone will turn out rightYou see, for this existenceThere’s no man who’s bad enoughStill it’s nice to watch themTrying to be tough

Sure, chase your bit of luckBut no need to run fastThough men always race after itLuck always runs lastYou see, for this existenceMan’s demands are just too toughAll this noisy strivingIs self-deluding guff

Quite fittingly, the melody of this song becomes a musical leitmotif in Shadows and Fog, parodying the corrupt, decadent Weimar world. Seemingly playful on the surface, yet with every repetition increasingly serious and verging on the hysteri-cal, this song is a warning of the impending doom, similar to the haunting Peer Gynt whistle by Grieg, which announces every appearance of the murderer in Lang’s M before the audience even sees him.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s first sound film, M – A City is Searching for a Murderer (1931) is about a famous child murderer, Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), and set in Berlin in the late 1920s. When the murderer in Shadows and Fog first appears as his shadow, the entrance of Beckert comes to mind, because we also initially see him as a shadow (falling on a poster announcing a search for the killer after the latest murder). Beckert, too, is on the loose and hunted by the police as well as by the vigilantes – the criminal underground, which is taking justice into its

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own hands, since they consider the police incompetent. Repeatedly, the film makes fun of the elaborate “plans” and drawings of the police which lead nowhere. It takes a criminal mind to recognize the murderer, and the vigilantes in M are also better organized than in Shadows and Fog and faster at catching the murderer than the police. Ironically, the unfortunate blind beggar who lives in the dark “sees” the killer, while the police cannot see or interpret the clues that are right in front of them – a sign that the justice system is failing the population by missing the obvious clues.

M depicts the paranoia which develops during the Weimar Republic, as well as the population’s need to project fears, uncertainties, and frustrations on a scape-goat before the Nazi rise to power. The film also appears hauntingly prophetic of events to come when we consider the real life story of the main actor, Peter Lorre (pseudonym for Ladislav Löwenstein, 1904–1964), and the subsequent distortion of his famous final monologue by Nazi propaganda. When we first “see” Lorre in the film (and not just his shadow or his reflection in the mirror), he is hunted and running from his persecutors. Someone uses chalk to paint the letter M on his coat so that he cannot escape. For a post-Holocaust reading, the analogy to later Nazi Germany and the star of David as a marker of difference and sign of persecution would be evident. Like Fritz Lang, Lorre was a Jew who emigrated after the Nazis came to power, and continued his career in Hollywood. Ironically, he played along with Lang’s plan to critique the rise of fascism in M, only to witness it being hijacked later by the opposite “plan” and appropriated for anti-Semitic propaganda: the Nazi propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew) (1940), by Fritz Hippler, used “Lorre’s final monologue from M  .  .  .  as an admission by the Jews that they were incapable of controlling their desires and were therefore unfit to live in a ‘moral society’ ” (Younkin, Bigwood, and Cabana 1982).4 In this final, powerful scene, we see Beckert put on trial by the vigilantes, who catch him before the police do. Not denying that he is the murderer, even feeling very sorry for his victims, Beckert makes a passionate plea to the criminal court, pleading not guilty because he could never help himself, describing the torment and terrible emotional suffering he experienced when his inner voice drove him to kill. As Beckert is about to be lynched by the outraged criminals, their hypocritical “justice” system is exposed as well because their leader (Gustav Gründgens), has committed murders and has gotten away with them. At this point the police raid the building, rescue Beckert, and take him to be judged in front of a real court, which pronounces him guilty.

Interestingly enough, in the original lost ending of the film, the last words of accusation – uttered by a victim’s mother – were not directed at the killer Beckert but against the audience: “You, You,” were the last words hanging in the air, with the mother looking into the camera at the viewer (Lang 1931). Blaming society fits with the title of Fritz Lang’s original filmscript, “Mörder unter Uns” (Murder-ers are amongst Us), and is also suggested by the repeated refrain in the film that, “Any man in the street could be the murderer.” A similar paranoia exists in Woody

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Allen’s film, and there is a direct echo of M when one of the vigilantes remarks: “My theory is, it’s someone that we all know .  .  . Someone we work next to or go to church with. He lurks in the shadows, waiting to pounce.” Or, as we read in “Death”: “The killer might be any of us” (Allen 1975: 61). Unlike Lang, Allen does not seek to highlight the complex psychology of the killer but rather the suspicions and fears which set in among the population when there is no plan in place to deal with the situation and no solution in sight.

The nightmarish atmosphere, political instability, restlessness, and anxiety in the Caligari and Mabuse noir films is also channeled into Shadows and Fog. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) tells the nightmarish story of Caligari, hypnotist and man of science, and his research “plan” to gain ultimate control over other human beings. At the circus, Caligari displays his power over Cesare, a somnambulist who can foresee the future. Cesare is Caligari’s scientific experi-ment: he is living proof of the success of Caligari’s research on how far he can control someone who is sleepwalking. In his state of trance, Cesare will do what he would never do when awake, such as kill another human being. In Shadows and Fog, another somnambulist, Spiro, is put on Kleinman’s trail and wrongly sniffs him out as the killer, convinced he has a particular smell, which makes the mob turn on Kleinman, who has to run for his life. Siegfried Kracauer contended that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari film weakened the revolutionary political message of the original script, in which the doctor represented “an unlimited authority that idolizes power as such, and, to satisfy its lust for domination, ruthlessly violates all human rights or values” (1947: 65). The script’s social critique exposed the “doctor” and not the “patient” as mad. The doctor was responsible for the murders, an authoritarian figure whose plan was to exercise absolute control over individu-als and by extension over a whole society that was sent into the trenches during World War I and told to kill. Instead, the adapted filmscript introduced a narrative frame, which begins in the insane asylum, with the fantasies of a mad patient, who is the narrator of the Caligari story. At the end of his story, we return to the original frame with the madman in the asylum finishing his narrative. As a result, Dr. Caligari’s sanity and authority are never questioned by the film; to the con-trary, they are strongly reaffirmed: confident that he has now understood the origin of his patient’s delusions, the doctor is optimistic about curing his psychosis (Regel 1989: 154). Nonetheless, despite the framed narrative, the boundaries between what is real and what is illusion are blurred for most of the film, and the equally blurred boundaries in Shadows and Fog suggest that the ominous uncertain-ties about the unfolding of future political events are important for Woody Allen. It really makes no difference if the story of the mad Dr. Caligari is the product of a deranged mind or not, when the whole Western world is about to become an insane asylum, 13 years later, with Hitler’s rise to power.

In Lang’s Dr. Mabuse films, the impending political nightmare is even more explicit. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. Part I. An Image of the Times and Inferno, Part II. People of the Times (1922) introduces Dr. Mabuse as another hypnotist like Caligari.

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Amazingly prophetic for its time, the film depicts a Dr. Mabuse who can literally control the masses. At the end of Part II, in the disguise of Sandor Weltmann (a magician and master hypnotist at a show where “the probable is the most likely to happen”), Mabuse represents more than a “Weltmann” or “man of the world.” He gambles with the world and has plans to become the world controller. The similarity of the two names Weltmann and Kleinman also immediately signals their difference –one “man” representing or desiring to conquer the world, while the name of the other “man,” Kleinman, suggests the very opposite, the smallness and insignificance of human existence. Allen’s Kleinman is a little man who is not mad, has no illusions of grandeur, and believes in reason and logic. Yet, the fact that Weltmann is said to have powers which make him recruit especially those who resist him most, suggests a parallel with Kleinman in the sense that “little” men like him during the Third Reich were made, of their own volition, to join the plan to conquer the world. In Allen’s Shadows and Fog, Kleinman does not put up great resistance, either, when pressured to join the vigilantes’ plan, which quickly turns destructive and violent. Though Kracauer has been criticized for seeing these noir films as too much of an allegory of the rise of fascism, they obviously contain the elements that later make up the nightmare of the Third Reich: emotional and social instability in the population, the need for escape into excitement or entertainment, the urge to take matters into one’s own hands because the established authorities and institutions fail, the persecution of Others and undesirables. Moreover, in Part II, Mabuse, the murderer, is a mastermind at work trying to subdue the population and himself ending up in complete madness. By reading Allen through the Mabuse films, as we are moving increasingly closer towards National Socialism and the Holocaust, we begin to see the significance of the title Shadows and Fog, with its clear allusion to the Auschwitz documentary, Night and Fog.

Lang’s 1933 film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, pushes the looming cloud further and makes the political danger obvious by showing how Mabuse lives on. The narrative continuity is underlined by the fact that the actor from the 1922 film (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is playing Mabuse again. Though caught and confined to an insane asylum in a state of sheer madness, Mabuse’s plans are all of a sudden beginning to develop a life of their own. Mabuse’s mind is waking up again: he has recently begun to scribble with his hands in the air and, when he is given paper, he becomes increasingly coherent and writes out plans for crimes which are carried out not only by criminals but also by ordinary people who are hired for pay and do not question anything. This “wake-up call” also produces no anxiety or concern: not even the doctor recognizes the danger to the public and becomes fascinated with Mabuse himself. Mabuse, then, has been gathering followers who, despite his madness, think he is a genius and have been waiting for this moment to come. He seems to be waking up at exactly the right political moment. Again, it is a medical doctor who is enthralled with Mabuse and protects him.

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Those who follow Mabuse blindly never see him, never meet him – he is always a shadowy figure, a figment of their imaginations in his lifetime and therefore no one even notices his death. Nor does anyone ever try to find out if it is indeed Mabuse’s own voice that speaks to them, and even if people knew, it would make no difference that the voice is really the voice of his doctor, the psychiatrist who carries on his legacy (the “Testament” – his “will”) after Mabuse’s death because he believes in his brilliant mind. Thus, those who are part of the “plan” never doubt who is in charge and blindly follow instructions until one average young man in love redeems his humanity through the love of a woman by questioning Mabuse’s orders, in the process of which the two almost get killed. Their personal trial ends when, with the help of the same police officer as in Lang’s M (Inspector Lohmann), they foil Mabuse’s plans, conquer the killer mind, and reestablish order.

Shadows of the Holocaust and Beyond

Allen’s echoes of European cultural history ultimately point to the Holocaust. This is obvious not only in the film’s title with its allusion to Alain Resnais’ Ausch-witz documentary, but also through the prophetic foreshadowing of the expres-sionist noir films. Their nightmarish world, with bouts of reason and insanity alternating and merging, was replicated in European societies on a large scale. Albert Camus’ phrase in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that it “all started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish, or impotence reigns” (1955: 23), aptly describes the world leading up to the Holocaust.

In contrast to Kaf ka’s often humorously absurd world is the paranoia which sets in amongst the population in Woody Allen’s film. Kleinman’s initial suspicion, when told about the vigilantes taking matters into their own hands, ultimately turns out to be correct, but he did not heed the “wake-up call” then. His remark at the time, “This is police business” was countered by “They’ve had their chance. We’re taking it into our own hands,” to which Kleinman replies “That’s scary.” Nonetheless, he goes along with the “plan.” Moreover, once these citizens have taken the law into their own hands to trap the killer, very soon there is not only a killer on the loose but different groups of vigilantes are seeking to assert their power. Fox rightly argues: “As in Lang’s film [M], the motif of the Citizens’ Com-mittee as an alternative to the orthodox legal process, demonstrates how anti-Semitism, vigilantism and hysteria may provide the seeds for extreme political acts” (1996: 222). The Weimar Republic saw not only different factions going after each other, but political groups like the communists and social democrats were internally divided amongst themselves and formed splinter parties rather than united fronts. In the film as in real life, we see different groups and factions fight-ing each other and losing sight of their goals. Thus Hacker is killed not by the

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murderer but by “someone from the other faction.” “So quickly it becomes violent?” Kleinman asks. He is told that “Hacker asked for it. He was stubborn and hot-headed, despite the fact that his plan wasn’t working.” The reason that these groups are developing different plans, even killing one another, is because “there’s disagreement on how to handle things.” In the midst of all this unrest (echoing the 1933 Mabuse film), this is the perfect timing for the mastermind/murderer to appear and thrive, as was the case during the 1930s: Hitler and his consorts had been lurking in the shadows all along, waiting for their opportunity to pounce.

A first sign for Kleinman that things seem to be getting out of hand is when the news spreads that the Mintz family has been arrested. Here “the parallel to the Nazi terror is inescapable” (Blake 2005: 107). They are clearly Jewish, because the father is said to be a mohel who performs circumcisions and they are called “social undesirables” and accused of being involved with the killings. This is the only time Kleinman speaks up, because he knows them to be “lovely people.” When Kleinman goes to the chief of police to discuss the Mintz family, he is told “there may be a connection between all these killings and certain well-poisoning incidents.” These charges are old anti-Semitic imputations that all of a sudden conveniently resurface. The chief of police knows very well they are not true, but he admits “there’s pressure on [him]” to act, and his remark, “It’ll probably never go any deeper than the more orthodox element,” reveals that he considers directed/channeled racism a necessary political measure to satisfy the mob. His reassurance to Kleinman that he and others like him will not be affected sounds hollow: “No one lumps you in with the Mintzes. You’re fine.” These are empty words, because the police have no control over the crowds and the vigilante mob mentality. Allen here distinguishes and links the insane racism of the mob and opportunistic, politically driven forms of “controlled” anti-Semitism.

Soon Kleinman himself is accused of being the killer and hunted by the crowd and the authorities alike. Like Joseph K., Kleinmann is put on trial by an equally dubious court which has no legal basis, because the vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands. There had been isolated evidence of paranoia before, which Kleinman dismissed, when someone early on took one “suspicious” black hair from his body and wanted it tested in a lab. Kleinman responded with: “Look, let’s not get crazy . . . The trick is to remain logical” (Allen 1975: 47). Only when the mob sicks “Spiro, the great clairvoyant” on Kleinman to sniff him out does he realize the danger. Here we have the racial anti-Semitism about the particular smell of the Jew (Gilman 1995: 150), which Allen turns into a funny scene, as Kleinman falls into the “trap” of the pseudoscience of Caligari or Mabuse. He who is “always so damn logical” and wants to believe that “we’re all reasonable, normal, rational people” is nearly lynched by the mob. The fact that Allen is exploiting this scene for its comic potential again points to the ultimate difference between Allen, Kaf ka, and the Mabuse films: the difference lies in the “nearly,” for Allen’s protagonist is allowed to escape. At this point in Kleinman’s life, though,

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Woody Allen also draws on Kaf ka’s vermin metaphor again, reading the vermin through the lens of the Holocaust. After Kleinman has been fired from his job, his fellow worker, Simon Carr, who receives the promotion instead of Kleinman, reveals to him that his boss called Kleinman a “kind of cringing slimy vermin, more suited to extermination than to life on this planet.” Allen is not alone in ascribing this prophetic reading to Kaf ka; as George Steiner (1970) argued in Lan-guage and Silence, Kaf ka was “possessed of a fearful premonition” and

saw, to the point of exact detail, the horror gathering . . . Gregor Samsa’s metamor-phosis . . . was to be the literal fate of millions of human beings. The very word for vermin, Ungeziefer, is a stroke of tragic clairvoyance; so the Nazis were to designate the gassed” (121).

Allen also underscores the inevitability of fascism and World War II through the playful use of Kurt Weill’s “Cannon Song” – another Brechtian alienation device and foreshadowing of the future:

John was there and Jim was tooAnd Georgie made sergeant in short orderThe army doesn’t give a fig who you areAnd they marched us North to the borderSoldiers live under the cannon’s thunderFrom the Cape to Cooch BeharIf it should rain one nightAnd they should chance to sightAn unfamiliar raceDark or fair of faceThey might just chop them upTo make their steak tartar . . . John is buried and Jimmie’s deadAnd they shot poor George for lootingBut blood is still blood redAnd the army is still recruitingSoldiers live underThe cannon’s thunder . . . [refrain].

Though the Brechtian lyrics to Weill’s music do not appear in Allen’s film, the educated viewer will remember that the army’s indifference to racism, looting, and killing is parodied by the song, as well as the inevitability of future wars. Allen also makes the Mabuse threat reach well into our present contemporary world. At the beginning of Shadows and Fog, lost in the fog, Kleinman is already wonder-ing if this, perhaps, may be intentional: “Unless . . . this is part of the plan. Maybe they have me under surveillance.” Here we have an allusion to Lang’s last Mabuse film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), in which the shadows return: we are

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told our “future lies in the shadow” and “the dark cloud is all powerful .  .  . No, it’s no cloud. It’s a face. The face of a dead man – no, he’s alive. Dr. Mabuse.” This last reincarnation of Mabuse shows a new mastermind at work – another doctor, Professor Jordan, who has hypnotic control over his victims. Drawing on the legacy of the Nazis, Jordan is using old Gestapo plans for an elaborate system of surveillance whose thousand eyes no one can escape. Professor Jordan is the post-Holocaust Mabuse, whose drive for power “knows no limits.” The latest plan is nuclear annihilation – he feels the temptation, he says, with the push of a button to “throw this rotten world into chaos and rule.” “Where’s the boundary?” is the question asked in the film. If what we are seeing is the temptation for a mad mind, with a push of a button to destroy the world, where indeed is the line between madness and sanity? How do we recognize and trap the “evil one”? When Mabuse starts, in the 1933 film, writing in the insane asylum, his thoughts are said to travel in the “same criminal channels” as before. The doctor admires the fact that his writing “is based on logic and worked out to the minutest detail” and exclaims: “What a genius this fellow was!” In Allen’s film, his doctor repeats the worn-out cliché that “Sometimes the very impulses that cause a maniac to murder inspire him to highly creative ends,” while the play highlights his scientific obsession with the killer – he wants to have “a one hundred percent understanding of precisely what he is in every aspect” (Allen 1975: 66). The serious man of science is satirized here for believing in a biological, scientific cause of evil. He plans to show that science can get to the bottom of what makes the killer tick. And, convinced that an autopsy will reveal “chaos” inside the killer’s brain, he is determined to find out “where insanity stops and evil begins.” To this, the killer simply replies: “So many questions,” putting an end to them by killing the doctor, and therefore, symbolically, annihilating the scientific optimism which the doctor represents. The ironic moral is that “real” science gets annihilated, while pseudoscience triumphs.

It further stands to “reason” that Kleinman responding with logic to the “evil one” is obviously not very effective, either, which is parodied throughout the film and also in the play: “I’m a man who likes to know which way is up and which way is down and where’s the bathroom” (Allen 1975: 72). Political solutions are equally unsuccessful when mobs of vigilantes get out of hand and become involved in infighting and killing each other instead of finding the killer. A spiritual/religious solution is also denied in the film: religion as an institution is represented as corrupt, and Kleinman’s repeated denials that he believes in God echo a modernist position best formulated by Eugene Ionesco in a 1957 essay on Kaf ka: “This theme of man lost in a labyrinth, without a guiding thread, is basic  .  .  . Yet if man no longer has a guiding thread, it is because he no longer wants to have one. Hence his feeling of guilt, of anxiety, of the absurdity of history” (qtd. in Esslin 1961: 345).

This mad, decadent world – “a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, [in which] man feels an alien, a stranger” (Camus 1955: 6) – is appropriately

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represented through the metaphors of the whorehouse and the circus. The brothel is the place which renders Kleinman completely impotent, without any agency. It is the “home” of doctors Caligari and Mabuse, the place where they forge their mad scientific plans which “foreshadow” Dr. Mengele types of experiments: in Shadows and Fog, Mengele’s fascination with identical twins is parodied in the whorehouse through a customer’s fetishism with “identical whores.” The brothel is also the place where, as one of the prostitutes remarks, “they all look so inno-cent and dignified when they walk in” and “then you hear the things they want you to do!” Ironically, the individuals frequenting the brothel are similar to the dignified judges in Kaf ka’s Trial whose law books turn out to be sordid pornog-raphy books (T: 57). The best customers are the university students who are paying the whores’ rent, and, ironically, they represent the future intellectual elite of a civilized culture. They readily admit that they find the whorehouse atmos-phere “a lot more stimulating than university,” where they learn “facts. Nothing but facts. Logic  .  .  .  and mathematics and how to become depressed.” But the whorehouse as an outlet for their intellectual and personal needs denigrates their “stimulating” existential discussions and turns the place into a circus, a perverse comedy which allows the students to escape by indulging in stimulating “meta-phors of perversion,” as student Jack puts it. There are no boundaries here, no limits to anyone’s fantasies of perversion. The highest educational institution is failing the next generation to prepare them for the shadows of the future; the brothel is doing far more to help them see through the fog.

In the end, Allen comes to Kleinman’s defense by allowing him to escape from this mad, absurd world. Kleinman is like Kaf ka’s Karl Rossman, one of the rare exceptions in Kaf ka’s work, who, after many trials, is allowed to enter a theater which welcomes everyone, the Theater of Oklahoma at the end of the Amerika novel. For his part, Kleinman is invited to join the circus. Typically, though, for Kaf ka’s protagonist the seemingly happy ending soon looks suspicious when Karl’s train is riding through an absolutely forlorn landscape with wild, crushing waterfalls and dark, threatening, jagged mountains and cliffs whose tips cannot be seen because they are covered by ominous clouds. Allen, on the other hand, uses his artistic power to influence the course of events for his protagonist in the opposite direction: there are no such ominous signs in the sky for Kleinman. The circus, for the amateur magician-artist Kleinman, signifies a world of art where different laws apply, where the world can be turned upside down without becoming perverse and menacing, and magic can still happen. As Woody Allen puts it:

And finally, in the end, the only thing that really saves him is a magician with a magic trick, because short of a magical solution there does not seem to be any way out of this terrible existence that we live in . . . all the other solutions I see around me – religious solutions, scientific solutions, intellectual solutions – you know, every-thing is too little too late and not good enough . . . (Schickel 2003: 143–144).

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The pay at the circus is “very low” and life will be “grueling,” but it will be meaningful because Kleinman is choosing a real circus where he can perfect his art, to play his own part finally to contain and combat the unpredictable, irrational, absurd, deviant, or decadent whorehouse of life. Kleinman does not get to this stage without deserving it, without performing at least a few small heroic acts. First, he faces the killer and saves Irmy, who would have been the next victim. Then, with the help of the great Irmstedt, the circus magician, he catches the maniac once, not for long, but long enough for Irmstedt to ask Kleinman, the “amateur magician,” to become his assistant, because “Nothing good’s gonna happen until we catch him.” “Your tricks didn’t stop the killer,” one of the circus hands objects, to which Irmstedt counters, “But we checked his reins for a moment. Perhaps we even frightened him.” Kleinman knows there really is no better alter-native for him to becoming the magician’s assistant via joining the circus; still, he struggles hard with himself because he feels so deeply that “at heart [he is] a clerk,” conditioned by the rules and codes of social behavior that society imposes on its citizens, with logic and reason telling him that he should really “go back to town and join real life.” Yet, this same Kleinman, who was so adamant before that he could not “make the leap of faith necessary to believe in [his] own existence,” has just, after all, for the first time in his life, decided to leap. Granted, this was no leap of faith but a leap into a magic mirror, and, true again, the killer shattered the fairy tale mirror almost immediately. Still, Kleinman stood his ground and performed his first act of resistance, standing up to the maniac and stopping him in his tracks, if ever so briefly. With his decision to join the circus, Kleinman shows real agency and turns his life around. Leaving behind the world of Kaf ka, the expressionist films, and the Holocaust, Kleinman chooses to embrace the world of illusion, fairy tale, and dreams for the much needed freedom that art can offer. “Everybody loves his illusions,” are Irmstedt’s words of farewell. “Loves them? They need them. Like they need the air.”

Notes

1 The major trials were the Tisza Eszlar trial in Hungary (1882–1883), the Dreyfus affair in France (1895), the Hilsner case in Bohemia (1899–1917), and the Beilis trial (1911–1913) in Russia. In 1895 Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), an officer in the French army, was wrongly accused and convicted of spying for the Germans. His case dragged on for years, with another trial in 1899 and Dreyfus’ final exoneration in 1906. Just a few months before The Metamorphosis was written, a Prague newspaper reported on the backlash of the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial on the Jewish population: “Yet again the spectre of ritual murder is traversing the lands, spreading rumours and whispering into the ears of the people: the Jews are draining our blood. With giant steps the bloody fairy tale crosses borders, speaks all languages and knows all the hidden paths” (Selbstwehr, Mar. 22, 1912: 1). See Bruce 2007: 18–20, 57–64.

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2 Cf. also Band (1980: 179–181); Robertson (1985: 12); Bruce (2007: 57–65). Ritual murder or blood libel refers to accusations which evoked the old medieval anti-Semitic charge that Jews needed Christian blood for their Passover rituals and slaughtered Christian children to obtain it. Because of this popular racist myth, frequently in Eastern Europe murders were committed around Easter/Passover time, so that the Jews would be blamed for the crime.

3 See Franz Kaf ka, Der Proceß (1994). The editor, Max Brod, had replaced “caught” with “arrested” in previous German editions, perhaps because it seemed more logical since there was no need to catch K. But by imposing this kind of logic on the text, Brod also eliminated the associative links and the play on the word “caught,” which allows the warder to clarify further that “catching” K. does not mean they had to search for him.

4 For the original quote see Beyer (1988: 54). Cf. also Hofmann (1998: 31).

Works Cited

Allen, Woody (1975) “Death.” In Woody Allen, Without Feathers. New York: Random House, 39–100.

Allen, Woody (n.d.) “Shadows and Fog script – dialogue transcript.” www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/s/shadows-and-fog-script-transcript.html (accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

Band, Arnold (1980) “Kaf ka and the Beiliss affair.” Comparative Literature 32, 168–183.Benjamin, Walter (1968) “Franz Kaf ka. On the tenth anniversary of his death” [1934]. In

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 111–140.

Beyer, Friedemann (1988) Peter Lorre. Seine Filme – sein Leben. Munich: Wilhelm Heyne.Blake, Richard A. (2005) Street Smart. The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee. Lex-

ington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.Brod, Max (1954) Über Franz Kaf ka. Frankfurt: Fischer.Bruce, Iris (2007) Kaf ka and Cultural Zionism. Dates in Palestine. Madison, WI: University

of Wisconsin Press.Camus, Albert (1955) The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. J. O’Brian. New York:

Vintage.Champlin, Charles (1995) “Woody Allen: The director at work.” In Charles Champlin and

Brian Hamill, Woody Allen at Work. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 10–23.Conard, Mark T. (2004) “God, suicide, and the meaning of life in the films of Woody

Allen.” In Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble (eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy. You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong? Chicago: Open Court, 7–23.

Corngold, Stanley (1973) The Commentators’ Despair: The Interpretation of Kaf ka’s Metamor-phosis. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press.

Corngold, Stanley (1988) Franz Kaf ka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Corngold, Stanley (1996) “Kaf ka’s The Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of the metaphor.” In S. Corngold (ed.), The Metamorphosis by Franz Kaf ka. New York: Norton, 79–107.

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Esslin, Martin (1961) The Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.Fox, Julian (1996) “Shadows and Fog.” In Julian Fox, Woody. Movies from Manhattan. Wood-

stock, NY: Overlook Press, 217–225.Gilman, Sander L. (1995) Franz Kaf ka, The Jewish Patient. New York: Routledge.Hofmann, Felix and Stephen D. Youngkin (1998) Peter Lorre. Portrait des Schauspielers auf

der Flucht. Munich: Belleville.Kaf ka, Franz (1994) Der Proceß. Frankfurt: Fischer.Kaf ka, Franz (1996) The Metamorphosis. Ed. S. Corngold. New York: Norton. Abbreviated

M.Kaf ka, Franz (1998) The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text. Trans. Breon

Mitchell. New York: Schocken. Abbreviated T.Kaf ka, Franz (2004) Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared. Trans. Michael Hofmann. New

York: New Directions.Kracauer, Siegfried (1947) From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Lang, Fritz (1931) M. [Film.]The Criterion Collection: Restored special edition.Regel, Helmut (1989) “Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari.” In Günter Engelhard, Horst Schäfer,

and Walter Schobert (eds.), 111 Meisterwerke des Films. Das Video Privatmuseum. Frank-furt: Fischer, 153–156.

Robertson, Ritchie (1985) Kaf ka: Judaism, Politics and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen. A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Spignesi, Steven J. (1992) The Woody Allen Companion. Kansas City, KA: Andrews and

McMeel.Steiner, George (1970) Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum.Stern, David (1991) Parables in Midrash. Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature. Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Youngkin, Stephen D., Bigwood, James, and Cabana, Raymond G. (eds.) (1982) The Films

of Peter Lorre. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press.

17

I’m a serious person, a disciplined worker, interested in writing, interested in litera-ture, interested in theater and film.

(Woody Allen, qtd. in Lax 2001: 155)

Comedy, like water, always finds its own level – as Shakespeare knew best. For the groundlings, there were physical buffoonery, “vulgar” double entendres, com-pounded insults and beratements, as well as the antics of rustics and clowns; for those with more refined tastes and better educations, there were often now-recondite literary allusions and witty, subtle, and cerebral wordplay. Both kinds of entertainment (and more) were provided, often in abundance and in the same play. This is the promise that was exemplified in the title As You Like It: each viewer could be assured that, for the price of a ticket, he or she would find whatever type of comedy was most likely to make him or her laugh. It is, however, a claim that can be made on behalf of remarkably few modern comedies, whether on stage or screen – and a standard to which few playwrights and screenwriters even aspire. Neil Simon provides a reliably “good night out” for those who are Broadway-bound in search of unchallenging fare; Noel Coward reliably amuses those with a taste for witty exchanges among the “Mahtini, dahling?” subset of the haute bourgeoisie. Even the great comedians of the silent era knew and reliably played to the particular tastes of a popular audience: hence the sentimentalities of Chap-lin’s Little Tramp, the sad-sack stoicism of Buster Keaton, the physical imperil-ments of Harold Lloyd, the knockabout shtick of Hal Roach’s Keystone Kops. The audiences for Porky’s (and its sequels and its legion of imitators) or Dumb and Dumber or Animal House know – and find – exactly and reliably the entertain-ments that they seek. Woody Allen’s films, however, are quite a different matter. Certainly, his early comedies have no shortage of slapstick humor and sexual

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Woody Allen and the Literary Canon

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innuendos; yet often, especially in his subsequent films, there can be found also a rich allusiveness and a wide-ranging erudition that are unrivaled among filmmak-ers of his time. His non-comic films confirm and deepen this unique intellectual intertextuality, often evoking literary works of the existentialist and absurdist traditions.

Nevertheless, an exact assessment of Woody Allen’s relationship to the literary canon is more problematic than it might initially appear – not least because of inconsistencies within his own self-presentation in interviews and his own writ-ings. At times, he frankly discusses literary authors with remarkable sophistica-tion and aplomb, articulating a post-Sartre, post-Kaf ka, post-Beckett worldview and aesthetic, as in many of the interviews cited herein. Particularly in the later years of his career, however, he has preferred to present himself as a street-smart “regular guy” from a Brooklyn blue-collar family – one who was thrown out of college during his first year, finds reading a chore rather than a pleasure (and does it mainly “to keep up with my dates”), ardently follows his favorite basketball team on television, plays jazz, and drinks beer (see, for example, Shickel 2003: 153). When asked in 2011 about his “top five books  .  .  .  that have made most impact on him as a film-maker and comic writer,” he included only one widely known literary work – J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye which “always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – 18 or so” (Gerber 2011). The others were Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe (1946), a memoir by a jazz clarinetist of that era; The World of S.J. Perelman (2000), an anthology of writings by “the funniest human being in my lifetime, in any medium,” to which Allen himself contributed the introduction; Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis (1880), about which Allen remarked that “Because it’s a thin book, I read it[; i]f it had been a thick book, I would have discarded it”; and Elia Kazan: A Biography by Richard Schickel (2005) (Gerber 2011). Yet, just three weeks later, following the release of Allen’s Midnight in Paris, his most overtly literary and allusive film since Love and Death (1975), the New York Times saw fit to publish an article “decoding” the film’s “historical truths,” its many references to “the enormously talented cast of expatriates and bohemi-ans that peopled Jazz Age Paris” including “[Ernest] Hemingway . . . [Gertrude] Stein[,] . . . Picasso’s mistress[,] . . . Salvador Dali, T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Jose-phine Baker, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and others,” all of whom figure in its plot (Berger 2011: C7). One month later, noting that Berger’s “crib sheet to the ‘Mid-night in Paris’ pantheon . . . still ranks highest among the most e-mailed items in the movie section,” A.O. Scott wrote a lengthy analysis of such cinematic inter-textuality as a (supposedly) recent trend. Allen’s film, he claimed, “wears its cul-tural baggage lightly and treats the great writers who flit across the screen less as touchstones than as imaginary friends for its hero” – adding that “his enthusi-asm for high art has always filtered snobbery through an essentially democratic temperament, and there is nothing obscure or recondite in the name dropping” in his latest film (Scott 2011: AR 12).

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Often, Allen’s less-than-literary self-characterization reflects the stand-up come-dian’s honed sense of playing to the specific audience/readership of the venue in which his comments will appear; it is also the conjurer’s age-old trick of “misdirec-tion,” his final topic in Schickel’s interview (Schickel 2003: 169, 173). Certainly, his satirical animus against pompous pseudo-intellectuals has long been apparent (most famously in Annie Hall, when Allen’s character brings in the real Marshall McLuhan to correct a pretentious moviegoer standing in line trying to impress his date by discussing the scholar’s theories); furthermore, Allen’s own public persona as a comic has long been relentlessly self-deprecating, a by-now-intuitive tendency that is perhaps exacerbated in literary matters by his status as an autodidact – a trait shared by working class English authors Joe Orton, Alan Sillitoe, and David Storey, among others. As the census prepared by Andrew Gothard (Chapter 18 in this volume) clearly reveals, the extensiveness of Allen’s allusions throughout his films, fiction, and interviews from over five decades far surpasses what has been widely assumed. A confident, knowing allusiveness, whether more or less subtly apparent, can be found in both the content and the structure of many of his works and in numerous interviews over five decades; yet alongside this, there persists a counter-tendency – equally strong – towards denying that he is an intellectual in any sense of the term. Such self-deprecation often carries over into his com-ments assessing his films as well – eventually provoking an interviewer’s profane outburst that seems no less appropriate to Allen’s disparagement of his literary knowledge:

[SCHICKEL:] I think you’re full of shit about this.[ALLEN:] Well, I . . . I . . . as long as long as people know how I feel about them

(Shickel 2003: 163).

These rival tendencies within Allen’s self-representation have long been not only an essential trait of his comic persona but also a recurrent characteristic of his creative genius and an underassessed facet of his personality.

From the outset, Allen’s affinity for allusions to and quotations from the literary canon was manifest, made all the funnier in their often incongruous contexts. Amid the standard comic alarums, slamming doors, and madcap chase scenes of What’s New Pussycat? (Clive Donner, 1965), Allen’s first feature film as both script-writer and actor, a character pauses in mid-farce to declaim a line from Hamlet. Even more surprisingly, there is an off hand if arcane allusion to German philoso-pher and playwright Friedrich Schiller. Similarly, near the end of Sleeper (1973), an excerpt of dialogue from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire gets interpolated, with Allen reprising famous lines of Blanche Dubois (including, inevitably, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”) and Diane Keaton responding with those of Stanley Kowalski, mumbled in the style for which Marlon Brando was by then renowned. Asked to identify assorted photo-graphs from the twentieth century by his twenty-second-century captors, Allen’s

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character describes F. Scott Fitzgerald as “a romantic writer loved by English majors [and] nymphomaniacs”; he also deems Rod McKuen a serious influence on American poetry – a line that would have drawn laughter even then.

Sleeper (1973, cowritten with Marshall Brickman) is the first Allen film to have its premise based on a single identifiable work of literature: H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakens, which is also known by its original title, When the Sleeper Wakes. Like Allen’s character Miles Monroe, Wells’s protagonist Graham awakens from a 200-year slumber to discover a civilization whose technologies, values, customs, and mores have been utterly transformed from those of the world he knew – though not for the better. The film soon diverges from Wells’s plot, however, in that Graham discovers that he owns more or less the entire earth, though the exact means by which this occurred remains unclear (it somehow involves multinational corporations, legacies, and tax laws as well as astute and unregulated corporate management). Miles, however, remains only a (former) health food store-owner/ English major/clarinet player who never awoke from minor surgery – an ordinary schlemiel who is anxiety-laden, beleaguered, and baffled by a world that he can neither escape, understand, nor control. Like Graham, he finds himself caught up in a plot by an antigovernment resistance movement and aligned with a female collaborator (Diane Keaton as Luna Schlosser) – although she is not a romantic interest in Wells’s novel, as she is in Allen’s version. Other tropes that the screen-play shares with Wells’s novel include its telescreen newscasts, instantly tailored clothing designed by computers, sliding doorways, gliding cars, and austere inte-rior design. Wells’s remote “Pleasure Cities” have been replaced with the in-home “orgasmatron” and metallic orbs that are fondled for pleasure. Eventually, Graham fights the earth’s governing council of oligarchs who rule, oppressively and cor-porately, in his name – and seems to die in airborne combat when the novel ends; Miles gets to kiss Luna instead, whether the insurgency succeeds or fails. Accord-ingly, Sleeper establishes the precedent for Woody Allen’s unique assimilation of literary texts throughout his career as a filmmaker: clearly he respects his sources, but he is equally willing to diverge from them whenever his own creativity demands it. As in a jazz rendition of a long-familiar melody, the baseline of the original remains there, but the improvisational variations make it inimitably, creatively his own.

Crossing the Literary Divide

Some of us are real, some are not.(The Purple Rose of Cairo)

Although described on its title page as simply “A Romantic Comedy,” Play It Again, Sam (stage, 1969; film, Herbert Ross, 1972) not only reinforced Woody Allen’s

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typical comic persona but also introduced a comic premise that would become increasingly important – and increasingly complex – in his later films: the inter-relationship between literature and/or film and actual life. Its protagonist, Allan Felix, is described in the opening stage directions in terms that effectively define its creator’s stage and screen persona:

a slight, bespectacled young man . . . [whose] mind is a hyperactive mass of prepos-terously neurotic contradictions that make the world a little too much for him. He is nervous, shy, insecure, and has been in and out of psychotherapy for years (Allen 1969: 5–6).

Recently divorced by his wife, he proves romantically inept as he tries to reenter the dating scene at the age of 28. He is, in fact, an intellectual who “daydreams of someday doing something important in literature or film. [He] daydreams a lot . . .” (Allen 1969: 6). Those reveries, like those of any true cinephile, are shaped by the images and narratives of the cinematic canon – to such an extent that Humphrey Bogart enters his life (the first of many such crossovers that will occur in Allen’s oeuvre) and offers Allan counsel about his relationships with women. Importantly, it is the trenchcoated Bogart-as-character who provides such advice to the lovelorn modern man, as opposed to Bogart-the-actor or Bogart-the-man with a private life of his own; his appearances are explicitly related to his roles in Casablanca (the final sequence of which begins the film adaptation) and The Maltese Falcon (in the stage version). “Bogart’s a perfect image,” Allan remarks; as a cin-ematic and/or literary character, he transcends time, preserved and immortalized on screen, never aging and forever heroic. In the screenplay’s opening lines, Allan notes that “I’m not like that. I never was. I never will be. It’s strictly the movies.” Like the opening views of him gazing raptly at the images on the screen – which are reflected in the lenses of his eyeglasses – this statement concisely and brilliantly defines the relationship between film (or literature) and life.

Such disparity between the heroic past and the devalued present has been a consistent preoccupation throughout much twentieth-century fiction and poetry, though rarely explored on stage or film. As Lily the caretaker’s daughter famously remarks in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” ( Joyce 2006: 154); they are men of words rather than heroically self-sacrificing deeds, Allan Felix rather than Humphrey Bogart. In words that would equally well fit Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy, Felix is characterized as a “writer of articles and reviews . . . for a little intellectual [daily]” who “earns a decent living” but is “shy [and] insecure” (Allen 1969: 6); Joyce’s protagonist stands in similarly stark contrast to Michael Furey, his wife’s long-dead teenaged lover who sacrificed his life out of selfless devotion to her but remains forever young and ardent in her memory, in contrast to her self-consciously inferior, aging, intel-lectual husband who “had never felt that way himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love” ( Joyce 2006: 194). In much the same way,

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T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock contrasts himself with figures of the heroic past, concluding that he is neither a Prince Hamlet nor a John the Baptist, “nor was meant to be”; indecisive, self-conscious about his body, shy, forlorn, and sexually frustrated, he has neither friends nor a heroic cinematic counselor to intervene on his behalf. The differences between these forlorn antecedents and Allan Felix are obvious: the latter is fundamentally comic in ways that the former are not. Like the onscreen personae of such great silent-screen comics as Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, Allen’s Allan is besieged by even simple objects: a handheld hairdryer, a plate of salad, a phonograph record, and a chair provide the basis for uproarious physical shtick. Yet, beyond the jokes about psychoanalysis, sedatives, neurosis, and sexuality, the sense of devaluation remains; pathos gets adroitly redacted through farce.

A similar “intervention” from the world of literature into the world of modern life provides the premise of Mighty Aphrodite (1995), wherein a chorus from Greek tragedy comments on and offers warnings about the life of New York sportswriter Lenny Weinrib, linking his and his wife’s adoption of a son to the story of Oedipus. Cassandra, Laius, Jocasta, and blinded Oedipus appear with the chorus in a Greek amphitheater (which Lenny can wander into), but the rag-clad Greek figures also appear in scenes set in contemporary New York. Tiresias, however, appears as a blind beggar in the New York streets, dressed in modern attire. In the latter half of the film, the chorus becomes a Broadway-style chorus, though still in its ancient attire; it performs a rendition of Cole Porter’s romantic “You Do Something to Me” and ends with a jitterbug-style performance of Fishe, Goodwin, and Shay’s “When You’re Smiling.” The plot itself is quasi-Oedipal, as Lenny seeks the truth about the parentage of his adopted son, Max, whose mother (Linda Ash, played by Mira Sorvino) turns out to be a prostitute and porn actress. Eventually, he has sex with the mother of his son – and fathers a child whose parentage he never discovers. Unlike Oedipus and Jocasta, neither Lenny nor Linda ultimately finds out the truth of his or her parenthood: he is never told that he is the father of her child, and she never learns that she is in fact the mother of his adopted son, whose photo he shows her. Oedipal conflicts are thus avoided for all concerned – as are the dire consequences of the ancient disclosures. The resolution features a modern-day deus ex machina when Linda’s future husband arrives via helicopter.

The premise of Play It Again, Sam is effectively reversed in Allen’s short story “The Kugelmass Episode”: instead of a character entering “actual” life, a “real” person enters the world of a classic novel (Allen 1980: 41–55). Sidney Kugelmass, a professor of humanities at City College of New York, finds himself transposed via magic into the world of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – and has an affair with Emma Bovary herself. At the same time, he appears as a character in stu-dents’ copies of the novel. Later, when she accompanies him on a shopping trip to modern-day New York City, she temporarily disappears from the novel entirely. At the end of the story, Professor Kugelmass disappears permanently into an obsolete Spanish textbook, endlessly pursued by an irregular verb. Significantly,

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this academic is the only one of Allen’s characters who does not eventually return to the literary or nonliterary world from whence he or she came. His everlasting torment is Dantesque in its grotesque and bizarre appropriateness: academic obscurity to the nth degree, disappearance into a long-abandoned textbook, with relentless pursuit not by a pitchfork-wielding devil but by a wholly linguistic tor-mentor all his own.

The culmination of Woody Allen’s works based on this interplay of fictional characters and “real” people is undoubtedly The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Sharing its central plot device with Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), in which characters from an abandoned work by an unidentified play-wright physically intrude themselves into a theater where the rehearsal of a Pirandello play is underway, The Purple Rose of Cairo ingeniously transposes this premise out of its theatrical setting and into a cinematic one; accordingly, it allows a film character to “cross over” into the world of a moviegoer – who later accom-panies him back into the black-and-white world of the film. Like the mirror in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) and its counterpart in Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus (1949), the movie screen itself proves to be a selectively permeable membrane separating the worlds of art and life, those alternative universes of the creative imagination and worldly experi-ence. Set during the depth of the economic Depression of the 1930s, when grim social realities of unemployment and its attendant desperations were in stark contrast to the carefree affluence and elegance of, for example, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat (1934, 1935, Mark Sandrich), The Purple Rose of Cairo juxtaposes these alternate realities in particularly vivid and poignant ways. Cecilia (Mia Farrow), the central character, finds refuge from her strained marriage and her thankless job as a waitress in her frequent moviegoing. To her astonishment, during one of several repeat viewings of The Purple Rose of Cairo (the film-within-the-film, an escapist fantasy whose bizarre plot involves an explorer and the capricious and carefree Manhattan-penthouse social elite among whom he unexpectedly finds himself ), its protagonist notices her in the audience, addresses her directly, and steps through the screen to join her in person. A clan-destine romance ensues, replete with metaphysical complications worthy of Pirandello himself: actor Gil Shepherd ( Jeff Daniels), who plays explorer Tom Baxter, is a naïf in the real world, oblivious to the custom of paying for meals in restaurants with other than stage-money, for example; his fellow actors, unable to follow him through the screen, are unable to continue the plot of their film but dread the moment when the projector might be turned off, consigning them to an existential oblivion and a darkness all their own. Moviegoers are as baffled – and as outraged – as the first audiences for Six Characters in Search of an Author; predict-ably, some demand their money back, perplexed and befuddled by a moviegoing experience unlike any they have encountered before. Producers, distributors, and the local theater manager fear the worst: similar disruptions could happen at other cinemas across the country, a possible crime spree could be staged by characters

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running amok, and even (of course) some kind of nefarious conspiracy could be behind it all.

When Cecilia steps through the screen with Tom/Gil, the metaphysical impli-cations of the now-doubled crossover are compounded far beyond anything in Pirandello’s play. The plot of the film can be resumed; the characters leave their time-passing card games, gossiping, and bickering and go to dinner at an elegant nightclub. Yet, like Madame Bovary after the intrusion of Kugelmass, the film’s story is inherently altered by the presence of Cecilia; even the number of chairs at their table in the restaurant must be changed, and Cecilia soon proves to be as out of place in the characters’ world as Tom/Gil was in hers. Their romance thus proves impractical, and they must part. Each “belongs” in his or her own world: Tom back on the screen, Gil back in Hollywood, and Cecilia – in the film’s final scene – back in the movie theater, raptly gazing up at the flickering screen. Rarely if ever has the moviegoing experience been so imaginatively and lovingly depicted in a work of metacinema: moviegoers, actors, characters, producers, distributors, and theater managers are all cleverly satirized. In much the same way that Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994) celebrates/skewers the life of the theater and evokes the prohibition era of the early 1920s, The Purple Rose of Cairo commemorates all that makes moviegoing worthwhile.

Nevertheless, Allen has adamantly insisted that such interpretation of the film seriously misreads his intentions:

I would not think of Purple Rose of Cairo as an homage to that kind of film [escapist fare of the 1930s]. I would think of that as a dark film about a woman who was forced to choose between fantasy and reality and naturally had to choose reality, because if you choose fantasy, that way lies madness, and so she chose reality, and as it does in real life it crushes her at the end. .  .  . To exist in the fantasy world is psychosis. And by choosing the real world, which we all must do, she is inevitably crushed by it, as we all inevitably are. . . . For me the, the tragic end of that movie was the only reason I did the picture (Schickel 2003: 77, 79, 80).

Yet later in the same interview, he blatantly contradicts that claim:

there’s a modicum of hope someplace. Even at the end of Purple Rose, when Mia goes back into the movie theater and starts watching the Fred Astaire movie, at least you get the feeling that at the very minimum she’s not going to kill herself. She’s going to lose herself in escapist films. I’m not Pollyannish, but I don’t think I’m cynical or gloomy or pessimistic (Schickel 2003: 139–140).

Neither “crushed” nor psychotic nor tragic, she ultimately displays a (fundamen-tally comic) resilience that opposes all of those. Fortunately, as always, moviegoers are free to decide such issues for themselves, regardless of authorial intent. Piran-dello – and Cecilia too, no doubt – would certainly approve.

Whereas the aforementioned characters find themselves transposed into realms of fiction or film or encounter literary or cinematic characters in their own lives,

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Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), the protagonist of Midnight in Paris, finds himself among their creators – physically transported into the literary milieu of American expatriates in Paris during the 1920s, the Golden Age of high modernism that was immortalized in such memoirs as Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Janet Flanner’s Paris was Yesterday: 1925–1939. There, Flanner remarks,

Back in the opening 1920s  .  .  .  for the first time Paris began being included in the memories of a small contingent of youngish American expatriates, richer than most in creative ambition and rather modest in purse  .  .  .  [who had] settled in the small hotels on the Paris Left Bank. . . . Though unacquainted with each other, as compatriots we soon discovered our chance similarity. We were a literary lot. Each of us aspired to become a famous writer as soon as possible (Flanner 1972: vii).

For them then, as for Gil now, the ambience of Paris provides an alternate set of markedly cosmopolitan values – a stark contrast to the philistinism, parochialism, shallow pietism, and (not least in the 1920s) prohibition that defined American culture of the time. William Faulkner eloquently summarized its appeal in an interview with Stephen Longstreet, whose We All Went to Paris: Americans in the City of Light, 1776–1971 provides an invaluable companion volume for Midnight in Paris. Why, Longstreet wondered,

did Paris still draw us to its fascination, why did it draw those who felt themselves creative – talent or no talent? Why had it been, since Franklin, that all of us felt that we were freer there than elsewhere? Why did art, literature, and sex, and the feeding and drinking seem more genuine there? Generations of Americans had run a whole gamut of desires, hopes in Paris – all so opposite to those they had found at home, on the farm, in the city . . . (Longstreet 1972: 447).

Faulkner’s reply is no less applicable to Gil Pender in 2010 than it was in the 1920s for Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Cole Porter, and Faulkner himself:

Maybe, Steve, we all went  .  .  . because the American strain for the writer fellow, the painter, the poet had become thin here, petered out. The sounds, the colors, the taste of Paris to us felt better than the country cooking we grew up on. Paris for us young fry was . . . an eager look at things you maybe felt had meanings you didn’t get from the folks back at the store. . . . Paris is the grab bag for us because it skirts the irrational, yet seems to find now and then the potential for genius in embryonic shape. . . . You can escape there getting entangled, sure, entangled in moral alterna-tives. We’re such black Calvinistic bastards at home.  .  .  . But you always want to go back [to Paris]. It leaves you spooked with a world of invisible presences. We go there hunting some damn evocative quality, maybe we come back and feel that only the unrealized parts of our lives seem perfect . . . That’s what keeps Paris green for us. It’s something we are sure is there only we ourselves never fully realized it (Longstreet 1972: 447–448).

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Certainly, for Gil “the American strain” has “become thin” if not entirely “petered out”: a would-be novelist, he feels that he has “sold out” to Hollywood, becoming a successful screenwriter of popular if shallow films which have brought him considerable financial success. “Getting and spending have laid waste [his more serious creative] powers,” as Wordsworth said, and Gil feels himself becoming “entangled in moral alternatives” – nowhere better exemplified than in an argu-ment with his fiancée over whether they should live in Paris or in Los Angeles after they are married.

No less than Allan Felix in Play It Again, Sam, Gil is self-consciously a modern-day devalued counterpart of the now-iconic larger-than-life figures from a decades-earlier Golden Age (Hemingway, Stein, and others) whom he meets and whose counsel – literary rather than romantic, this time – he solicits and heeds. Stein’s approbation of Gil’s novel plus Hemingway’s perspectives on life and love and writing fortify his resolve much as Bogart’s counsel did in Allen’s earlier work. Yet, importantly, icons and legends that they have become, the “actual” Stein and Hemingway are in a sense characters who are no longer any more separable from their personae than Bogart-the-actor is from Bogart-the-character in his Casablanca trenchcoat. Thus, as David Denby observed in his review of Midnight in Paris, “the artists and writers are presented not as they actually were but as Gil wants them to be” (Denby 2011: 88). Perhaps more accurately, they are as Gil expects them to be based on his own knowledge of their works and lives. Hem-ingway implies as much in the genre-blurring final paragraph of his preface to A Moveable Feast: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact” (1964: ix). Accordingly, “Hem” in the narrative simultaneously is and is not the “him” of the 1920s or, for that matter, the “him” at the time of his writing in the late 1950s when, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, he had “become a name.” The choice – and the problem of differentiation – is thus left to the reader and, by extension, to the viewer of Allen’s film. Longstreet even contends that

The problem about gathering research [about Americans in Paris in the 1920s] has been that in some cases there is almost no source material, [and] in others there is too much, most of it so mixed with myth and legend . . . that almost all published memoirs must be suspect. There is so much in literary heroism that destroys modesty and fact (Longstreet 1972: 18).

Although Paris in the 1920s certainly looks to be in a Golden Age throughout Midnight in Paris, it is recognizable as such only via nostalgia-induced retrospec-tion. For Picasso’s mistress Adriana (with whom Gil too falls in love) the Golden Age was the 1890s – and he accompanies her there through the same magical transposition, entering the café society of Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas. Always, therefore, the mythic, legendary, and ultimately fictional Golden Age

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must be defined against the then-current, in infinite regress, whether or not it is beyond recall except through literature.

Like Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo and like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Gil ultimately cannot remain in the realm of Otherness to which he has been transported – although the detective who pursues him there ultimately finds himself trapped in pre-revolutionary France, a doom akin to that of Professor Kugelmass, a perpetual malediction. Yet Gil’s experiences in Paris enable him to “escape getting entangled . . . in moral alternatives,” exactly as Faulkner discerned: left “spooked with [its] world of invisible presences,” Gil chooses distinctly “Paris-ian” values, embraces his new found twenty-first-century Parisian girlfriend, and finds the courage to reject his fiancée, her California values, and his Republican would-have-been in-laws. In so doing, he affirms the truth of Hemingway’s self-quotation that became the epigraph of A Moveable Feast itself: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast” (1964: v).

Russian Influences

Maybe it’s because I’m depressed so often that I’m drawn to writers like Kaf ka and Dostoyevski and to a filmmaker like Bergman. I think I have all the symptoms and problems that their characters are occupied with: an obsession with death, an obses-sion with God or the lack of God, the question of why we are here.

(Woody Allen, qtd. in Lax 1991: 179)

I had, of course, always loved the Russian classics, and I was trying to do a film with philosophical content, if you can believe it.

(Woody Allen, qtd. in Schickel 2003: 104)

Nowhere is the influence of the literary canon on Woody Allen’s comedic genius more apparent than in Love and Death (1975) – which is surely the most allusive and intertextual film ever made for a popular audience. Though its script contains countless allusions to and parodies of nineteenth-century Russian novels, its physi-cal shtick, sexual double entendres, absurd plot, and the presence of Woody Allen himself with his familiar comic persona and trademark style all keep the film quite enjoyable for those who recognize none of its literary allusions. Set during the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, Love and Death obviously parodies Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The gravitas of its compound title – fit company for Crime and Punish-ment and Being and Nothingness as well – makes it (mock-)epic and epochal, por-tentous and pretentious in equal degrees. Although it depicts a cross-section of Russian society (including the village idiot, shown attending a convention of his kind) from the serfs through the aristocracy and even Napoleon Bonaparte (or at

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least one of his doubles), the plot focuses on Boris and his long-unrequited love, Sonja, whom he does eventually marry. Like Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezuhov and his beautiful but immoral wife, Ellen Kuragin, as well as the assorted Bolkonskys and Rostovs who fill War and Peace, Boris and Sonja are caught up, albeit bunglingly, in the sweep of history. Dire though their plights may be (the film’s opening voi-ceover reveals that Boris is to be executed by firing squad at dawn), they neverthe-less always manage to find time to philosophize at length in the distinctive nineteenth-century-Russian-fictional-character way, though the conversation soon veers into Sartrean distinctions between the pour-soi and en-soi and other distinctly modern epistemological in-jokes.

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), like A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), presents a complex series of interrelationships and amatory entanglements, though this time their complications lead to an arranged murder. The film’s primary literary forebear is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, though its char-acters are affluent and highly educated members of America’s professional classes – an ophthalmologist, television producers, writers, and a filmmaker – rather than Dostoevsky’s down-and-almost-out student Raskolnikov and his circle of acquaintances. More important than the details of the plot, however, is the extraordinary exposition of profound and complex philosophical issues: such themes as guilt and moral responsibility, the existence or nonexistence of God, whether there is any moral centering of the universe, and how we are to live in the midst of such uncertainties have rarely been so thoughtfully and explicitly presented in twentieth-century popular culture. Multiple perspectives on these issues are presented with remarkable thoughtfulness, though none is privileged; indeed, all of them are complicated or undercut by further details of plot and characterization. These conversations take place both in the narrative present and in a poignant evocation of the ophthalmologist’s past when (in a rather “stagey” flashback) he remembers – and briefly reenters – a dinner-table argu-ment that occurred during his adolescence; while gathered for a Seder meal in the early 1940s, his family argues passionately over the value of religion and tradition amid the manifest evil rampant in the world. Other voices further com-plicate the film’s present day narrative: a rabbi who is going blind offers moral guidance to the ophthalmologist, who cannot see a way out of a dilemma in which his mistress threatens to expose him as an adulterer and embezzler; in a series of filmed interviews a life-affirming academic philosopher holds forth on the sources of joy – even though he would end his career in suicide. The murder itself goes unsolved and unpunished (in contrast to Raskolnikov’s), except and unless by the doctor’s own guilt, exacerbated by his (ostensible) belief in the all-seeing eyes of God – which had been emphasized by his patient, the near-blind rabbi. Allusions to and images of sight, eyes, blindness, and guilt recur through-out the script, which also explicitly mentions Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (in an argu-ment among film producers over whether the ancient play can be considered comic, given the passage of time). The film’s most important similarity to

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Oedipus, however, is the ability to provoke virtually endless arguments over remarkably similar – and remarkably profound – ideas.

As in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Dostoyevskian influence in Match Point (2005) is unmistakable. Indeed, within the first four minutes of the film, its central character, Chris Winton, is shown reading Crime and Punishment and The Cambridge Companion to Dostoyevskii, the covers of which are shown in separate shots at nearly full screen. Once again, complications about marital infidelity, financial malfeasance, and blackmail lead to murder, including not only the intended victim but also an innocent neighbor. Match Point’s central existential issue, again, is whether in a world in which “science is confirming more and more a purposeless existence,” anything becomes permissible since there is no transcendent purpose and no permanent basis for morality – the issue that Ivan Karamazov eloquently raises with his brother Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. During the film’s opening scene of a tennis ball crossing a net during a match, the voiceover deals with the importance of sheer luck and circumstance, quite apart from skill or strategy. Something literally as arbitrary and uncontrollable as which way the ball bounces if it strikes the top of the net can determine whether one wins or loses – and indeed will determine whether or not the murder that Winton committed gets discovered by the police at the film’s end. Accordingly, such issues as freedom versus imprisonment, success versus failure, truth versus duplicity, fate versus chance, and justice versus injustice are all shown to depend on literally the bounce of one hurled object during the final quarter of the film. When literally so much can and does depend on random happenstance, the nature and meaning of life can easily get called into question in a markedly Dostoyevskian way.

Nevertheless, as in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the equation with Dostoevsky goes only so far. The psychological focus on murder in both films may evoke the des-peration of Raskolnikov, but there is no emphasis on the perpetrator’s psychologi-cal torments after committing the crime and no implication whatsoever that there is any redemptive power in suffering, whether or not it is inflicted through judicial punishment. Accordingly, notwithstanding its existential implications and overt Dostoyevskian allusions, Match Point has equally significant precedents in a very different part of the literary canon, far from nineteenth-century Russian fiction. In many ways, Chris Wilton is a close counterpart to Tom Ripley, the protagonist of five novels by Patricia Highsmith, of which the first, The Talented Mr. Ripley, is the most pertinent here; both are young, personable, and ambitious outsiders who find themselves in worlds of wealth and privilege where they never entirely belong, affable but conscienceless charmers for whom expediency and self-survival lead to multiple murders and audaciously cunning cover-ups that remain undetected. Yet the erotic intensity of Match Point – the irresistibility that leads via inevitability to homicide – is characteristic not so much of Highsmith’s coolly calculating Ripley as it is of the characters of James M. Cain’s novels such as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Scarlett Johansson’s Nola Rice is no less a blonde femme fatale than Lana Turner’s Cora Smith in the 1946 film of Postman

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– passionate, amoral, frustrated, and doomed. There are also notable structural parallels with Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: Chris Wilton, like Clyde Griffiths, is an ambitious social climber whose social ascendancy takes him into a world of corporate respectability; he too carefully plans the murder of his mistress (who has refused an abortion) in order not to lose his opportunities brought by a much wealthier woman he loves (and, in Wilton’s case, has married); each con-cocts a devious ruse to make the death seem accidental (an interrupted drug robbery in Match Point, a drowning in An American Tragedy); in both cases, docu-ments prove incriminating (Nola’s diary, Roberta’s letters). Of the two, however, only Clyde Griffiths is arrested, tried, convicted, and electrocuted for his crime; Chris Wilton, though obviously no less guilty, evades arrest because at a crucial moment an object happened to bounce one way rather than the other, exactly as the film’s opening voiceover portends:

The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.

Clyde Griffiths loses; Chris Wilton wins. A universe in which such apparent inequity and injustice occur – when so much depends on the all-important but uncontrollable bounce of a certain small object, controlled only by chance, the logistics of randomness, and the law of gravity – is the epitome of the absurd. Whether Wilton goes on to any Raskolnikovian remorse of conscience is left for each viewer to imagine; there is very little if any indication that he will.

No such indeterminacy about the aftereffects of a carefully planned murder can be claimed about Cassandra’s Dream (2007). Among all of Woody Allen’s “Crime and Punishment” films, this is the only one in which a perpetrator is psy-chologically tormented by remorse over what he has done – and, equally notably, the “punishment” is not a consequence of apprehension by the police, since the murder remains unsolved. Cassandra’s Dream is anomalous as well because its characters have a working class background, far from the elegance of the haute bourgeoisie of so many of Allen’s films. Brothers Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell) are aggressively “on the make” despite often being under financial duress as a result of expensive personal tastes (they buy and refurbish a used sail-boat), unstable sources of income (Terry is a compulsive gambler), and pampered girlfriends to support. Having grown up with an ethos that family always comes first, they are offered financial support from their uncle, a self-made millionaire whose financial shortcuts and misrepresentations are being threatened by a whistleblower within his organization. As in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, the person threatening to disclose incriminating information is to be mur-

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dered in a way that will appear to have been a random, hence untraceable, act of violence. The brothers agree, under duresses of their own, and carry out the crime successfully. Whereas Ian is quite ready to “move on” after the crime, Terry is wracked by guilt that is exacerbated by reliance on pills and liquor; he plans to turn himself in to the police and has talked about the crime to his girlfriend, who believes it to have been a dream or a delusion. Ian and the uncle agree that Terry must now be killed, and Ian plans to poison his brother at sea but cannot go through with it. In a scuffle that ensues, Ian dies when Terry knocks him against the hull; Terry then deliberately drowns himself. Unlike much of the tradition in which malefactors do themselves in (from Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” to John Huston’s film of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Allen’s film offers no such easily moralistic resolution: the mastermind of the entire scheme, the uncle, sur-vives and will apparently escape indictment. As in Match Point, he “wins” as a matter of luck.

I certainly love Chekhov. No question about that. He’s one of my favorites, of course. I’m crazy about Chekhov. I never knew anybody that wasn’t! People may not like Tolstoy. There are some people I know that don’t like Dostoyevsky. . . . But I’ve never met anybody that didn’t adore Chekhov.

(Woody Allen, qtd. in Björkman 1993: 156)

Long rightly attributed to the influence of his admiration for the directorial skills, emotional complexity, and stark cinematography of Ingmar Bergman, Allen’s controversial turn away from his trademark comedies led him towards serious, bleak, somber, existential domestic dramas such as Interiors and September. Even comparatively lighter films such as Hannah and Her Sisters and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger are no less emphatically a testament to a fascination with – and phenomenal mastery of – a fundamentally Chekhovian dramaturgy. Remarkably specific affinities with The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, and Three Sisters abound throughout these films:

• a patrician family matriarch who, like Madame Ranevskya in The Cherry Orchard and Irina Nikolaevna Arkadina in The Seagull, is typically impractical, extrava-gant, aesthetic, emotionally manipulative and/or neurasthenic

• daughters (often three) whose lives, like those of the Olga, Masha, and Irina in The Three Sisters and Anya and Varya in The Cherry Orchard, have been and continue to be defined by their conflicted family obligations and unfulfilling romantic or marital entanglements

• a lower class, vulgar, and/or philistine outsider who, like Yermolay Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, disrupts the family’s often tenuous emotional equilib-rium. Typically less educated and certainly less emotionally constricted than the family, this outsider has never mastered – and fails even to comprehend –

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the patrician ethos and etiquette by which the family lives; they in turn are no less baffled and/or affronted by the crass forthrightness and/or tastelessness of the intruder

• juxtaposition of such characters’ mutually exclusive worldviews as the source of the central conflict in the plot. Often, this stark socioeconomic contrast originates in class norms related to issues of money (or the lack of it) in the present; in September, this involves the impending sale of a farm that is part of an estate, as in The Cherry Orchard. The female outsider may often be perceived by the family as a gold-digger whose upward mobility is the result of multiple marriages (Interiors) or a prostitute (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Mighty Aphrodite); nevertheless, she embodies an earthiness, practicality, vitality, and/or unrepressed physicality that her alleged social “superiors” conspicuously lack

• dialogue that is defined by silence and subtext. However much this may have been derived from the stark minimalist dialogue of such Bergman master-pieces as The Seventh Seal, The Silence, and Cries and Whispers, the inventor of this dramatic technique remains Anton Chekhov. Notwithstanding its Berg-manesque cinematography and existential austerity, Interiors in particular could serve as a masterclass in Chekhovian acting technique; no silences in the history of cinema have been more eloquent, more nuanced, more heartbreak-ing, more Chekhovian, or more profound.

The presence and prevalence of such Chekhovian dramaturgy need not – and indeed should not – imply that these films are “derivative,” as has been too often been condescendingly remarked, particularly by those who wish that the director/screenwriter would continue to create only the kind of comedies for which he became renowned. Without exception, these films bear the unmistakable imprint of Woody Allen’s particular sensibility, as instantly recognizable as that of any other auteur. Unmistakably American in their idiom as well as their zeitgeist, they are remarkable for the complexity of their characterizations as well as the sophis-tication of their style.

In many ways, September (1987) is the most purely Chekhovian of Woody Allen’s films, having many distinct affinities with The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, and Three Sisters. Set within a single American house in the countryside, it could as easily be produced on stage as on film. Like The Cherry Orchard, its structure begins with the arrival of the family matriarch – here, as in The Seagull, a famous actress whose career is now past its prime – who has a legendary, rather lurid, passion-driven life: she abandoned her husband to live with a lover, a gangster who was later shot by her then 14-year-old daughter. Like The Cherry Orchard too, it ends with her departure, with considerable emotional distress having ensued in the interim. As in The Seagull, the plot features a series of unrequited loves, with each in love with someone who is in love with someone else: Howard, an elderly friend of the family (like Dorn in The Seagull), loves Lane (the daughter who, it is

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claimed, killed her gangster stepfather); she in turn loves Peter, a frustrated writer (like Treplev in The Seagull), who secretly loves Stephanie (Lane’s sister), who refuses to betray her marriage or give in to her feelings for him. Lane, like Varya in The Cherry Orchard, has long resided at the family homeplace but, like the sisters in Three Sisters, she yearns to live in the city – where she would begin a career as a photographer. Unlike its counterpart in The Cherry Orchard, the sale of the prop-erty does not go through, so Lane is left in the countryside, nearly suicidal in her multiple frustrations. Stephanie’s poignant final speech to her is remarkably similar to Irina’s closing words in Three Sisters, on the importance of work, perseverance, and “petty things to keep you going, and distractions to keep you from focusing on the truth” – although that truth itself may remain unknown.

Beyond such structural similarities and shared leitmotifs, however, September contains one of the most remarkable, distinctly Chekhovian sequences ever filmed: almost 20 minutes of extraordinarily revealing soliloquies and duologues occur during a power failure brought on by a thunderstorm. Lit by candlelight as Stephanie softly plays hauntingly melancholy popular songs from decades past on the piano, the sequence is an exact counterpart of the second act of The Cherry Orchard, in which the Ranevsky family and their retinue sit in the garden in seemingly idle conversation during which nothing much “happens” but many painful truths are revealed. Rife with subtext, nostalgia, repressed desires, unre-quited love, and eloquent silences, the scene encompasses both personal heart-aches and philosophical musings; Peter the novelist and Lloyd, a physicist, look at the stars, finding there beauty and wonder (Peter) or an aimless universe in which “deep truth  .  .  .  is always slipping away” and a world that is “haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent” (Lloyd). Diane, at a Ouija board, speaks to her dead second husband, reminiscing about now long-ago good times and ruing that their daughter Lane has never gotten over the shooting and hates her mother; when she asks the deceased to rap in support or acknowledgment, however, there is of course no reply. Howard confesses his long-held love for Lane, yearning for her touch, beseeching her not to leave as she intends to, having put the house up for sale; Lane admits her love for Peter, who tells her that he cannot commit following his failed marriage, though he subsequently tells Stephanie that he loves her; she in turn refuses to leave her husband and children for him. Even the titles of the songs played in the background provide subtle reinforcement of the sentiments expressed in the dialogue: “What’ll I Do?” (Irving Berlin), “Who” ( Jerome Kern, Otto Harlach, and Oscar Hammerstein II), “I’m Confessin’ ” (Al J. Neiburg, Doc Daugherty, and Ellis Reynolds), “Moon-glow” (Will Hudson, Eddie DeLange, and Irving Mills), and “When Day Is Done” (Robert Katcher and B.G. DeSylvia). In Chekhov’s distinctively dialogic form (as Mikhail Bakhtin has defined the term), each character gives a prose “aria,” though none is privileged over the others. Equally nuanced in its script and its direction (with an extraordinarily capable all-star cast), September irrefutably demonstrates the remarkable depth of Woody Allen’s understanding of Chekhovian content

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as well as his dramaturgy. It is surely among the most Chekhovian dramas not to have been written in Russian.

Kafka and Other Absurdists

Beckett is superintelligent . . . but I don’t like his plays. Though he is able to com-municate a sense of absurdity and despair that resonate within me. Kaf ka, on the other hand, just gets to me totally. He’s the best reading.

(Woody Allen, qtd. in Kelley 2006: 26)

Among the many screen roles that Woody Allen has created for himself, the char-acter of Kleinman in Shadows and Fog (1992) is in many ways the best match between his own comic persona and major literary forebears – specifically, the protagonists of the best-known novels of Franz Kaf ka. Like Joseph K. in The Castle and K. in The Trial, Kleinman finds himself caught up in a process that he can neither understand nor control even though his life itself is at stake. In an unnamed city that is clearly based on Kaf ka’s native Prague (recognizable through its distinc-tive streetlights, angular streetscape, and bridgeways), a serial strangler prowls near-deserted streets at night in search of prey. Kleinman (whose name means “little man” in German) is roused from sleep late one night to take part in a vigi-lante plan to capture the killer even though he knows – and can find out – little or nothing of the plan or his role in it (an early version of this opening sequence is the one-act play titled Death, published in Without Feathers (Allen 1972: 39–100); its central character is also named Kleinman). He may or may not be bait in a trap for the killer, and those who rouse him into participation may or may not be providing him surveillance and protection. His attempts to understand the plot and his role in it are constantly thwarted amid circumstances that remain utterly beyond his control; his irremediable uncertainties, his unrelenting anxieties, his continuing frustrations, and his desperate but futile struggles to make sense of his situation are not only central motifs of Kaf ka’s fiction but also the quintessence of the absurd. The existential implications of Kleinman’s plight are unmistakable: he is a common man trapped in a major life-or-death situation that he cannot comprehend or meaningfully affect; ill equipped and unprepared though he is, he nevertheless defines himself (and his future, including his life or death) through every action, decision, and inaction. Yet, uniquely among the various screen adap-tations of Kaf ka’s works – including adaptations of The Trial by both Orson Welles (1962, from Welles’s own screenplay) and David Hugh Jones (1993, from a screen-play by Harold Pinter) as well as Stephen Soderbergh’s Kaf ka (1991) – Woody Allen’s film captures not only Kaf ka’s characteristic nightmarishness and menace but also, no less importantly, Kaf ka’s quite distinctive comedy, an equally impor-tant characteristic of the absurd. Arguably, Allen’s Kleinman could join such comic

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icons as Chaplin’s “Little Tramp,” Buster Keaton’s stoic sad-sacks, Laurel and Hardy, and Jackie Gleason’s “Poor Soul” among the twentieth century’s foremost images of the endlessly beleaguered yet comically resilient common man.

The circus-based subplot of Shadows and Fog is an homage to the German silent film classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Kaf ka’s contemporary Robert Weine (1920), which also features a traveling circus or carnival, a sinister doctor, and a murderous somnambulist who turns out to be under his control. Kaf ka’s aesthetic, like Weine’s, readily accommodates the eccentrics and grotesques who populate such a world, heightening the contrast with the “ordinary” citizens of the beleaguered community. Visually, too, the world of Weine’s film seems Kaf kaesque: the set contains no right angles (and the streetlights are distinctively Prague’s), the logic of the action seems always somehow askew or nightmarish (for reasons that become clear at the end), and the characters are often (semi-)comic grotesques. Kaf ka too used the circus or carnival as a setting, particularly in his short story “The Hunger Artist,” in which the central character turns self-starvation into performance art in a traveling show. The opening scene in which Kleinman is abruptly awakened by the posse authorities echoes the famous opening of The Trial, when K. is roused from sleep to be arrested without explana-tion. The process through which Kleinman tries but fails to discover what’s actu-ally going on is as futile as Joseph K.’s efforts to get answers in The Castle – though neither he nor any Kaf ka protagonist ever asks “Why me?” as Kleinman does. The ending of Shadows and Fog seems brilliantly Kaf kaesque as well, since his novels were unfinished at his untimely death; Kleinman simply and literally disappears as part of a vanishing act performed by a down-and-out drunken circus magician. Together, they escape the still-on-the-loose strangler themselves – leaving many of the plot’s issues unresolved.

Allen has unreservedly admired the early generations of absurdist playwrights, novelists, and philosophers, although they seem to have had little apparent direct influence on the form or content of his own writings:

Kaf ka, a lot I like. And Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard . . . I’m also a great fan of Ionesco – I found his plays very amusing and imaginative. And I thought Genet’s The Balcony was a brilliant play . . . (qtd. in Kelley 1976: 26).

In the same conversation, he praised Samuel Beckett’s “superintelligen[ce]” and the “resona[nce]” of his “sense of absurdity and despair” (26), but his admiration notably and explicitly does not extend to the plays; neither the Irish author’s mini-malist aesthetic nor his down-but-never-quite-out characters have any significant presence in Allen’s writings. Edward Albee has been acknowledged among “serious authors [who] were performed on Broadway” in another of Allen’s interviews (Ciment and Tobin 2006: 136) – and may have been, surprisingly, the most directly influential of the aforementioned playwrights. Specifically, Allen’s little-known and rarely produced one-act play, Riverside Drive (Allen 2003), shares its dramatic

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premise with Albee’s early one-act play Zoo Story (1958, prod. 1959). Both plays begin with seemingly happenstance encounters and perfunctory conversation between male strangers in a public park; gradually, the stranger who began the conversation becomes increasingly menacing until an unexpected act of extreme violence occurs at each play’s climax. The dialogue in Riverside Drive is unusually spare for a Woody Allen play or filmscript, with many lines consisting of only a few words; unlike the conversationalist in Zoo Story ( Jerry), his counterpart in Allen’s play (Fred) knows far more than he has any reason to know about his interlocutor ( Jim Swain, a writer), whom he has clandestinely spied on and/or stalked for an unknown period of time. Fred’s increasingly disconcerting disclo-sure of details about Jim’s personal life, including an extramarital affair that he seeks to end this day in the park, gives him an air of menace that is more often associated with the works of Harold Pinter – whose name is surprisingly absent in the numerous interviews in which Allen has discussed his assessment of con-temporary authors. Like Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party or Ben and Gus in The Dumb Waiter, Fred seems all too ready to turn violent – as he proves when he murders Jim’s soon-to-be-ex lover and disposes of her body as if merely doing his friend a favor. Though reminiscent of the plot device in Crimes and Mis-demeanors, the murder in Riverside Drive is fundamentally different from the stab-bing in Zoo Story, the victim of which is the perpetrator’s interlocutor who has been sharing the park bench throughout the play.

Whereas the aesthetic and character types found in Samuel Beckett’s plays are wholly absent from Woody Allen’s oeuvre, his “sense of absurdity and despair . . .  resonate within” many of his interviews, fiction, and films. At times, Allen is dis-missive of Beckett and other avant-garde authors:

With a play, when the curtain goes up and people are in garbage cans [i.e., in Beck-ett’s Endgame], I know I may admire the idea cerebrally, but it won’t mean as much to me. I’ve seen Beckett, along with many lesser avant gardists, and many contem-porary plays, and I can say yes, that’s clever and deep but I don’t really care (qtd. in Kakutani 1995: 207).

However, as revealed in an interview with Robert E. Lauder, Allen’s views on the nature of human existence might serve as a concise and eloquent introduction to Samuel Beckett’s thought – if not, indeed, a “channeling” of Samuel Beckett himself. When asked why he continues to make films in a universe that he regards as meaningless – and what he means by the term “salvation” through creative activity, Allen replied that

you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me . . . it’s a brutal, meaningless experi-ence – an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experi-ence, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition,

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the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. . . . I think what I’m saying is that I’m really impotent against the overwhelm-ing bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort (Lauder 2010).

With such similarly singleminded obsessiveness towards their creative work, with such similar mastery of a remarkable variety of media, styles, and forms, with such idiosyncratic humor in the face of the direness of existential existence, with such consistent disregard for the opinions of reviewers and critics over their half-century-long careers, Woody Allen and Samuel Beckett have remarkably much in common, notwithstanding any differences about the advantages or disadvan-tages of a minimalist aesthetic and the social class of the characters about whom they respectively choose to write.

Insofar as absurdism can be concisely defined as existentialism played for laughs, Woody Allen has undoubtedly been the foremost American popularizer of such a worldview in the latter half of the twentieth century and over a decade into the twenty-first. Like the silent film comedians whose work he admires – who were themselves avatars of the absurd long before it became a philosophical ideology – he has not only established an iconic comic persona which he has sustained for five decades – far longer than Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Fatty Arbuckle, or Harold Lloyd – but also directed over 40 feature-length films, authored the screenplays of the vast majority of them, and published dozens of short stories. Among the foremost characteristics of his remarkable oeuvre is its deft literary allusiveness; yet beyond the often subtle literary references that can be found in many of his films and stories, his deeply felt admiration for canoni-cal authors clearly shaped both his dramaturgy as well as his directorial skills. While he may not have a scholarly understanding or an academic’s theoretical perspective, few creative artists do – nor do they particularly need one. In an era when the alleged coarsening of American culture has been almost ceaselessly deplored, Woody Allen’s films and short stories have constituted a body of work remarkable not only for its diversity of genres but also its often subtle erudition, the quality and sophistication of which have remained underappreciated for far too long.

Works Cited

Allen, Woody (1969) Play It Again, Sam. New York: Samuel French.Allen, Woody (1972) Without Feathers. New York: Random House.

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Allen, Woody (1980) Side Effects. New York: Random House.Allen, Woody (2003) Riverside Drive. In Woody Allen, Three One-Act Plays: Riverside Drive,

Old Saybrook, Central Park West. New York: Random House.Berger, Joseph (2011) “Decoding Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” The New York Times

(May 27), C1, C7.Björkman, Stig (1993) Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Björkman. New

York: Grove Press.Ciment, Michel and Franck Garbarz (2006) “Woody Allen: ‘All my films have a connection

with magic.’ ” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 169–178. (Original work published 1998.)

Denby, David (2011) “The better life.” Review of Midnight in Paris. The New Yorker (May 23), 88–89.

Flanner, Janet (1972) Paris Was Yesterday: 1925–1939. Ed. Irving Drutman. New York: Viking.Gerber, Eve (2011) “Woody Allen’s top five books.” Guardian (May 6). www.guardian.co.uk/

books/2011/may/06/woody-allen-top-five-books (accessed Oct. 3, 2012). Excerpted from Eve Gerber, “Woody Allen on inspiration.” The Browser. http://thebrowser.com/interviews/woody-allen-on-memory?page=3 (accessed Oct 26, 2012).

Hemingway, Ernest (1964) A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Joyce, James (2006) “The Dead.” Dubliners. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: Norton,

151–194.Kakutani, Michiko (1995) “Woody Allen: The art of humor I.” Paris Review 135, 201–

222.Kelley, Ken (2006) “An interview with the real Woody Allen.” In Robert E. Kapsis and

Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mis-sissippi, 7–28.

Lauder, Robert E. (2010) “Whatever Works: Woody Allen’s world.” Comonweal Magazine. www.commonwealmagazine.org/woody (accessed Oct. 3, 2012).

Lax, Eric (1991) Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf.Lax, Eric (2001) “Conversations with Woody.” In Kimball King (ed.), Woody Allen: A Case-

book. London: Routledge, 153–155.Longstreet, Stephen (1972) We All Went to Paris: Americans in the City of Light, 1776–1971.

New York: Macmillan.Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Scott, A.O. (2011) “Catch that reference? There’ll be a quiz.” The New York Times ( June 26),

AR 1, 12.

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While there have been articles in the past that have discussed Woody Allen’s allu-sions to other modes of creative work, this census represents the first substantial listing of Allen’s literary, philosophical, and artistic allusions throughout his films, short fiction, and interviews. With all three of these source types included, there is an average of three to five sources for each five-year span of Allen’s almost 50 years of creative productivity (1965–2010), thus allowing this chart to provide a representative sketch of Allen’s familiarity with major writers, artists, and philoso-phers, and the works that they crafted. This census is meant to provide direct insight into both Allen’s creative process and his views concerning the meaning of life and the nature of the universe; it is therefore much more than an index of “buzz words” that have been collected from a broad spectrum of sources. This census will be a key resource to anyone – student, professor, or general moviegoer – who consults this Companion in order to understand the intellectually rich, highly original nature of Allen’s corpus of creative work. For instance, this list will allow those interested in Allen’s work to see that out of all nationalities of world litera-ture, Allen thinks Russian novelists are the best, that he considers William Butler Yeats to be the greatest English-language poet since Shakespeare, or that he thinks Shakespeare’s plays are “dumb and bumpkin oriented” (Björkman 1993: 211, 200; Lax 2007: 85). This list, then – because it is meant to be representative rather than exhaustive – should be a means by which readers might gain insights into Allen’s artistic tastes and influences, or even the merits of different genres of creative

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

“Who’s He When He’s at Home?”

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions

J. Andrew Gothard

382 J. Andrew Gothard

activity (comedy vs. drama), without necessarily including every individual refer-ence that Allen makes throughout the body of his work.

This census also offers a thorough and up-to-date bibliography of Allen’s major interviews, while exemplifying the wide array of publication types in which these interviews appear. It includes publications from such varied periodicals as Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Village Voice to Paris Review, Positif, and The New York Times. In addition, this bibliography contains major interviews from some of the more well-known collections, such as those by Stig Björkman (1993), Eric Lax (1975, 2007), Robert Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (2006), and Richard Schickel (2003). The decision regarding which interviews would be included here rested upon a short series of considerations: the magazine or collection in which the interview was published, the country in which the interview originated, and the purpose the interview was meant to serve. Furthermore, there was a requirement that at least one major interview be included from each decade of Allen’s cinematic productiv-ity. Since Allen has always engaged in a multitude of interviews for each film that he releases, an exhaustive listing of every interview Allen ever did would make this census unwieldy, while at the same time providing little improvement to the reference as a whole. Allen does not discuss literature, art, or philosophy in all of his interviews, just as all of his films do not include references to these subjects. Thus, the listing of interviews here is meant to be representative in much the same way as the listing of the allusions themselves.

In order to make this census both useful and manageable for Companion readers, I have used specific rules for defining which references should be included as significant allusions. First, for a reference to be included in this list, Allen’s quote from the original source must state more than merely the title of the work or the name of the writer or artist. The reference must offer at least a marginal amount of commentary about the work or author in question in order to prove that Allen knew about the writer or work on an intellectual rather than a popular culture level. Because of this restriction, some works that fans of Woody Allen might consider to be heavy in literary content, such as Bullets Over Broadway (1994), had most of their references excluded from this list, mainly because the references themselves were more like name-dropping than thoughtful commen-tary. Many of Allen’s allusions within his short fiction had to be overlooked for the same reason. One particular example is the story “Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This?” from Getting Even (1966), wherein Allen describes how the invention of the sandwich passed through a series of stages involving a number of historically important figures. However, for the most part, within this story he only gives the names of the figures themselves, with no indication of a deeper knowledge of the personality in question. Readers may also notice that some of Allen’s most important films are not represented in this census, such as The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Broadway Danny Rose (1984). Simply put, the reason for these exclusions was that they lacked any allusions that fit the aforementioned criteria for this census.

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 383

In spite of the benefits that a work of this nature can provide, there are some problems that producing this type of census creates, and it will be helpful for readers to be aware of these issues when attempting to make sense of the allusions that follow. In general, when reading through this list readers should keep in mind the context of each quote or reference. The references from Allen’s interviews, which make up the majority of this listing, are typically straightforward and serious, meaning these references can typically be taken at face value. The movie and short fiction references, however, should be read with an understanding that much of what is listed is thoroughly tongue in cheek because the references them-selves are typically rather silly. Yet, even the silliest references in this list in some way provide interesting or useful commentary upon the work or author in ques-tion, while also telling readers something about Allen himself. Still, it will be helpful to remember that while the interviews are a forum in which Allen notes his tastes and ideas at length, his thoughts in his films and short fiction are much more fleeting and lighthearted in nature.

Another key distinction between Allen’s interview references and those in his films and short fiction is that Allen himself may disagree with some of the claims made in the latter. In his interviews, Allen clearly states what he thinks is true and what he thinks is false or exaggerated in discussions of his favorite authors or works. In his movies and short fiction, however, the characters that Allen creates will often have a different view of life from that of the director and writer. Thus, viewers and readers should not always expect Allen to depict himself or his per-sonal views in his films and short stories: some of the more parodic references may not necessarily make claims that Allen agrees with. For example, in the film Manhattan (1979), Diane Keaton’s character, Mary, mentions a short list of authors she refers to as “the academy of the overrated.” While Allen’s character Ike Davis immediately disagrees with Mary’s evaluation of these authors, it is unclear what Allen’s own personal opinion of these writers is. Another such example of this problem can be found under the listing for Christopher Marlowe, where Allen parodically discusses the details of the Shakespearean authorship controversy in the short story, “But Soft . . . Real Soft,” published in Without Feathers (1972). While it is clear that Allen is satirizing the issue, he does not take an immediately appar-ent stance on either side. In most cases, it will be up to the readers to make their own decisions about where Allen as a director, writer, and thinker stands on these particular issues.

Something else that readers of this census will no doubt notice is how at times Allen displays a tendency to contradict himself, particularly in his inter-views. In his 1970s interviews with Eric Lax (On Being Funny, 1975), for example, Allen claims quite openly that he is a voracious reader, a claim that is thor-oughly confirmed by the rest of this list. Yet, when being interviewed by David Itzkoff in 2010, Allen told The New York Times that reading was more of an obli-gation or duty for him, not a passion. This is not the only place that readers can find an apparent self-contradiction in Allen’s ideas, but it is one of the most

384 J. Andrew Gothard

obvious. It seems to me, after examining such a large swath of Allen’s work over such a broad expanse of time, such inconsistencies can be accounted for in two ways:

• First, it is likely – or even inevitable – that Allen’s views on life and literature would metamorphose over a 50-year period of writing and filmmaking and that these changes would be reflected in the responses he gives to different inter-viewers over time. In fact, a key interview for this change, and from which all subsequent interviews take a completely different tone, is the 1993 Rolling Stone article with Anthony DeCurtis, in which Allen describes some of the hardships he experienced during the Soon-Yi controversy. In general, it will be helpful for readers to consider at what point in Allen’s career the interviews occur before jumping to any conclusions about the unity and consistency of his worldview.

• Second – and I think most interestingly – a key reason that some of Allen’s answers to interview questions at times seem to contradict one another is because Allen has a tendency to tailor many of his responses to whom the interviewer is and where the interview will be published. Two key interviews that depict this issue are the 1967 Playboy interview with Sol Weinstein and the 2010 Commonweal Magazine interview with Robert Lauder. In the first, Allen is clearly speaking in the comedic persona that was then beginning to make him famous. He seems antsy and restless throughout the interview, and he responds to every question with a quirky joke or a short witticism. This is not to say that Allen dodges any questions; in fact, Weinstein encourages Allen’s use of this persona with the types of questions that he asks. However, the Commonweal interview is completely different in nature and tone. In a short introduction, Lauder is identified as a priest, and accordingly, many of his questions for Allen concern the filmmaker’s views of the bleak nature of the universe. In this interview, readers will find nothing of the jocularity and humor seen in the Playboy article; rather, Allen goes on at length about how the universe itself has no meaning and that life is a dark and hopeless experience. Therefore, while it is important to note at what point in his career Allen is giving the interview, it is also important for readers to notice the ideological preconceptions of the interviewer and those of the intended audience because Allen seems to play off of both at will.

“Who’s He When He’s at Home?,” the title of this census, comes from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and it is a common Irish witticism invoking the idea that people are never what they present themselves to be. It concerns the difficulties human beings have in understanding each other on a deeper level, the ability to see past the façade of daily existence and into the true nature of another person. In the end, none of us can truly or ultimately know one another; we can never say with certainty who another person is “when he’s at home.” Since the Husbands

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 385

and Wives imbroglio, Allen has taken great care to portray himself as an average guy, who leads an average life, and who happens to also make movies. His self-constructed persona is that of a non-intellectual – of an autodidact who, at the end of the day, feels more at home at a baseball game than in a film studio. But as it is with almost all learned and successful individuals, when we as readers and moviegoers know who and what those people are reading and thinking about, we gain greater insight into their personalities. We get to see the world through their eyes, if only for a moment, and because of that insight, we learn something about life and ourselves in the process. Thus, it is fitting that the title of this census evokes James Joyce – a writer who, Allen claimed, read everything and knew more about art and literature than his critics (Kakutani 1996: 212). Despite what he would have us think to the contrary, it seems the same could easily be said of Allen himself.

Census of Woody Allen’s Allusions1

AgathonVisits narrator in a dream to discuss death Allen 1975: 34–40

Albee, EdwardAs serious author Ciment and Tobin 2006: 136

Alighieri, DanteAnd the circles of Hell Deconstructing HarryFirst read with a Columbia tutor Lax 1975: 38The Inferno, erotica, and a circle of Hell for

contractorsAllen 2007: 108

ArchilochusThe fox and the hedgehog Husbands and Wives

AristophanesPlagued by the problems of life Foundas 2009

AristotleFirst read with a Columbia tutor Lax 1975: 38Comedy compared to drama in The Frogs Lax 1975: 72Parody of Ethics Allen 2007: 142

Auden, W.H.Read Auden instead of asking why you

deserve terrible thingsAnything Else

Bacon, FrancisParodied author of Shakespeare’s Works Allen 1972: 186–187Parody of essays Allen 1972: 101

Baker, JosephineAs character in film Midnight in Paris

386 J. Andrew Gothard

Balzac, Honoré deGreat entertainment Kakutani 1996: 207There goes another novel Annie HallVastly overrated Midsummer

Barnes, DjunaAs character in film Midnight in Paris

Beckett, SamuelAs serious author Ciment and Tobin 2006: 136Allen has seen and does not care for Kakutani 1996: 207Less scary waiting for Lefty than waiting for

GodotDeconstructing Harry

Narrator as first interpreter of Waiting for Godot

Allen 1966: 103

Nature of meaningless relationships Annie HallSuper intelligent Kelley 2006: 26

Beowulf Annie HallBerdyaev, Nikolay

Romantic mindset in philosophy Lax 1975: 231Bergman, Ingmar

Allen’s “Death Knocks” as parody of The Seventh Seal

Lax 1975: 225

Best filmmaker Allen ever saw Lax 2007: 358His films make Allen wonder “what I’m

doing”Lax 1975: 168

As philosophical interest Lax 1975: 45Worked because he believed in it, not for

moneyBjörkman 1993: 127

Blake, WilliamBelieved in unseen forces Allen 1972: 122Call girls hired to discuss literature Allen 1972: 36

Böll, HeinrichMember of Mary Wilkie’s academy of the

overrated (Isaac disagrees)Manhattan

Brecht, BertoltNeed to be a devoted Brechtian, Mother

CourageAnother Woman

Buñuel, LuisAs character in film Midnight in ParisThe Exterminating Angel as a movie idea

pitched to BuñuelMidnight in Paris

Byron, George GordonBeing Byronic and not moronic Lax 1975: 231Gabe Roth is crazy about Husbands and Wives

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 387

Camus, AlbertAllen’s preferred reading Kelley 2006: 26Exciting to read Lax 2007: 85Part of fictitious, philosophical reading list Allen 1966: 27Romantic mindset in philosophy Lax 1975: 231Suicide and the meaning of life Foundas 2009Women are all we’ll ever know of paradise

on EarthAnything Else

Capote, TrumanLook-alike contest Annie Hall

Carlyle, ThomasVisit to his grave Midsummer

Carroll, LewisAlice in Wonderland as allegory for

Shakespearean authorship conspiracy theories

Allen 1972: 187

Chaucer, GeoffreyAuthor of King Lear as satirical revue Allen 1972: 187English major, minor in foreplay Sleeper

Chekhov, AntonAllen’s adoration for Björkman 1993: 156Allen has no compunction stealing from Kakutani 1996: 213And human crises Kakutani 1996: 207As initial model for Allen’s drama Lax 2007: 86As main influence on September Björkman 1993: 179Negative characters Moss 2006: 56Said life is a soap bubble Melinda and MelindaUncle Vanya played with a limp Melinda and Melinda

Chomsky, NoamCall girls hired to discuss literature Allen 1972: 35Pseudonym for analyst Manhattan

Coleridge, Samuel TaylorAnd the nature of genius in a contractor Allen 2007: 110

Conrad, JosephKurtz and “the horror” from Heart of

Darkness as major themeWhatever Works

Coward, NoelAnd martinis ManhattanMistaken as classical composer Scoop

Cummings, E.E.Allen’s favorite poet (among others) Lax 2007: 84Character purchases Complete Poems:

1913–1962Hannah

388 J. Andrew Gothard

As a witty poet Björkman 1993: 200“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly

beyond” as main themeHannah

Dali, SalvadorAs character in film Midnight in ParisImportance of the rhinoceros Midnight in Paris

Defoe, DanielMoll Flanders as proposed film Melinda and Melinda

Degas, EdgarAs character in film Midnight in ParisDistinguished between apple and pear

shaped behindWhatever Works

DemocritusComponents of the universe Allen 1966: 30

Descartes, RenéOn Cartesian dictum Allen 1966: 29Dualistic universe Allen 1966: 145On knowledge Allen 1966: 29Parody of mind/body dualism Allen 2007: 142

Deus ex Machina Mighty Aphrodite and Allen 1972: 141

Dewey, JohnSober and uncharismatic philosophy Lax 1975: 231

Dickinson, EmilyAllen’s favorite poet (among others) Björkman 1993: 200 and Lax

2007: 84“My life closed twice before its close” ShadowsSource of title, “Hope is the thing with

feathers”Allen 1972

Cliff and Lester compete in quoting poem with lines, “Death kindly stopped for me” Crimes

Dinesen, IsakMember of the academy of the overrated

(Isaac disagrees)Manhattan

Donne, John“For Whom the Bell Tolls” Allen 2007: 57“Ask for whom the toilet flushes” Celebrity

Dostoyevsky, FyodorAllen’s personal depression as reason for

interestLax 1975: 45

The Brothers Karamazov murder as philosophical

Lax 2007: 24

Compared to writing students Husbands and Wives

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 389

Crime and Punishment murder as philosophical

Lax 2007: 24

Fifteen-minute reading of Brothers Karamazov as goal for speed-reading course

Allen 1966: 59

A full literary meal with dessert Husbands and WivesGreater work than Flaubert Björkman 1993: 211Historically existential material for

dramatistsBjörkman 1993: 209

House of the Dead Anything ElseMain character reads Crime and Punishment Match PointMurder in Crime and Punishment as a vehicle

for the author’sphilosophical views DeCurtis 1993: 46Notes from Underground Anything ElseParodied by Allen’s stories Lax 1975: 221And prostitutes Ciment and Garbarz 2006: 176Raskolnikov as nice boy next door Love and DeathRomantic mindset in philosophy Lax 1975: 231As urban writer Björkman 1993: 71And “Weight Watchers” on a plane Allen 1966: 81Wrote for gambling money Allen 2007: 35

Eliot, T.S.Allen’s favorite poet (among others) Björkman 1993: 200As character in film Midnight in ParisFour Quartets as reflection of imminent

reason in the worldAllen 1975: 126

Gabe Roth is crazy about Husbands and WivesAs great city poet Lax 2007: 84The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Love and DeathMurder in the Cathedral and becoming a

Spanish dancerAllen 1972: 121

“People measure out their lives in coke spoons”

Midnight in Paris

EuripidesCostumes from The Trojan Women Allen 1972: 108Medea and jealousy Annie HallPlagued by the problems of life Foundas 2009Wants to buy Deus ex Machina Allen 1972: 143

ExistentialismAllen’s preferred philosophical reading Lax 1975: 37–38Existential Alka-Seltzer removes queasy

feeling about lifeAllen 1975: 12

390 J. Andrew Gothard

Existentialist literally kills God, viewed at the morgue

Allen 1966: 146

And fear of the void Yabroff 2008French existentialism as main theme of Love

and DeathBjörkman 1993: 74

Historically philosophical material for dramatists

Björkman 1993: 209

Faulkner, WilliamBoris compares Melody to Benjy Compson Whatever WorksEarliest reading Björkman 1993: 8 and Lax

2007: 83“The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Midnight in ParisWrote movie scripts Allen 2007: 35

Fitzgerald, F. ScottAs character in film Midnight in ParisAs character in film ZeligDriving off of a cliff and posing for

American GothicAllen 1966: 92–93

Earliest reading Björkman 1993: 8Identification with twentieth-century history SleeperMember of the academy of the overrated

(Isaac disagrees)Manhattan

Pseudonym for checking into a hotel Anything ElseWrote movie scripts Allen 2007: 35

Fitzgerald, ZeldaAs character in film Midnight in ParisEmotional maturity award ManhattanPseudonym for checking into a hotel Anything ElseReducing Scott Fitzgerald’s creative output Allen 1966: 93 and Midnight in

ParisFlaubert, Gustave

Character described as Madame Bovary Anything ElseCollege professor as character in Madame

BovaryAllen 1975: 45–49

College professor brings Emma Bovary to present time

Allen 1975: 49–55

Madame Bovary and the boredom of being a doctor’s wife

Melinda and Melinda

More skilled writer than Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy

Björkman 1993: 211

Sentimental Education makes life worth living ManhattanFreud, Sigmund

Allen read as part of his education Björkman 1993: 36

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 391

In classic Freudian slip, Gabe leaves novel ms. in a cab

Husbands and Wives

Disciple who discovered sexuality in bacon Allen 1972: 5Felt concept of penis envy should be limited

to womenZelig

Fictitious analysis of Metterling Allen 1966: 10–11Freud and sex jokes in the fifth grade Lax 1975: 25As the great pessimist HannahAnd Helmholtz Allen 1966: 113–121Melody’s problem was that she made up in

ego what shelacked in superego Whatever WorksPenis envy Annie HallOn running people over ManhattanSex in relationships Annie HallSaid the two most important things are

work and sexDeconstructing Harry and

Anything ElseSex is the royal road to the unconscious Allen 1972: 199Treats Mahler for composer’s block Allen 2007: 103–104

Frost, RobertAllen’s favorite poet (among others) Lax 2007: 84

Gaudi, AntoniVicky studies his architecture VCB

Gauguin, PaulAs character in film Midnight in Paris

Genet, JeanThe Balcony as brilliant play Kelley 2006: 26

Hammett, DashiellParodied by Allen’s stories Lax 1975: 221

Heller, JosephCatch-22 as funny novel Lax 1975: 228

Helmholtz, Hermann vonParody of his influence on Freud and

psychoanalysisAllen 1966: 113–121

Hemingway, ErnestIn Africa Allen 1966: 91–92As character in film Midnight in ParisIn Gertrude Stein and Jack Dempsey’s

training campAllen 1966: 89

Making love and its relationship to death Midnight in ParisParis is A Moveable Feast Midnight in ParisParodied by Allen’s stories Lax 1975: 221

Lax 2007: 83

392 J. Andrew Gothard

Is of the root canal set Melinda and MelindaSome of Allen’s earliest reading Björkman 1993: 8

Hegel, G.W.F.Boring to read Lax 2007: 85Sober and uncharismatic philosophy Lax 1975: 231

Herrick, Robert“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” Midsummer

Hobbes, ThomasOn reality Allen 1966: 29

HomerOdysseus awakens a roe Allen 1972: 182As symbol for T.S. Eliot Allen 1972: 121

Hume, DavidPart of fictitious, philosophical reading list Allen 1966: 27

Hugo, VictorHunchback is Coriolanus with minor

changesAllen 1972: 187

Marriage to Quasimodo Lax 1975: 36Musical version of Hunchback Bullets

Ibsen, HenrikHannah plays Nora in A Doll’s House HannahAs initial model for Allen’s drama Lax 2007: 86It is very difficult to behave like Torvold’s

little chipmunk withoutmaking an ass of yourself HannahOswald, Ghosts, and a headache Annie Hall

Ionesco, EugèneAmusing and imaginative Kelley 2006: 26

Irving, WashingtonPhil Gamisch looks like Ichabod Crane Hannah

James, HenryConfused as Harry James Small Time CrooksThe Turn of the Screw Annie Hall

Johnson, SamuelAnd Boswell Midsummer

Joyce, JamesAnecdote about Joyce eating sauerkraut and

frankfurtersMidnight in Paris

Compared to writing students Husbands and WivesFirst read with a Columbia tutor Lax 1975: 38Molly Bloom has affair with J.M. Synge Allen 1972: 121Read everything and knew more than his

criticsKakutani 1996: 212

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 393

And reading Finnegan’s Wake on a roller coaster

Allen 1966: 103

Cliff plagiarizes love letters to Nora CrimesJung, Carl

Jungian therapist suggests a Ouija board Allen 1972: 198Member of the academy of the overrated

(Isaac disagrees)Manhattan

As veterinarian Allen 1966: 35Kaf ka, Franz

Best reading Kelley 2006: 26We both started out wanting to be Kaf ka Deconstructing HarryDepressing conclusions Allen 1966: 76Depression as reason for interest Lax 1975: 45Fictitiously emulated by Metterling Allen 1966: 9Inferiority complex Allen 1975: 133Master of despair Stardust MemoriesPart of fictitious, philosophical reading list Allen 1966: 27Self-esteem a step below Kaf ka’s ManhattanSex as Kaf kaesque experience Annie HallAnd silence Björkman 1993: 105

Kant, ImmanuelExistence of God proved on moral grounds Allen 1966: 145The mind imposes order Allen 1972: 197Parody of moralistic world Allen 2007: 143–144

Keats, John“truth is beauty” DeCurtis 1993: 50

Kierkegaard, SørenAnd breakfast cereal Weinstein 1967Fashionable pessimism ManhattanHistorically existential material for

dramatistsBjörkman 1993: 209

Knowledge vs. Faith Allen 1966: 145Not always clear Allen 1966: 27Part of fictitious, philosophical reading list Allen 1966: 27Preferred reading Kelley 2006: 26Romantic mindset in philosophy Lax 1975: 231

Krafft-Ebing, Richard vonNarrator jokes about Allen 1966: 105In relation to the Marquis de Sade Lax 1975: 25

Larkin, PhilipAllen’s love for Lax 2007: 84

Lautrec, Henri de ToulouseAs character in film Midnight in Paris

394 J. Andrew Gothard

Leibniz, GottfriedComponent parts of the universe Allen 1966: 30Parody of monads discovery Allen 2007: 142

Literature, GeneralLearned little about literature and theatre at

schoolBjörkman 1993: 8

Women as motivation for learning literature Lax 1975: 37Literature, Russian

As main theme of Love and Death Björkman 1993: 72–74Russian novelists are greatest novelists Björkman 1993: 211

Mailer, NormanAffirmative/negative duality EYEWTKASAllen’s preferred reading while filming in

ParisItzkoff 2010

Donated ego to Harvard medical school SleeperIn film, not literature Kakutani 1996: 206Member of the academy of the overrated

(Isaac disagrees)Manhattan

Malraux, AndréArt as the last defense against death Lax 1975: 231

Mann, ThomasDeath in Venice Annie HallWriting a fictitious play The Hosiery of Moses Allen 1966: 9

Marlowe, ChristopherParodied as author of Shakespeare’s works Allen 1972: 186–187

Marquis de SadeCustomer in the Marquis de Sade room

orders 12 loaves of bread and a boy scout uniform

Lax 1975: 25 and Pussycat

Marx, GrouchoAllen grew up loving Groucho as an actor Lax 2007: 86Alvy cites “I wouldn’t wanna be a member

of a club that wouldhave someone like me for a member” Annie HallDuck Soup scene convinces Mickey to rejoin

existenceHannah

Groucho was “built-in ‘funny’ ” Björkman 1993: 4Not fair that Groucho never won an Oscar Lax 1975: 178Verbal comedian with automatic physical

humorLax 2007: 177

Marx, KarlQuantity effects quality (in sex) BulletsResistance reading materials Sleeper

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 395

Matisse, HenriAs character in film Midnight in Paris

McKuen, RodPicture during identification of twentieth-

century historySleeper

Melville, HermanBilly Budd as justification of ways of God to

manAllen 1972: 35

Character pays a girl to sit and talk about Moby Dick with him

Allen 1972: 34

Zelig never manages to finish reading Moby-Dick

Zelig

Millay, Edna St. Vincent“My candle burns at both ends” poem Anything Else

Miller, ArthurDramatic impact of Death of a Salesman Lax 1975: 72Good feel for drama Lax 2007: 104Groucho Marx vs. Death of a Salesman Lax 1975: 179As serious author Ciment and Tobin 2006: 136

Milton, JohnBetter to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven Deconstructing HarryParadise Lost lacks substructure of pessimism Allen 1972: 35

MolièreAs vulgarian, Bourgeois Gentleman Small Time Crooks

More, ThomasFirst read with a Columbia tutor Lax 1975: 38

Nietzsche, FriedrichDiscovery of fictional Friedrich Nietzsche’s

Diet BookAllen 2007: 141–146

First read with a Columbia tutor Lax 1975: 37Fun to read Lax 2007: 85“God is dead” statement as inventor of

modern manAllen 1975: 57

Insanity Allen 1966: 144In “The Metterling Lists” Allen 1966: 7–8“Eternal return” and Ice Capades Hannah

O’Casey, SeanCharacter played a part in Juno and the Paycock Whatever Works

O’Neill, EugeneAs character in film ZeligDramatic impact of Mourning Becomes Electra Lax 1975: 72As fan of morbid, depressing writing of

young playwrightBullets

396 J. Andrew Gothard

And human crises Kakutani 1996: 207And nihilism/pessimism Anything Else

One Thousand and One Arabian NightsShort story “Death Knocks” as parody Allen 1966: 41–54

Orpheus and EurydiceAs plot for new novel Deconstructing Harry

Pascal, BlaiseOn the existence of God Allen 1966: 30

Perelman, S JThe World of S J Perelman as one of top five

booksGerber 2011

Picasso, PabloAs character in film Midnight in Paris

Plath, SylviaSuicide Annie Hall

PlatoFirst read with Columbia tutor Lax 1975: 38Exciting on first read Lax 2007: 85Parody of Plato’s Cave from The Republic Allen 1975: 39–40

Poe, Edgar AllenNot appreciated in his lifetime Bullets

PlutarchAnalyst implies the Sabine women had it

comingHusbands and Wives

Pope, AlexanderEnglish major, minor in foreplay Sleeper

Porter, ColeAs character in film Midnight in Paris

Ray, ManAs character in film Midnight in Paris

On ReadingReading as an obligation, not for enjoyment Itzkoff 2010Voracious reader Lax 1975: 38

Rilke, RainerAs enjoyable poet Björkman 1993: 200“The Panther” poem Another WomanAs philosophical poet Björkman 1993: 200Quotes “Archaic Torso of Apollo” Another WomanWriting student named after Husbands and Wives

Robinson, E.A.“Which era would you prefer to live in,

Miniver Cheevey?”Midnight in Paris

Rodin, AugusteThe Thinker and Rodin’s mistress Midnight in Paris

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 397

Roth, PhilipAllen can’t relate to Roth’s characters Kelley 2006: 24College professor attempts to enter world

of Portnoy’s ComplaintAllen 1975: 54–55

Portnoy’s Complaint as funny novel Lax 1975: 228Runyon, Damon

Guys and Dolls Hollywood EndingRussell, Bertrand

Hard to argue with Kelley 2006: 26Resonates deeply with Allen Lax 2007: 85Sober and uncharismatic philosophy Lax 1975: 231

Salinger, J.D.The Catcher in the Rye Annie HallThe Catcher in the Rye as funny novel Lax 1975: 228The Catcher in the Rye as one of Allen’s top

five favorite booksGerber 2011

Sartre, Jean-PaulAllen’s preferred reading Kelley 2006: 26Exciting to read Lax 2007: 85No Exit and The Flies as anniversary gift Anything ElseAnd nothingness in communication Allen 1966: 77Part of fictitious, philosophical reading list Allen 1966: 27

Schopenhauer, ArthurParody of arguments concerning the human

willAllen 2007: 143

Speed-reading Stardust MemoriesAnd will Allen 1966: 30

Shakespeare, WilliamActress misquoting “to be or not to be” speech BulletsAs beautiful writer Lax 2007: 85At end of universe, doesn’t lament the loss

of Titus AndronicusAllen 1975: 15

Gabe is crazy about Husbands and WivesHamlet and Oedipus Husbands and WivesDesdemona scene from Othello Melinda and MelindaInfluence on Everything You Ever Wanted to

Know About SexBjörkman 1993: 58

King Lear mistaken as King Leo Husbands and WivesKing Lear played with a limp Melinda and MelindaMacbeth and murder as philosophical issue Lax 2007: 24 and DeCurtis

1993: 46Mistaken as classical composer ScoopNarrator’s parents fight like the Montagues

and CapuletsAllen 1975: 145

398 J. Andrew Gothard

Not much humor in Macbeth Lax 2007: 183Not much humor in Othello Kakutani 1996: 218Parody of authorship conspiracy theorists Allen 1972: 185–187Plays are dumb and bumpkin-oriented Lax 2007: 85Has the only real ghosts MidsummerRichard II and stealing leotards Annie HallWine “provokes the desire, but it takes away

the performance”Midnight in Paris

Zelig plays Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream ZeligShaw, George Bernard

Character comedy in Shaw and Play it Again, Sam

Lax 1975: 175

Character played Henry Higgins with a limp

Melinda and Melinda

Chorus makes wrong reference to Higgins in Greek play

Allen 1972: 157

Comedy compared to drama in Pygmalion Lax 1975: 72Henry Higgins would jump out the window

if he tried to convert MelodyWhatever Works

Pygmalion given as a gift Small Time CrooksPygmalion, Henry Higgins to Eliza Doolittle Deconstructing HarryPygmalion and seriousness Lax 2007: 41–42Relationship between Born Yesterday and

PygmalionLax 2007: 11

Shelley, Percy B.“Ode to the West Wind” Husbands and WivesOzymandias Melancholia Stardust Memories“Ozymandias” and Stardust Memories Björkman 1993: 103

Sheridan, RichardComedy compared to drama in School for

ScandalLax 1975: 72

SimmiasVisits narrator in a dream to discuss death Allen 1975: 34–40

SocratesAnd courage in the face of death Allen 1975: 33And the good life Allen 1972: 121Evil as ignorance of truth Allen 1972: 164Suicide Allen 1966: 144Used to knock off little Greek boys Hannah

SophoclesHamlet and Oedipus Husbands and WivesNever being born is the greatest boon of all Match Point and Deconstructing

Harry

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 399

Oedipus and his mother appear in Greek play

Allen 1972: 158

Oedipus plot told by a Greek chorus Mighty AphroditePlay with Jesus loving Mary as an Oedipal

complexBullets

Wants to buy Deus ex Machina Allen 1972: 142Spinoza, Baruch

Parody of First Cause argument Allen 2007: 142–143Part of fictitious, philosophical reading list Allen 1966: 27

Stein, GertrudeAs character in film Midnight in ParisWith the narrator, Picasso, and Hemingway Allen 1966: 89–94

Steinbeck, JohnEarliest reading Björkman 1993: 8

Lax 2007: 83Stevens, Wallace

Call girls paid to discuss literature Allen 1972: 37Stevenson, Robert Louis

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Small Time CrooksStoker, Bram

Dracula and the baker Allen 1966: 95–101Strindberg, August

Award for marriage ManhattanAllen has no compunction stealing from Kakutani 1996: 213Brutalized by critics Kakutani 1996: 220Directed a series of his plays Melinda and Melinda

Sumer Is Icumen InSung by character Midsummer

Swift, JonathanAllen’s plays not like Swift’s Lax 1975: 207

Synge, John MillingtonAs podiatrist who has affair with Molly

BloomAllen 1972: 121

Thoreau, Henry DavidParody of Civil Disobedience Allen 1972: 106–109

Toklas, Alice B.The narrator, and Picasso in a villa in South

FranceAllen 1966: 89

As character in film Midnight in ParisTolstoy, Leo

Allen’s preferred reading while in Paris Itzkoff 2010Allen’s preoccupation with death Lax 1975: 227A full, literary meal Husbands and Wives

400 J. Andrew Gothard

Great entertainment Kakutani 1996: 207Greater work than Dostoevsky Björkman 1993: 211Narrative structure of Anna Karenina and

Hannah and Her SistersBjörkman 1993: 154 and

Walker 2006: 95“The only absolute knowledge attainable by

man is that life is meaningless.”Hannah

As opposite of cerebral Manhattan Björkman 1993: 79Reviewing the letters ManhattanAs rural writer Björkman 1993: 71And suicide Lax 2007: 90

Turgenev, IvanLiterary dessert Husbands and WivesAs rural writer Björkman 1993: 71

Trollope, AnthonyEnglish country estate brings to mind Scoop

Unamuno, Miguel deEternal persistence of consciousness Allen 1975: 58

Wilde, OscarDorian Gray and an aging portrait in a closet Small Time Crooks

Williams, TennesseeBlanche DuBois escapes her play because

Williams “dropped me in the center of a nightmare”

Allen 1972: 149

Dramatic impact of Streetcar Lax 1975: 72Groucho Marx vs. Streetcar Lax 1975: 179Music in his writing process Moss 2006: 50Narrator’s wife always dependent upon the

kindness of strangersAllen 2007: 115

Parochial Moss 2006: 56Parody of Blanche Dubois SleeperProducing plays is annoying Kakutani 1996: 206Said the opposite of death is desire Anything ElseAs serious author Ciment and Tobin 2006: 136Stanley Kowolski enters a Greek play

shouting “Stella!”Allen 1972: 178

Streetcar and pregnancy Björkman 1993: 175On transcending writing Björkman 1993: 50Wonderful feel for drama Lax 2007: 104

Williams, William CarlosAllen’s favorite poet (among others) Björkman 1993: 200 and Lax

2007: 84Yeats, William Butler

Allen’s favorite poet (overall) Björkman 1993: 200 and Lax 2007: 84

A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions 401

As greatest poet since Shakespeare Björkman 1993: 200Michael Gates quotes poems while drunk Husbands and WivesPoetry analyzed through dental care Allen 1966: 61

Note

1 The films covered in this census, with any abbreviation used:Annie Hall, 1977.Another Woman, 1988.Anything Else, 2003.Bullets Over Broadway, 1994. (Bullets)Celebrity, 1998.Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1989. (Crimes)Deconstructing Harry, 1997.Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex*But Were Afraid to Ask, 1972. (EYEWTKAS)Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986. (Hannah)Hollywood Ending, 2002.Husbands and Wives, 1992.Love and Death, 1975.Manhattan, 1979.Match Point, 2005.Melinda and Melinda, 2004.Midnight in Paris, 2011.Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, 1982. (Midsummer)Mighty Aphrodite, 1995.Scoop, 2006.Shadows and Fog, 1992. (Shadows)Sleeper, 1973.Small Time Crooks, 2000.Stardust Memories, 1980.Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 2008. (VCB)What’s New Pussycat, 1965. (Pussycat)Whatever Works, 2009.Zelig, 1983.

Works Cited

Allen, Woody (1966) Getting Even. New York: Random House.Allen, Woody (1972) Without Feathers. New York: Random House.Allen, Woody (1975) Side Effects. New York: Random House.Allen, Woody (2007) Mere Anarchy. New York: Random House.Björkman, Stig (1993) Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Björkman. New

York: Grove Press.

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Ciment, Michel and Franck Garbarz (2006) “Woody Allen: ‘All my films have a connection with magic.’ ” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 169–178. (Original work published in Positif, 1998.)

Ciment, Michel and Yann Tobin (2006) “Interview with Woody Allen: ‘My heroes don’t come from life, but from their mythology.’ ” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 130–142. (Original work published in Positif, 1995.)

DeCurtis, Anthony (1993) “The Rolling Stone interview: Woody Allen.” Rolling Stone (Sept. 16), 45–50, 78–82.

Foundas, Scott (2009) “Interview: Woody Allen on Whatever Works, the meaning of life (or lack thereof ), and the allure of younger women.” Village Voice ( June 18). http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2009/06/interview_woody.php (accessed Oct. 25, 2012).

Gerber, Eve (2011) “Woody Allen on inspiration.” The Browser (May 5). http://thebrowser.com/interviews/woody-allen-on-memory?page=full (accessed Oct. 25, 2012).

Itzkoff, David (2010) “Woody Allen on faith, fortune tellers and New York.” The New York Times (Sept. 14). www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/movies/15woody.html?_r=0 (accessed Oct. 25, 2012).

Kakutani, Michiko (1996) “Woody Allen: The art of humor I.” Paris Review (Fall), 200–222.

Kelley, Ken (2006) “A conversation with the real Woody Allen.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mis-sissippi, 7–28. (Original work published in Rolling Stone, 1976.)

Lauder, Robert E. (2010) “Whatever Works: Woody Allen’s world.” Commonweal Magazine (Apr. 15). www.commonwealmagazine.org/woody (accessed Oct. 25, 2012).

Lax, Eric (1975) On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy. New York: Charterhouse.Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Moss, Robert F. “Creators on creating: Woody Allen.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie

Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 49–57. (Original work published in Saturday Review, 1980.)

Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Walker, Alexander (2006) “Woody Allen.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.),

Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 92–105. (Original work published in Cinema Papers, 1986.)

Weinstein, Sol (1967) “Playboy interview: Woody Allen.” Playboy (May), 63–73.Yabroff, Jennie (2008) “Take the bananas and run.” Newsweek (Aug. 8). www.thedailybeast.

com/newsweek/2008/08/07/take-the-bananas-and-run.html (accessed Oct. 25, 2012).

19

This much Kaf ka was absolutely sure of: first, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, that only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is whether it can do humanity any good.

(Walter Benjamin in a letter to Gershom Scholem, June 12, 1938: Scholem 1992)

Yiddish has but quips and flashes,Words that fall on us like lashes,Words that stab like poisoned spears,And laughter that is full of fears,And there is a touch of gall,Of bitterness about it all

(“Monish” by I.L. Peretz: 2002)

Since the nineteenth century, the schlemiel has been the principal comic character in Yiddish literature, theater, and humor; and in the twentieth century this comic character made his way to America to extend its legacy on the stage, literature, stand-up comedy, comic books, and film. According to Ruth Wisse, however, its life in America was short lived. At the end of The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, written in 1971, Wisse argued that

whether for reasons of gloom, exotic self-indulgence, opulent self-hatred, or a new dedication to reform, the schlemiel is being rejected as a hero in contemporary American writing. No one, I think, could argue that balanced irony is the perfect response to life’s miseries (Wisse 1980: 123).

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Schlemiel in Woody Allen’s Later Films

Menachem Feuer

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What Wisse means by the schlemiel’s “balanced irony” is an irony that maintains a tension between hope and skepticism. The schlemiel lives in the world of hope, aloof from the world; the irony is that while he dreams, the audience, like Sancho Panza of Don Quixote, bears witness to the fact that reality is against the schlemiel. The schlemiel’s obliviousness to reality is funny and troubling. The audience’s skepticism does not aim to correct the schlemiel; rather, it is directed at hope and the reality that denies hope. To be sure, the schlemiel’s hope is not effaced by skepticism; it is wounded by it. His foolish hope lives on. Balanced irony worked in the past because there was a real struggle afoot by the Maskilim ( Jewish intel-lectuals, many of whom wrote Yiddish literature and theater), Jewish socialists (Bundists), and the Jewish tradition to prove reality wrong; Irving Howe called this utopian movement “historical idealism” but traditional Jews in the Pale of Settlement called it messianism. Today, however, “no one would argue that bal-anced irony is the perfect response to life’s miseries” because Jews no longer have to face a bleak reality with a schlemiel’s foolish hope. Jews apparently live in a world that no longer needs “historical idealism,” where the real and the ideal no longer contradict each other. In other words, the schlemiel can only exist in a world where, because of contradictions that are historical, political, and even theological, both optimism and skepticism are in tension. Today, Wisse tells us, they are not. The post-utopian world insists on either optimism or skepticism, not both.

When read against Woody Allen’s films over the last 12 years, Wisse’s claims take on a different tone. First of all, Allen’s films show us that while the schlemiel was not, according to Wisse, of interest to writers in the early 1970s, this comic character was still of great interest to Woody Allen. He made the schlemiel the main character of nearly all of his films (before the 1970s until today).1 Second, and more importantly, while the tension between hope and skepticism is – to some extent – retained in Allen’s earlier films, in his later films this tension is resolved. By the end of the film, this tension is insignificant. We witness the schlemiel’s gradual transformation in many of Allen’s films over the last 15 years: in these movies, schlemiels go from being children or psychological misfits to self-conscious adults/artists. This is no accident. Allen’s schlemiels have, through hard work and a little chance, transformed themselves. To be sure, no such schlemiel exists in the tradition of Yiddish or Jewish American literature and film. As Wisse argues, sch-lemiels have always been naive and are consistently poised between optimism and skepticism. They do not resolve this tension as they do not transform themselves. Woody Allen’s new schlemiel, however, no longer challenges the “political and philosophical status quo” (Wisse 1980: 6) through “balanced irony”; instead, he transforms the outward challenge to the “political and philosophical status quo” into an inner, psychological challenge which the character overcomes.

According to Fredric Jameson, this movement from the outside to the inside constitutes the origin of the middle-class subject and, as a symbolic gesture, reifies the status quo ( Jameson 1981: 20–21). Its salvation is personal, not collective or historical. This movement poses internal resolutions to contradictions which are

The Schlemiel in Woody Allen’s Later Films 405

external to the subject and are thoroughly historical. In Woody Allen’s later films, the psychological transformation of the schlemiel not only reifies the status quo by resolving external contradictions internally, but it also makes the schlemiel into the model for the self-actualized modern artist. These transformations of the schlemiel – embodied in the transformation of the schlemiel’s blindness, skepti-cism, and weakness into insight, optimism, and strength – can be found in Holly-wood Ending (2002), Whatever Works (2009), and Midnight in Paris (2011). Allen’s new “psychological” approach to the schlemiel marks a major turn in Woody Allen’s work and bears with it many questions about the legacy and future of this important comic character.

The Schlemiel and Autonomy: From Moses Mendelssohn to Woody Allen

Sander Gilman argues that “Schlemiels are fools who believe themselves to be in control of the world but are shown by the reader/audience to be in control of nothing, not even themselves”(1986: 112). Gilman’s definition of the schlemiel contrasts with Ruth Wisse’s definition because he focuses on the German rather than the Eastern European schlemiel. Gilman argues that German Jews in the eighteenth century related the schlemiel to all of the negative characteristics that they wanted to rid themselves of. These characteristics were, Gilman claims, associated with the target of German idealism; namely, heteronomy. Gilman draws his argument from the premise that the greatest thinker of the Enlighten-ment, Immanuel Kant, captured the minds of his generation when he argued that to be enlightened, one must be autonomous. As Kant argued in his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment?,” the greatest obstacle to becoming autonomous was mindless obedience to history, culture, or religion, which he associates with het-eronomy. Only an autonomous person who, in Gilman’s words, is in control of her/his “world” was considered enlightened. The schlemiel is the antithesis of this.

Gilman argues that this notion of autonomy and its negative corollary, heter-onomy, found its way into the Jewish community by way of Moses Mendelssohn, who argued that satire could be used as a way of prompting Jews to correct them-selves and become autonomous. According to Gilman, this notion of satire reso-nated in nearly all of the schlemiel plays in Germany during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

For Gilman, the goal of satire was to eliminate negative traits that impeded acceptance into a Germany guided by rational ideals, not balancing hope and skepticism. If it were to do the latter, it would be putting its hope for integration into question. And this is certainly not to be found in the German schlemiel. He is an object of ridicule, not hope. While this German schlemiel isn’t a close relative

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of the Eastern European schlemiel, which “balances” hope and skepticism, he is a distant relative of the schlemiel in Woody Allen’s later films, since both aim at leaving certain schlemiel-like traits behind or, at the very least, transforming them.

But there is a major difference. In the schlemiel plays in Germany, the schlemiel does not change – only the audience is prompted to change. In Allen’s later films, however, we witness the elimination or transformation of negative, heterono-mous traits on screen. Through Woody Allen’s schlemiels, we witness the process of individuation and personal salvation.

Blindness and Insight

A modernist film, Hollywood Ending begins in medias res (in the middle of things). This middling circumstance is a figure of fragmentation and disharmony. At the outset, we witness to two radically different scenes evoking disharmony: the first scene is of a group of Hollywood executives showing their doubts about whether or not they should hire Val Waxman to direct a film. Val, played by Woody Allen, had once been a great filmmaker. After his divorce, his career and life had gone downhill. He can no longer work or finish any project that he starts because the life he is now living does not correspond to his vision of himself as a great artist. He cannot accept the ‘reality’ that he is now a second-rate filmmaker. We see this indicated throughout the film. This characterization resonates with the schlemiel of the past since the schlemiel has often been characterized as a dreamer (a Luft-mensch – literally, a person who lives on air, an airman) and Val is a classic case; he is caught up in his narcissistic dream of greatness, he – literally and figuratively – can’t see what’s in front of his face. And it is this psychological problem which we witness being transformed in the film.

Val’s girlfriend, Lori (Debra Messing), younger than Val, believes in her naive way that Val will someday recapture his Hollywood a success and give her a star-ring role. This is what Val told Lori so as to win her over. She foolishly believes this will happen, even though Val can’t actually finish anything. This situation clearly demonstrates to the audience that Val’s relationship with Lori is tenuous. Yet, Val chooses not to “see” this. After Val returns home from a job in Canada he was fired from, Lori – wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of a German shep-herd that contrasts with Val’s modest (middle class) attire – confronts him. When Val tells her the bad news, she begrudgingly notes how this story is nothing but a repeat performance. As far as psychological ailments go, Val’s repetition compul-sion is constituted by his inability to finish any form of work. Only by working through this psychological issue can he be successful. But, at this point, it doesn’t seem possible.

In the midst of Val’s breakdown before Lori, an offer comes by way of a phone call; namely, a script which is connected to his ex-wife, Ellie (Tea Leoni). She is

The Schlemiel in Woody Allen’s Later Films 407

living with Hal, the man with whom she cheated on Val. When his agent Al (Mark Rydell), tells him from whom the offer comes, Val is immediately inflamed and his pathology kicks in yet again. Nonetheless, Al does a fine job of arguing with Val and cajoling him to take the new work.

Al is a catalyst. He helps Val to transform himself. Together, Al and Val are a comic duo. Al – like Val – is a Jew and a New Yorker. This point is by no means arbitrary because Allen creates a similar tension between the New York Jew and California WASP as he did in Annie Hall (1977) – making Los Angeles, where Hal and Ellie reside, into a WASP haven which is only interested in success, wealth, and leisure. New York, in contrast, is represented through two very “ethnic” Jewish characters – Val and Al – who, while interested in success, do it their way.

Psychologically, Al is like a concerned parent, while Val is a traumatized schle-miel (boy-child). Al’s task is to help Val become a success again. This partnership contrasts with one of the first schlemiel novels by Mendel Mocher Sforim, entitled Benjamin III. In that novel, a comic duo, from the beginning to the very end of the novel, travels around the Pale of Settlement, thinking it is going somewhere but goes nowhere. Instead of learning about an outside world, they learn nothing; they see their voyage as a success, but it is really a failure. To be sure, the split-protagonists of Benjamin III echo each other’s blindness. We see this in many schlemiel duos. Their names, Al and Val – like Benjamin and Sender, Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Vladimir and Estragon, or Klein and Gross – resound this comic theme. Often, one of the two is a schlimazl and experiences bad luck while the other character – the schlemiel – blunders.2 Hollywood Ending differs from this tradition as it shows how one schlimazl – Al – can help the schlemiel – Val – to succeed.

But Al’s help is not enough for Val to achieve success; the hook in the plot is that Ellie, who works for a film company called Galaxie, convinces Hal that Val can make a comeback. She does this because she truly believes that Val is a great artist. The subplot is that she is really not happy living with Hal in Los Angeles and still has a love for Val that is, at this point, hidden or masked. Her marriage – symbolically associated with Los Angeles – is missing the spice and creativity of New York. She, in a much different sense, has also blinded herself. And, at the other end of the continent, Val is not truly happy with Lorie. Val and Ellie are a match waiting to re-happen; this plot structure makes up what Stanley Cavell has called, in his book of the same title, the “Hollywood comedy of remarriage.” Strangely enough, the filmscript that Val is given is entitled The City that Never Sleeps. It is a period piece based on jazz-era New York. Since Val is a New Yorker and loves that transitional time period, the film would be perfect for him. His success is nearly guaranteed. The studio buys Ellie’s argument and hires Val to do the film.

After getting Val the job, Ellie goes out for dinner with him. The relationship is odd because it is the reunion of the divorced couple and a “professional”

408 Menachem Feuer

meeting. Much has not been discussed, let alone worked out, between them. In the midst of their conversation, Val, in a classic Woody Allen fashion, breaks out and spills the beans about his confused feelings for Ellie and what happened with the divorce. The conversation comes out with such a torrent that one can surmise that it had been bottled up for years. In a schizophrenic schlemiel-like fashion, Val goes back and forth between recounting his confused emotions for Ellie and com-posing himself – comically, referring to their “professional” relationship. The routine is obviously a parody of professionalism and it sets up a primary love conflict which, by the end of the film, is resolved. Val’s tirade dramatizes what Sanford Pinkser would call Woody Allen’s “loveable schlemiel” (1991: 173–175) or what David Biale would call Woody Allen’s “erotic schlemiel” (1997: 206). The erotic schlemiel, according to Biale, is more masculine and, for this reason, is no longer a schlemiel which, traditionally, is humble and weak (207). This introduces a new element of the schlemiel, one that Wisse did not find present in any Yiddish or Jewish American schlemiels before and after the Holocaust. And it is this erotic aspect which is the catalyst for changing the schlemiel into a man. For both Biale and Pinsker, it is the “loveable” or “erotic” aspect that causes the audience to identify with Woody Allen’s characters.3

In the midst of the scene, we see what created the divorce is the fact that Val wanted to be the “great American artist.” In his single-minded pursuit of this goal, he went “blind.” As Ellie tells him, “You don’t see what you don’t want to see.” This blindness and lack of “harmony” (Ellie’s definition of a good marriage) makes Val into another kind of schlemiel – one who dreams of being the best American artist and ends up destroying everything around him (albeit in a comic, and not in a tragic, sense). To be sure, Val’s blindness, the central motif in this film, is what causes him to become a greater schlemiel than he originally was. For Allen, the blindness/insight distinction underlies the schlemiel as a character; but in classical schlemiel literature and theater, the schlemiel remains blind and foolish. Val doesn’t. The audience who would watch/read the schlemiel would have insight; here, the schlemiel, Val, will eventually have the insight which will trans-form him.

At this point in the film, however, insight is lacking and blindness is comically emphasized and exaggerated. After their dinner, what follows is a wonderful parody of Val’s schlemiel-artistic sensibility which is, at the same time, indistin-guishable from his blindness. To be sure, Val embraces an aesthetic of random-ness and calls himself, at one point, an “accidental Fellini.” He has “total freedom” and can do what he wants. Accordingly, Val ends up hiring a cameraman who cannot speak a word of English. Val chooses him to film the movie because the cameraman filmed the “Red Army” and “understands color” (namely, red). He also hires several artistic directors who think in ways that are grandiose and ridiculous. One of the directors, who speaks, dresses, and acts like a Queer artist, wants to rebuild Manhattan in Central Park and paint everything green. The other artistic director doesn’t object to painting everything green so much as the color

The Schlemiel in Woody Allen’s Later Films 409

he chose: she would prefer white and red. In response, the cameraman says he cannot shoot anything in white. All of this comic chaos ends up getting back to the studio. Fortunately, Val is protected by Ellie, who tells Hal that Val is an artistic genius; he has reasons for doing what he is doing. There is method in his comic madness.

After these scenes, Val is questioned by an Esquire journalist. Through her, we see that Val is something of a narcissistic artist (hence his blindness to others). When she butters him up, calling him a “unique American artist,” he allows her to stay on the set. Ellie pulls him to the side and injects some realism by telling him that the Esquire interviewer says such things at first to win directors over but in the end she stabs them in the back. Once she has said this, Val reacts and throws comments at Ellie regarding her relationship with Hal; she retorts and asks Val how long he has been living with his “wind-up doll” girlfriend. All of this amounts to a plot structure that posits the smart as opposed to the stupid partner; the schlemiel chooses the stupid over the intelligent and fails rather than succeeds because of his blindness. This is his character flaw. To foreground this blindness as a central theme and bring out what must be done if Val is to transform himself, Allen has Val literally go blind.

The next major scene is Al’s Passover Seder. Val makes a call to Al during the Seder and interrupts it, demanding that Al come to him. In response, Al says he can’t just interrupt the first Seder; to be sure, it is one of the most important rituals of the Jewish tradition. Val then says the magic words which draw Al away from his family Seder: “It’s a matter of life and death.” When Al arrives, with a kippah on his head, he notices that Val really is blind. At that moment, he throws off his kippah to address the situation. This gesture is telling, because it communicates what Allen considers to be of greater value than Judaism: friendship and artistic success. To be sure, if it weren’t for Al’s care for his friend (not simply his client), Val would not be able to make a film that, he believed, would change his life. Indeed, love, friendship, and artistic passion, as we shall see, are the ingredients for transforming the schlemiel – in this film – from a narcissistic failure into a new man.

Val’s blindness is a part of his condition. We learn that it is psychosomatic, which implies that this schlemiel, out of his intense fears about reality, has brought about his own blindness. This is an odd move because the classical schlemiel, from Mendel Mocher Sforim’s Benjamin III to I.B. Singer’s Gimpel the Fool and Charlie Chaplin’s immigrant, is not “blind” by virtue of his own will or psyche. His blind-ness, so to speak, is not intentional. The schlemiel’s blindness points: it is an accusation, not a description. Indeed, while the schlemiel’s blindness may be funny, the mistreatment of the schlemiel by different characters is not. It accuses the world and not the schlemiel of being wrong. As we mentioned above, this accusation is what Wisse would call a challenge to the “political and philosophical status quo.” The world and not the schlemiel must change. Here, on the contrary, the schlemiel has a psychological problem and is made aware of this flaw. Unlike

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the traditional schlemiel, it is the character and not the world that must change. This is an internalization of a challenge that was once posed – by the schlemiel – to the world.

What makes this psychosomatic condition so interesting is that it isn’t truly addressed until the end of the movie. Before we get there, the movie within a movie that follows Val’s blindness is a powerful parody of the trust people invest in the artist and his or her creations. And, although the main theme of the film deals with this internal challenge, these scenes hearken back to the traditional schlemiel.

In this part of the film, Al helps out Val by confiding in someone who can be by Val during the entire filming process. He does this because it is an unwritten rule that an agent should not be on a film set; for this reason, Al can’t be there to help Val. So he chooses the cinematographer’s translator. The problem is that the translator is a Math major at NYU and knows nothing about filmmaking. For this reason, Val’s eyes for the film don’t match with reality and create yet another schlemiel effect dividing action and intention (which parallels the difference between the real and the ideal that is found in all classical schlemiel stories and humor).

As the movie commences, we see Val act as if he is fine. No one notices, think-ing that what Val does is what an eccentric filmmaker – an “accidental Fellini” – does. George Plimpton, who plays a Galaxie studio executive, is a case in point. Throughout the filming, all he can say about Val’s happenstance way of filming is that “it’s brilliant”; meanwhile, the cinematographer can only curse in Chinese that none of the film makes sense. In addition, the interviewer for Esquire maga-zine exacerbates this mistaken belief that Val is brilliant through her voiceover, in which she discloses her contention that Val is a filmic genius.

The film gets more and more chaotic as it develops. The cinematographer insists on firing the translator because he thinks that everything he is saying to Val is being mistranslated. He tells Val that either he or the translator will have to leave. Who will be by Val’s side if the translator is fired? He will be discovered!

Ellie, who is visiting the set while this is happening, is thrown into the mix by Al. He decides that he has no choice but to tell her since he can trust her; she is close to Val and would be the perfect match to allay a possible disaster. This throws Val and Ellie close together and functions in two ways: one, it brings Ellie closer to Val emotionally and, two, shows us a combination that will facilitate the move-ment from the schlemiel to the new man. This combination between a WASP and Allen is much different from the one we see in Annie Hall because this combination will transform the schlemiel and prove beneficial; rather than leaving the schlemiel to be the odd one out (as Alvy Singer is at the end of the movie), this combination will make him shine.

Ellie now takes part in a major bluff, but it is exposed when Val accidentally tells the interviewer, whom he thinks is Ellie (because of the perfume they both

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wear), that he is blind. After this moment, everything starts falling to pieces. But before this happens, Val’s psychiatrist discovers something that will cure him: he realizes that Val has a son that he has not communicated with in years. In the scenes that follow, Val goes to his son (who calls himself “scumbag”) and asks forgiveness for not being the best father.

Val’s son is his diametrical opposite. He sports a green Mohawk, lives in near squalor, and has never tasted success like his father has. He is, without a doubt, a modern outsider. We learn that, while on drugs, he pushed Val down the stairs. Val never forgave him; but, at this moment, Val’s son apologizes and Val accepts him. The last words of the scene ring with a delicious irony and mark a major transformation of the schlemiel from someone who is blind to his son and his life to someone who accepts them: “I love you, Scumbag.”

Immediately after reconciling with his son, Val and Ellie are together in the park. Against this scene, the Esquire writer tells the story of how, all of a sudden, Val regained his eyesight. At this point, Val has something of a revelatory experi-ence and raves about how much he loves everything (“I can see . . . I can see . . .  the city looks so beautiful”). It’s as if Val is seeing everything for the first time.This is not a miracle that comes out of nowhere; it is the miracle of personal salvation.

After turning to the city, the romantic theme music starts up again and he turns to Ellie and says, “You look so beautiful!” Ellie is of course beside herself with happiness as Val is literally and psychologically restored to vision and insight into who he is and what he must do. At this point, he acknowledges Ellie as his true love and leaves Lorie and his previous self behind.

This moment of reconciliation and transformation is interrupted by the next frame which shows Val and Ellie in the screening room with frightened looks on their faces. Val’s first words are “Someone call Dr. Kevorkian  .  .  .  This is the worst  .  .  . This looks like the work of a blind man!” The irony is obvious. But the verdict is not final.

The movie is edited and screened to viewers, all of whom find it to be an artistic disaster. In going over the responses, Ellie sticks up for Val and says “that’s the audience, not the critics.” The film hits rock bottom when Hal goes over the critics’ responses and discusses the Esquire article that he receives – before publica-tion – from the journalist. He confronts Ellie with the fact that she lied to him about Val’s capability to direct the movie. He also has insight.

At this point, Hal lays down the law: “You care more about [Val] than Galaxie.” Ellie is not loyal to the corporation or Hollywood; her loyalty and trust is in a schlemiel who is not blind (and really not a schlemiel) but, supposedly, a great visionary artist.4 Hal goes on to say that he heard Ellie was seen kissing Val around the set – each of these kisses, she explains, were done to distract others; they were not passionate. Hal says it doesn’t matter now, asking her if she still loves Val. At this moment, the camera focuses in on Ellie. And she says that “I never stopped loving him.” She now has insight. The circle is almost complete.

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As the movie approaches its end, Val and his son sit in Val’s study, talking about the film. Scumbag offers his father solace when he tells Val not to listen to the critics; he never did. Scumbag stayed true to himself. These words manage to console Val to some extent. And Scumbag’s last insight in this film reveals the artistic intent of the schlemiel’s transformation: “Wow, blindness as metaphor!” This realization marks a threshold; for, immediately after saying this, the doorbell rings and Al enters, bearing good tidings: “Guess what? The French have seen your movie and they think it is the greatest American movie they have seen in years!” Amazed, Val looks at the French newspaper and says, “You must be kidding!” To this Al says grandly, “You are being hailed as a true artist! A great genius!” Al goes on to say – in a hat tip to progressive Jewishness (one that forgives) – that France atones for the rest of Europe. He can return to Europe with Val. The French want him to do a movie there and Al has led the way.

At this point the theme music starts again and Val states the line that delineates the new dichotomy: “Over here I’m a bum, over there I’m a genius!” Al: “A genius!” Val: “Thank God the French exist!” These words, spoken by a Jew (Val), are transformative; they revise history and posit that Jews no longer need to despise the French (and Europe) for their complicity in the Holocaust and anti-Semitism prior to it. If the classical schlemiel’s task is to compel the world to change and become more human, what need is there for a schlemiel if the world (here, France) has become humane rather than anti-Semitic and barbaric? This is Woody Allen’s rhetorical question. For, at this moment, he is insisting that the battle is over.

In the last scene of the film, we see a tree full of flower blossoms – symbolizing, in the most obvious fashion, a new transformation and hope, as the camera pans down to Ellie, who races with Val to a taxi taking them to the airport.

“This is my life’s dream!” he tells her. “To live in Paris!” At this point, she asks him “Are you sure?” – so as to confirm that Val is a man and not a schlemiel. In response, he says, “You look so beautiful!” and kisses her. Now he can “see” what is in front of him; he is no longer a blind and foolish schlemiel. This is a Hollywood ending which is novel and metaphorical in its own right; it eschews America and its corporate filmmaking for Paris as the true artistic haven for the modern artist. At this point, it seems as if the schlemiel is dead and gone. Val is a new man, a success. However, the last words of the film taint that ending (a little): “Did you remember to pack my Dramamine?”

Clearly, Woody Allen designed this film to show us a character who goes from being a schlemiel to being a success. But even if Val’s film was not praised by the French – who, we learn from one scene in the film, appreciate experimental film – Val would still be a new man. He would no longer be a schlemiel because of his reconciliation with his son and his new found love for Ellie. To be sure, the success at the end of the film completes his transformation. The condition is that of being a schlemiel. It, like psychosomatic blindness, can be overcome. It is, according to

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Allen, a psychological or cognitive problem, not a cultural or historical crisis that the schlemiel is situated in.

Mitigated Skepticism

Whatever Works (2009) returns us, once again, to the process of transforming the schlemiel into a man. But the schlemiel in this film, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), differs considerably from Val. And his transformation marks yet another way to redefine the schlemiel: this time, with a wink toward a new practice that defines the life of the new post-schlemiel man – namely, faith in whatever works rather than ubiquitous skepticism.

The movie begins with Boris arguing over religion with three of his friends in the Village: “it’s not the idea behind Christianity I’m faulting or Judaism or what-ever religion that I’m slighting, it’s the professionals.” He distinguishes between intentions and realities; in other words, the real and the ideal. He privileges the former over the latter and argues that the fundamental flaw of these religions is their “fallacious notion that people are decent.” He goes on in his pessimism to claim that we “are a failed species.”

What is most interesting about this schlemiel, in contrast to the schlemiels we see in Yiddish literature, Jewish American literature, or in Allen’s earlier films, is that Boris is a pessimist. Usually, schlemiels are not intelligent and their dreams do not match reality. Here, we find the opposite. Boris is intelligent and measures ideals against reality; not the other way around. Nonetheless, Boris is a schlemiel because his pessimism makes him blind to goodness. His belief in pessimism, because it is so excessive, is comic. For this reason, his transforma-tion into an optimist is the main trajectory of this film.

After stating his pessimistic view on life, Boris is asked to tell his real story. In response, Boris says “my story is whatever works, so long as you don’t hurt anybody.” All of those listening cajole him to tell the “real” story, not this story which they know is too optimistic for Boris. Rather than tell his friends, he turns to the camera and the audience to confess the truth: foregrounding the film within the film – a tactic found in many Woody Allen films. As he limps before the camera, Boris tells the audience how difficult a person he is. To illustrate, he tells the audience how stupid we are; looking only for happiness, the audience, he informs us, is deluded. He refuses happiness and, it seems, is not interested in whatever works; to the contrary, that would make him a dupe much like the audi-ence which refuses to face the fact that reality is a nightmare.

In the midst of his harangue, he comically discloses his tragic secret: that his father committed suicide because of all the terrible things he witnessed in the world. Boris’s psychological issue is now foregrounded; because he “knows too

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much,” he cannot find any reason to be optimistic and is doomed to repeat his father’s legacy. Boris admits that he, like his father, tried to commit suicide. His limp is a physical trace of that failed attempt and, perhaps with a wink to the Jewish tradition, the limp can be read, midrashically, in terms of the struggle Jacob had with the angel – a struggle in which he earned his name, Israel, yet with a price; namely, a wound, a limp. This motif has some resonance in this film because Boris will emerge from his struggle a new man – he will go from a man with a limp (a schlemiel) to a healthy man with a new name and life.

Like the classic schlemiel, Boris is a failure. But unlike the classic schlemiel (and much like Val), he had at one time been successful but his outlook on life – the vision of “the genius” – made him fail miserably. In an important scene, we learn that his suicide attempt is linked to his visionary problem. In the scene, Boris has a “panic attack” in the middle of the night which his first wife, a psychologist, wakes to. She tells him that he shouldn’t take his pessimism seriously. In response, he says that “I’m the only person who sees the whole picture for what it is.” And that picture is one of death, devastation, and chaos. To be sure, in this film, the vision of the “genius” is what makes him into a schlemiel. He is – apparently – too intelligent not to see the limits of his vision. What follows is his failed suicide attempt and his new life.

Instead of teaching at Columbia University, he now teaches chess to children. And whenever he has free time, he bickers about the most hopeful things. For instance, even though Barack Obama was elected president and represents a major shift in history, he pessimistically retorts to his group of friends that racism lives on. In the midst of this discussion, Boris is accosted by an angry mother, who accuses him of throwing a chessboard at her son for being incompetent. He con-firms the allegation and insists that it was justified. In addition, he heaps insults on the mother and, so to speak, illuminates several things about her life that dis-close how ugly it really is. Here we have a picture of a person whose realism is so bitter and cynical as to render everything he sees contemptible.

On the way home, Boris, limping at high speed, runs into the character who will transform him from a schlemiel into a man: another schlemiel, Melody (Evan Rachel Wood). She is another kind of schlemiel: a traditional schlemiel who is naive and trusting. But instead of being confined to an Eastern European shtetl or a New York slum like most traditional schlemiels, she is confined to a Southern shtetl. Her parents keep her sheltered in a right-wing world of the South. Coming from the South is like coming from the shtetl to the city (one thinks of Sholom Aleichem’s Menachem Mendle, who leaves the shtetl to travel through Europe and then to America). Throughout the film, Allen continually reminds us that Melody is moving from the conservative to the liberal world. This world change has been the subject of countless American and European pastoral novels that record the progressive movement from tradition to modernity. But, more impor-tantly, this movement is from naivety to experience. Here, the schlemiel is being grafted on to this narrative configuration (something that was never done before).

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In the Eastern European version, the schlemiel may have been a country bumpkin, but this didn’t make him the subject of a transformation – as it does in Whatever Works. In traditional literature on the schlemiel, experience (here, change and travel) doesn’t transform the schlemiel; he/she always retains his or her naivety. But if you are a new schlemiel, experiences will change you. And, in this film, as we shall see, Melody’s transformation is from a naive Southerner to a mature, modern New Yorker while Boris’s transformation is from being a pessimist to an optimist.

Hence, the setup: the ultimate theme of this film is the transformation of two schlemiels into normal, happy, optimistic, modern New Yorkers. For this to happen, something needs to be softened – namely Boris’s pessimism – and some-thing needs to be hardened – namely Melody’s sense of self. She is on the way to autonomy and maturity while Boris is on the way to acceptance and compassion.

When we first meet Melody, what we notice is what is most schlemiel-like about her: in her innocence, she can’t understand one iota of Boris’s pessimism since she is a literalist and can’t understand any of Boris’s ironies. She lacks the intellectual sophistication to know the difference between the real and the ideal – which is the bread and butter of irony. Because of this lack of intellect, Boris heaps insults on her, calling her an “imbecile child,” “an idiot,” “brainless inch-worm,” and “stupid beyond all comprehension.”

What is most striking about the dichotomy between Boris and Melody is that it embodies and yet contrasts with the distinction between the Haskalah, who made the schlemiel a popular character in Yiddish literature, and the people they wished to reform – the traditional and religious Jews of the Pale of Settlement. At the outset, the Haskalah, much like Boris to Melody, looked down on these religious Jews, yet they knew that this perspective would do nothing to gain adher-ents. Condescension may have worked in Germany, as Sander Gilman argues, but it didn’t work in Eastern Europe. For this reason, the schlemiel came to be the embodiment of the better traits of shtetl Jews which, as mentioned above, fit well within the project of historical idealism. Here, however, Melody is presented as a naive Southerner whose beliefs – having much to do with God – are shown, via Boris, to be naive. For Allen, there seems to be nothing worth emulating in these beliefs – nonetheless, her optimism and hope are still employed by Allen as cata-lysts for Boris’s transformation.

Together, Melody and Boris embody a version of the tension between opti-mism and skepticism – as this tension is closer to optimism and pessimism.5 The tension is brought out in a visit to the Statue of Liberty. There, Melody recites Ezra Lazarus’s famous lines that appear on Ellis Island. For a beauty pageant, Melody memorized the lines about how America welcomes the “weak and the weary” to its shores. Boris retorts by saying although the message is beautiful, the fact of the matter is that immigrants were not welcomed and had to fight for nearly everything they needed to live. Boris’ retort marks the difference between hope and skepticism.

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But this tension, which is at the core of the schlemiel’s character, is gradually displaced in this film by the new schlemiel. To be sure, we see this in the same scene when Boris notes how blacks were enslaved and brought to this “great country”; Melody, in response, notes that her father says that people feel sorry for blacks and “bend over backwards for them.” Boris proceeds to call Melody’s father a “racist bigot” and Melody concedes, saying that Boris probably knows because he is “the genius.” After saying this, Boris smiles and acknowledges that he may have taught her something. This teaching moment marks the beginning of Mel-ody’s separation from her religious and Southern roots which, in this film, get in the way of her becoming a New Yorker and keep her a schlemiel.

As the film progresses, we see that her education is paying off. She notes many of the things Boris taught her, such as his claim that the American education system is inadequate or that many things people say are clichés. While this is hap-pening, we notice that Boris is gradually learning compassion and love. We see this, for instance, through his being affected by romantic music. As he listens, he smiles. Nonetheless, he is not ready to accept Melody’s greatest gift: love.

After dating a man she meets on the street walking his dog, Melody realizes that she, like Boris, finds many people too optimistic and shallow; meanwhile, Boris acknowledges to his friends that, in his estimation, Melody has gone from a “6” to an “8.” This culminates in Boris having an epiphany regarding chance and randomness in the universe. In the next scene, we see that randomness need not be regarded as something negative, for in this scene Boris marries Melody. In so many words, he shows us that he is going through changes when he admits – like David Hume did centuries earlier – that it’s better to mitigate his skepticism – created by a pessimistic yet realistic view of life – than to wallow in bitterness. Boris tells us that after being married for a year, he has developed a “delicate balance.” At this point, it seems as if Boris has gone from being a schlemiel to a new man because, in Allen’s view, the schlemiel is a schlemiel by virtue of this or that pathology. But the differences between Boris and Melody at the middle of the film show that this balance is tenuous.

Boris and Melody’s transition from the schlemiel to the new man/woman is foreshadowed by Melody’s mother and father’s transformation from Bible-thumping Southerners to New Yorkers. When she first meets him, Melody’s mother calls Boris a “secular humanist” and confirms what Boris imagined he would find when he eventually met Melody’s parents. What follows this initial meeting is the beginning of a long critique of religion that goes on to the very end of the film. In the end, the mother, like her daughter, leaves the shtetl and her old-time religion behind for New York liberalism. Everything starts changing when one of Boris’s friends, a philosophy professor, inspires the mother to pursue art. He finds her photos – which were not intended to be art – to be “haunting” and “primitive.” Boris narrates her transition from a Southern housewife to an artist who sleeps with two men and throws religion “where it belongs, in the toilet.”

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Melody’s final transition occurs when, upon meeting up with a handsome young English actor her mother set her up with, she realizes that she is “more a nurse than a wife” to Boris. Through him, she also realizes that she mistakes his pessimism for wisdom. Once she has this insight, she stops being a schlemiel and becomes a “mature woman” with a mature (“proper”) relationship. This realiza-tion leads to her breaking up with Boris so that he can also reform himself and live a normal life. She would rather do that than live with a schlemiel who, even after marriage, can’t transform himself. We see how “abnormal” Boris is when Melody’s new flame, Randy, who is wise and normal, says he doesn’t fall for Boris’s pessimism. Randy is a willful and self-reliant individual who believes in what he can achieve. His optimism is connected to his willpower.6

Randy and Melody live well in the world; they are beautiful, independent people who enjoy life. According to this contrast, which draws heavily on vitalism, the schlemiel is not in the world; s/he is ugly, weak, and for these reasons not truly happy. What their healthy relationship teaches us is that the schlemiel, as Allen understands this character, has an internal and psychological sickness that must be transformed or negated. Boris does not portray the schlemiel of the tradi-tion so much as a caricature of the real man, Randy. Therefore, if Boris is a sch-lemiel, he is not the traditional schlemiel, but a schlemiel who has been reduced to a being with a debilitating psychopathology.

However, the end of the film completes Boris’s transformation into a healthy, well-functioning individual. The next time we see Boris – after Melody leaves him – he is in the hospital. Boris visits the woman who had broken his fall from his second suicide attempt. This time, the audience is spared the details and the panic attacks, the omission of which gives the audience a more “healthy” view of Boris. We see his health in the fact that, instead of negatively reacting to the fact that his preserver is a psychic, he smiles and shows interest. As one can expect, a healthy Boris ends up falling in love with her. The framing of the film, in terms of the smiles and glances they exchange, and the dialogue between them indicate that she seems to be the proper match for him.

At the very end of the film, on New Year’s Eve, we get yet another Hollywood ending, this time in New York City. Boris narrates how everyone is happy: Melody, her mother, her father, and even himself. The metaphor is obvious: on New Year’s Eve, everyone is new, transformed. At the end of the film, it seems as if there are no remains of the schlemiel. But after the ball drops, Boris expresses a moment of schlemiel-like pessimism. Nonetheless, this moment is interrupted by the group when they ask Boris who he is talking to. But unlike the beginning of the film, where he expressed schlemiel-like pessimism, here, he smiles and expresses optimism. His last words to the camera, said with a smile, are that he is the only one to see the whole picture, “that’s why they call me a genius.” But now the whole picture is perfect, harmonious. After saying this, he returns to the group of celebrants rather than turning away from them and the world. His vision is now in line with everyone – with the world – rather than opposing it.

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His completion of the artistic whole is, in short, the abandonment of the schle-miel. As in Hollywood Ending, the death or transformation of the schlemiel marks a new beginning. Allen seems to be telling his audience that, for it to be effective, the psychological transformation of the schlemiel into the reality-adjusted ego (what we called above personal salvation) must be rehearsed in each film so as to emphasize a new habit that is, so to speak, “healthy.” This is confirmed by Woody Allen’s last film Midnight in Paris, which, yet again, rehearses the trans-formation of the schlemiel.

The “Parisian Dream”

At the close of Hollywood Ending, Val Waxman enthusiastically affirms “This is my life’s dream! To live in Paris!” Gil Pender will fulfill the same dream at the end of Midnight in Paris. In Midnight in Paris (2011), Owen Wilson plays an attractive, successful Hollywood screenwriter but unsuccessful writer from Pasadena, Cali-fornia. The “problem” with Gil is that he can’t seem to get his life together and make the right decisions. There are two things that Gil is unsure of: his impending marriage and the book he has been trying, for a very long time, to finish. Like Val in Hollywood Ending, Gil needs to make decisions which will bridge his love life and his life as an artist. And, as in Hollywood Ending and Whatever Works, this film takes us through the decisions that will make for the transformation of the sch-lemiel into a man.

The plot brings us from California to Paris where Gil and his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams), are tagging along with her parents, and her friends, Paul and Carol, on vacation. Gil has obvious problems with the entire entourage but, because he is a weak and indecisive schlemiel, he doesn’t challenge them. However, like all of Allen’s later schlemiels, this lion learns courage. As the film progresses, we go along with Gil to experience what gives him the strength to step up to Inez’s parents – who see Gil as falling short of all their expectations – and Paul – whose pedantic descriptions of Parisian history, art, and culture irritate Gil greatly yet entice his fiancée no end. The process of Gil’s education, which Allen wants us to witness (as in each of the two above mentioned films), is, once again, the process of the schlemiel’s psychological transformation.

The fact that this film takes place in Paris, the home of modernism, is very telling as it lays bare Allen’s project to turn the schlemiel into the modern artist. For Allen, as for Hemingway and Baudelaire, the modern artist is a hero; he cannot be a schlemiel. He is a man in love. We have seen this in Hollywood Ending. And in Whatever Works, we learn that only a real man, an optimist, can be an artist.

Allen manages Gil’s education through a magical realist conceit: time travel. After leaving the entourage on the second night of the trip, Gil goes for a walk along the streets of Paris. Around midnight, in some nondescript area of Paris,

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Gil stumbles upon a gap in time and space which brings him into Paris of the 1920s. Celebrants riding by in a Peugeot of the era insist upon taking him to a party. Astonished and not knowing whether or not he is dreaming, Gil goes along. At the party he meets famous writers and musicians such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. From there he goes to another party and meets other artists including Ernest Hemingway.

Every evening Gil goes out to meet more of his literary and artistic heroes. But it is Hemingway who tells him and shows him what he should be: a real man and an artist. For Gil, the first test of his manhood is twofold: one, he must passion-ately involve himself with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who had been in an affair with Pablo Picasso and two, he must work with Gertrude Stein to produce a good novel.

It is appropriate that Hemingway should initiate this challenge to Gil because, as Ruth Wisse points out, Hemingway posed the greatest challenges to the post-World War II schlemiel. He believed in the power of the will to correct one’s follies and because the schlemiel fails to do this, he is deemed despicable (Wisse 1980: 76–78).

In The Sun Also Rises, Cohn is the token Jew. According to Wisse, he is a “schlemiel-manque, because the book realizes neither the humor of his condition nor any irony in his failure as compared with the ‘success’ of the in-group” (1980: 76). In contrast to Cohn, “Romero the Bullfighter is still the traditional Western hero in his work, a man of dignity, truth-to-self, physical courage, romantic polish, masculine beauty, the old-fashioned virtues” (77). The schlemiel is characterized in this way because Hemingway “writes about the schlemiel from the standpoint of the gentile Westerner, and concludes that his qualities are wholly defeatist and distasteful” (77). Because Gil is deeply affected in this film by Hemingway, so deep that he even competes with him in one scene for Adriana, there can be no doubt that Allen has been taken in by such a perspective. However, Allen chal-lenges it only because he gives Gil (in the place of Cohn) the power to transform himself.

Although Allen parodies Hemingway’s excessive masculinity in the film, he truly emulates it by making the central conceit of this film the transformation of Gil from a schlemiel manqué – like Cohn – into an independent artist, like Hemingway. Like Hemingway, Allen sees a direct correlation between masculinity and art. To be sure, Gil goes from writing a novel on nostalgia that fails to one that (in Gertrude Stein’s preliminary estimate) succeeds. He is only able to do so because he is bold when it comes to his love for Adriana. And this is exactly what Hemingway advised him: to be a bold lover and man is to be a good artist.

Not only does his courage do its work in the virtual realm of the 1920s time warp; it also does its work in the realm of reality. At the end of the film, Gil speaks what he feels; he ends up leaving his fiancée and her Tea Party parents, and walks off – in the rain – with a French woman he met earlier in the film who shares an interest in the music of Cole Porter. She just happens to show up after Gil makes

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his ultimate decision to live in the present and leave Adriana and the artistic 1920s behind. Like Baudelaire’s modern artist, Gil lives in the present, not in the past. He can now start a new life as an artist – that is, as a man, not as a schlemiel.

Conclusion

It is clear that Gil’s final transformation is not unexpected. Like Hemingway, Allen rejects the schlemiel. But instead of showing a character who is “better” than Cohn, Allen has Cohn, so to speak, transform himself. Allen and Gil’s response to Hemingway shows us an old/new paradigm of the schlemiel in which the Jew believes that he/she can get rid of negative traits and become a success. This paradigm is based on the dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy; as we saw above, it presupposes that autonomy is the goal of the modern man while heteronomy marks man’s childhood and immaturity. The hope that one can trans-form from a heteronomous to an autonomous individual can be found in the schlemiel of nineteenth-century Germany. This hope is placed with the audience; here, in these films by Allen, it is given instead to the character to transform himself.

While it would be easy to simply accept Allen’s new reading of the schlemiel, I would like to argue, in closing, that its internalization of the schlemiel’s challenge to the “philosophical and political status quo” is problematic. To be sure, the dichotomy and characterization of the schlemiel characterized by the German schlemiel and Allen’s schlemiel cannot be found in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Eastern European schlemiel. There is a distinct reason for this difference. Allen’s schlemiel, like its German predecessor, has given up on the belief that the world and not the schlemiel should change.

As we saw above, what we find in the Eastern European schlemiel is a “balanced irony.” With “balanced irony,” optimism is not negated by skepticism. Both are suspended but one doesn’t eliminate the other. Rather, skepticism wounds opti-mism. In the above-mentioned films, there is no such wound; an “ironic balance” cannot be found in any of these films. The reason for this has to do with Allen’s belief that the real and the ideal, although they are initially in conflict, can be and are in fact reconciled in and through the schlemiel’s transformation. He can, liter-ally, save himself.

Allen’s belief that personal salvation is the goal of the schlemiel does away with and internalizes the utopian aspect of this character which insists that the gap between the real and the ideal cannot be realized in the artwork, the audience, or in the labors of the schlemiel. The gap discloses a historical contradiction; instead of resolving this contradiction through a psychological transformation, the schle-miel can perhaps bring us closer to understanding a contradiction that is not simply an intellectual or psychological issue but rather a historical one.

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What I would like to suggest in closing is that in bringing us closer to this contradiction between what is and what should (or could) be, the schlemiel brings us close to utopia, which is not present and accessible to us but is always to come. It is precisely as unfulfilled and untransformed that this comic character can make its appeal to something beyond our psychological power. And it is through this character that our complacent acceptance of this world can be challenged. Instead of focusing us on something internal, the schlemiel should focus us on what Emmanuel Levinas calls exteriority or what Ernst Bloch would call utopia. For Bloch (1988) and Levinas (2000), the contradiction which cannot be resolved or “internalized” deals with time (not an internal psychological time, a past that can be transformed, but a different kind of time, one we can’t control).

Time, the future in particular, challenges the comic belief found in all of Allen’s latest films: that the present moment is transformational. In the present, the sch-lemiel can stand up and be transformed into a man and an artist. This is a hope shared by Allen with Harold Bloom who, using Nietzsche, Freud, and the Gnos-tics, argues that the “I willed it” of artistic creation negates the “it was”7 of con-tingency and history. But this is an impossibility.

If the schlemiel were to just will his transformation, then the future would lose its weight and the present would engulf everything. The schlemiel’s hope has always served to challenge our satisfaction with the present moment. The hope of the schlemiel is thus not psychological; it is historical and utopian. It is the hope that one day there will be justice and happiness. Our current happiness, according to this view (the happiness of the liberal and modern life we see in all of the above-mentioned films) is incomplete. For this reason, one will notice that many Yiddish jokes about the schlemiel are bittersweet. All happiness – in the present moment – is wounded, incomplete or, as Wisse might say, “balanced.” For many past authors of the schlemiel, no amount of psychological transformation will resolve the greatest contradictions which are shared by humanity; they are not internal psychological contradictions, they are historical, ethical, and political. For this reason, the schlemiel has always been and perhaps always will be a char-acter that doesn’t go through a psychological transformation as that which would contradict its relation to utopia.

The fact that we live in a liberal state and can make our own choices, which is, lest we not forget, the backdrop of all the above-mentioned films, doesn’t mean that we are at the end of history, that utopia is realized, and that we can now turn inward. For Levinas and Bloch, at least, there doesn’t seem to be an end to history; it is not realized in the liberal state, as Fukuyama, Kojeve, and, I would add, Allen believe.8 And it is not realized in the psychological control we have over our lives. For Levinas, the other reminds us of a future that is beyond our mastery.9

I would like to close with the claim that it is the schlemiel that can still remind us of the fact that history is not over and that utopia is, in Bloch’s words, “not yet.” Allen’s schlemiels hold before us a temptation to believe that utopia is within our grasp, that is, within the power of psychological transformation. Autonomy

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is the goal. This internalizes utopia and displaces our wounded hope which is time and time again evoked by the schlemiel’s foolish exploits that inevitably clash with reality. This hope, historical hope, bound as it is to the future is foolish; for Levinas and Bloch it is built into our very existential relation to the future and others. It is necessary but it is uncertain. It is like the hope of I.B. Singer’s Gimpel the fool, who is constantly being betrayed by people he unconditionally trusts – simply because they are human. The happiness in knowing that one can trust the other, that humanity is good, is “not yet.” Right now, this hope is wounded or “bal-anced.” Nonetheless, we need a fool like Gimpel to remind us of this temporal gap. But there is, of course, a problem. As Walter Benjamin once said in a letter to Gershom Scholem, only a fool can provide “real help”: “The only uncertain thing is whether it can do humanity any good” (Scholem 1992: 225).

Notes

1 Nearly every film made by Woody Allen over the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s cast schle-miels as main characters.

2 One can see this in the classic joke about the schlemiel and the schlimazl. The former is asked to bring in a bowl of soup for the latter. The schlemiel does so with the utmost scrupulousness, but when he is about to put it down on the table, he falls. The schlimazl gets the hot soup spilled on his lap. The point being that schlemiel always blunders and to bring out the blunder there is always a hapless schlimazl who suffers.

3 It should be noted that for Wisse weakness was an asset to challenge the “political and philosophical status quo.” Daniel Boyarin (1997), in a different context, also sees Jewish weakness and femininity as a challenge to the status quo. In this film, and in many of Allen’s later films, humility and femininity are ultimately given a negative valence which is transformed into a masculinist power of individuation – the very things that Boyarin, for instance, is looking to challenge in his book.

4 I say “supposedly” here because it the evidence of Val’s being a great artist is never shown – save for a mention of awards he had received in the past for his films. In the film it is merely talked about and played with.

5 The distinction between pessimism and skepticism is a matter of degree. Ruth Wisse makes a similar distinction between sarcasm and irony (1980: 46–48). The latter is more skeptical than the former, which is more pessimistic. As Wisse explains in reference to the Yiddish joke, the second part of the joke challenges the first part. If it is a challenge to the first part, then we have irony and skepticism; but if it negates the first part, we have sarcasm and pessimism. For instance, Wisse uses the classic Yiddish joke regarding the chosenness of the Jewish people: “You chose us from amongst all of the nations; why did you have to choose the Jews.” The first part of the joke comes from the Bible and is in Hebrew; the second part is in Yiddish. The second part does not reject the first part so much as express dismay and skepticism over its truth or meaning. A more pessimistic rejoinder to this first part of this joke would sarcastically negate it. This is what Wisse calls “black humor,” which also had a place in Yiddish humor but no place in schlemiel literature.

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6 It should be noted that a reading of the metaphysics of will could certainly be made here. I am making reference to Martin Heidegger’s critique of the Nietzschean will-to-power which is found in many of his works; especially his volumes on Nietzsche. This critique of voluntarism has had a profound effect on deconstruction and post-structuralism. It has application here because Allen’s entire model is based on a meta-physical privileging of the will. The reading of the schlemiel I would like to propose, in contrast to Allen’s, doesn’t privilege the metaphysics of the will.

7 See Bloom’s Agon: Toward a Theory or Revisionism (1982: 57–60).8 See Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of the

Spirit (1996) and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (2006) which share this thesis of the end of history in the liberal state, a thesis originally put forth by Hegel.

9 With respect to Levinas see Time and the Other (1987) and God, Death, and Time (2000), in which he discusses the relationship of ethics to time, most notably the future. Levinas also discusses Bloch’s notion of utopia, death, and the future in the latter book.

Works Cited

Biale, David (1997) Eros and the Jews. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Bloch, Ernst (1988) The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank

Mecklenburg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Bloom, Harold (1982) Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Boyarin, Daniel (1997) Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of

Jewish Man. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Cavell, Stanley (1984) Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Fukuyama, Francis (2006). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.Gilman, Sander L. (1986) Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the

Jews. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press.Kojeve, Alexandre (1996) Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures in the Phenomenology

of the Spirit. Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Levinas, Emmanuel (1987) Time and the Other. Trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA:

Duquesne University Press.Levinas, Emmanuel (2000) God, Death, and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stan-

ford University Press.Peretz, Isaac L. (2002) The Peretz Reader. Ed. Ruth Wisse. New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press.Pinsker, Sanford (1991) The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish

Fiction. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.Scholem, Gershom (ed.) (1992) The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem

1932–1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Wisse, Ruth (1980) The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Instead I went openly to Barcelona, the treasure house of courtesy, the refuge of strangers, the hospital of the poor, the country of the valiant, the avenger of the injured, and the abode of firm and reciprocal friendships, unique in its position and its beauty. And although the adventures that befell me there occasioned me no great pleasure, but rather much grief, I bore them the better for having seen that city.

(Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha)

In The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, Peter J. Bailey writes of Manhattan, “The exquisite craft of the film, which conjures up a city of Gershwinian sublimity, is contravened by the interior lives of its characters; in a significant sense, Manhattan is about its own cinematic “faking” of Manhattan” (2003: 47–48). Manhattan, the central city of Woody Allen films, and Manhattan, the filmmaker’s central state-ment on that city, have been much discussed in the literature concerning the films and their maker. Often this commentary returns to concerns, such as Bailey’s, over the authenticity of the films’ presentation of the city and the meaning of their accuracy or inaccuracy. Crucially, though, the films are not necessarily judged by how faithful they are at representing Manhattan but by how telling their indiscretions or discrepancies are in regard to other elements within the films. Reception of the films begins with recognizing/misrecognizing the deploy-ment of the city.

According to Bailey,

One distinguishing feature of his more substantial films is that they do what Manhat-tan does: they deliberately place under ironic scrutiny their own tropism toward

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Barcelona

City of Refuge

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idealizing New York. That self-critical attitude manifests itself in Manhattan through the juxtaposition of the city’s magnificently visualized surfaces with what Isaac characterizes as its human substance and heart: “the decay of contemporary culture.” To configure the central antinomy of the film differently, the cinematic art which makes Manhattan such a sumptuously gratifying visual experience finds nothing resembling an answering moral perfection in its characters, the film’s repeat-edly invoked disparity between surface and subject, form and content, generating its major thematic dynamic (2003: 48).

When analyzing the topos of Woody Allen’s films, especially in regard to Manhat-tan, critics consider these dynamics between surface and subject, form and content, in order to read the theme of the films as a measurement of the juxtaposition between elements. In his analysis of the relation between characters and setting in Manhattan, for example, Bailey finds,

Although he experiences temporary success in imbuing himself with the city’s sexiest virtues, throughout the rest of the film the Manhattan in Isaac’s mind remains an ideal, unchanging metropolis completely irreconcilable with the emo-tional inconstancy, faithlessness, and ex tempore egocentrism of its actual inhabitants (2003: 52).

In this film, certainly, the city comes off better than the characters who inhabit it. In fact, the very relation between the city and the characters works to increase the standing of the former while decreasing the standing of the latter. The weak-nesses of the characters mark the strength of the setting. In conclusion, then, Bailey notes,

The Manhattan of Manhattan turns out to be a fantasy projection so narcissistically magnificent and pure that it can live on only in art. Ironically, the capacity for which Allen is indicting art in Manhattan is its ability to transform reality into something more morally coherent, harmonious, and beautiful that it actually is. (“Beauty is untruth,” might be the film’s rewriting of Keats.) New York remains Isaac Davis’s town at the end of Manhattan, and it probably always will be his town. But it’s a much smaller, much bleaker, and much less romantic city than the one Tracy and George Gershwin – and Gordon Willis – illuminated for him. And for us (57).

Allen’s film, then, in the end, criticizes even this relationship by reminding us that the city itself is the idealized creation of one of its characters. Therefore, an analy-sis of the topos of Manhattan and of the juxtaposition of character and setting, leads to questions about the role of art in transforming a city into a location, especially one as fantastic as seen in Manhattan.

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Ultimately, Bailey’s criticism of Manhattan turns toward the function of the location rather than the representation of it through his analysis of the film’s topos. It is not the commonplace (koinòs tópos) question of setting or of the rela-tion between fictional and real cities in order to judge the artifice of one by the authenticity of the other. It is not a question of location alone or of the conven-tions (loci communes) of character development against the background of a locale. Rather, it is a question of what the location does in the film, how it functions in regard to the other elements of the film. If the film is seen as an enunciation rather than a representation then, a functional analysis considers the relationship between its constituent parts and its audience address. Thus, the relation between the characters and the setting highlights the deployment of both elements.

In a similar way, this chapter takes up Woody Allen’s 2007 Vicky Cristina Barce-lona, not to judge the authenticity of its representation of “Barcelona” against the city and attendant history of Barcelona but to examine its function as topos in the film, especially in relation to four other major films that have deployed Barcelona. The question of the accuracy or inaccuracy of these deployments is not the concern of this analysis. Rather, the concern here is the ways in which Barcelona functions in regard to the other elements of the film and its audience address. Like Manhattan, Vicky Cristina Barcelona makes much of the juxtaposition between loca-tion and characters; however, the latter’s deployment of Barcelona positions its topos within a long tradition – the tradition of the city of refuge – rather than the city of sublimity.

Since Michelangelo Antonioni set a sequence of Professione: Reporter (The Pas-senger, 1975) in Barcelona, a number of films have made special use of locations in this “unique” Spanish-Catalonian city and its surroundings. This chapter com-pares Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Antonioni’s film, Whit Stillman’s Barcelona (1994), Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999), and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010) in order to trace the function of Barcelona in each. In these films, Barcelona marks a certain temporally and spatially ambivalent topos, one which challenges the morally coherent, harmonious, and beautiful located-ness of the city of sublimity with the duality of the city of refuge. Throughout these films, Barcelona functions as a city of refuge, as the topos of encounters – linguistic, cultural, economic, and personal – and of the duality of refuge, as escape and exile. Its very ambivalence marks the immediacy and vulnerability of this location. Characters in Barcelona are always passengers; they arrive and depart, but they never remain. Thus, like the city Don Quixote encounters, Barcelona remains always courteous, sheltering, and valiant, marking an ethos never quite one’s own, somehow always foreign, that makes its characters better for having seen the city regardless of the pleasure or grief of the adven-tures that befall them there. To describe Barcelona in these films as a city of refuge, then, is to connect the deployment of this city to Cervantes and older traditions.

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Cities of Refuge

The cities which you give to the Levites shall be the six cities of refuge, where you shall permit the manslayer to flee, and in addition to them you shall give forty-two cities.

(Numbers 35:6)

Cities of refuge, places of asylum, locations of sanctuary have a long history. One trajectory traces their origins within the biblical tradition, another marks them as older than their biblical account. As a starting point, we might refer to Numbers 35:9–28.

And the Lord said to Moses, “Say to the people of Israel, When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall select cities to be cities of refuge for you, that the manslayer who kills any person without intent may flee there. The cities shall be for you a refuge from the avenger, that the manslayer may not die until he stands before the congregation for judgment. And the cities which you give shall be your six cities of refuge. You shall give three cities beyond the Jordan, and three cities in the land of Canaan, to be cities of refuge. These six cities shall be for refuge for the people of Israel, and for the stranger and for the sojourner among them, that any one who kills any person without intent may flee there.”

According to the biblical account, God commands the Israelites to set aside six cities as cities of refuge, where those who commit manslaughter may take shelter from immediate revenge. Anyone who accidentally kills someone can escape to these six cities to take refuge. They are open cities, cities accessible to natives, foreigners, or travelers, regardless of whether these persons unintentionally killed natives, foreigners, or travelers. They are to be a place of respite until proper deci-sions and judgments can be made.

However, the biblical description continues, cities of refuge shall not be open to those who commit murder through open neglect or irresponsible behavior or intentionally – whether in a fit of rage or through a premeditated scheme. Mur-derers who commit murder through irresponsible or intentional actions shall be put to death. Furthermore, they shall be put to death by the avenger – a family member of the victim – as soon as they meet. If there is any doubt, the community should intercede and remove the unintentional murderer to the city of refuge until “the death of the high priest who was anointed with the holy oil.” Therefore, the emphasis is on the protection of the accidental killer and the patience of proper legal deliberation. The city of refuge is a “safe place” that allows for thought, for consideration, for decision, without haste. As long as the refugee remains in hiatus within the city of refuge, he cannot be killed by the avenger. If he should wander

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from the city, though, and encounter the avenger, the avenger can take his revenge without being “guilty of blood.” In this way, the city of refuge links time and place. The refugee is safe as long as he remains within the confines of the city of refuge or until the proper time period has expired. As the passage from Numbers concludes, “For the man must remain in his city of refuge until the death of the high priest; but after the death of the high priest the manslayer may return to the land of his possession.” The refugee must remain within the city of refuge until the full sentence is served. And this last point is the key to understanding cities of refuge. As much as they allow the refugee to escape, they also imprison them. Cities of refuge are not utopia that simply allow the guilty (even if acciden-tally) to go free of time and place. As much as they provide refuge, they also enact exile. Cities of refuge only protect those who remain confined within their walls; thus, cities of refuge are also punishments. In cities of refuge, then, there is pro-tection of the innocent which is also punishment of the guilty: both at the same time in the same place.

In Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures (1994), Emmanuel Levinas extends the way in which we consider this passage from Numbers to include more than literal murders and manslaughter. Levinas relates the concept of cities of refuge to social, economic, and political imbalance and magnifies the relation between escape and exile inherent in cities of refuge. Thus, Levinas’ reading of cities of refuge fits more appropriately into our discussion of the function of Barcelona as a city of refuge in contemporary films, especially in regard to the focus on refugee and tourist escape/exile in these films, including Vicky Cristina Barcelona. In his reading of this passage and Talmudic responses to it, Levinas asks if all modern cities might not be considered cities of refuge, with the attendant dangers. Have not the very social, economic, and political structures of the modern city made them all into refugee camps?

The cities in which we live and the protection that, legitimately, because of our subjective innocence, we find in our liberal society (even if we find it is a little less than before) against so many threats of vengeance fearing neither God nor man, against so many heated forces; is not such protection, in fact, the protection of a half-innocence or half-guilt, which is innocence but nevertheless also guilt – does not all this make our cities cities of refuge or cities of exiles? And while it is a neces-sary defence against the barbarity of heated blood, dangerous states of mind, and threatening disorder, is not civilization – our brilliant and humanist Graeco-Roman civilization, our wise civilization – a tiny bit hypocritical, too insensitive to the irrational anger of the avenger of blood, and incapable of restoring the balance? (1994: 40).

Cities of refuge are certainly necessary, claims Levinas, as protections against injustice, outrage, and irrationality. Cities of refuge maintain order, allowing for procedural justice to rule. Yet, as necessary as this economic, social, judicial ordering is, he challenges, it remains unable to address two concerns. First, by its

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ordered structure, it cannot address that which exceeds order, procedure, and rule. Order can only address order. Second, because its ordering relies upon a hiatus – it puts judgment on hold – it fails to address the restoration of the balance of social justice between the refugee and the injured party. Abiding in the city of refuge is remaining and waiting, patiently. Its patience demands a remaining in suspension. While cities of refuge may alter certain aspects of retributive justice, then, they are neither restorative nor reparative.

It is this relation among the tensions at the core of cities of refuge – refuge/exile and retribution/restoration – that Jacques Derrida elaborates in his discus-sion of the ethics of hospitality in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001). And, it is this elaboration on hospitality that connects the deployment of Barcelona as a city of refuge in these films. In the essay, Derrida asserts,

We have doubtless chosen the term “city of refuge” because, for quite specific his-torical reasons, it commands our respect, and also out of respect for those who cultivate an “ethic of hospitality.” “To cultivate an ethic of hospitality” – is such an expression not tautologous? Despite all the tensions or contradictions which distin-guish it, and despite all the perversions that can befall it, one cannot speak of culti-vating an ethic of hospitality. Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experi-ence of hospitality. But for this very reason, and because for this very reason, and because being at home with oneself (l’être-soi chez soi – l’ipséité meme – the one within oneself ) supposes a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropri-ate, control, and master according to different modalities of violence, there is a history of hospitality, an always possible perversion of the law of hospitality (which can appear unconditional), and of the laws which come to limit and condition it in its inscription as a law (2001: 16–17).

Hospitality is culture. Ethics is hospitality. Derrida’s claim here is that ethics as ethos connects culture and custom back to the home, to the act of hosting and to the complex relation between host and hostage. Cities of refuge host refugees but also make hostages of refugees and at the same time cities of refuge also make hostages of the hosts themselves. There are rights and regulations on both parties. Refugees must adhere to rules and regulations while in refuge. Cities of refuge must uphold certain standards while at the same time demanding certain stand-ards from refugees. To cultivate an ethics of hospitality, then, is to relate between host and hostage.

This question of the ethics of hospitality (the relation between host and hostage) at play in cities of refuge (the site (topos) of escape and exile) is central to Don Quixote’s understanding of Barcelona – where he is treated as a guest/held hostage – while he visits there. Barcelona is no utopia (ou-topos) for Don Quixote. On the

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contrary, he suffers his greatest defeat and humiliation there. Yet, he proclaims, he is better for having experienced his downfall in Barcelona, for having experi-enced it and Barcelona. Despite being produced four hundred years later, the bulk of the films featuring Barcelona return to this trope of the city of refuge. From Antonioni’s Professione: Reporter (1975) to the recent 11-11-11 (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2011), Barcelona functions as a city of refuge, a location linking time and place, escape and exile, host and hostage. This function is especially prevalent in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, where Vicky and Cristina abide for a time treated as guests/held hostage.

Set in Barcelona

Quid quid est in territorio est de territorio.(Medieval statement on territorial and personal

independence and sovereignty)

Professione: Reporter is a film in which the narrative is composed almost entirely of meetings where the mise-en-scène provokes us to ask constantly where and when we are and were. In this film, it is a question of memory and location – of remem-bering and forgetting, of leading and following, of appearing and disappearing, as one might while lost in a maze where one is hidden and hiding. About halfway through the film, on a match on action edit, we are thrust into Barcelona, where the maze is made concrete.

“Hey, por favor!” shouts the Locke character as he dashes for a gondola. He catches the cable car and rides it over the docks, toward the sea, with the city in the background. The other passenger – a local man – remarks that it is beautiful, and Locke agrees, spreading his arms wide and nodding. He leans out over the sea and flaps his arms as if flying over the surface of the water. The topography of Barcelona is established – sea, docks, buildings climbing an incline toward the mountains – and Locke set within it, or at least over it.

At noon, he sits in the Umbraculo covered garden in the Parque Comunal. A man with a cane approaches, and Locke introduces himself by stating he is, “waiting for someone who hasn’t arrived.” The man begins to tell Locke his story, but as they talk, the camera cuts away to documentary footage of an execution and then a scene of Locke’s wife with another man. When we return to Barcelona, we see Locke exiting the Hotel Oriente, followed by the television producer he once worked with and now wants to avoid because Locke knows the producer can identify him as Locke. (The focus on ambivalence in this film permeates how we identify Locke – as Locke, his alter ego Robertson, some permutation of these identities, or as the “no one” he becomes at the end of the film.)

Locke disappears into a building open to tourists to avoid the producer and meets The Woman, an architecture student who will join him on the rest of the

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journey. It is through their first conversation that we learn where we are in Bar-celona. In the sparsest terms, the scene also remembers the first half of the narrative.

Addressing The Woman, Locke says, “Excuse me, I was trying to remember something.”

“Is it important?”“No.”Glancing at the wall, referring to the building and the larger question of trying

to remember something, Locke asks, “What is it, do you know? I came in by accident.” The woman does not tell him what the building is, but instead tells him about the architect’s death:

“The man who built it was hit by a bus.”“Who was he?”“Gaudí. Come. He built this house for a corduroy manufacturer. They used this

room for concerts . . . Wagner.”“Do you think he was crazy?”Redirecting the conversation, The Woman asks, “How could you come in here

by accident.”“I was escaping.”“From what?”“I thought somebody might be following me. Somebody who might recognize

me.”“Why?”“I don’t know.”“Well, I can’t recognize you. Who are you?”“I used to be somebody else but I traded him in. What about you?”“Well, I’m in Barcelona. I’m talking to somebody who might be someone else.

I was with those people, but I think I’m going to see the other Gaudí buildings alone.”

“All of them?”“They’re all good for hiding. Depends on how much time you’ve got.”“I have to leave today. This afternoon.”“I hope you make it. People disappear every day.”“Every time they leave the room.”“Goodbye.”From the moment the film shifts to Barcelona, Professione: Reporter highlights

the city’s function as a maze – as a location where the paths may lead nowhere and the line between hiding and getting lost blurs. In this way, in this film, the city and characters intersect. The topos of Barcelona in Professione: Reporter mirrors the characters, especially Locke and The Woman. The conversation in the cordu-roy estate house is indirect, curved. It matches Gaudí’s architecture. Here the soundtrack and visuals echo each other, not in content but in form.

When Locke and The Woman meet again on the rooftop of Gaudí’s Casa Mila apartments, at first, they have a difficult time navigating the space. They have to

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plan a route in order to meet between the spires. This navigating and planning a route then becomes a conversation in which they plan secretly to reclaim Locke’s belongings from his hotel and escape pursuit. Here, again, the characters and the city are not juxtaposed but used to amplify the topos of Barcelona in relation to its refugees. Barcelona is no safe haven for Locke but a maze he must learn to navigate as it hides him but also confounds him. He takes sanctuary in the dark corners and alcoves of the city, abides in the churches and parks, but is then trapped in the very shadows they provide. He is not free – as it seems in the opening scene set in the gondola – but suspended above the city or within its walls. Barcelona is a city of suspension. In taking refuge in Barcelona, he risks being trapped in Barcelona, as a guest, he is also held hostage.

While Allen’s Barcelona is visually more colorful and acoustically more buoyant than Antonioni’s, Vicky’s and Cristina’s experience of the city significantly does not differ from Locke’s and The Woman’s. There is, of course, a difference in tone and genre between the films. Professione: Reporter is a modernist drama while Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a postmodern romantic comedy. Yet, what their deployment of Barcelona marks is how close these films remain regarding questions of char-acter identity and a certain relation to this location. In both films, Barcelona func-tions as the city of refuge with its complex topos of escape and exile as Locke and The Woman travel through Barcelona, altered by the experience there and driven to depart for another destination. They cannot remain in the city. It provides only a hiatus for them. They may abide for some time, as do all the other characters under discussion here, but only temporarily.

Barcelona (Whit Stillman, 1994) is a romantic comedy featuring NATO and anti-NATO sentiment, “trade fair girls” and international sales of high speed motors, the politics of US intervention in Europe and around the world, and terrorist acts against US foreign installations and personnel. Again, Barcelona functions as a city of refuge – with characters moving through this topos rather than remaining within it. (The film ends with the main characters in the United States.) However, Stillman’s use of juxtaposition here is closer to Allen’s in Manhattan than it is to Allen’s use of Barcelona in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Stillman’s film opens with the march “Americans Abroad” (Mark Suozzo) playing over a brief credit sequence. The soundtrack shifts to the up-tempo “Barcelona Merengue” (Mark Suozzo) as the film cuts to the opening title,

Barcelona, SpainThe last decade of the Cold War.

The image fades in to an establishing shot of the city from the harbor to the mountains, revealing the upward slope of Barcelona from the Balearic Sea to the Cordillera Costero Catalana (including Montserrat Mountain). The next shot cuts to a view from a building over the rooftops looking toward the sea. Another cut to an overhead shot shows the empty street in front of “The American Library,

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Barcelona.” Over the merengue, an explosion, and a cloud of black smoke from the library’s upper windows envelops the American flag hanging in front. The merengue continues across a fade as the smoke becomes powder, the windows a mirror, and we see Marta in a brassiere before the mirror applying make up. A shirtless Ramon enters the frame of the mirror. In the reflection, we see him take Marta’s chin in his fingers, study her face, and pronounce, “Perfecto.” A cut to a street and a shop window with a display for IBM replaces the mirror. A young man throws a brick through the shop window, shattering it. A sign on the back wall of the display reads, “La calidad de IBM no es noticia. El precio, sí” (the quality of IBM is not news. The price is). Cut to the promenade in front of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia and the “trade fair girls” in their black hats, black skirts, and bold red jackets walking to work. One smiles as she walks into close up before the camera and looks off screen toward Ted, the Chicago-based salesman who will become the narrator of the film. Ted enters the frame and turns repeatedly to watch the trade show girl walk away as the merengue softens.

In this opening sequence of just over two minutes, Barcelona stages the city as an intersection of aesthetics, politics, erotics, and economics, recalling the rela-tions of the city of refuge in its expanded understanding. Barcelona here marks the violence of the city of refuge, on public and private levels. Through the jux-taposition of its audio and visual channels, the film stages a relation between beauty and violence that deploys the duality of its location – harbor and moun-tains, trade fair and back street with anarchist graffiti, foreign consul and local bar – without locating a final judgment within the topos. The function of Barce-lona in Barcelona is to maintain the juxtaposition as a dynamic between beauty and violence, foreign and domestic in order to demonstrate the relationship between them on multiple levels. This marking of violence arises in a more subtle manner in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, where domestic violence and “romantic” vio-lence dominate the narrative, and larger violent implications are only suggested (especially through the character of Juan Antonio’s father, and his refusal to publish his poetry because of his hatred of the world). The violence of Vicky Cristina Barcelona remains the violence of the bedroom, of lovers’ quarrels, or of unbalanced relationships. The violence of Barcelona is located on a much larger scale. While they focus on different levels of violence, though, both films display the link between beauty and violence through a display of an ambivalent topos of Barcelona.

Further, while it is tempting to see Barcelona as a simple essay on repression and liberation, where Ted and Fred mark childish polar opposites who find adult-hood through synthesis of each other’s personalities, the film’s topos shows again how refuge is repression and liberation, containment and release, exile and escape. There is no either/or to synthesize here but always ambivalence – pleasure and grief. Such duality is signaled within the film by the presence of the two main characters (who echo through Vicky and Cristina in Allen’s film), the humorous

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references to sadomasochism and other sexual attitudes bantered about, the somber passing of the motor corporation into the hands of two leaders, and the marriage of foreign and domestic that does not resolve into some “cosa de gringos,” despite what Ted and Fred tell themselves at the end of the film. In fact, the ending of the film demonstrates how much Ted and Fred have not changed (matured) from the beginning of the film as they continue to state their opinions about others as if they are correctly deduced rather than only assumptions. In Barcelona, one must abide in the between time and place, whether in the time of a vow (such as Ted takes to date only plain-looking women) or the coma (such as after Fred is injured in the shooting). One abides in Barcelona, suffers in Barcelona, even if in the end Barcelona is transported to a cabin in the woods in the United States and remains the topos and never the utopia.

Todo Sobre mi Madre (All About My Mother, Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) is the first film Almodóvar set outside Madrid. This other man of La Mancha became famous for his intense development of the topos of Madrid in his films throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Then, at the end of the 1990s, Almodóvar turned toward Barce-lona and with that turn developed a new relationship with time and place, inter-textuality, character, and location, and the duality of cities of refuge. This change echoes the change of Allen’s filmmaking as he moved from Manhattan to London to Barcelona as well, especially as he shifted from juxtaposition to a mirroring of character and setting. For Almodóvar, this mirroring is made explicit through a blending of billboards and larger-than-life imagery of characters, some of whom stand directly before super-size images of themselves and through the “trans” aspects of Barcelona and the characters who abide there. In this way, Barcelona is the most transient topos Almodóvar has deployed, and Barcelona his most tran-sient city.

Travel in Todo Sobre mi Madre is time and space travel. As characters travel between Madrid and Barcelona, they travel forward or backward in time. Memory and experience merge with location, and the tunnel between the two cities func-tions to relocate characters in their own understanding of their surroundings as much as to move them from place to place. Everything in Barcelona is blending, mirroring, merging, transitioning. Transgendered characters, stage actors, and kinship bonds reflect the logic of the tunnel, where relating becomes possible only through relating between and ambivalence is the norm. The between-space/time is the relationship, neither one side nor the other. In this way, Barcelona’s refuge reworks the refuge of Almodóvar’s Madrid (and especially Pepa’s apart-ment in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Almodóvar, 1988) – which reflects Allen’s Manhattan more closely) – for the mother Manuela, the father Estéban, and Rosa (who takes refuge in Manuela’s apartment). Barcelona functions as a city of refuge as in these other films as its topos invokes safety and danger (Manue-la’s first arrival among the prostitutes), escape and confinement (for Manuela and Rosa, who is confined to her bed in Manuela’s apartment), and protection and punishment.

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From the moment Manuela arrives in Barcelona, the city’s topos as city of refuge between escape and exile is made clear and its ambivalence pronounced. After her son is killed in a car accident, Manuela travels to Barcelona to inform Estéban’s father and to remove herself from life in Madrid. Manuela travels to Barcelona, in part, to seek at least a temporary solace from her grief. However, the moment she arrives in Barcelona, Manuela finds herself rescuing her friend Agrado (a trans sex worker) from a physically abusive client. Agrado is thrilled to reconnect with Manuela, even under such dangerous circumstances. Barcelona is pleasure and grief, violence and beauty. It is a location of cultural sophistication (theater, archi-tecture, music, cafés) and sexual and embodied complexities. Yet, it is also a topos that includes drug abuse, street violence, and HIV/AIDS.

Eventually, Manuela’s apartment in Barcelona becomes a site of refuge within the city of refuge. While the outside spaces of the city may remain ambivalent, this inside space (like others in Almodóvar’s work) seems to offer safe haven, in part because it is an all-female space. Interestingly, this inside/outside divide is a departure from the other films under discussion in this study. No other film makes such a firm break between inside/outside, where at least one inside space, such as an apartment, is an unambivalent haven. In fact, it might be argued that it is exactly this failure to provide any inside/outside divide, where inside might be safer from outside threats, that marks the topos of the city of refuge so ambiva-lently. Within the refuge of Barcelona in the other films discussed here, the inside is no safer and often more dangerous than the outside, especially when the gloss of domestic space is wiped away – such as in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Biutiful. Todo Sobre mi Madre, though, seems to argue for a refuge within the city of refuge.

Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010) is a drama about the underclasses in Barcelona, regardless of where they come from: Africa, China, Spain. Among the films of this study, it is the most literal depiction of the city of refuge of these films and the one that most connects refuge, economics, social justice, and the ambivalence of refuge. It is also the film that most marks the structural dilemma of refuge as ambivalence, one which cannot be overcome simply by the right actions of of one character. In fact, as the film suggests, the right actions of any one actor within the structure of refuge may lead to even more grievous outcomes for others within the city. In Biutiful, Barcelona is also an open city, accessible to natives, foreigners, or travelers, regardless of whether they have killed or cheated natives, foreigners, or travelers. As such, it is an overt example of the city of refuge as Levinas and Derrida describe it. If the function of Barcelona in Barcelona and Todo Sobre mi Madre seems closest to that of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, then the func-tion of that topos in Biutiful seems on the surface the most distant from it. However, comparing the two films opens the question of the function of both deployments as cities of refuge. As radically different as this drama and romantic comedy may be, their intersections are telling.

While both films focus on transience through Barcelona, the statuses of their characters as tourists, students, immigrants, street workers, artist-wanderers, or

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migrant workers, reveal the differences of transience. Work in the city of refuge is predominantly offscreen in Vicky Cristina Barcelona while it is the primary focus of onscreen time in Biutiful. And while work provides a certain sumptuous life and provides a certain romantic lifestyle in the former, its relation to poverty, vulnerability, and the threat of death are marked in the latter. This link between work and death is highlighted in the film through workers who die because of dire working conditions and the irresponsible actions of employers (including Uxbal’s attempt to alleviate some of their suffering). It is also marked by the work Uxbal does as a medium between the living and the dead. Indeed, it is Uxbal’s role as paid medium that further marks the ambivalence of the city of refuge, as even ghosts in the film can only stay so long there and must eventually leave. Life, work, and death are transitions through which people and ghosts move, experiencing pleasure and grief, with no promise of rest, only escape and exile. If in Vicky Cris-tina Barcelona characters are called to find themselves or a purpose to their lives beyond the ordinary, in Biutiful characters seem already to be there but to have discovered that being there is still only a point from which one begins the next quest. In this way, Biutiful may recall Don Quixote’s quests more than the other films in this discussion.

One significant link between Biutiful and Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the acting of Javier Bardem in both: as Uxbal in the former and Juan Antonio in the latter. In both films Bardem plays men who live above the fray, despite the fact of their broken relationships, or, at least, what seems to be above the fray at first. Both men – one a hustler dying of prostate cancer, the other an artist who has stolen much of his technique – operate outside the mainstream of their worlds eco-nomically, socially, and morally. Uxbal is the petty criminal with the heart of gold and a supernatural connection with ghosts. Juan Antonio is the charming bohemian who claims to love humanity and want to find all the pleasure he can in life. Despite the differences in genre, the ways in which both men are posi-tioned vis-à-vis the city of Barcelona is telling. They both move between back-ground and foreground. They both merge with architecture and surroundings at different times. Uxbal is a tragic character whose actions lead to the death of those he is trying to help. Juan Antonio is a pathetic character who cannot break the cycle of his relationship with Maria Elena. Despite these differences, though, ultimately both characters end as failures. The stakes in Biutiful are elevated by the presence of Uxbal’s dependent children, and while the final moods are dif-ferent in degree, they are not different in kind. Biutiful and Vicky Cristina Barce-lona are connected through their topos as cities of refuge where all the characters escape to be exiled.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Woody Allen’s second film set outside New York and the United States. (The first being Match Point (2005), set in London.) It tells the story of two American women abroad for the summer: one to study Catalan culture, the other to find herself. Among other aspects, two points of the film highlight, especially, the deployment of Barcelona as the ambivalent city of refuge in this film and bring together many of the points raised throughout this discus-

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sion: the film’s title song, “Barcelona,” and the brief scene in the amusement park about halfway through the film. These elements bring together the transience of refuge and the ambivalence of this relation between pleasure and grief.

The film opens with the song “Barcelona,” by Giulia y los Tellarini, a group that combines French chanson, tango jazz, and Latin boleros, playing over the credits and into the first scene of the women arriving at the airport. From the start, audio and visual will be merged, not in juxtaposition but to complicate the address of the film and the function Barcelona within its topos. The title song does not make clear if “Barcelona” is the subject of address or the object of dis-cussion in the song, and its form and content highlight the very ambivalence of refuge that is Barcelona in this film. The song moves between blaming Barcelona for mixing pleasure and grief and warning Barcelona of the transience of “her” relation to both. The singer’s heart aches because of the pain Barcelona has brought her or because she sympathizes with the pain Barcelona experiences. The singer must move on, she says, “I will only be able to experience you/ From a distance/ And write you/ A song./ I love Barcelona.” Being too close, remaining in proximity is not a choice. Through this ambivalent address and ambivalence of emotional affect, the song marks the pleasure and grief of Barcelona as well as its invocation of the transience of refuge. From the start, this trope of merged address and object becomes a theme of the film as the title itself refers both to the story of Vicky and Cristina as well as to a tale addressed to Vicky and Cristina in this city of refuge, which will allow them to escape only to exile them and in the end return them to the very airport from which they arrived. In the song, Barcelona is a powerful lover who cannot be loved. In the film, Barcelona is the abode that cannot be abided.

Por qué tanto perderseTanto buscarseSin encontrarse?Me encierran los murosDe todas partes.

Why so much losing oneself,So much searching oneself,Without finding oneself ?The walls close in on mefrom all sides.

Barcelona.Te estás equivocando.No puedes seguir inventandoQue el mundo sea otra cosaY volar como mariposa.

Barcelona.You are mistaken.You cannot keep ignoringThat the world may be something otherAnd fly like a butterfly.

Barcelona.Hace un calor que me dejaFría por dentro,Con este vicioDe vivir mintiendo.Qué bonito sería tu mar,Si supiera yo nadar.

Barcelona.There is a heat that leaves meCold inside,From this viceOf living a lie.How beautiful would be your sea,If I knew how to swim.

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Barcelona.Mi mente tan llenaDe cara de gente extranjera –Conocida, desconocida –He vuelto a ser transparenteNo existo más.

Barcelona.My mind is fullOf the faces of strangers –Known, unknown –And back to being transparent,I no longer exist.

Barcelona.Siendo esposa de tus ruidos,Tu laberinto extrovertido,No he encontrado la razónPor qué me duele el corazón.Porque es tan fuerte,Que solo podré vivirteEn la distanciaY escribirteUna canción.Te quiero Barcelona.

Barcelona.Being married to your sounds,Your extroverted labyrinth,I have not found the reasonWhy my heart aches.Because the pain is so strong,I will only be able to experience youFrom a distanceAnd write youA song.I love Barcelona.

¡Ella tiene el poder!¡Ella tiene el poder!¡Ella tiene el poder!Barcelona es poderosa.

She has the power.She has the power.She has the power.Barcelona is powerful.

At first glance, the amusement park might stand as a refuge within the city of refuge of Barcelona. However, as much as the title song highlights the ambiva-lence of the film through the audio tracks, the amusement park scene, as short as it is, does the same for the visual and compositional elements of the film. Thus, the park recalls and critiques the topos of the apartments in Almodóvar’s films. Even more than the architecture put on display in the film, the amusement park is the visual and compositional signifier of the ambivalence and complexity of Barcelona.

Over a montage of different rides and attractions at the park, the narrator explains, “The amusement park was everything Juan Antonio led them to believe. It was antique and charming and overlooked all of Barcelona.” Spanish guitar plays on the soundtrack, as we see the couples in different permutations enjoying cotton candy, a carousel, or other park attractions. In the background remain the issues that complicate these relations, especially the secret affair between Juan Antonio and Vicky. The park not only “overlooks” the city – recalling the gondola in Professione – but is, in a way, Barcelona in miniature and the scene functions as a mise en abyme for the film’s display overall of the city as city of refuge. The amusement park is romantic, friendly, peaceful, fun. It is sensuous and thrilling while also comforting. It is how Barcelona (and Oviedo) is portrayed throughout the film. Yet, the amusement park is also like Barelona (and Oviedo) in the inverse as well.

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As the scene continues, we overhear Juan Antonio and Vicky talking on a balcony overlooking the amusement park, with all of Barcelona in the background. They discuss the confusing incident from lunch where Juan Antonio mistakenly brushed Vicky’s foot with his, and the future of their relationship. Juan Antonio states that he is now with Cristina and that Vicky is to marry Doug. Perhaps in the future, he suggests, they may meet again, but for now, their relationship is over. Soon after, Vicky marries Doug, and they leave on a short honeymoon. Again, the conversation and narrative emphasize the transience and ambivalence that sur-rounds the characters, even in the amusement park. There is no refuge outside time and space, no refuge here from the pleasure and grief. There is only the hiatus in the in-between time and place. The adventures in the amusement park, rather than resolving the ambivalence of refuge, repeat it, and perhaps only leave the characters better for having seen that place that overlooks the whole of the city.

Allen’s Barcelona, like so many others, is the Barcelona of architecture and the visible, as well as the audio and the compositional. If Manhattan “conjures up a city of Gershwinian sublimity,” Vicky Cristina Barcelona creates a topos of Gaudí and Miro. It is a city of color, of curve, of indirect paths. Indeed, if Allen’s Man-hattan is a habitat, then his Barcelona is an abode. You wait in Barcelona, you abide in Barcelona, but only temporarily, and even Doug functions – when we first see him – to recall us to Manhattan. Almost every character stays with someone in Barcelona, as guests and hostages, and the ones who live alone are questioned about their solitary arrangements. In fact, Juan Antonio’s father in Oviedo, who lives alone, is said to, “hate the world.” He may be the only character who remains habituated in time and place. Like other films set in Barcelona, the mise-en-scène of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is filled with Gaudí architecture: the cathedral, the park, facades, etc. As many critics have noted, the characters almost merge with the city itself. (Some critics have noted especially how, in the photography shoots, Maria Elena merges with the very walls of the city she it shot against. The line between character and setting in this topos disappears.) Yet, this merger is always only tem-porary, like the good days of the relationship between Juan Antonio and Maria Elena or the happy times of the threesome of Juan Antonio, Maria Elena, and Cristina. Barcelona, city of refuge, is never a city of permanence, certainty, or habit. It is a topos of refuge precisely because characters remain positioned against the city yet over, above, outside it.

Barcelona, New York, Barcelona

In a 1986 interview essay, Joe Klein writes,

Woody Allen is fifty now. He looks the same – exactly the same – but seems older somehow, a curious presence: someone entirely familiar, yet not very well known.

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He has spent the past thirty years living on Manhattan Island, which he loves as only someone who spent the first twenty years of his life in Brooklyn can. The Manhat-tan that he loves and inhabits, though, is a rather remarkable place: prettier, cleaner, more romantic and less dangerous than the city most people know. He created it in his films, and – while he acknowledges, sadly, that the other Manhattan exists – he somehow seems to have found a way to live in his creation; he is the only permanent resident, although visitors wander through from time to time (Klein 2006: 84).

Allen responds by agreeing with Klein’s assessment, admitting he has romanticized the city, given others a romanticized version of the city which might disappoint them if they visit New York on a holiday. Still, Klein says, “Manhattan” the setting does exist alongside Manhattan, just as “Woody Allen” the character does exist alongside Woody Allen. This chapter has not asked after the relation between “Barcelona” and Barcelona but, rather, after the function of Barcelona in these films. The Barcelona of Vicky Cristina Barcelona functions as a city of refuge – asylum and exile, protective and punishing – despite what the characters want of it. They would prefer an amusement park, one a local (even a transplanted one from Oviedo) can invite them to tour, “antique and charming.” Here, the topos of characters and location resists the “wonderland” idealized image of New York City.

The Gentleman of La Mancha is finished in Barcelona. Upon being defeated by the Knight of the Moon, Don Quixote is forced to return home and retire from knight errantry. He dies in retirement. As he says of Barcelona, “And although the adventures that befell me there occasioned me no great pleasure, but rather much grief, I bore them the better for having seen that city.” Like Don Quixote, Vicky and Cristina, and all the characters of these films, experienced adventures that they bear better for having seen the city. The question of pleasure remains, but the question of abiding and experiencing is clear. In these film, despite what char-acters may say or do, Barcelona has the power. She is powerful.

Works Cited

Bailey, Peter J. (2003) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Derrida, Jacques (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge.

Klein, Joe (2006) “Woody on the town.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 83–91.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1994) Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Trans. Gary D. Mole. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

PART V

Philosophy/Religion

21

Between air conditioning and the Pope, I’ll take air conditioning.(Harry Block in Deconstructing Harry, 1997)

Certain themes of Woody Allen’s films (and writing) are prevalent and well docu-mented: his blurring of the distinction between fiction or fantasy and reality, his skepticism regarding religion, his skewering of intellectuals, his characters’ need to escape or distract themselves from “the terrible truths of existence,” as Sandy Bates’ analyst puts it in Stardust Memories (1980).1 While Allen at times mentions or alludes to well-known philosophers in his films,2 and at times includes or hints at philosophical ideas, mostly those derived from existentialist thinkers, what I’m interested in here are the philosophical commitments presupposed by the themes delineated in my title. That is, what are the philosophical assumptions that moti-vate the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality, that compel one toward religious skepticism, or that lead a character like Mickey Sachs in Hannah and Her Sisters to say, rather astonishingly: “Millions of books written on every con-ceivable subject by all these great minds, and in the end none of them knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do”? Does Allen honestly believe that Plato or Aristotle, Kant or Hume, know nothing more about the big questions than the producer of a late night comedy TV show? How could that possibly be?

To summarize, here’s the philosophical argument I believe to be implicit in Allen’s films: everything changes and nothing stays the same, and this means there is no God. We ourselves are constantly changing and finite. Death for us means nonexistence, individual and eventually collective extinction. Because of our own

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Woody Allen and the (False) Dichotomy of Science and Religion

Mark T. Conard

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finitude and imperfection, and because of the changing nature of the universe, the only serious things we can know about the universe and human existence are these depressing facts – that everything changes and we’re doomed to annihilation. Further, the only real meaning our lives could possibly have would entail some sort of permanence, specifically our own immortality (even if our works live on after us – and they’re not even permanent – that doesn’t mean anything, since we’ll be dead). Consequently, life is utterly meaningless. Last, the best that we can hope to do in life (should we decide not to commit suicide) is to deceive ourselves about reality through religion or distract ourselves from these terrible truths, particularly through art and sex.

I will argue that at least some of these claims that pervade Allen’s films are based on the false dichotomy of science and religion. That is, as so often happens in contemporary discourse, people assume that when it comes to important exis-tential or ethical questions (for example, the existence of God or the morality of abortion), the answer to the questions (if any are forthcoming) must come from either science or religion, forgetting that these are properly philosophical ques-tions and require a philosophical approach and methodology in order to be handled in any kind of competent fashion. That is, Mickey Sachs is wrong. The great minds know much more about the big issues than he does.3

Allen’s Flux Metaphysics

The notion of a flux metaphysics is captured neatly in an aphorism by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who famously said, “You cannot step twice into the same river,” meaning that everything is constantly changing and nothing ever stays the same. Since, as the aphorism concludes, “other waters and yet others go ever flowing on” (Wheelwright 1985: 71), it’s never the same river the second time. Further, as part of the flux, you yourself are continually changing, so it’s not the same you the second time, either!

Allen’s commitment to such a metaphysics is expressed in a number of films, most hilariously by the young Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977), when he tells the doctor to whom his mother has taken him because of his depression: “The uni-verse is expanding. One day it will break apart, and that will be the end of every-thing.” Given his understanding of this terrible truth, young Alvy has stopped doing his homework. In Stardust Memories, Sandy Bates (Woody Allen), asks his handlers:

Hey, did  .  .  .  did anybody read on the front page of the Times that matter is decaying? Am I the only one that saw that? The universe is gradually breaking down. There’s not going to be anything left. I’m not talking about my stupid little films here – eventually, there’s not going to be any  .  .  .  any Beethoven or Shakespeare . . . 

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And in Whatever Works (2009), Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), who has come to echo the thinking of the pessimistic Boris (Larry David), uses nearly the same line: “Well, you know, nothing lasts forever, you know, not even Shakespeare or Michelangelo or Greek people. I mean, even as we’re standing here talking right now, we’re flying apart at an unimaginable speed.”

Now, our everyday experience tells us that things change: we watch the hours pass and the seasons drift into one another; we see ourselves growing older; we lose friends and loved ones to death; and we change our minds all the time. However (at least in Allen’s thinking) it’s theoretical physics that tell us that eve-rything is changing all the time, that we’re “flying apart at an unimaginable speed,” and that eventually there will be nothing left – that everything will decay and be destroyed. Consequently, Allen occasionally has characters appeal to physics to express these ideas. For example, in September (1987), Peter (Sam Waterston) and Lloyd ( Jack Warden), a physicist, have the following exchange:

PETER: What branch of physics are you involved with?LLOYD: Something much more terrifying than blowing up the planet.PETER: Really? Is there anything more terrifying than the destruction of the world?LLOYD: Yeah – the knowledge that it doesn’t matter one way or the other, that it’s

all random, radiating aimlessly out of nothing, and eventually vanishing forever. I’m not talking about the world. I’m talking about the universe. All space, all time, just a temporary convulsion. And I get paid to prove it.

PETER: You feel so sure of that when you look out on a clear night like tonight and see all those millions of stars? That none of it matters?

LLOYD: I think it’s just as beautiful as you do, and vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away, but then my professional per-spective overcomes me, a less wishful, more penetrating view of it, and I understand it for what it truly is: haphazard, morally neutral and unimagi-nably violent.

So the authority of physics tells us that the universe is haphazard and a “temporary convulsion.” Similarly, the above-mentioned Boris Yellnikoff in Whatever Works is also a scientist who worked in quantum physics. Mirroring Lloyd’s thinking, Boris describes himself and Melody as “two runaways in the vast, black, unspeakably violent, and indifferent universe”; and at their breakup, he says, “The universe is winding down. Why shouldn’t we?” Also, in Deconstructing Harry (1997), Harry’s sister, Doris (Caroline Aaron), says of him: “He has no spiritual center. He’s betting everything on physics and pussy.” And in a fantasy sequence, Harry Block (Allen) tells the devil: “I never believed in God or heaven or any of that stuff. I’m . . . I’m strictly, you know, quarks and particles and black holes, and, you know, all that other stuff is junk to me.” And, echoing Lloyd and Boris, Harry tells a prostitute: “You know that . . . that the universe is coming apart?”

The two most important corollaries to (or perhaps conclusions from) the acceptance of this flux metaphysics are the nonexistence of God and our own

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extinction with death. I’ll discuss below the phenomenon of religion, but suffice it to say for now that Allen’s skepticism about (or, more substantially, his rejection of the notion of ) God is clear and has been much discussed in the literature. Indeed, a number of his main characters (most of whom he plays himself ) are atheists: Miles Monroe in Sleeper, Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories, Danny Rose in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Harry Block, Boris Yellnikoff, and Alan Alda’s character in Everyone Says I Love You.4 This only makes sense. If the universe is flying apart and will one day be completely destroyed. There’s certainly no room in such a cosmos for a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being.5

The obsession of Allen and his characters with death is also clear and pervasive in the films. Just a few familiar examples: Alvy in Annie Hall is preoccupied with death, Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters is obsessed with mortality, Renata in Inte-riors (1978) is overwhelmed by the thought of death, and the allegorical Shadows and Fog (1991) is all about being hunted by the specter of death (the film being based on Allen’s “Death (A Play)”). Connecting the flux metaphysics specifically with mortality, Gabe in Husbands and Wives (1992) claims that “change is death.” In his Woody Allen on Woody Allen, Stig Björkman asks Allen about this view. Allen responds:

Yes, change is death. That’s an opinion of mine. I’m against change. Because change equals ageing, change equals the progression of time, the destruction of the old order. Now, you can say that somebody in a certain station in life wants nothing more than change, because they want the destruction of the old order. But ulti-mately, to me, change is not your friend. It’s like nature (Björkman 1993: 230).

Elsewhere in the same book, Allen goes on to say:

I’ve made this joke before, that I’m not interested in living on in the hearts of my countrymen, I’d rather live on in my apartment! And that’s really what I feel about it. In Interiors that theme occurs a few times. Really what we’re all talking about is the tragedy of perishing. Ageing and perishing (105).

Last, I’ll mention that in the absence of God and permanence, the universe becomes, as Lloyd puts it above (echoing Boris), “morally neutral and unimagina-bly violent.” Thus Allen and his characters understand nature not as some har-monious idyllic place, but as predatory. As the Boris of Love and Death (1975) describes it, nature is like an “enormous restaurant,” with creatures feeding on one another. Commenting on this scene, Allen tells Björkman:

But, in this context, I meant “nature” overall, city and country. I mean, when you look at natural beauty you look at a beautiful pastoral scene. If you look closely, what you will see is pretty horrible. If you really look closely, you would see violence and chaos and murder and cannibalism (Björkman 1993: 71).

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And, speaking of Interiors and Renata, Allen says: “Here comes also my view upon nature, that when you look close at nature, you find that nature’s not your friend. It’s marked by murderous and cannibalistic competition” (Björkman 1993: 105).6

Allen’s Epistemological Claims

Given that the universe is continually changing and nothing is permanent, it might naturally follow that there’s little of significance we can grasp and understand about the world and ourselves (except, seemingly, the fact that everything changes and we’re doomed to extinction). That is, any fact you can get hold of will undoubtedly change if you wait long enough, and there’s nothing absolute and fixed to be grasped at all. That even seeming truths grasped by sense experience might be suspect is suggested in a scene in Shadows and Fog. Affirming the flux metaphysics, Kleinman (Allen) says, “Everything’s always moving all the time . . . No wonder I’m nauseous.” And when Kleinman and Irmy (Mia Farrow) pause to appreciate the stars that have peeked through the fog, they have the fol-lowing exchange:

IRMY: You see that very bright star, up in that direction?KLEINMAN: Um-hmm.IRMY: For all we know that star could’ve disappeared a million years ago, and

it’s taken the light from it a million years to reach us.KLEINMAN: I don’t understand. What are you saying – that that star is not there?IRMY: That it might not be there.KLEINMAN: Even though I can see it with my own eyes?IRMY: That’s right.KLEINMAN: That’s a very disquieting thought, you know, because when I see

something with my own eyes I like to know that it’s actually there. ’Cause otherwise, you know, a person could sit down on a chair and break his neck. You know, you have to be able to rely on things. That’s very . . . very important.

Given the changing nature of things, Allen here suggests, we can’t always trust what our senses tell us. Interestingly, the opposite view is proclaimed by hardnosed empiricist philosopher Leopold ( José Ferrer) in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982): “Ghosts, little spirits, or pixies – I don’t believe in them,” says the professor in the film’s opening. “Nothing is real but experience, that which can be touched, tasted, felt or in some scientific fashion proved.” Allen would seem to approve of Leopold’s distaste for metaphysical speculation: “Metaphysical philosophers are simply men who are too weak to accept the world as it is,” says the professor.

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“Apart from this world, there are no realities.” However, as the exchange from Shadows and Fog above indicates, Allen rejects Leopold’s empiricism. This is par-ticularly evident, given that Leopold’s claims are disproved when – in a classic Allen skewering – the professor himself is turned into a spirit!

However, most of Allen’s skepticism seems to be directed not towards every-day sense experience, but rather towards knowledge of what he labels “the big questions” of life. For example, at the end of his fruitless search for God and meaning in Hannah, Mickey Sachs says: “I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I’m never going to get, and just enjoy it while it lasts.” This realiza-tion for Mickey leads to his claim that none of the great minds “knows anything more about the big questions of life” than he does. That is, Mickey comes to the conclusion that questions about God and meaning, the big questions, are inac-cessible to and unanswerable by the human mind. Consequently, no one, not even great philosophers, could possibly know anything more about these issues than he does; we’re all equally in the dark. Allen seems to embrace this position in an interview:

I would be better off abandoning asking the audience to try to come to grips with certain issues because those issues finally always lead you to a dead end. They’re never going to be understandable, they’re never going to be solvable. We all have a terrible, fierce burden to carry, and the person who really does something nice is the guy who writes a pretty song or plays a pretty piece of music or makes a film that diverts (DeCurtis 1993: 50).

Thus we seem to be able to conclude with Halley in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989): “No matter how elaborate a philosophical system you work out, it’s got to be incomplete.”

However, there’s a real tension, if not outright contradiction, between what I’ve argued above are Allen’s metaphysical commitments and what I’ve been dis-cussing here as his epistemological claims. That is, previously I said that Allen has definitively answered the question about God; but here, through his characters and his own statements, Allen seems to be saying that such a question is unanswer-able. I believe this tension can be resolved. I think the above analysis of his views of God and the flux is correct: for Allen, the universe is in flux and there is no God. I think the apparent tension or contradiction arises because of the epistemo-logical claims as I’ve been discussing them. Though it certainly seems so, it’s not the issues about God and meaning that are, strictly speaking, unanswerable and unsolvable for Allen. It’s really the question about death and individual extinction (which is closely tied to the issues of God and meaning). What Allen and his characters are searching for is a solution to the problem of their mortality. This is the “terrible, fierce burden” Allen makes reference to, and this is why Halley thinks any philosophical system must be incomplete. Indeed, when Björkman asks him about the fear of death, Allen responds:

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There is no other fear of significant consequence. All other fears, all other problems one can deal with. Loneliness, lack of love, lack of talent, lack of money, everything can be dealt with. In some way, there are ways to cope. You have friends that can help you, you have doctors that can help you. But perishing is what it’s all about (Björkman 1993: 105–106).

For Allen, no other concern or fear is of any real import; that is, the only significant existential question is the one about death, and given the nonexistence of God, of course there’s no answer to this question; of course none of the great philoso-phers has any better solution to the problem of mortality. Consequently, when Mickey Sachs decides not to worry about these questions any longer, since they’re unanswerable, and just enjoy life, he’s deluding himself. The consequent happy ending of Hannah, in which Mickey marries Holly and she somewhat miraculously becomes pregnant (miraculous because earlier in the film Mickey finds out he’s infertile), is, as Allen admits, something of a copout. Regarding the question of whether life is meaningless, he says:

It was not a point of departure for Hannah, but it’s certainly what my story was about, what my thread was about. I think, if I’d had a little more nerve on that film, it would have been confirmed it somewhat more. But I copped out a little on the film, I backed out a little at the end (Björkman 1993: 156).

Again, the question about God (and, consequently, the question about meaning) has already been answered. It’s for the sake of a happy Hollywood ending that Allen has Mickey adopt agnosticism and throw himself joyfully back into life.

The Meaning and Value of Life

Roughly, the difference between the meaning and the value of life is that the former refers to the sense or purpose of, or reason for, life, and the latter refers to whether or not life is worthwhile. As I’ve already indicated above, for Allen, because there is no God and we’re mortal, life is utterly meaningless. Thus, for one of his section titles in Hannah, he quotes Tolstoy: “The only absolute knowl-edge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.” This, as he says, is what the film was about, though he copped out in the end and gave the movie a happy ending. That meaning is tied to both God and mortality is confirmed in various scenes from Allen’s films. For example, in the midst of his search for God and meaning, Mickey Sachs explains to a priest why he’s considering converting to Catholicism: “Well, because, you know, I’ve got to have something to believe in. Otherwise, life is just meaningless.” He goes on: “I need to have some evidence. I’ve got to have some proof. You know, if . . . if I can’t believe in God, then I don’t think life is worth living.” Similarly, in Love and Death, Sonja claims: “But if there

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is no God, then life has no meaning.” In The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Cecilia (Mia Farrow) and the fictional Tom Baxter ( Jeff Daniels) stumble into a church. Knowledge of religion wasn’t built into Tom’s character so he’s puzzled about the purpose of the place:

TOM: It’s beautiful. I’m not sure exactly what it is.CECILIA: This is a church. You do believe in God, don’t you?TOM: Meaning?CECILIA: That there’s a reason for everything, for our world, for the universe.TOM: Oh, I think I know what you mean: the two men who wrote The Purple

Rose of Cairo, Irving Sachs and R. H. Levine, they’re writers who collabo-rate on films.

CECILIA: No, no, I’m talking about something much bigger than that. No, think for a minute. A reason for everything. Otherwise, it would be like a movie with no point, and no happy ending.

While Purple Rose certainly isn’t pointless, we should note that Allen didn’t cop out here and give it a happy ending, thus confirming his position on the issue: God doesn’t exist and there’s no reason for, or meaning to, anything.7 Further, in Interiors, Renata claims it’s hard to dispute that “in the face of death life loses real meaning.” Last, in Whatever Works, given his commitment to the picture of a transient universe physics presents to us, Boris says of life: “What does it all mean anyway? Nothing, zero, zilch. Nothing comes to anything.”

Given the lack of meaning in life, many of Allen’s characters decide life isn’t worthwhile (it’s valueless) and contemplate committing or commit suicide. In Hannah, Mickey considers suicide and almost pulls it off, when he fails to get an answer about God. In Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Professor Levy (Martin Bergmann), recognizing that the universe is a “pretty cold place,” jumps out the window. In Another Woman, Marion’s (Gena Rowlands) first husband, Sam (Philip Bosco), who always lectured her on the pointlessness of existence, kills himself, and Hope (Mia Farrow) contemplates suicide. In Interiors, Eve (Geraldine Page) successfully kills herself after a first botched attempt and, in September, Lane (Mia Farrow) has once attempted suicide and contemplates it again. Boris, in Whatever Works, gave himself a game leg prior to the opening of the story by jumping out of a window, and towards the end of the film makes another (rather humorous) suicide attempt.

Responses

In Allen’s godless universe, should one decide not to commit suicide, there seem to be several types of response to meaninglessness and the horror of mortality.

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The first I want to mention isn’t usually explicitly articulated, though we fairly often see Allen’s (and his characters’) reaction to it. This response is broadly a kind of denial of our own lack of understanding about the universe. The most explicit example of this position, as I noted above, is expressed by Leopold in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. He’s convinced that, after a rejection of God and other meta-physical meanderings, he still understands the universe: “I’m sorry, I did not create the cosmos,” he tells one of his students, “I merely explain it.” As noted above, Leopold’s cosmology is undermined when he dies in the heat of passion and is transformed into some sort of disembodied spirit, set loose to wander the upstate countryside. That Allen utilizes the supernatural to skewer Leopold’s pretentions to knowledge doesn’t mean, of course, that he’s somehow affirming the real exist-ence of the supernatural; the film is meant to be a Shakespearean fantasy. Part of the point of the plot’s unfolding is to deflate Leopold’s pretentious claims to knowledge.

Indeed, one of Allen’s favorite pastimes is skewering intellectuals, and this is what I meant when I said we are often presented with Allen’s reaction to pretenses to knowledge and understanding. That is, beyond the fact that the universe is chaotic and random, God doesn’t exist, and death is inescapable for us, we can’t really know anything, at least intellectually. As Isaac Davis (Allen) says in Manhat-tan: “Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.” Consequently, anyone who says he’s got it all figured out needs to be exposed as the pretentious blowhard that he is. So Isaac’s new love interest, the brainy Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton) and her odd assortment of friends, including her “devastating” and “bril-liant” ex-husband, Jeremiah (Wallace Shawn), are exposed as neurotics and homun-culi, who generally have no clue as to what’s going on. Further, in Annie Hall, Alvy’s intellectual first wife and her friends are revealed to be pompous bores, as is the media professor standing in line behind Alvy and Annie at the movies in the delightful Marshall McLuhan scene. In Another Woman, because of its seriousness, Marion – a philosophy professor – isn’t exactly skewered or deflated, but she’s shown to be out of touch, sterile, and disconnected from real people. Her abstract philosophical musings have only alienated her from reality.8 Further, one of Allen’s most brilliant deflatings of intellectual pretention occurs in Love and Death, in this exchange between Boris and Sonja as they discuss the existence of God and the meaning of life:

SONJA: Boris, let me show you how absurd your position is. All right, let’s say that there is no God and each man is free to do exactly as he chooses. Well, what prevents you from murdering somebody?

BORIS: Murder is immoral.SONJA: Immorality is subjective.BORIS: Yes, but subjectivity is objective.SONJA: Not in an irrational scheme of perception.BORIS: Perception is irrational. It implies immanence.

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SONJA: But judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomena exists in any rational or metaphysical or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract and empirical concept such as being or to be or to occur in the thing itself or of the thing itself.

BORIS: Yeah, I’ve said that many times.

If you don’t understand what’s being said here, you’re ahead of the game. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s a bunch of highfalutin language, philosophical buzz words, strung together in an incoherent fashion. The point hilariously made in this exchange is that when intellectuals start conversing in their abstractions, the conversation quickly devolves into gibberish. Allen makes a similar move in the Annie Hall movie line scene. McLuhan tells the pretentious academic: “You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.” Again, that last sentence makes no sense at all. How could a fallacy be wrong? Likewise, in Stardust Memories one of Sandy Bates’s critics is asked about the meaning of the Rolls Royce in the movie he’s just screened, and he responds: “I think it represents his car.” As Alvy tells his first wife: “That’s the thing about intellectuals – they’ve proved that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.”

A second response to the human predicament is to deny everything: flux, meaninglessness, mortality, and godlessness. This is the way of religion. As Harry Block says to his sister in a discussion about her faith in Deconstructing Harry, “Tradition is the illusion of permanence.” That is, religion allows us to deceive ourselves about the ever-changing universe and our unlucky place in it. Allen’s fullest and most extended treatment of religious faith occurs in Crimes and Misde-meanors. There, in a flashback to Judah’s (Martin Landau) boyhood, the choice is laid out between atheistic nihilism and its denial of objective morality, articulated by Judah’s Aunt May (Anna Berger); and a pious but illogical devotion to God and a clinging to religious ethics, embodied in Judah’s father, Sol (David S. Howard).9 Judah’s friend and ophthalmological patient, Rabbi Ben (Sam Waterston), echoes Judah’s father and claims: “Without the Law, it’s all darkness.” He expands on this thought to Judah, after Judah confesses an infidelity to him:

It’s a fundamental difference in the way we view the world. You see it as harsh, and empty of values, and pitiless. And I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t feel with all my heart a moral structure with real meaning and forgiveness, and some kind of higher power. Otherwise there’s no basis to know how to live.

In a somewhat heavy-handed dose of symbolism, Rabbi Ben loses his sight, indi-cating that he’s blind to reality. Allen confirms this reading of the character:

Yes, my own feeling about Ben is that, on the one hand, he’s blind even before he goes blind. He’s blind because he doesn’t see the real world. But he’s blessed and lucky because he has the single most important lucky attribute anyone could have, the best gift anyone could have. He has genuine religious faith . . . The worst kind

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of adversity can be surmounted with faith. But as the author, I think that Ben is blind even before he’s blind, because he doesn’t see what’s real in the world. But he’s lucky, because he has naïvety (Björkman 1993: 223).10

Religious faith is naive, a refusal to accept reality,11 but it’s good fortune to possess it, because it enables one to endure life and all its difficulties.

At times, artists are tempted by a similar self-deception. That is, according to Allen, they can delude themselves into believing that they can cheat death and the flux and achieve a certain immortality through their work. Discussing Renata’s questioning of this idea in Interiors, Allen says:

I sometimes feel that art is the intellectual’s religion. Some artists think that art will save them, that they will be immortalized through their art, they will live on through their art. But the truth of the matter is, art doesn’t save you . . . it doesn’t save the artist. I mean, it doesn’t profit Shakespeare one iota that his plays have lived on after him. He would have been better off if he was alive and his plays were forgotten (Björkman 1993: 103).

The fallacy of immortality through art is likewise exposed in Stardust Memories. In a fantasy sequence, Sandy Bates imagines being posthumously honored for his films after having been murdered by a zealous fan. He’s dismissive of the acco-lades; they don’t mean anything to him because he’s dead: “I would trade that Oscar for one more second of life,” he says. His analyst designates this bit of wisdom, “Ozymandias Melancholia,” referring to the Shelley poem in which a traveler discovers in the desert the ruins of a once-great civilization. He spies on a pedestal the king’s exclamation: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (Shelley 1986: 691). The point is, of course, that even great kingdoms disintegrate; nothing really lasts. The melancholia refers to the depression that sets in once one realizes there’s no immortality to be had through great works. Allen says of “Ozymandias Melancholia”:

That’s a symptom I’ve invented that describes that phenomenon specifically, the realization that your works of art will not save you and will mean nothing down the line. Eventually, there won’t be any universe, so even all the works of Shake-speare and all the works of Beethoven will be gone (Björkman 1993: 103).

The third response to the terrible truths of existence, which is most prevalent in Allen’s films and which drives many or most of his characters and plots, is the attempt to distract oneself from the horror of meaninglessness and the human condition. “I feel the only way you can get through life is distraction,” Allen told an interviewer (Cadwalladr 2011), and one common means of distraction for Allen’s characters is sex or romantic relationships. For example, in September, when Lloyd the physicist describes the universe to Peter as “haphazard, morally neutral and unimaginably violent,” Peter somewhat remarkably responds, “Look,

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we shouldn’t have this conversation. I have to sleep alone tonight.” That is, Peter has no one to share his bed with and thus no one to distract him from these depressing truths about reality. Similarly, in “God, (A Play),” a character named Doris says: “But without God, the universe is meaningless. Life is meaningless. We’re meaningless. (Deadly pause) I have a sudden and overpowering urge to get laid” (Allen 1975: 150). And, in Whatever Works, Boris explains why he married Melody. It has to do, he says, with “The search in life for something to give the illusion of meaning, to quell the panic.” Of course, characters throughout Allen’s films pursue relationships – this is an important element of the drama of life. What these passages indicate is that an important function of romantic relation-ships (one might argue, pessimistically, that for Allen the only function of relation-ships ultimately) is to help us forget about the horror of existence.

The other very common source of distracting illusion for Allen’s characters is art, both through the creation of art for the artist and the experiencing of art for the spectator. A great many of Allen’s characters are artists of some kind; they are writers, painters, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers. In the Felliniesque Stardust Memories, for example, in which there’s a deep blurring of fantasy and reality, Sandy Bates used magic tricks as a boy and film as an adult to attempt to escape reality. But in the emergency room where Sandy has been taken after being shot, a nurse reminds him, “All those silly magic tricks you do couldn’t help your friend Nat Bernstein,” Sandy’s friend who died horribly of Lou Gehrig’s disease. That is, the illusions ultimately are no match against death. I’ve already discussed the danger of what Allen terms the “artist’s Catholicism,” the fallacious belief that he or she will achieve some sort of immortality by producing great works of art. As Peter J. Bailey argues in The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, the artist’s attempts at creating meaning in Allen’s films are ultimately fruitless in that,

Allen is content . . . to dramatize a single Irmstedt trick – the one that fails to stop the killer/Death in his tracks – because that failure so effectively epitomizes Allen’s ambivalent conception of art’s value to humanity: we need its illusions in order to live, but we’re only deluding ourselves if we believe they can redeem us from death (Bailey 2001: 162).

To reiterate, for Allen the one serious existential issue for human beings is our own mortality. Philosophers and scientists can’t solve this problem: we’re under a sentence of death (to put it as an existentialist might), and the best we can hope for is to delude ourselves about, or distract ourselves temporarily from, this hor-rifying reality.12

The False Dichotomy

Woody Allen is not a philosopher; he’s a filmmaker and a writer. Consequently, there may admittedly be something unfair (or untoward) about calling him on

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fallacious reasoning. Why worry so much over philosophical details? Why not just enjoy the movies?! The answer is that he includes philosophical themes and ideas in his films and has (if I’m correct above) drawn certain philosophical conclusions in his work, and these invite analysis and critique. After all, the guy at the cocktail party doing some armchair theorizing isn’t a professional, either, but if he starts philosophizing and says something that doesn’t seem right, we should call him on it. What’s more, if I’m diagnosing it correctly, the mistake I’m going to point out that Allen is making is one that’s quite common in contemporary American dis-cussions of important issues.13 Thus, by illuminating it in Allen’s case, I may be able to shed light on the problem more generally.

The problem, as the title of this chapter indicates, is summed up in Harry Block’s juxtaposition of “air conditioning and the Pope.” There’s a fallacy, vari-ously named a “false alternative,” “false dichotomy,” or “false dilemma,” which consists in presenting choices as if they were only ones available, when there are, in fact, other relevant options. I suggest this is where Allen’s thinking goes wrong. Specifically, when he deals with the philosophical questions discussed above – God, knowledge, meaning, value, etc. – the choice for him is between answers provided by science (air conditioning) and religion (the pope). In addition to appearing in Deconstructing Harry, that option is also evident in Whatever Works in the juxtaposi-tion of theoretical physics and its nihilistic conclusions, as espoused by Boris and then by Melody, on the one hand, and the Southern Protestantism of Melody’s parents, on the other. The religion/science dichotomy appears as well in Crimes and Misdemeanors. In contrast to Rabbi Ben’s piety, Judah refers to himself as a “man of science” and acknowledges that he’s not a religious man. Similarly, Judah’s Aunt May isn’t presented as a believer necessarily in science, but she is identified as a Leninist (which means a materialist, in this context, someone who thinks the only reality is material or physical, as does Leopold in Sex Comedy), a nihilist, and she’s clearly an atheist, and this is in stark contrast to Judah’s pious father. To summarize: for Allen the only two alternatives are one, religion, and accompanying it: God, personal immortality, understanding, and a meaningful and valuable life; or two, science and consequently a haphazard, indifferent uni-verse, lack of real knowledge, death, meaninglessness and valuelessness, and (in a word) nihilism. Allen then claims that the former is unreal, a delusion, and so the only justifiable conclusion is the latter. Rabbi Ben goes blind, and Judah gets away guilt-free with murder.

I want to suggest that there’s an option missing, such that Allen’s dichotomy is indeed a false one. The option is philosophy,14 and it’s odd that it’s missing because questions about God, knowledge, meaning, human nature, and so forth, have traditionally been treated as distinctly philosophical in nature, and I would argue that’s the proper way to treat them. This doesn’t mean that one must be a professional or academic philosopher to deal with these questions. What I am claiming is that when one grapples with them in a serious, rational way, in an effort to discover the truth, one is doing philosophy, and thus the methods of science and the faith of religion are inadequate and misguided. Why is that? Well,

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with regard to natural science, there are certain basic assumptions that we tend to have in our everyday lives regarding ourselves and the world around us, and these natural assumptions are taken up and remain largely uninvestigated in our empirical, scientific (and social scientific) investigations of the world. The assump-tions include the notion that there is a mind-independent reality accessible to our sensory organs and our cognitive apparatuses; that it exists as we perceive it to exist, such that any being with any sort of mind would perceive and understand it the same way; and, broadly, that there’s nothing beyond what we perceive and understand. There’s nothing wrong with these assumptions; there’s usually no real reason to question them in our everyday lives. But natural science doesn’t for the most part question them; that’s not the job of natural science. Rather, it’s the job of philosophy. These are some of the issues dealt with in the history of phi-losophy, which wants to leave no assumptions unexamined. Questions about a mind-independent reality and about whether anything might exist beyond what we can perceive with our senses (including God) are part of metaphysics, and nonempirical (that is, nonpsychological) questions about knowledge and what we can know and how we know these things are part of epistemology. In addition, ethical issues and questions of meaning and value are traditional philosophical matters as well.

On the other hand, accepting certain things on religious faith isn’t an explora-tion or a rational investigation of the real world, and such faith isn’t meant to be. This isn’t to say there’s anything necessarily wrong with religious faith; even Allen approves of it as a lucky self-delusion! It just means that belief unsupported by evidence and argument tells us only about the attitudes of the believer. If we’re interested in acquiring knowledge about the world and about human existence, which is what I’ve been discussing, then we need something more than mere belief.

Again, to sum up, Allen’s dichotomy is a false one, since the methodology and approach of natural science and the nonrational, nonevidentiary faith of religion are inadequate to the issues we’re investigating. What we need is a philosophical approach.

I won’t here get into an overview of the history of philosophy; suffice it to say that that history represents a profound, rational engagement with the issues dis-cussed above. And, while philosophers haven’t solved the problem of mortality, they have well demonstrated (contrary to what Allen supposes) that it’s not the only problem worth worrying about. Indeed, there are other, profound human, existential, and ethical issues worth dealing with; and, in addition, some philoso-phers have well argued that we can live meaningful lives, despite our mortality. To be completely frank, Mickey Sachs’s claim that none of the great thinkers of history knows any more about the deep questions than he does is jejune and ignorant. If my analysis above is correct, it’s based on the narrow and narcissistic, not to say childish, view that his own personal mortality is the only thing that matters. Once we look beyond our narcissism and our fear, we find that there are

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many important and worthwhile questions to ask, and issues to explore, and we find that great thinkers have much to teach us about asking those questions and offering potential answers to them.

Some, and perhaps those like Mickey Sachs are among them (maybe this is part of the reason he falsely believes the great thinkers have nothing to offer him), despair of not getting an unambiguous answer from philosophers: Aristotle disa-grees with Plato; Descartes disagrees with Aristotle; Hume disagrees with Des-cartes; Kant disagrees with Hume; and of course Nietzsche disagrees with all of them. But that there is little consensus on a particular issue amongst philosophers is completely irrelevant. Dispute and a difference of opinion regarding an impor-tant question or issue means nothing about the issue itself.15 It doesn’t mean the problem is unsolvable or unanswerable. Rather, disagreement often points to the great difficulty of the question, and to the varieties of intellectual approach to answering it. Frankly, in my humble opinion, we ought to take heart in such protracted debate; it often points to the fortitude and largeness of the human spirit in grappling with such difficult but important issues.

Investigating the ways great thinkers have addressed these issues and ideas will enable us to come up with our own resolutions and answers. It’s the process, the asking of the questions, and not always the answers arrived at, that is transform-ing. Philosophy, as Socrates so well showed us, is a way of life; it is living the examined life. And the examined life is a meaningful life.

Notes

1 In a fantasy sequence after Bates imagines himself shot by a fan, his psychoanalyst says: “I treated him. He was a complicated patient. He saw reality too clearly – faulty denial mechanism, failed to block out the terrible truths of existence. In the end, his inability to push away the awful facts of ‘being-in-the-world’ rendered his life mean-ingless, or as one great Hollywood producer said: ‘Too much reality is not what the people want.’ ”

2 For example, Kierkegaard is mentioned in Manhattan (1979), Schopenhauer is men-tioned in Stardust Memories, Nietzsche and Socrates are mentioned in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Marion Post is a Heidegger scholar in Another Woman (1988).

3 This chapter represents an expansion and development of the ideas contained in my earlier “God, Suicide, and the Meaning of Life in the Films of Woody Allen” (Conard 2004).

4 And more mildly (perhaps for the audience’s sake), some others are, or seem to be, agnostics, like Mickey Sachs in Hannah and Her Sisters and Boris Grushenko in Love and Death (1975).

5 We should note that Allen’s conception of God is a thoroughly Abrahamic one. 6 Allen’s view of nature is akin to that of the pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer,

who says: “This world is the battle-ground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in

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it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths” (Schopenhauer 1958: 581).

7 Allen has expressed uncharacteristic satisfaction with Purple Rose and its ending. Regarding the film, he says: “That’s the closest I’ve come to a feeling of satisfaction. After that film I thought, ‘Yes, this time I think I got it right where I wanted to get it’.” Regarding the unhappy ending, he says: “Some people have suggested that perhaps if they had married at the end, Cecilia and the movie star, the film would have had a bigger audience. There was such a feeling of unhappiness or melancholy when he left her at the end. But that was the whole reason I was doing the film, that was the whole point of the film” (Björkman 1993: 116, 80).

8 “Allen’s intelligentsia are incapacitated by their intellects,” says Maurice Yacowar in reference to Another Woman (1991: 268).

9 Another guest at the imagined or remembers Seder in Crimes and Misdemeanors says, “Sol’s faith is a kind of gift. It’s like an ear for music or the talent to draw. He believes, and you can use logic on him all day long, and he still believes.” Sol responds: “Must everything be logical?”

10 Allen goes on: “So unless you have a strong spiritual feeling, spiritual faith, it’s tough to get through life. Ben is the only one that gets through it, even if he doesn’t really understand the reality of life. One can argue that he understands it more deeply than the others. I don’t think he does myself. I think he understands it less, and that’s why I wanted to make him blind. I feel that his faith is blind. It will work, but it requires closing your eyes to reality” (Björkman 1993: 224–225).

11 The naivety of religious belief is smartly and succinctly expressed in Manhattan, when Mary says: “Hey listen, hey listen, I don’t even want to have this conversation. I mean, really, I mean, I’m just from Philadelphia, you know, I mean, we believe in God. So, okay?” Isaac is baffled by this comment, thinking it nonsensical, but the implication is clear: belief in God is for those who are a bit backwards and ignorant, as Philadel-phians are in comparison to sophisticated New Yorkers.

12 One other suggested means of distraction in Allen’s films is neurosis. As Isaac Davis in Manhattan says, dictating notes to himself: “An idea for a short story about  .  .  . people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves ’cause it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.” This seems to be the case with Boris in Whatever Works. He hasn’t deluded himself about reality, but, knowing the truth, he has developed a number of neurotic ticks (for example, singing “Happy Birthday to You” every time he washes his hands).

13 See, for example, Robert Wright’s article from The New York Times (2009) regarding the existence of God. The options presented in this discussion are the point of view of materialist/atheistic natural science and faith-based religious conviction. The author neglects the alternative of approaching the problem philosophically.

14 Of course Allen does at times present another option besides science or religion. For example, in Whatever Works he seems to be offering art as an alternative, as Melody’s mother is reformed of her religious ways by her immersion in creativity and the art world; and he seems to be offering human relationships and love as a second alterna-tive, when Boris falls on (and falls for) a woman in his second suicide attempt and then ends up in a relationship with her. But, as discussed above, for Allen art and

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romance are only temporary distractions from the horror of existence and not any kind of real solutions.

15 That Bob and Joe differ with regard to claim A is irrelevant to the truth of A. For example, people at one time argued whether the earth was round or flat.

Works Cited

Allen, Woody (1975) “God, (a play).” In Woody Allen, Without Feathers. New York: Ballantine.

Bailey, Peter J. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Björkman, Stig (1993) Woody Allen on Woody Allen. New York: Grove Press.Cadwalladr, Carole (2011) “Woody Allen: My wife hasn’t seen most of my films . . . and

she thinks my clarinet playing is torture.” Observer (Mar. 13). www.guardian.co.uk/ film/2011/mar/13/woody-allen-interview-carole-cadwalladr (accessed Sept. 13, 2012).

Conard, Mark (2004) “God, suicide, and the meaning of life in the films of Woody Allen.” In Mark Conard and Aeon Skoble (eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court Press.

DeCurtis, Anthony (1993) “The Rolling Stone interview: Woody Allen.” Rolling Stone (Sept. 16).

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1958) “On the vanity and suffering of life.” In Arthur Schopen-hauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol, II. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover.

Shelley, Percy (1986) “Ozymandias.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th edn. New York: Norton.

Wheelwright, Philip (ed.) (1985) The Presocratics. New York: Macmillan.Wright, Robert (2009) “A grand bargain over evolution.” The New York Times, Opinion

Piece (Aug. 22). www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23wright.html?_r=1&scp=8&sq=god&st=cse (accessed Oct. 5, 2012).

Yacowar, Maurice (1991) Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen. New York: Continuum.

22

Woody Allen has remarked, “If I had my education to do over, I would probably go to college and probably be a philosophy major” (Lax 2007: 85). Instead, he has read and pondered philosophy on his own,1 and has repeatedly dramatized his principal philosophical conclusions in his films. Several of his movies forcefully argue that there is no God, afterlife, or meaning inherent in the universe. Much of the interest of these films lies in Allen’s probing of the implications of these philosophical theses across a wide range of issues, including the possibility and importance of moral responsibility and personal integrity, the meaning of death, and the value of artistic creation. My aim in this chapter is both to make clear some of the ways in which Allen’s handling of philosophical issues enhances the aesthetic value of his films and to examine his philosophical claims2 directly on their merits – that is, to consider whether or to what extent they might be true.3

Allen’s Philosophical Claims

What are Allen’s main philosophical conclusions? Without pretending to offer an exhaustive account,4 I would suggest that seven major philosophical claims recur repeatedly and consistently in his films.

Life is meaningless

While Allen is not as rude or grouchy as Boris Yellnikoff, his protagonist in Whatever Works, Yellnikoff evidently reflects the views of his creator when he

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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announces to the audience, “What the hell does it all mean anyhow? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nothing comes to anything.”5

Allen had been suggesting as much from the very beginning of his career. In Play it Again, Sam, a woman with whom Allan Felix strikes up a conversation in an art museum offers the following interpretation of the meaning of an abstract expressionist painting:

It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of exist-ence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

While audiences in the 1970s may have assumed that Allen’s intent here was merely to mock such gloomy ideas for comedic effect, we find that in his subse-quent serious films they are presented sympathetically. In September, a scientist, played by Jack Warden, declares,

it’s all random  .  .  .  Everything is resonating aimlessly out of nothing, eventually vanishing forever. I’m not talking about the world; I’m talking about the universe. All space, all time – just temporary convulsion . . . I understand it for what it truly is – haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.

And in Hannah and Her Sisters, which, like a novel, is explicitly divided into chap-ters, the following quotation from Tolstoy is featured as a chapter heading: “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”

There is no God

In an interview given in connection with You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Allen was asked, “What seems more plausible to you, that we’ve existed in past lives, or that there is a God?” He replies, “Neither seems plausible to me. I have a grim, scientific assessment of it. I just feel, what you see is what you get” (Itzkoff 2010).

Once again, while Allen had made numerous joking references to atheism in his early work, most notably in Love and Death, his endorsement of this position only became fully clear in his subsequent dramatic films. Allen reports that in Crimes and Misdemeanors his intent was

to illustrate in an entertaining way that there’s no God, that we’re alone in the universe, and that there is nobody out there to punish you, that there’s not going to be any kind of Hollywood ending to your life in any way (Schickel 2003: 149).

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He elsewhere claims also to have “said explicitly” in that film that we inhabit “an atheistic and hopeless and godless and meaningless universe,” and that “the absence of God in the universe matters: To me it’s a damn shame that the universe doesn’t have any God or meaning” (Lax 2007: 125).

Death is inevitable, irrevocable, and horrible

Jokes expressing a fear of death and a disbelief in an afterlife abound in Allen’s early films. In Love and Death (1975), we encounter this bit of dialogue:

BORIS: Nothingness . . . nonexistence . . . black emptiness . . . SONJA: What did you say?BORIS: Oh, I was just planning my future.

In his later films these concerns are presented more straightforwardly. When Mickey Sachs, Allen’s character in Hannah and Her Sisters, is reminded of the inevitability of death, he comments, “Yes, but doesn’t that ruin everything for you? That . . . just takes the pleasure out of everything. I mean, you’re gonna die, I’m gonna die, the audience is gonna die . . . Everything!”

Still, audiences might assume that such observations are advanced merely for dramatic or darkly humorous effect, as opposed to representing the true views of their author. But any such assumption is destroyed by familiarity with Allen’s frequent comments on death in interviews. Here are three representative exam-ples: In comparison to the fear of death,

there is no other fear of significant consequence. All other fears, all other problems, one can deal with. Loneliness, lack of love, lack of talent, lack of money, everything can be dealt with. In some way, there are ways to cope. You have friends that can help you, you have doctors that can help you. But perishing is what it’s all about (BjÖrkman 1995: 106).

[I am] preoccupied with .  .  .  the tragedy of life, the fact that in the end you’re screwed by death, that death is ever present, that death is a constant companion in one form or another . . . (Schickel 2003: 105).

The fundamental thing behind all motivation and all activity is the constant struggle against annihilation and against death. Death is absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishment meaningless (Rich 1977: 76).

There is no cosmic justice

The protagonist of Crimes and Misdemeanors, a respected ophthalmologist, arranges to have the woman with whom he is having an affair murdered. He does so, reluctantly, because he sees no other way to prevent her from revealing their affair

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to his wife, which, as he sees it, would destroy his family and reputation, and thus ruin his life. At the end of the film, speaking in the third person under the pretense that he is describing a character in a movie plot, he reveals the aftermath of his crime:

And after the awful deed is done, he finds that he’s plagued by deep-rooted guilt . . . He’s panic-stricken. He’s on the verge of a mental collapse, an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police. And then one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted. He takes his family on a vacation to Europe and as the months pass, he finds he’s not punished. In fact, he prospers. The killing gets attributed to another person  .  .  . Now he’s scot-free. His life is completely back to normal. Back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.

Match Point also features a murdering protagonist who evades punishment. “It would be fitting if I were apprehended,” he comments. “At least there would be some small sign of justice. Some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.”

The argument of these films is clear. Speaking specifically of Crimes and Misde-meanors, Allen summarizes it as follows:

No higher power is going to punish us for our misdeeds if we get away with them. Knowing that, you have to choose a just life or there will be chaos, and so many people don’t do that and there is chaos . . . (Lax 1991: 362).

I was really saying, there’s no God and no justice. We wish that we lived in a world where there was a God and where these acts would be adjudicated in some way. But we don’t . . . [We live] in a world where it’s simply up to you to . . . make your moral choices. And if you can get away with it, you get away with it (Schickel 2003: 150–151).6

Human existence is miserable

In a memorable scene from Annie Hall, Alvy Singer tells Annie,

I feel that life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. Those are the two categories. The horrible would be like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.

But does Alvy here articulate Allen’s own views? In response to a question about this very passage, Allen assures us that he does (BjÖrkman 1995: 85), which is not surprising, given the gloomy outlook that pervades his non-comic movies, such as Interiors and September. Moreover, he peppers his interview statements with

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references to “the agony and terror of human existence,” and to “the overwhelm-ing bleakness of the universe” (Lauder 2010a).

In defense of such harsh judgments, Allen invokes “the uncertainty of life, the inevitability of aging and death and death of loved ones,” “mass killings and star-vation,” “holocausts” and other instances of “man-made carnage,” among other horrors (Allen 2009). Nor is such ugliness confined to human experience. Rather, Allen suggests, it pervades the natural world as well. He points out that if you would “look closely” at “a beautiful pastoral scene,” what you would see would be “pretty horrible.” “You would see violence and chaos and murder and cannibal-ism.” And lest you be tempted to dismiss this claim as reflecting nothing more than the bias of a notorious urbanite, note what he immediately goes on to say about “the city”: “When you come in close, you can see the bacteria and what happens between man and his fellow man. It’s a pretty miserable, ugly, horrifying thing” (qtd. in BjÖrkman 1995: 71).

There is nothing mysterious, then, about Allen’s conclusion that “the basic thrust in life is tragic and negative” (Kelley 2006: 26), that “the metaphor for life is a concentration camp” (Rich 2006: 46),7 and that “human existence,” aside from some “small oases” of “delight, some charm and peace,” is “an agonizing, mean-ingless experience. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience” (Lauder 2010a). Indeed, he thinks that “everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is,” and that this painful truth can denied only by those who, in order to “get through” life, try to disguise or distort it through something like religion, sports, money, love, or art. And while these things “definitely serve a certain function,” in the end, Allen asserts, “they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way” (Lauder 2010a).

The fact that there is no God, afterlife, or cosmic justice makes it all the more necessary for us to meet our moral obligations, and to lead lives of authenticity and integrity

Most of Allen’s films are to some degree concerned with ethics. Consider Zelig, Allen’s mock-documentary about a man who in social situations wants so desper-ately to fit in that he develops the ability to take on the mannerisms, attitudes, skills, and even physical characteristics of those surrounding him. At the time of its release, the film was admired mostly for its humor, and for the technical bril-liance with which Allen and his crew created the illusion that we were seeing authentic footage of a figure from the 1920s and 1930s, even though that figure was, of course, utterly fictitious. But what was often overlooked was the moral of the story – the importance of those virtues most celebrated by existentialists – namely, authenticity (thinking carefully for oneself about what is true and right, rather than passively accepting, in an effort to get along and fit in, what others think), and personal integrity (living in accordance with those convictions, and

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resisting the temptation to compromise them for personal advantage). The fact that Zelig winds up, albeit briefly, a Nazi, brings home the political importance of these ideals. Holocausts do not happen because millions of people suddenly become insane or evil. Rather, the film argues that they happen when a few mad or evil people succeed in attaining political power, and then millions, through cowardice and/or lazy conformity, go along with them. As Allen explains it, one of the main points Zelig tries to make is that the “desire not to make waves, carried to an extreme, could have traumatic consequences. It could lead to a conformist mentality and, ultimately, fascism” (Kakutani 2006: 74).8

Some viewers, even among those who admire Allen’s movies, miss this ethical thrust in his work because they see it as precluded by his atheism, pessimism, and general philosophical outlook. As Allen sees it, such critics make “a wrong assump-tion,” namely, that “if, as I say, life is meaningless and chaos and random, then anything goes and nothing has any meaning and one action is as good as the next.” Instead, he insists,

What I’m really saying – and it’s not hidden or esoteric, it’s just clear as a bell – is that we have to accept that the universe is godless and life is meaningless, often a terrible and brutal experience with no hope, and that love relationships are very, very hard, and that we still need to find a way to not only cope but lead a decent and moral life.

People jump to the conclusion that what I’m saying is that anything goes, but actually I’m asking the question: given the worst, how do we carry on . . . ? Now, there are plenty of people who choose to lead their lives in a completely self-centered, homicidal way. They feel, since nothing means anything and I can get away with murder, I’m going to. But one can also make the choice that you’re alive and other people are alive and you’re in a lifeboat with them and you’ve got to try and make it as decent as you can for yourself and everybody  .  .  .  If you acknowledge the awful truth of human existence and choose to be a decent human being in the face of it rather than lie to yourself that there’s going to be some heav-enly reward or some punishment, it seems to me more noble. If there is a reward or a punishment or a payoff somehow and you act well, then you’re acting well not out of such noble motives (Lax 2007: 123–124).

On this view, Allen’s denial of the existence of God, an afterlife, and a system of cosmic justice does not nullify morality or make it incomprehensible, but rather underscores its importance, and lends to the struggle to lead a moral life an inten-sity, seriousness, and sense of urgency that it would otherwise lack. And this is so for at least three reasons: (1) If there is a God, and if this God sees to it that any imbalances in the scales of justice in this life are fully balanced in the afterlife, then I need not worry too much about my failures to treat others justly – after all, God will eventually set things right. But if we do not make these metaphysical assump-tions, then my obligation to treat others fairly and decently appears to be much more stringent, for in that case there is no reason to suppose that my negligent

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or evil actions will ever be corrected or my victims compensated. (2) Whereas a God might be able and willing to forgive me for my sins, and somehow erase them, as if I had never committed them, the absence of God would seem to pre-clude such a miracle, thus rendering my foul deeds a permanent and irrevocable stain on the universe. In that case, it is even more important than it would other-wise be to get it right the first time. (3) Finally, if I believe that there is an afterlife, and a God concerned to punish wrongdoing and reward virtuous conduct, then my motive to do the right thing might be at least partly selfish, and thus less than fully moral. This is not the case if I do the right thing with no expectation of reward for doing so, and while believing that I would suffer no negative conse-quence for failing to do so. As Allen puts it, it is

only when you can accept [that] the universe doesn’t have any God or meaning [that you can] go on to lead . . . a decent, moral life. You can only lead it if you acknowl-edge what you’re up against to begin with and shuck off all the fairy tales that lead you to make choices in life that you’re making not really for moral reasons but for taking down a big score in the afterlife (Lax 2007: 125).

Art is overrated and has no social value

Allen’s tepid evaluation of art (to be documented below) is surprising. After all, he has devoted his professional life to artistic creation. He has written thousands of jokes, and several comic monologues, short stories, plays, and screenplays; he has performed as a stand-up comedian, stage actor, and film actor; and, most notably, he has directed over 40 films. Moreover, one of his principal hobbies is the clarinet – he practices daily, and publicly performs on the instrument weekly in a Dixieland jazz band. Since he is obviously a thoughtful person, and concerned about existential issues, one would suppose that his choices of career and avoca-tion would tell us a great deal about his attitude toward art. For surely he would not have chosen to spend his time in these ways had he not thought such activities to be meaningful and valuable. Accordingly, Ian Jarvie, a philosopher and distin-guished film scholar, argues that Allen’s tireless dedication to creative work evi-dences, despite his despairing rhetoric, an outlook of “optimism” and “hope” ( Jarvie 2004: 65).

Furthermore, some of Allen’s films seem to point to art as one of the very few things that make life worthwhile. In a famous scene from Manhattan, the character Allen plays poses to himself the very question of why life is worth living, and answers by offering the following list of items:

For me  .  .  . oh, I would say Groucho Marx, to name one thing, and Willie Mays, and . . . the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and . . . Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Potato Head Blues.” Swedish movies, naturally. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra. Those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne. The crabs at Sam Wo’s. Tracy’s face.

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Notice that 8 of these 11 items are from the art world, and that the remaining three, Willie Mays, the crab dish, and Tracy’s face, are all things the appreciation of which would likely be primarily aesthetic. (And Allen has made it clear that this list expresses his own views in that, while his personal list would be longer, all of these items would be on it: BjÖrkman 1995: 120; Kelley 2006: 17.) Similarly, in Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey Sachs, who had just been considering suicide because he wasn’t sure he wanted to go on living in “a Godless universe,” renounces suicide and “actually begins to enjoy” himself only after starting to watch a funny movie in a theater into which he had, in his despair, aimlessly wandered.

So why does Allen repeatedly issue such statements as that “the artist is much too revered” (Kakutani 1996),9 and that “there’s no social value in art – not just comedy, but no social value in art at all, anyplace, anytime?” (Guthrie 1978: 144). How can such a dismissive view be reconciled with the two pro-art points just mentioned, those concerning Allen’s career choices and the content of some of his films?

With regard to the first point, Allen’s testimony, reiterated on numerous occa-sions, is that his decision to spend his time making films is not based on a high regard for the value of art, but rather on the fact that this activity is uniquely suited to distracting him from the horrors of existence:

[Working on a film is] an important distraction. I’ve always felt that if one can arrange one’s life so that one can obsess about small things, it keeps you from obsess-ing about the really big things. If you obsess about the big things, you are impotent and frightened, because there’s nothing you can do about aging and death. But the little things you can spend days obsessing about, such as a good punch line for the third act. And this is a nice problem to obsess over because it’s not surgery (Geist 1992: 41).10

Nor is its propensity to create endless distracting busywork the only, or even the primary, feature of filmmaking that renders it ideal for providing a long-term refuge from reality. The other point is that filmmaking amounts to the creation of an unreal fantasy world in which one can live continuously for months at a time. Allen has often explained that this is a big part of what motivates him to make movies:

I’m on the set . . . I live in a fake world for ten months. And by living in that world I’m defying reality in a way – or at least hiding from reality . . . That’s what it’s all about for me . . . That’s the impetus for the work . . . I get to create a fake situation and live in that situation .  .  .  I control the reality for that period of time, and live amongst beautiful women and guys who are brilliant and guys who make witty remarks . . . And it’s great” (Schickel 2003: 145–146).11

We can now understand why, from Allen’s standpoint as a creative artist, art has such a limited value. For fantasy is not a viable alternative to reality. Art can create a fantasy world, which can postpone one’s encounter with the horrors of reality.

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But since a postponement of a confrontation with life’s problems is not at all the same thing as a permanent solution to them, art ultimately fails the artist, and reality inevitably wins in the end.

And if the value of art to its creators is severely limited, so is it for the audience, and for the same reason. That Allen sometimes suggests that art is one of the best things available to us, one of the few things that make life worth living, is to be taken, then, not as indicating his high regard for art so much as his low regard for nearly everything else. Or, to put it another way, he sees art, whether from the standpoint of creation or appreciation, not as a singularly valuable part of reality, but rather as a (brief, unsustainable, and thus ultimately less than fully satisfying) escape from reality. It is art that provides the “small oases of delight” that briefly relieve the horrors and brutality of human existence. As Allen puts it,

You know, watching the Marx Brothers or a Knicks game or listening to great jazz, you get a great feeling of ecstasy. You’re in a great moment watching Michael Jordan. But then it passes, and the dark reality of life starts to creep back in (Kaplan 2006: 180–181).

That art represents the abandonment of reality in favor of an unreal and unsus-tainable fantasy world is a recurring theme in Allen’s films. Consider the famous scene in Annie Hall where Annie and Alvy are standing in line for the movies and a professor standing behind them loudly broadcasts his opinions, first about Fellini and then about Marshall McLuhan. When the professor overhears Alvy complain-ing to Annie about his overbearing lecturing, a confrontation between Alvy and the professor ensues, which Alvy wins by triumphantly producing McLuhan himself, who had been hidden behind a movie poster. To Alvy’s – and the audi-ence’s – delight, McLuhan immediately lets the professor have it: “You know nothing of my work! How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!” Alvy then makes Allen’s point about the unreality of art by turning to address the audience and saying, “Boy, if life were only like this!” As Sandy Bates puts the point in Stardust Memories, the problem is that “You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only–only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.”

An obvious rejoinder to Allen would be that many works of art, including some that he himself is on record as enjoying and admiring, have content that is far from escapist in nature. Some of these works directly address, and often grimly, the very existential issues that so perplex and concern him. So might not some of these works be valued, not for providing an enjoyable break from reality, but rather for delivering wise advice as to how reality, in all of its harshness, might be confronted and navigated more successfully?

Allen answers this question negatively. For one thing, there is no reason to suppose that the ability to make art should be correlated with practical wisdom of the sort Allen is seeking. But the main problem, in his view, is simply that a large part of what makes life so tragic is precisely that no one has any good answers

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to life’s terrible existential dilemmas. (Recall the words of Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters: “Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds, and, in the end, none of ’em knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do”). So, while Allen readily concedes that “I’ve known moments of great happiness in my life thanks to art,” he informs us in the same breath that art “was never a solace to me . . . Because, when it comes to ponder-ings about the meaning of life and existential anguish, art never brings any answers – it’s never brought me personally any answers” (Ciment and Garbarz 2006: 171).12 Even the darkest films of Bergman, and the most serious novels of Dostoevsky and stories of Kaf ka, then, are on this view valuable only for the distraction and amusement they provide. The difference in value between such works and, say, a silly lowbrow comedy, is merely quantitative, rather than qualitative. As Allen puts it, “Art to me has always been entertainment for intellectuals. Mozart or Rembrandt or Shakespeare are entertainers on a very, very high level” (BjÖrkman 1995: 103).

Film and Philosophy

As thought provoking as these seven philosophical conclusions are, almost as interesting is the fact that Allen has chosen to present them in the medium of film. But is film a good vehicle for the presentation of philosophical ideas? And is the aesthetic value of Allen’s movies, in particular, enhanced by their philosophical content? It is ironic that an affirmative answer to these questions depends, for its justification, on a repudiation of Allen’s own philosophy of art.

For if, as Allen insists, art can aspire to be nothing more than “entertainment for intellectuals,” then the inclusion of philosophical ideas in his films could increase their artistic value only by making them more entertaining – that is, by increasing their capacity to amuse us, to take our minds off our troubles, to dis-tract us from (as Allen sees it) the hideous realities of human existence. But the entertainment effects of the philosophical content of Allen’s movies are, at best, mixed. On the positive side, such content usually requires characters who are liter-ate, educated, thoughtful, and articulate. Spending time in the company of such people can be enjoyable, and, given the reluctance of most Hollywood filmmakers to include any material that might prove inaccessible to a significant portion of a mass audience, refreshingly different from our typical moviegoing experience. Similarly, Allen’s subject matter allows him to work with an expanded range of reference, relative to other filmmakers. Some of the best jokes in Allen’s films are about such figures as Kaf ka, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Socrates, Strindberg, and the Greek gods. The pleasure one takes in these jokes is enhanced, once again, by the rarity of such references in films – one especially enjoys hearing (good) jokes about subjects not joked about elsewhere.

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On the negative side, however, Allen’s more philosophically oriented films remind us of the darker aspects of human life and suggest that there is no possibil-ity of escaping them. Such intellectual content seems ill designed to bring an audience amusement or diversion or distraction. So the inclusion of Allen’s philo-sophical ideas can improve his movies aesthetically only if the value of artworks, such as films, can consist in something other than mere entertainment. But can it? What else, aside from amusement, can art offer us?

A partial reply can be gleaned from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, a philosopher Allen is on record as admiring.13 In “What is Literature?,” Sartre argues that the author–reader relation stands as the very model of what authentic interpersonal relationships (roughly, relationships that are honest, nonexploitative, generous, and fully reciprocal) can be like (Sartre 1988). Authors do not simply inject their ideas directly into the heads of their readers, who passively receive them; rather, authors must appeal to the freedom and generosity of their readers as they engage in the active project of interpreting, and thus bringing to life, the authors’ works. And on the other hand, readers, in attempting to understand a text, must appeal to the freedom of the author, and recognize the work to be the product of free, creative decisions. There is no room for coercion or domination in this exchange, which writers and readers enter into voluntarily, for their mutual benefit.

Generalizing Sartre’s ideas about literature to other arts, including film, yields the conclusion that Allen’s movies can achieve more than mere entertainment. At their best, they can stand as examples of meaningful interpersonal commu-nication. When an intelligent, sensitive person shares with us his or her thoughts and feelings about important issues of interest to us, the experience is valuable. It might inform us of something we had not previously known; it might chal-lenge or inspire us to do better than we have done previously; it might console us by showing us that someone else has suffered as we have; it might add excite-ment to our lives by causing us to experience intense feelings; and, perhaps most importantly, it might provoke in us a thoughtful, questioning, and creative response.

But the sincere communication of ideas is not, by itself, art. There is a differ-ence between, on the one hand, a straightforward presentation of an argument in, say, a political speech or a philosophical essay, and, on the other, the inclusion of philosophical content in a beautiful painting or poem, or in a stirring piece of music, or in an engrossing story. The inclusion of philosophical content can enhance a work of art, I would suggest, only when it does not overwhelm the other aesthetic concerns of the piece, but is rather well integrated with them. The ideas should be interwoven into the texture of works that can be fully appreciated on other levels, such as for their humor, suspense, or compelling plot.

Consider, in this light, the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which Frederick, the painter played by Max von Sydow, addresses Lee, his domestic partner, played by Barbara Hershey, on her return to the apartment they share. He greets her by issuing the following report:

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You missed a very dull TV show about Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason why they could never answer the question “How could it possibly happen?” is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the ques-tion is “Why doesn’t it happen more often?”

The scene works on at least three levels. First, thanks in large part to von Sydow’s exuberant performance, it is pleasurable to watch from the standpoint of pure spectacle. There is something compelling about seeing a charismatic person expounding his views with such force and passion; and the contrast between the horrifying content of his convictions and the self-satisfied relish with which he delivers them is darkly comic. Second, the scene is effective in terms of helping to establish Frederick’s character, which, in turn, is both intrinsically interesting and helpful for advancing the plot (for example, Lee has begun an affair with another man and will ultimately leave Frederick; this scene helps us to under-stand why she does so). Finally, the content of Frederick’s statement, which, as Allen confirms, represents his own thinking on this subject (Allen 1991: 7–8), is worth pondering in its own right, in the sense that its interest would not be diminished if it were considered quite apart from its function as part of a work of art.

Moreover, fiction facilitates the construction of thought experiments. A sto-ryteller can probe an idea by asking what would happen if such-and-such happened to a person like so-and-so. The resources of film, a medium encom-passing both sight and sound, and one that accommodates an almost limitless variety of techniques of communication (including flashbacks, close-ups, juxta-posing images on a split screen, subtitles, music, and so forth), enable a skilled filmmaker to carry out such experiments with extraordinary subtlety and com-municative power.

Consider, once again, Allen’s argument against cosmic justice. In mounting such an argument Allen is confronting a belief that is so deeply rooted in our emotional needs, and so recalcitrant in the face of counterevidence, that some psychologists label it a “delusion” (Lerner 1980). A growing body of experimental psychology research indicates that when we are confronted with what would appear on its face to be an instance of gross injustice, we tend to construct, often out of thin air, and then stubbornly to believe in, a theory of the event according to which the victim did something to bring about this state of affairs, and thus deserves his or her fate.14

It is not difficult to understand why we might have a powerful emotionally based interest in insisting that life is fundamentally just. For one thing, if it were not, this would seem to impose on us a burden to try to help the victims of injus-tice. We can therefore save ourselves a good deal of trouble if we can only con-vince ourselves that those who suffer had it coming. Even more importantly, the belief that life is utterly and mercilessly unfair would reveal to us our own

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terrifying vulnerability, showing us that we, too, stand in danger, through no fault of our own, of suffering some horrific catastrophe, such as losing one’s job, home, health, sanity, child, or life (Fine 2006: 61).

How might one counter this deep-rooted bias, this emotionally driven insist-ence that justice always prevails? While there is room for a variety of approaches, Allen’s is to use the medium of film to present examples, both in Crimes and Mis-demeanors and in Match Point, of individuals who evade punishment or any other kind of significant negative consequence, even though they murder victims who clearly do not deserve to be killed. To be sure, not everyone is convinced by an argument based on imagination, rather than fact; but then not everyone is con-vinced by even the most rigorous and most consistently replicated experimental research. If we are biased against seeing the world a certain way, a powerful artistic presentation of that way of seeing can help to break down that bias. A film can compel us to look at the world in new ways, thus making us more receptive than we otherwise would be to evidence that our old ways of thinking are inaccurate. Of course, the case made in the film still has to ring true – the filmmaker has to persuade us that his or her vision is plausible, that events really could unfold in this way rather than that, that a character like this one is believable, and that he or she really would be likely to do such-and-such in response to so-and-so. But if the filmmaker passes this test (and Allen, in his best work, does), then his thought experiments get a fair hearing, we consider his ideas seriously, and he has a chance to persuade us of the truth of his vision.

Assessing Allen’s Philosophical Claims

Very well, then. Is Allen’s vision true? It is noteworthy that admiration for his films is wholly consistent with a negative answer to this question, as is evidenced by the praise Allen has received from avowed theists, including members of the clergy. Robert E. Lauder, a Catholic priest, citing “the themes he presents and the cinematic skill with which he presents them,” declares that “Allen has no equal among contemporary filmmakers” (Lauder 2010b). And Francis Schaeffer, a pro-lific and influential Presbyterian pastor, praises Allen as “a human being who has simply looked life in the face and has the courage to say what he sees” (Schaeffer 1994: 355).

But it is not quite right to say that Lauder and Schaeffer simply reject Allen’s philosophical stance entirely. Rather, they suggest that he has reasoned correctly, and has drawn the right conclusions from his atheism. As Lauder puts it, “If there were no God, surely Allen’s extreme pessimism – and the extreme language in which he expresses it – would be right on target” (Lauder 2010b). Schaeffer concurs: “If there is no personal God, nothing beyond what our eyes can see and our hands can touch, then Woody Allen is right: life is both meaningless and ter-

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rifying” (Schaeffer 1994: 355). But, of course, Lauder and Schaeffer reject Allen’s atheism. The fact that they praise him for the conclusions he draws from it sug-gests, then, another reason they may welcome his films. Perhaps, by (as they see it) showing how horrific are the consequences of atheism, Allen is inadvertently making their position, Christian theism, look irresistibly attractive.

So Allen, Lauder, and Schaeffer, though they disagree on almost everything else, agree on the conditional judgment that if there is no God, afterlife, or cosmic justice, then life is meaningless and terrible. It seems doubtful, however, that this conditional judgment is true. Despite what Allen and the two clergymen assert, it is far from clear that the nonexistence of God, an afterlife, or cosmic justice would render our lives meaningless and terrible, or, for that matter, that the exist-ence of God, an afterlife, or cosmic justice would help us to solve our deepest philosophical and existential problems.

One problem that we face, and one for which God is often proposed as a solu-tion, is cosmological. We wonder about the origin of being itself. Surely the fact of existence – that there is something rather than nothing – calls for an explana-tion. How did the universe, with all its vastness, come into being?

The answer, we are often told, is that God, a personal, spiritual being of infinite power and goodness, created the universe. Notice, however, that this merely pushes the problem back a step. If the existence of the universe calls for an expla-nation, then surely so does the existence of God. Some might reply that God requires no explanation, that God has always existed, and thus that God stands as an exception to the rule that generates this issue – namely, that there is a causal explanation for the existence of everything. But if we are entitled to assume that something has always existed, and thus was not caused to exist, we have no reason to postulate that this entity is something other than the universe itself, or perhaps matter-energy. In this way, we save a step, and we refrain from having to posit the existence of something which, in radical contrast to matter-energy, we do not on independent grounds know to exist.

To be clear, the point of this argument is not that we have the answers to our cosmological question. We do not. The point, rather, is, one, that the existence of God would not solve the problem, but rather would merely push it back a step; and, two, that, to the extent that the question is answerable, the nonexistence of God would not stand in the way of our answering it.

The same reasoning applies when we examine other problems for which God has been proposed as a solution. Consider, for example, the orderliness of the universe – the fact that the planets move about without crashing into each other, and that, in general, physical objects appear to behave in a regular, predictable, law-like fashion. Some argue that blind, purposeless forces cannot produce such orderliness. On this view, the orderliness of the universe entails that it is the product of design. Then, since design implies a designer, we arrive at the conclu-sion that the design-like features of the universe constitute evidence for the exist-ence of God.

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Once again, however, this argument, far from solving the problem, merely pushes it back a step. If, as the argument assumes, order implies design, then what accounts for the orderliness of a mind capable of creating the universe? Clearly, if the major premise driving this argument were true, then we would have to infer that the well-ordered mind of God is itself the work of an intelligent designer, that this designer’s mind is, in turn, the product of another designer, and so on infinitely. If, on the other hand, one counters that perhaps God’s mind is an excep-tion to the general rule that order implies design, then, once again, we can save a step and avoid exotic postulations by assuming that some aspect of the natural world is capable of generating nondesigned order.

And the same logic applies when we turn to ethics. If we have problems with ethics (for example, we don’t understand the basis for morality, or cannot deter-mine in any given case which of the courses of action available to us would be morally right, and which morally wrong), will turning to God help? The problem with such an approach becomes clear as soon as we notice that it would not be moral to obey the evil commands of an evil creator. Thus, before it would make sense for us to look for moral guidance from God, we would need to determine that this God is indeed good. But this, in turn, implies that appealing to God in order to help us figure out what is good or bad gets things precisely backwards. We would first have to know something about what is good or bad before we could possibly know whether any given purported moral authority can be relied on for sound moral advice. Thus, once again, the postulation of God, far from solving the problem, merely pushes it back a step. If our ignorance of morality is such that we cannot determine what is right and wrong in the realm of human action, then that ignorance also precludes us from knowing that God is good, or that God’s moral teachings are sound.

Since Allen is an atheist, and also a moralist, it seems likely that he would accept these arguments. After all, he obviously would not deny that the universe exists, he is highly unlikely to deny that it exhibits a degree of order, and he is on record as affirming that we have moral obligations to one another. Consequently, his atheism entails that he does not think that these things imply the existence of God. As we have seen, he explicitly argues that the absence of God in no way undercuts morality.15

It is odd, then, that he appeals to the nonexistence of God in arguing that human existence is meaningless and terrible. For the same arguments that show that the nonexistence of God would not create problems in connection with cos-mology, orderliness, or ethics, and that the existence of God would do nothing to solve these problems, also show that the nonexistence of God would not render human life meaningless, and that, to the extent that there is a problem of mean-inglessness in our lives, the existence of God would do nothing to solve it.

Allen’s reason for thinking otherwise is presented, by means of an analogy, in a scene from The Purple Rose of Cairo. Tom, a character from a film who has magically walked off the movie screen and into real life, and Cecilia, a filmgoer with whom he has started a relationship, discuss God.

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CECILIA: You do believe in God, don’t you?TOM: Meaning?CECILIA: The reason for everything, the world, the universe.TOM: Oh, I think I know what you mean – the two men who wrote The Purple

Rose of Cairo, Irving Sachs and R.H. Levine, the writers who collaborate on films.

CECILIA: No, no, I’m talking about something much bigger than that. No, think for a minute. A reason for everything. Otherwise, it would be like a movie with no point, and no happy ending.

The analogy suggests that our lives can have meaning only if they play a significant role in a sequence of events that is itself meaningful and planned. But a moment’s reflection shows that not just any role in any plan will do. Suppose our assigned role were simply to suffer for the sadistic pleasure of a cruel creator, or to develop our best human capacities so that eventually we would be worthy of serving as slaves of the superior beings of the future who are the creator’s true chosen ones. While this would give our lives meaning to the God who assigned to us these roles, it is far from clear that it would enhance our own sense of the meaningful-ness of our lives (and that, after all, is the issue).

But suppose, on the other hand, that a God’s plan for us were something that we would regard more favorably. Suppose, for example, that it were clear that God intended us to seek knowledge and understanding, to express ourselves creatively, to develop deep, caring relationships with one another, to strive to attain admirable character traits, such as courage, honesty, and kindness, and to enjoy to the fullest all of the joys and pleasures available to us, consistent with respecting and foster-ing others’ ability to do the same. While those who live life in accordance with this plan, or one like it, might well experience their lives as meaningful, it is far from clear that the meaning would derive from the fact that the plan originated from an external source, as opposed to flowing from the rich and positive content of the plan itself. If anything, originating in an external source might diminish the meaning of the plan for us, on the general grounds that, all else equal, it is more meaningful for us to make choices for ourselves, to carry out our own plans, than it is to fulfill roles assigned to us by others.

As we have seen, though, there is something else, according to Allen, that does lessen the meaningfulness of life: death. But there is something odd about this claim, and Allen, in the joke that his character delivers directly to the audience at the beginning of Annie Hall, shows that he is aware of it:

There’s an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

The joke turns on an inconsistency that Allen appears to be acknowledging as his own. If life is terrible, then we should be relieved, not devastated, to know that it

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will end fairly soon. But if we desperately don’t want it to end, then it must not be so terrible. So our unhappiness at the prospect of death, far from showing life to be meaningless to us, rather underscores its meaning and value.

In any case, it is unclear why, exactly, our mortality should render us unable to derive deep satisfaction from the time we have available to us. After all, even if we were immortal, the individual meaningful actions that we undertake, such as watching a film, eating a meal, talking to a friend, going for a swim at the beach, and so forth, would still endure in time only briefly. The fact that they come to an end and do not last forever, and that we know this about them, does not seem to diminish their value to us. Nor is the worth of these activities less-ened by the fact that some of them are not in any obvious way embedded in projects or plans, or that others of them are attached to projects that are eventu-ally completed and thus discontinued. So while immortality may have much to recommend it, there is no apparent reason why our mortality should render our lives meaningless.

Nor should our mortality, or the nonexistence of God, make our lives miser-able. While Allen is certainly right to point out that there is much cause for misery in the world, if one is lucky enough to have reasonably good health, adequate economic means, a few true friends, a sense of humor, and a capacity to take an interest in the vast spectacle that the world presents to us, it appears that it is pos-sible to live a modestly happy life. The point is not that it is easy to attain all of these good things. It is not. Rather, the point is that a consideration of them underscores the limited relevance of the factors that Allen takes to be crucial – God and immortality. For one who does attain all of these positives can likely achieve happiness without God or an afterlife; and a physically sick, desperately poor, friendless, humorless, bored person can’t possibly achieve it even with God and eternal life. Assuming that certain minimum external requirements for hap-piness are met, the question of whether human experience is miserable or not probably depends more on individual psychology and perspective than on a purely logical evaluation of the relevant evidence. Life throws at us a rich mixture of good and bad, and while the mixture varies radically from person to person, partly as a matter of luck (as Allen rightly insists), and partly as a result of the wise or foolish choices that we make, probably an even greater factor in determining our level of happiness is our skill (or lack thereof ) at fully appreciating the good, and at calmly taking in stride and dealing with the bad.

Conclusion

There is much to admire in Allen’s handling of philosophical issues in his films. The inclusion of such content gives his movies a staying power (in the sense that they repay repeated viewing and subsequent pondering) that is lacking in films

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aiming only to thrill or amuse. Moreover, because the problems he treats are broad, existential, and humanistic, they readily lend themselves to the medium of film, and are capable of engaging an audience on a much deeper level than would be possible in films dealing with more precise or technical issues. Finally, because he avoids excessive didacticism, and presents his philosophical ideas as merely one strand of a complex artistic fabric, skillfully interwoven with other aesthetic con-cerns (such as humor, suspense, music, visual composition, and so forth), the philosophy enhances the artistry without displacing it. Little wonder, then, that strong disagreement with the philosophy underlying Allen’s best movies does not in the slightest diminish one’s appreciation of them.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Notes

1 Allen’s friend and biographer, Eric Lax, lists philosophy, along with magic and the clarinet, as one of Allen’s three “constant avocations” (Lax 1975: 37), and reports that “the problems inherent in the existential dilemma of man” are Allen’s “daily preoc-cupation” (Lax 1991: 151).

2 Given that Allen’s films are works of fiction, it may be questioned how one can iden-tify philosophical “claims” in them and attribute them to Allen. A philosophical-sounding utterance might, after all, be presented for some other purpose (for example, to be funny, to establish a character, or to advance a story), and the views expressed might merely be those of a fictional character, rather than those of Allen himself. But on the other hand, Allen is a prolific filmmaker, and the same ideas recur repeat-edly in his movies, making his intentions hard to miss. According to his own testi-mony, his “movies have been very self-expressive. They’re expressive of observations of mine or feelings of mine” (Lax 2007: 311). Moreover, he reports that the philosophy he expresses in his films “has been consistent over the years . . . The ideas have always been the same” (Vilkomerson 2009). Finally, in interviews Allen has not been at all shy about explaining what he has attempted to communicate in his films. I have generally found his self-interpretations convincing.

3 Some argue that the pursuit of truth no longer makes sense as a goal in these post-modern times. Detailed responses to these anti-truth arguments can be found in Lynch (2005), Blackburn (2007), and Detmer (2003).

4 A more complete account would have to include Allen’s claim that our lives are gov-erned substantially by luck, his ideas about the difference between fantasy and reality, and his thoughts about the extreme importance, but almost impossible difficulty, of love relationships.

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5 Allen explains that he “did want to portray Larry’s take on life as closer to reality than other people. He might seem like a complainer, a malcontent, like a misanthrope, a cynic, a nihilist – whatever words you want to impute to him, but there’s a great deal of sad truth to his perceptions. And I wanted to make that very clear at the end of the movie” (Vilkomerson 2009).

6 Allen has articulated this self-interpretation many times, and has forcefully defended it against critics who read Crimes and Misdemeanors as asserting that the ophthalmolo-gist, and presumably wrongdoers in general, are destined to suffer as a consequence of their crimes. See, for example, BjÖrkman (1995: 226), Lax (2007: 25, 122, 358), and Lee (2002: 162–163, quoting from personal correspondence with Allen).

7 Allen makes a similar statement in Rich (1977: 75). 8 A much more detailed analysis of this film can be found in Detmer (2004). 9 See also Kakutani (2006: 76).10 See also McGrath (2006: 122), Lahr (2006: 152), and Kaplan (2006: 182).11 See also Lax (2007: 365–366), and BjÖrkman (1995: 51).12 See also Kakutani (2006: 75).13 See, for example, Lax (1991: 351; 2007: 85), BjÖrkman (1995: 72), and Lee (2002: 223).

Note also that Sartre is sometimes mentioned in Allen’s films (for example, in a scene near the beginning of Husbands and Wives, Mia Farrow’s character is shown holding a book with Sartre’s name clearly visible on the cover; and, in Anything Else, Amanda gives Jerry a gift of Sartre’s plays No Exit and The Flies).

14 A good brief account of some of the experiments supporting this claim can be found in Fine (2006: 60–64).

15 Note that morality and punishment are distinct, and that the former is logically prior to the latter. One must first do something wrong (or right) in order to deserve punishment (or praise). Thus, while it is true that, in Allen’s view, the nonexist-ence of God entails that many crimes go unpunished, this would undercut morality only if evading punishment for wrongdoing somehow cancelled out the wrongdoing.

Works Cited

Allen, Woody (2009) “Woody Allen on life, films and Whatever Works.” National Public Radio ( June 15). www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105400872 (accessed Oct. 5, 2012).

Allen, Woody (1991) “Random reflections of a second-rate mind.” In Joyce Carol Oates (ed.), The Best American Essays 1991. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1–8. (Original work published in Tikkun, 1990.)

BjÖrkman, Stig (1995) Woody Allen on Woody Allen. New York: Grove Press.Blackburn, Simon (2007) Truth. New York: Oxford University Press.Ciment, Michel and Franck Garbarz (2006) “Woody Allen: ‘All my films have a connection

with magic.’” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 169–178. (Original work published in Positif, 1998.)

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Detmer, David (2003) Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.

Detmer, David (2004) “Inauthenticity and personal identity in Zelig.” In Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble (eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 186–202.

Fine, Cordelia (2006) A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives. New York: Norton.

Geist, William (1992) “The Rolling Stone interview: Woody Allen.” In Stephen J. Spignesi (ed.), The Woody Allen Companion. Kansas City, KA: Andrews and McMeel, 39–55. (Origi-nal work published in Rolling Stone, 1987.)

Guthrie, Lee (1978) Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Drake.Itzkoff, Dave (2010) “Woody Allen on faith, fortune tellers and New York.” The New York

Times (Sept. 14). www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/movies/15woody.html (accessed Oct. 5, 2012).

Jarvie, Ian (2004) “Arguing interpretation: The pragmatic optimism of Woody Allen.” In Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble (eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 48–66.

Kakutani, Michiko (1996) “Woody Allen: The art of humor no. 1.” Paris Review 136 (Fall). www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1550/the-art-of-humor-no-1-woody-allen (accessed Oct. 5, 2011.)

Kakutani, Michiko (2006) “How Woody Allen’s Zelig was born in anxiety and grew into comedy.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 73–77. (Original work published in The New York Times, 1983.)

Kaplan, Fred (2006) “The lowdown from Woody.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 179–183. (Original work published in Boston Globe, 1999.)

Kelley, Ken (2006) “A conversation with the real Woody Allen.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 7–28. (Original work published in Rolling Stone, 1976.)

Lahr, John (2006) “The imperfectionist.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 143–168. (Original work published in New Yorker, 1996.)

Lauder, Robert E. (2010a) “Whatever Works: Woody Allen’s world.” Commonweal Magazine (Apr. 15). www.commonwealmagazine.org/woody (accessed Oct. 5, 2012).

Lauder, Robert E. (2010b) “Woody‘s cold comforts.” Commonweal Magazine (Apr. 23). www.commonwealmagazine.org/woody%E2%80%99s-cold-comforts (accessed Oct. 5, 2012).

Lax, Eric (1975) On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy. New York: Charterhouse.Lax, Eric (1991) Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf.Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Lee, Sander H. (2002). Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Lerner, Melvin J. (1980) The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. New York:

Plenum.Lynch, Michael P. (2005) True to Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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McGrath, Douglas (2006) “If you knew Woody like I knew Woody.” New York (Oct. 17). In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 116–129. (Original work published in New York, 1994.)

Rich, Frank (1977) “Woody Allen wipes the smile off his face.” Esquire (May), 72–76, 148–149.

Rich, Frank (2006) “An interview with Woody.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 43–48. (Original work published in Time, 1979.)

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1988) “What Is Literature?” Trans. Bernard Frechtman. In Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?” and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 21–245.

Schaeffer, Francis A. (1994) The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview. Volume V: A Christian View of the West. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Vilkomerson, Sara (2009) “The unshine boys.” New York Observer (Apr. 14). www.

observer.com/2009/movies/unshine-boys (accessed Oct. 5, 2012).

23

In Zelig, Woody Allen pulls off a marvel of trick cinematography – at one point, we see him as Leonard Zelig in the on-deck circle while Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig take spring batting practice – but it is his trick philosophy on which we will focus. A magician and lover of “the magic lantern” (cinema) as a youth, it is no wonder that Allen would be drawn to trick philosophy. In Radio Days, Joe (Seth Green), the 10-year-old Woody Allen surrogate, experiences the magic of the movies as an epiphany when he accompanies Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest) and her suitor to Radio City Music Hall. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the “spirit ball” that inventor Andrew Hobbs (Allen) rigs up works like a movie projector. At the end of Shadows and Fog, Allen’s character, Max Kleinman, apprentices himself to Irm-stedt the Magician (Kenneth Mars), symbolizing, perhaps, Allen’s choice of “a life in film.”1 One of the magician’s favorite tricks is the disappearing act (usually fol-lowed by the reappearing act), and Irmstedt saves Max and himself from the lumbering town murderer by disappearing into his magic mirror. To Irmstedt’s amazement, the murderer performs his own disappearing act by escaping from his chains. Shadows and Fog ends as the screen goes black a moment after Irmstedt and Max vanish before our eyes. In Oedipus Wrecks the disappearing and reappear-ing acts take unexpected turns as Sheldon’s (Allen) mother (Mae Questel) actually disappears during a magician’s act only to reappear projected over Manhattan, hounding her son. The trick of making oneself invisible is an ancient trope (the Ring of Gyges) used by Plato in the second book of the Republic. Allen explores this power in Alice, when Dr. Yang (Keke Luke) provides herbs to make Alice (Mia Farrow) invisible.

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Disappearing Act

The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen

Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler

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How the Factoring Philosophy Makes the World Disappear

What we call Woody Allen’s trick philosophy puts even a great magician like Irmstedt to shame. Allen’s trick philosophy relies on the power of unconstrained reflection to make God, the external world, enduring physical objects, other people, knowledge, morality, responsibility, character, meaning, beauty, power, action, even one’s self disappear. We call this trick philosophy factoring philosophy, because its characteristic pattern of reasoning is to factor out the purely subjective, what is for us, from the purely objective, what is in itself. Factoring philosophy is trick philosophy because it makes phenomenologically unjustifiable purist splits, notably, between subjectivity and the world. By contrast, the standpoint of the present authors, which reaches back to George Berkeley’s criticism of “abstract ideas,” calls factoring philosophy into question. Berkeley argues that certain assumptions about language play tricks on us (Berkeley 1950). Because we have one word for a general idea, say “triangle,” we assume that it must represent a single, necessarily abstract idea of a triangle. And where we have two separate words, say “color” and “shape” or “subjective” and “objective,” we jump to the conclusion that we have two separable phenomena.

The consequence of applying unconstrained reflection again and again is a progressive emptying of content from the world – and us – leaving an unknowable residue. The result is a profound skepticism: we know nothing of the world as it is in itself; all specific content is deemed subjective. Even Descartes’ certainty that his mind exists as an enduring, thinking thing comes under attack in the skeptical, factoring philosophies of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume can find no evidence of an enduring self, only a parade of perceptions, and Kant distinguishes between the self that appears, which is caught up in the determinism of the phe-nomenal world, and the free, noumenal self, about which we know nothing. Allen sides with the skeptics:

Sure, you know, you can never resolve the epistemological conundrum. I once did a joke a long time ago about having to take God’s existence on faith, and then I realized that I had to take my own existence on faith. And that really is the truth – that you can’t be certain of anything (Schickel 2005: 157).

As Hegel describes skepticism’s disappearing act: “In Skepticism . . . thought . . .  annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold determinateness” (Hegel 1977: 123). Of such thinking Hegel writes, “The sickness of our time, which has arrived at the point of despair, is the assumption that our cognition is only subjec-tive and that this is the last word about it” (Hegel 1991: 54). Consumed by the power of the factoring philosopher’s unconstrained reflection, the world vanishes behind the veil of subjective appearances.

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We might compare this peculiar disappearing trick to Truman’s ( Jim Carrey) realization in the film The Truman Show that his entire life has been spent on an elaborately constructed set for a television show chronicling his life: the set doesn’t disappear with Truman’s recognition, but its identification with the world does. It abruptly becomes a staged reality, a shell of its former self. Allen creates similar effects by having a film or story within a film: both Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry start that way. Awakening from a dream is a common experi-ence of abrupt transformation. Of Play it Again, Sam, which opens with the final scene of Casablanca, Sam B. Girgus comments, “the film also makes the important connection between the structure and nature of films and the way dreams are formed and function” (Girgus 1993: 16). This is how the trick philosophy operates; everything appears to be the same yet everything is different. Lemons still look yellow and taste sour, but we relegate those qualities to our own mental states: lemons aren’t yellow or sour. Imagine the trick philosopher holding a lemon:

“Ladies and Gentleman, is there a yellow, sour fruit in my hand?” “Yes, of course,” they answer. “Permit me a brief lecture on the subjectivity of secondary qualities (such as color and taste) . . . . Thank you. Ladies and Gentlemen, once again, is there a yellow, sour fruit in my hand?” “No,” they admit, “there’s something in your hand that looks yellow and tastes sour, but it is neither yellow nor sour.”

The more we reflect in this factoring way, the more things recede behind the way they appear, the less remains to say about them. In the end, the factoring philoso-phy leaves nothing to say about the world as it is in itself. The trick has worked: the world disappears while remaining in full view. Imagine the Truman Show ending with Truman returning to “job,” “friends,” and “wife,” convinced either that there is no reality beyond the set or that, if there is, it is no less a human concoction than the reality TV show he stars in.

Woody Allen is captivated by the ideas of global skepticism that question the order and goodness of the world. The vicissitudes of the global skeptic play them-selves out in Allen’s films. This kind of skeptic is dogged by the thought that every meaning and purpose is illusory. Even when the illusion doesn’t vanish, what remains is never quite real. Allen’s skepticism sparks lively intellectual exchanges among his characters and feeds a comic genius, but corrosive ideas have conse-quences for art. For the global skeptic, matters of substance are liable to dissipate at any time. Augustine describes a young skeptic caught in adultery who, in court, doubts that the woman is married, that adultery is wrong, and that they are not dreaming. Moral seriousness disappears into the lather of “what ifs.” Allen is ensnared by dubious ideas that make it hard to love life. The joy and promise of good art is possibilities, but possibilities piggyback on necessities. To be convinced that, at bottom, nothing really matters throws up obstacles for developing char-acters and plot. What remains is to flip-flop between repeating the global skeptic’s

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moves and engaging topics of ordinary artistic concern, such as marriage. The trouble is that global skepticism threatens to bleed through to the ordinary con-cerns. Even infidelity, a recurring theme in Allen’s films, loses weight. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, one of Judah’s (Martin Landau) motivations for having Dolores (Angelica Houston) killed is that his wife, Miriam (Claire Bloom), would never forgive his adultery. That motivation erodes by Midnight in Paris, when Inez (Rachel McAdams) admits to her fiancé, Gil (Owen Wilson), who is wooing two other women, that she’s spent a few nights with her pedantic married friend Paul (Michael Sheen) but that Gil should just “get over it.” When the need to confess or forgive dissolves in the plotline, the ground of art slips away.

Woody Allen’s Existentialism

Woody Allen’s philosophy is plausibly identified with existentialism. But existen-tialism is not of a piece; in fact, existentialists hold differing and even contradictory views on such fundamental questions as the existence of God, meaning, and morality. L. Nathan Oaklander offers three existentialist themes that fit popular conceptions well:

One common theme is the emphasis on human freedom and the related Sartrean slogan that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that we have no prepackaged essence or nature, but that what we are is what we choose to be. Another theme stressed by existentialists is the contingency of the world, the fact that the universe has no meaning and is absurd. A third is that there are no objective values (Oak-lander 1986: 7).

As Peter J. Bailey notices, the philosophy professor Louis Levy (Martin Bergmann) in Crimes and Misdemeanors embraces all three:

Levy’s existentialist philosophy emphasizes the coldness of the universe, its utter obliviousness to human happiness, and the necessity of human beings to project value into its moral vacancy, a central value being love. “It is only we with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe,” Levy argues. “We define ourselves by the choices we have made – we are in fact the sum total of our choices” (Bailey 2001: 133).

Allen affirms Levy’s philosophy, but with an important proviso: “The professor [Levy] was intellectual, and so all his insights and all his philosophy about life, while valid and deep and profound, was  .  .  .  the product of intellectualism” (Schickel 2005: 152). Allen’s reservation, which Halley Reed (Mia Farrow) voices in Crimes, commenting on Levy’s suicide, leads us to an additional feature of existentialism, distrust of philosophical systems.

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In the decades following World War II, the mainstream of philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, entered the doldrums of a professionalized posi-tivistic philosophy hostile to metaphysics and moral philosophy and indifferent toward the significance of philosophy for an individual’s life. It wasn’t that God was dead; the question of God’s existence was not meaningful in the first place. Emotivism assured us that there was no cognitive content to moral utterances, no moral knowledge to be gained. “Murder is wrong” was really a disguised way of saying, “Murder rubs me the wrong way, so don’t do it.” Into this stifling situation, existentialism arrived as a wake-up call – an alternative. Walter Kaufmann, an academic champion of existentialism, offered this account of what makes one an existentialist:

The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life – that is the heart of existentialism (Kaufmann 1975: 51).

This comes close to identifying existentialism with nonconformism and suggests an irrationalism that privileges feelings over philosophical systems.

Reflecting on his interview with Allen, Richard Schickel observes, “We are all conditioned by the values of our formative years. And, as our interview makes clear, Woody is no exception” (Schickel 2005: 174.) Born in 1935, Woody Allen’s formative years were the two decades following World War II. This was the period of civil rights activism, but whatever sympathies Allen may have had for that movement, it was not his center of gravity. At the end of Manhattan, when Isaac Davis (Allen) is ruminating over reasons to live, he turns up Willie Mays and Louis Armstrong, but not Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr. Allen was shaped more by the nonconformist sensibilities of the Beat generation.2 Like the young Rus-sians that Ivan Karamazov describes, Allen was drawn to the eternal questions “of the existence of God, and immortality” (Dostoevsky 1993: 4). Allen says of “dis-cussion about life and death and the meaning of both,” “Well, that’s I guess at the center of my thinking so much. I mean, it’s on my mind so much” (Schickel 2005: 156). For like-minded dissidents, contempt for the conformist culture and politics of the 1950s often took the form of a sniping withdrawal from politics. When the counterculture and radical politics of the 1960s arrived, Allen was hitting his early and mid-thirties. Though Play it Again, Sam opened as a play in 1969 and as a film in 1972, it is bleak Beat sensibilities that surface in a scene where Allan (Allen), desperate for a date, approaches a young woman at an art gallery. She is studying a Jackson Pollock painting. When Allan asks what she sees in it, she unleashes this torrent:

It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of exist-ence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless

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eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation forming a useless straightjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.3

This is scripted to be over-the-top and played for laughs, but the substance of what she has to say turns up over and again in Allen’s films and interviews, resulting in an intellectual cul de sac that boxes in Allen’s art.

Misdirection is the idea that Schickel highlights in the afterword to his interview with Allen. Allen responds to Schickel’s observation that the reversal in Small Time Crooks, where a cookie shop meant to cover up a bank robbery becomes an over-night sensation, is vintage Woody Allen, “Right. That’s my magical background. That’s misdirection” (Schickel 2005: 169).4 A magician’s technique, misdirection, when taken more broadly, evokes a kind of freedom that suits Allen’s nonconform-ist soul. This conception of freedom goes back to the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus, who deviated from the determinism of Democritus’ atomism: Epicurus’ atoms swerved! This Epicurean conception of freedom insists that nothing binds the subjective individual. We hear it in Sartre’s insistence that no preset essence harnesses us. So many of Allen’s loves – comedy, jazz, and magic – are like that, marked by misdirection, deviation, nonconformism. “When you see a magic trick, it defies reality” (Schickel 2005: 145). In an interview with John Lahr, Allen says, “in the end we are earthbound,” but comedy can

defy all that pulls you down, that eventually pulls you all the way down. The come-dian is always involved in that attempt somehow, through some artifice or trick, to get you airborne. Being able to suggest that something magical is possible, that something other than what you see with your eyes and senses is possible, opens up a crack in the negative (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 200).

“A crack in the negative” is like the swerve of an Epicurean atom, namely, an abstract affirmation of freedom against the order of things – nonconformism. In Midnight in Paris, writer Gil Pender’s midnight time travel is the “crack in the negative” that gets him “airborne.” But when he ends his nostalgic nighttime adventures, he lands not far from where he started – with another bright-eyed blonde. At least this one loves Paris and Cole Porter instead of Malibu and what-ever money will buy.

Luck, with which Allen is much impressed, likewise involves deviation. Like jokes, magic tricks, and jazz improvisations, luck is recognizable only against the background of an already ordered world. Chris Wilton ( Jonathan Rhys Myers) begins Match Point: “The man who said that it is better to be lucky than to be good saw deeply into human life.” Allen, in reply to Sander Lee’s question, says that authentic romantic commitment is “a question of pure luck” (Lee 2002: 223). Allen takes this idea to absurd lengths in Whatever Works when Boris (Larry David) meets his future wife accidentally, by falling on her in a suicide attempt. But, given what we know about Boris and his outlook, is there any reason to suppose that his luck

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will hold and make this new relationship thrive and endure? Looking back, wouldn’t Chris Wilton have been better off being good than lucky?

David Hume as the Consummate Trick Philosopher

Who counts as an existentialist is controversial, just as existentialism’s defining features are. Though existentialism is widely accepted to be a mid-twentieth-century movement, nineteenth-century writers, notably Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, are numbered among the existentialists. James Collins reaches further: “Its remote historical roots lie in Kant and Hegel” (Collins 1962: 46). We want to stretch back to David Hume, who woke Kant from his “dogmatic slum-bers.” Most, if not all, of the ideas associated with Allen’s existentialism are found in Hume.5 We do not claim that Allen is a reader of Hume. It is not necessary to read Hume to be shaped by his ideas: the default philosophy of the modern, skeptical person owes much to Hume. In Hume we find trick philosophy par excellence. Hume’s philosophy holds keys to understanding intellectual preoccu-pations and moves dramatized in Allen’s films. Hume factors out the purely sub-jective from the objective in one phenomenon after another to conclude that what we ordinarily take to be true of the world is actually purely subjective. One of his best known analyses concerns causality. By factoring experience, Hume argues that it provides no evidence of causal necessity; instead, causal necessity “is some-thing, that exists in the mind, not in objects” (Hume 1967: 165). We will focus on Hume’s argument that all values, moral and aesthetic, are “in the mind.” You thought that life was in earnest; now you recognize that life is just a game to be enjoyed – or quit.

For Hume, nature and custom are the master magicians whose artifices make the world reappear, full of meaning and value and equipped with enduring physi-cal substances having causal powers. Hume’s first trick is to factor experience so as to make that familiar world disappear. Thanks to nature and custom, the world reappears, only in a new modality, as projection. Hume’s magic is to make every-thing disappear while leaving it all but unchanged. This skeptical double move-ment, to undercut all our beliefs but then return to them, with irony, yielding to the pull of nature and custom, plays out in Allen’s films. In Crimes and Misdemean-ors, for example, meaning and moral law are subjected to global doubt at the very same time that we anguish over cold-blooded murder to cover up adultery and embezzlement.

Hume’s trick philosophy is cinematic; it is a philosophy of projection. The external world, enduring physical objects, power, substance, aesthetic and moral values, and more are all projected. Hume’s cinematic philosophy pictures a mind (light source) projecting feelings (celluloid frames) onto the world in itself (screen). Hume posits a mental world of thoughts, feelings, and expectations apart from

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the physical world; by contrast, everything about cinema belongs to the world. Real projection, such as occurs in a movie theater, involves physical objects and processes in the world. Hume’s projection involves a mysterious injection of mental stuff into a world stripped bare. Cinema is an understandable, if imagination-stirring worldly process. Hume’s projection philosophy, by contrast, stymies efforts to make sense of how it could work (Stroud 1993: 253–272).

Skepticism’s Instability

The trick philosophy, which makes the world disappear only to reappear as projec-tion, is a skeptical philosophy. Skepticism is a deeply unstable pattern of thinking, predisposed to flip-flopping, which is responsible for ambiguities in how we talk of it. The opening move of skepticism is to put human cognitive faculties in doubt, leading to the conclusion that, in order to avoid error, one should suspend belief. But without beliefs one is unable to get around in the world. Hence the famous question in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: shall I leave by the door or the window? (Hume 1980: 5) Ordinarily, we exit by the door because we believe that it is safer than going out the window. How would we act if we suspended such beliefs? Though he expresses skeptical ideas, when Professor Levy “goes out the window,” it is because he believes in gravity and that his life is no longer worth living.

A skeptic may concede that we cannot do without beliefs but (1) continue to suspend belief by insisting that the beliefs one lives by are not true but only plau-sible or truthlike and (2) limit beliefs to what Hume called “common life,” while suspending belief on speculative questions such as the origins of the universe. Difficulties arise, however, on both scores. If I am excluded from the truth, what justifies claims that my beliefs are truthlike or plausible? If my beliefs are not even truthlike, what is there to say for them? What distinguishes the truthlike from the arbitrary? You can wrestle with the truth, but you can’t wrestle with the truthlike. As for limiting the scope of one’s suspension of belief, that requires drawing a bright line between common life and speculation, but it is difficult, if possible, to draw such a line.

Drawing that line became a key topic in philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant drew the line between claims that bear on some possible experience and claims such that no possible experience could count for or against them. This way of thinking was hardened by positivists, as by A.J. Ayer in his Language, Truth, and Logic. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, philosophy professor Leopold Sturgis ( José Ferrer) hectors students with his positivist rejection of anything beyond the sensible. He gets his comeuppance at the end of the film, when he expires at the moment of sexual climax with Dulcy ( Julie Hagerty) and his spirit is lifted to flit through the woods with kindred spirits.

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With these trouble spots in mind, it is perhaps not surprising to find that the meaning of skepticism swings from suspension of belief to belief in a particular set of ideas, often about highly speculative matters. The profile of a skeptic’s beliefs resembles George Berkeley’s description of a Freethinker:

There is no God or providence: that man is as the beasts that perish: that his hap-piness as theirs consists in obeying animal instincts, appetites, and passions: that all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education: that religion is a State trick: that vice is beneficial to the public: that the soul of man is corporeal, and dissolveth like a flame or vapour: that man is a machine actuated according to the laws of motion: that consequently he is no agent, or subject of guilt: that a wise man will make his own particular individual interest in this present life the rule and measure of all his actions: these, and such opinions, are, it seems, the tenets of a minute philosopher, who is himself, according to his own principles, an organ played on by sensible objects, a ball bandied about by appetites and pas-sions .  .  .  . To complete his character, this curious piece of clock-work, having no principle of action within itself, and denying that it hath or can have any one free thought or motion, sets up for the patron of liberty, and earnestly contends for free-thinking (Berkeley 1950: 107).

The Freethinking skeptic does not suspend belief in God, providence, morality, conscience, guilt, religion, freedom, and moral responsibility. Rather, the Free-thinking skeptic denies them all.6 Such beliefs show up in many of Allen’s charac-ters; Harry (Allen), in Deconstructing Harry, and Boris, in Whatever Works, are particularly vivid examples.

Skepticism and Freethinking: Oscillating between Incompatibles

The oscillation between suspension of belief and doctrinaire Freethinking ensnares Woody Allen and several of his characters in multiple inconsistencies. These inconsistencies show up in Crimes and Misdemeanors, as Aunt May (Anna Berger) holds forth at a Seder with her nephews Judah and Jack listening. Her Freethinking ideas echo Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov.

1. On the one hand, Ivan plays the skeptic regarding questions as speculative as those concerning the nature and existence of God: “I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions” (Dostoevsky 1993: 5). All the same, Ivan collects stories about the mistreatment and murder of inno-cent children in order to clinch Epicurus’ ancient argument: since the exist-ence of evil is incompatible with the existence of God, God must not exist. But can you claim to be unable to know anything of God and then cite evil

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in the world to prove that this unknowable God does not exist? And can you then turn around and reason from the nonexistence of God to the conclusion that everything is permissible, when you first rely on the impermissibility of torturing innocent children to prove that God does not exist?

2. Aunt May rejects any suggestion of a moral structure to the universe, but she is appalled by the fact that “Hitler got away with it.” Hers is an impossible mixed marriage of moral outrage and nihilism. If the world lacks a moral structure, then there is no way to formulate Epicurus’ pincer argument against God’s existence.

3. Aunt May becomes livid when her brother Sol (David S. Howard) says that he will always put God before the truth. But in a world without moral struc-ture, what obligation could we have to the truth?

4. Aunt May thinks that if people like Hitler are not punished for their crimes, then God must not exist, and if God does not exist, there is no moral structure to the world. That delivers us over to the Freethinker’s creed: “all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education.” At one point in their conversation at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors, Cliff Stern (Allen) relies on this reasoning to point out to Judah Rosenthal that his mur-derer’s worst nightmare has come true. That is, if the murderer goes unpun-ished, and his feelings of guilt dissipate, then there is no justice, no God, and no moral order. But if a murderer avoids discovery and prosecution, how does that prove that no wrong was done? If a murderer’s feelings of guilt recede and fade, how does that prove conscience to be a “prejudice”?7 Are the judg-ments of conscience matters only of feeling? Strangers starve without my feeling upset, but I still judge that their starving is bad. Must Judah feel guilty to know that having Dolores murdered was wrong? Imagine a world where suitable punishments were meted out like clockwork for every crime and misdemeanor. Could an existentialist accept the chilling effect that would have on human freedom?

5. Cliff suggests that the murderer should turn himself in because, in the absence of God, we have to take responsibility for the moral law ourselves. But if we are obliged to take on that responsibility, then there must be some prior source of obligation. If we are not so obliged, then why would a mur-derer turn himself in? Supposing we could give ourselves a moral law, what would keep us from giving ourselves a different or even contradictory one tomorrow?

6. Aunt May says that morality is fine for those who want to have it, and Allen concurs. One of the two lessons of Crimes and Misdemeanors, says Allen, is: “your morality is strictly up to you” (Schickel 2005: 149). But this misconceives morality, dodging its binding character. Not every option for living is recogniz-able as a morality. In Plato’s Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus has to give up calling the tyrant the just person and argue instead that the unjust person is better off.

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Global Skepticism’s Philosophical and Artistic Dead Ends

The global skepticism of Allen’s existentialism, his trick philosophy, sets up dead ends for him philosophically and as a filmmaking artist. Global skepticism about the true, the good, and the beautiful is a philosophy that leaves no room for development. Once factoring philosophy severs thought from the world and what goes on in it, there is nothing to do but to make that point over and over. Such repetition grows tiresome, though Allen’s brilliant wisecracks offer comic relief. By the time we get to the window exits of the nihilistic physicist Boris in Whatever Works, we have something approaching self-parody. Global skepticism and nihilism undercut the local skepticism in which we all participate. Strawson distinguishes between global and local moral skepticism, and he flatly rejects the global kind. Morality belongs to the human makeup: “our natural human com-mitment to ordinary inter-personal attitudes . . . is part of the general framework of human life, not something that can come up for review as particular cases can come up for review within this general framework” (Strawson 1974: 13). We all have moral questions – say, what are my responsibilities to an aging parent? But to question morality wholesale is to imagine one could unravel the fabric of human existence. If integrity were optional, would Cliff ’s face turn ashen when Halley appears on Lester’s arm, now his fiancée, at the wedding that ends Crimes and Misdemeanors?

Global skepticism makes art as well as life unintelligible. An artist can no more work in a world without meanings and values than a person can walk on a fric-tionless surface (Girgus 1993: 18). In such a world – if we can call it that – there is nowhere to begin, nowhere to go, and no way to get there. Even to argue for global skepticism is impossible without beginning from a world fraught with meanings and values: skepticism and nihilism are parasitic on truth and goodness. Barry Stroud states the general problem for trick philosophy. It cannot make sense of the world that it wants to make disappear: “What is problematic is therefore to explain how we can have intelligible thoughts or perceptions which do not represent .  .  .  the way things ‘really stand in nature’” (Stroud 1993: 268). Global skepticism is literally a nonstarter. So, in Allen’s films, global skepticism arises as a counterpoint to local action.

Many of Allen’s films work in both registers, global and local, but the two are discordant. Film counts on local issues to engage us in concerns that global skepti-cism would have us regard with utter indifference. If it doesn’t matter whether singer Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte) leaves his wife for Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow) and dumps his loyal agent Danny Rose (Allen) when a nostalgia fad gives his career a boost, Broadway Danny Rose will be hard to enjoy. How does one get worked up about adultery, lying, embezzlement, self-deception, murder, or betrayal with global skepticism all the time nagging that these activities, like every other, are

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morally indifferent and that “all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are preju-dices and errors of education”? Try writing a screenplay on those assumptions. Localized doubt is the friend of art; globalized doubt would put an end to it.

Crimes and Misdemeanors works in both the global and local registers, just as it is comic and tragic. We might view Crimes as the first of a trilogy of films dealing with family, adultery, embezzlement, and murder. In the other two, Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, both shot in England, the comic dimension drops out. In Crimes, with its overarching image of “the eyes of God,” the global register domi-nates. The film’s upshot appears to be that, since Judah’s crime goes unpunished – even his feelings of guilt pass – there is no justice, no God, no conscience, no moral law. Allen says, “We wish we lived in a world where there was a God and where these acts would be adjudicated in some way. But we don’t” (Schickel 2005: 151). The plot involves many local concerns: how far will Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston) go to bring Judah down? How serious are Judah’s financial misdeeds? How would his wife, Miriam, take the news that he is a liar, an embezzler, and an adulterer? But how important are these questions, if we grant that lying, embez-zling, and adultery have no moral significance? If a pillar of the community such as Judah is capable not only of lying, embezzlement, and adultery, but also order-ing murder in cold blood, we wonder, on the local register, how pervasive is human iniquity? But, if no morality binds, what, really, is there to wonder about?

When we move to Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, the weight shifts to local concerns. As we study Chris’s face at the window in the closing shot of Match Point, we wonder less about the eyes of God and more about what lies ahead in this life for him. Where has his strategic marriage, adultery, and cold-blooded double murder gotten him? In Cassandra’s Dream, brothers Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell) are not bent on excusing their murder of the accountant of their rich Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson) by calling the moral structure of the universe into question. The combination of Terry’s gambling debts, Ian’s busi-ness and romantic aspirations, and a sense of obligation to their cornered uncle pressure them to do something they know is wrong. The remission of Judah’s guilt feelings at the end of Crimes seems designed to cast doubt on the reality of conscience. But are we supposed to feel the same way about Terry’s irrepressible guilt as we do about his gambling, drinking, and pill popping – it’s just one more addiction? Or does the vulnerable Terry bring Ian around to face the truth that they committed a terrible crime?

How to Live if All Values Are Strictly Subjective

Now we want to spotlight the skeptical doctrine that values are strictly subjective and the correlative doctrine of Freethinkers that “all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education.” In his essay “The Sceptic,” David

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Hume insists that values are purely subjective: “We have already observed, that no objects are, in themselves, desirable or odious, valuable or despicable; but that objects acquire these qualities from the particular character and constitution of the mind, which surveys them” (Hume 1985: 171). “The Sceptic” is not of one mind regarding the consequences of this conclusion that nothing is intrinsically of any value. Hume’s opening position is that everything is left as it was. What might seem to be an earthquake is barely a tremor. Just because we discover that everything is intrinsically valueless does not mean that we stop caring. Hume points out that if the modern “discovery” regarding secondary qualities, namely, “that tastes and colors, and all the other sensible qualities, lie not in the bodies, but merely in the senses,” does not keep anyone from calling lemons yellow or adding sugar to make lemonade; neither should subjectivism about values alter our speech or behavior:

There is a sufficient uniformity in the senses and feelings of mankind, to make all these [secondary] qualities the objects of art and reasoning, and to have the greatest influence on life and manners. And as it is certain, that the discovery above-mentioned in natural philosophy, makes no alteration on action and conduct; why should a like discovery in moral philosophy make any alteration? (Hume 1985: note 3, 166).

Hume trusts in the uniformity of human feelings to preserve our ordinary prac-tices even when we recognize that they have no objective basis. Murder is judged wrong and prosecuted whether values are disclosed as subjective or not.8

Rejecting the objectivity of values can ease into an ironic assertion of custom-ary values. Skepticism and conservatism can be two sides of the same coin. In Hume’s Dialogues, Demea argues that skepticism is a bulwark of traditional reli-gious beliefs. If you doubt the power of human reason, you will never discover a reason to abandon the religious practices and beliefs in which you were raised. If you are skeptical about values, that is, you think that they are all purely subjective, but you also realize that you can’t do without them, then why not avow custom-ary ones?9 Allen is too much the Freethinker for that. Among other things, reli-gion, perhaps Judaism in particular, offends his cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, he explores this path in his films. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey Sachs (Allen) tries Catholicism on for size, but it doesn’t fit. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, at the Seder that Judah observes in his mind’s eye, the young Judah and his brother, Jack, are buffeted by conflicting attitudes toward Jewish beliefs and practices. Aunt May, called a “Leninist” by her brother Sol, scorns them. Judah’s uncle demeans the rituals as “mumbo jumbo,” yet he goes along. Sol, Judah’s father, champions his faith and its rituals. In Deconstructing Harry, the dialogue between Harry Bloch (Allen) and his sister, Doris (Caroline Aaron), who keeps a practicing Jewish house-hold (though she and Harry did not grow up in one), provides another perspective. Harry parodies Doris’s choice in a story where a psychiatrist (Demi Moore) abruptly adopts Jewish practices at home to the chagrin of her husband (and

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former patient). Doris complains that Harry “has no spiritual center,” whereas Judaism supplies her household with a set of values. Superstitious and parochial ones, Harry counters.10

Affirming a set of traditional values faces hurdles other than Harry’s Freethink-ing disdain. The skeptical realization that our values are without any objective warrant makes us feel funny about them and ourselves. Accordingly, “The Sceptic” concludes by regarding life as a game. We entertain ourselves only as long as we cling to the fiction that something matters:

In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and care-lessness (Hume 1985: 180).11

In the interview with Schickel, Allen professes just this approach to life; in his case, making films keeps him entertained:

To me that’s the impetus for the work. For me – I’ve said this before – it’s like a patient in an institution who they give basket weaving to, or finger painting, because it makes him feel better. The actual work of making the film is great for me, because I get to create a fake situation and live in that situation and act the character, or if I’m not in the film live with those characters and bring them to life, and dress them, and put music around them, and put them in a setting that we create, and manipulate them. I control the reality for that period of time, and live amongst beautiful women and guys who are brilliant and guys who make witty remarks or who are extra brave. And it’s great (Schickel 2005: 145–146).

That’s entertainment.So all’s well, in a way, as long as the game holds its charm. But consider the

ominous conclusion to Professor Levy’s affirmation of the subjectivity of values, “under certain conditions we feel that the thing isn’t worth it anymore.” In an indifferent universe nothing really matters; mattering is up to me – though nature and custom do much to give life its savor. If we lose the taste for living, why not go out the window? In telling Halley what he knows of Levy’s death, Cliff cracks a joke, but it is more revealing than he (or Allen) seems to recognize: “He always was affirmative. He always said ‘Yes’ to life, ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes.’ Now today he said ‘No.’” Cliff and Halley are shocked and dismayed by Levy’s suicide, but why should they be either? At the heart of Levy’s philosophy, which Halley deemed “large and life affirming,” is arbitrariness. Levy’s laconic suicide note underlines that philosophy: “I have gone out the window.” The note repels the question “Why?” To what had Levy been saying “Yes”? Why affirm a remorseless universe? Why isn’t “No” every bit as reasonable an answer?

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Reflecting on “Life’s Shortness and Uncertainty”

Hume considers how, if they are strictly subjective, one might change another person’s values. Where beliefs are concerned, we count on the traction that factual claims have with the world to provide footholds. To the astronomer who believed that all heavenly bodies were perfect spheres, Galileo could offer a look at the moon through his telescope, revealing a surface with mountains and craters. But what does one say to a person who finds the moon dull? Hume contrasts reason-ing with valuing:

In the operation of reasoning, the mind does nothing but run over its objects, as they are supposed to stand in reality, without adding any thing to them, or diminish-ing any thing from them. . . . To this operation of the mind, therefore, there seems to be always a real, though often unknown standard, in the nature of things; nor is truth or falsehood variable by the various apprehensions of mankind (Hume 1985: 164).

By contrast, values are what we add, based on our feelings; if there is any standard here, it lies not in the world but in our human makeup.

But this is an untenably passive view of scientific reasoning. The categories of the objects over which the mind runs are not simply given in experience; thinking is required. Allen recognizes this in his factoring way, “We’re all given this spec-tacular denial system, and also a mind that puts all this chaos in order” (Schickel 2005: 157–158). This human element may account for Allen’s ambivalence toward science. On the one hand, we find characters who hold science up against supersti-tion (usually in the form of religion) – for example, Judah in Crimes or Harry in Deconstructing Harry, who says, “I’m all quarks and particles and black holes – all that other stuff is junk to me.” In Midnight in Paris, Gil cannot fathom how Adriana (Marion Cotillard) could choose to live in a nineteenth-century world without novocaine and antibiotics. In September, we are encouraged to admire Lloyd ( Jack Warden), the nuclear physicist husband of Diane (Elaine Stritch). Asked by the aspiring writer Peter (Sam Waterson) what he sees when he looks out into the universe, Lloyd replies:

I think it’s as beautiful as you do. And vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away. But then my professional perspective overcomes me. A less wishful, more penetrating view of it. And I understand it for what it truly is: haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.

On the other hand, Miles Monroe (Allen), in Sleeper, puts no faith in science. Medicine is often the butt of Allen’s jokes. One of the doctors treating Leonard Zelig, Dr. Birsky (Paul Nevens), assures his press conference listeners that Zelig’s

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odd behavior results from a brain tumor, only to die of a brain tumor himself two weeks later. The narrator punctuates the episode: “Leonard Zelig is fine.”

Ordinarily, when we believe that someone is blowing things out of proportion or else dismissing the importance of something – of driving drunk, for example – we appeal to the true value of the thing. In Zelig we see this everyday process go haywire when several doctors come to visit Zelig at Dr. Eudora Fletcher’s (Mia Farrow) country home and Zelig gets into a scuffle over whether it is a nice day. Dr. Henry Mayerson points out that the sun is shining and it is mild. Zelig won’t hear of it and attacks the physicians with a rake. But what if, as Hume insists, the true value of everything is nil? Then values, being purely subjective, have no trac-tion in the world. Hume draws the conclusion: “To diminish therefore, or augment any person’s value for an object, to excite or moderate his passions, there are no direct arguments or reasons, which can be employed with any force or influence” (Hume 1985: 171). The title of Whatever Works advertises the arbitrariness underly-ing Allen’s philosophy. However, “works” appeals to an objective measure by which we can distinguish working from failing to work. In a world without meaning or value, there is no non-arbitrary way to determine what works. Hume does not leave it at that:

But though the value of every object can be determined only by the sentiment or passion of every individual, we may observe, that the passion, in pronouncing its verdict, considers not the object simply, as it is in itself, but surveys it with all the circumstances, which attend it. . . . Here therefore a philosopher may step in, and suggest particular views, and considerations, and circumstances, which otherwise would have escaped us; and, by that means, he may either moderate or excite any particular passion (Hume 1985: 172).

The trouble here, as Hume sees it, is that so often these suggestions amount to “artificial arguments,” such as he finds in Stoic philosophers. Hume dismisses their extreme arguments: “The reflections of philosophy are too subtile and distant to take place in common life, or eradicate any affection” (Hume 1985: 172). We shrug them off. Such “artificial arguments” crop up in Allen’s films. In Stardust Memories, Sandy Bates (Allen) worries about entropy bringing the universe to a standstill. The young Alvy Singer in Annie Hall fears that if the universe keeps expanding, it will eventually break apart, a prospect that keeps him from his homework. These concerns are too distant to alter our feelings: I learn about entropy, but I go shop for groceries all the same.

Hume points up two considerations that are not artificial; they have the power to alter our feelings, but they introduce new difficulties. The first is an Allen standby: “When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despica-ble seem all our pursuits of happiness?”12 Discussing Stardust Memories with Schickel, Allen remarks, “Every single person – it’s a total washout after a hundred years” (Schickel 2005: 143). But Hume takes the point further, as Allen does:

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And even, if we would extend our concern beyond our own life, how frivolous appear our most enlarged and most generous projects; when we consider the inces-sant changes and revolutions of human affairs, by which laws and learning, books and governments are hurried away by time, as by a rapid stream, and are lost in the immense ocean of matter? (Hume 1985: 176).

In the exchange with Schickel, Allen explains that Sandy “suffers from . . . what I called Ozymandias Melancholia, a depression over the fact that years from now they will come across your statue in the desert – the rotting statue in the desert – and it will mean nothing” (Schickel 2005: 118). It’s not just that I am whisked away; my accomplishments, like those of others, are “hurried away by time.”

Even the possibility that one’s work might endure brings no consolation. In Interiors, Renata (Diane Keaton) questions her poetry writing:

I mean, just what am I striving to create, anyway: I mean, to what end? For what purpose? What goal? . . . I mean, do I really care if a handful of my poems are read after I’m gone forever? Is that supposed to be some sort of compensation? Uh, I used to think it was, but now for some reason, I–I can’t.

When, after Sandy’s death, the film festival director assures her audience, “Sandy Bates’s work will live on after him,” Bates retorts from the grave, “Yeah, but what good is it if I can’t pinch women or hear any music.” Speaking in his own voice, Allen says:

Some artists think that they will be saved by their art, that they will be immortalized through their art, that they will live on through their art. But the truth of the matter is, art doesn’t save you. Art for me has always been entertainment for intellectuals. I mean, it doesn’t profit Shakespeare one iota that his plays have lived on after him. He would have been better off if he were alive and the plays were forgotten.13

Nothing can compensate for the loss of my life. Sandy Bates, speaking from the grave, exclaims that he would give back his Oscar for one second of life. That leaves us wondering: what wouldn’t he trade for more life? Would he trade the lives of others for another year of his own life? If what happens to the rest of the world matters while I am alive, why would it stop mattering once I’m dead? Don’t we learn from the deaths of others that life goes on without them? If eve-rything in the world were to stop mattering once I’m dead, why would it have mattered while I’m alive? And why wouldn’t the world have stopped mattering a long time ago, after the first person died? In Allen’s imagination, “It doesn’t matter to me” slides, perilously, into “It doesn’t matter.”

Later in Hume’s essay it seems that the problem with human affairs runs even deeper than the fact that they are “hurried away by time.” Even if they were enduring, they would be insignificant. Hume appeals to a god’s-eye view of human affairs to make his point: “It is certain, were a superior being thrust into

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a human body, that he never could be induced to take part in any thing, and would scarcely give attention to what passes around him.” A reflective human being can recognize the vanity of human pursuits but soon takes them up again:

Now all the same topics of disdain towards human affairs, which could operate on this supposed being, occur also to a philosopher; but being, in some measure, dis-proportioned to human capacity, and not being fortified by the experience of any thing better, they make not a full impression on him. He sees, but he feels not suf-ficiently their truth; and is always a sublime philosopher, when he needs not; that is, as long as nothing disturbs him, or rouzes his affections. While others play, he wonders at their keenness and ardour; but he no sooner puts in his own stake, than he is commonly transported with the same passions, that he had so much con-demned, while he remained a simple spectator (Hume 1985: 175–176).

Hume counts on our feelings once again to pull us into life and divert us from the terrible truth of its triviality.

In Manhattan Murder Mystery, Carol (Diane Keaton) feels cramped in her Man-hattan routines. When what looks like a murder mystery unfolding down the hall falls into her lap, Carol seizes upon it, especially since it doubles as an opportunity to flirt and share the intrigue with an attractive, recently divorced friend, Ted (Alan Alda).14 When her husband, Larry (Allen), eventually gets involved in the mystery and displays some daring at the same time that Ted’s attentions are shifting toward Marcia (Angelica Huston), Carol is content to resume her marriage and Manhat-tan condo life. Allen finds no salvation in routine: “But as long as you’re mired, as we all are, in everyday routine and reality, we’re all going to come to the same nasty end, and have the same grim lives” (Schickel 2005: 141). The affirmation of life’s routines is a denial mechanism that is always in jeopardy; the truth that all our efforts are pointless and for naught threatens to break through at any moment.

Counterworking “the Artifice of Nature”

Reflection on the “shortness and uncertainty of life” can chasten us – so your team lost the championship game . . . you might be dead tomorrow, just get over it – but what will keep such reflection from draining away our desire to live, Hume wonders:

Such a reflection certainly tends to mortify all our passions: But does it not thereby counterwork the artifice of nature, who has happily deceived us into an opinion, that human life is of some importance? And may not such a reflection be employed with success by voluptuous reasoners, in order to lead us, from the paths of action and virtue, into the flowery fields of indolence and pleasure? (Hume 1985: 176).

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Hume counts on nature and custom to keep us going, to give us the desire to live virtuously even when we know that there are no reasons to live.15 Like too many questions to an older sibling about Santa’s travels on Christmas Eve, reflection on the “shortness and uncertainty of life” saps our groundless belief that life matters. Into the vacuum created, slide the “voluptuous reasoners” with their siren song: “Present pleasure is always of importance” (Hume 1985: 176–177). In the same vein, Hume quotes Fontenelle’s observation: “the bright eyes of the ladies are the only objects, which lose nothing of their lustre or value from the most extensive views of astronomy” (Hume 1985: 175). The roster of “bright-eyed ladies” lending their “lustre” to Allen’s films keeps growing.

The cynical logic of the “voluptuous reasoners” shows up time and again in Allen’s films. Consider the characters that Tony Roberts plays in Annie Hall, Star-dust Memories, and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Return to the scene in Play It Again, Sam where Allan asks the young woman what she sees in the Jackson Pollock painting. He answers her outburst with the question “What are you doing Saturday night?” When she replies that she is committing suicide Saturday night, Allan pauses and asks, “What are you doing Friday night?” When asked by Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) at the end of Sleeper what he believes in if he doesn’t believe in science or God, Miles answers, “sex and death.” Harry, the dissolute protagonist of Deconstructing Harry, gives us an idea of where “voluptuous rea-soning” can lead, as does Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh) in Celebrity. Faced with the supermodel played by Charleze Theron, who reveals that her entire body surface is acutely erogenous, Lee blurts out, “If the universe has any meaning, I’m looking at it.” As Harry Bloch’s sister, Doris, puts it to him: “You have no values. Your whole life is nihilism – it’s cynicism, it’s sarcasm and orgasm.” If values lack traction in the world, a disturbing question for Hume – and Allen – is what can stave off dissolution if the spell cast by human sentiments and customs wears off ?

Problems with Projection Theory – But Not to Worry

Professor Levy claims, “It’s we who invest it [the universe] with our feelings.” This sort of existentialism is a rerun of David Hume’s projectionist theory of value – and is every bit as problematic. Recall Hume’s statement that, while aesthetic and moral value are purely subjective feelings, “objects acquire these qualities” from the mind that “surveys them.” Somehow, inherently indifferent objects are sup-posed to be invested with or acquire feelings from us. How seriously should we take Levy’s notion that we “give meaning to the indifferent universe” or “invest the world with feelings”? Not too seriously, we believe. Hume notes that “nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation, which they occasion” (Hume 1975a: 78n). But what can we make of such an assertion? How

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do we apply feelings to the universe? If I find a harvest moon beautiful, am I playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” on a cosmic scale, pinning my agreeable feelings on the moon? How strange! Hume contrasts reason with taste and writes that taste “has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation” (Hume 1975b: 294). Imagination is that “productive faculty,” and in Hume’s esti-mation, it puts the most extraordinary magician to shame: imagination makes a “new creation” appear.

If we actually could give meaning to the universe, then it would no longer be indifferent, but of course it would have stopped being indifferent ages ago, since our forebears would have given the world meaning. No one since time immemo-rial would have experienced an indifferent world. No, neither Hume nor Professor Levy can be serious about the idea that we actually give meaning to the universe: if it is cold and indifferent to begin with, then cold and indifferent it remains. The very idea of our injecting meaning into a meaningless world is bogus. Pro-fessor Levy’s affirmation of life is hocus pocus; it counts on nature to cast its spell over us.

Fortunately, we don’t miss the reappearing magic of projection theory when we recognize that the disappearing magic of Allen’s trick philosophy gets thinking off on the wrong foot. His factoring approach falsifies experience; the very idea of the purely subjective is a myth. We need not be like Cecilia (Mia Farrow) in The Purple Rose of Cairo, whose life would grind to a halt if the projectors stopped running. Art’s task is not the impossible but unnecessary one that the Gertrude Stein character (Kathy Bates) in Midnight in Paris assigns it: “the job of the artist is to find an antidote to the meaninglessness of existence.” For better or worse, and for all the illusions and unanswered questions we have about it, the world we inhabit is already full of meaning, of beauty and ugliness, good and evil. And it is that world, the world, that makes possible magic and the movies and all that we love about them.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank Peter J. Bailey for his many helpful suggestions.

Notes

1 On Allen’s association of film with magic, see “Interview with Schickel” (Schickel 2005: 144–145).

2 Much the same might be said of Stanley Kubrick. See Murray and Schuler 2007.

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3 Contrast this with Mario Savio’s speech on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, Dec. 2, 1964: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious – makes you so sick at heart – that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all” (Savio 1964).

4 Allen also mentions The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, where the insurance investigator, C.W. Briggs (Allen), turns out to be the jewelry thief, acting on the post-hypnotic suggestions of Voltan Polgar (David Ogden Stiers). Misdirection is key plot device in Bullets over Broadway, where a mobster (Chazz Palminteri) turns playwright.

5 Allen’s introduction, in Midnight in Paris, of the fallacy of “Golden Age Thinking,” which esteems past ages to the detriment of the present, takes a page from Hume’s Treatise: “Hence we imagine our ancestors to be, in a manner, mounted above us, and our posterity to lie below us” (Hume 1967: 437). Given the gorgeous, Sidney Bechet accompanied visual homage to Paris that opens the film, one wonders if Allen replaces golden age with golden place thinking. Gil drops his romance with the 1920s, but he moves to Paris all the same. When Gil waxes poetic about how the light of Paris shines against a “cold, violent, meaningless universe,” we recall Isaac’s (Allen) statement in the Central Park carriage in Manhattan that Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) is God’s answer to Job: a city has taken a person’s place.

6 As we have seen, existentialists believe in freedom; Berkeley charges that Freethinkers equivocate on freedom.

7 In Dostoevsky’s stories, guilt works variously. In Father Zossima’s recounting of his youth in The Brothers Karamazov, the mysterious stranger Mihail, on whom Judah may in part be modeled, experiences no guilt for years after his cold-blooded murder of the woman he loved. Later, though he is in the clear with the law, Mihail is bursting with guilt. Guilt strikes Fr. Zossima (then a young military officer) like a lightening bolt the morning he is about to fight a duel that he provoked out of jealousy and pride. His interrogation of the “vile and shameful” sensation that awakes him pro-vides a model discernment of the workings of conscience (Dostoevsky 1993: 51).

8 Hume is adamant on the point that, though any presumed objective basis for morality disappears, morality never does: “if ever there was any thing, which cou’d be call’d natural in this sense, the sentiments of morality certainly may . . . These sentiments are so rooted in our constitution and temper, that without entirely confounding the human mind by disease or madness, ’tis impossible to extirpate and destroy them” (Hume 1967: 474).

9 Sander Lee poses the “existential dilemma” that he sees as central to Allen’s work: “perhaps the greatest tension is between the desire of many of your characters to ground their lives in a set of traditional ethical values while, simultaneously, they sadly acknowledge that no ontological foundation can currently be found to justify such a belief ” (Lee 2002: 222).

10 Customs can be secular. Lane (Mia Farrow), at the end of September, is kept from attempting suicide by Stephanie (Dianne Wiest), the friend who had just betrayed her. Stephanie counsels Lane to return to New York, look for work and an apartment, and tranquilize herself with life’s routines.

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11 Jerold Abrams finds in Allen’s “life in film” an ethic of aesthetic self-fashioning inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault. Perhaps entertaining oneself through filmmaking is the deflated remainder of such an ethic after its urgency has dissipated. Abrams cites Nietzsche: “For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself ” (Abrams 2004: 115). Perhaps keeping himself entertained is what sat-isfaction comes to for Allen.

12 The second is to compare our situation with that of others. The trouble here is that we are prone to compare ourselves with those who are better off, only making our-selves more miserable.

13 As quoted from a 1994 interview with Stig Bjorkman (in Bailey 2001: 242). Allen expressed the same view back in the 1970s in an interview with Lee Guthrie, “To me, all [art] – opera, painting, anything – is a diversion, an entertainment” (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 16). By contrast, in Bullets over Broadway, Sheldon Flender (Rob Reiner) would carry the last copy of Shakespeare out of a burning building rather than save a stranger’s life.

14 Peter J. Bailey observes, “What the pursuit of the mystery is for Carol (Diane Keaton) is too much what the film is for Allen: a contrived antidote for an oppressive reality, distraction impersonating remedy” (2001: 208).

15 Ivan Karamazov explains to his younger brother Alyosha why he would go on living even in a “devil-ridden chaos”: “I have a longing for life and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves, you know, sometimes without knowing why” (Dostoevsky 1993: 2). This passage is echoed at the end of Manhattan, when Isaac brainstorms reasons to live, culminating with Tracy’s face.

Works Cited

Abrams, Jerold (2004) “Art and voyeurism in the films of Woody Allen.” In Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble (eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 101–117.

Bailey, Peter J. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Berkeley, George (1950) Alciphron. In The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, vol. 3. Ed. T.E. Jessop. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons.

Collins, James (1962) Crossroads in Philosophy: Existentialism, Naturalism, and Theistic Realism. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1993) The Grand Inquisitor. Ed. Charles Guignon. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Girgus, Sam B. (1993) The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hegel, Georg W.F. (1977) The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon

Press.Hegel, Georg W.F. (1991) The Encyclopedia Logic. Trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and

H.S. Harris. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

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Hume, David (1967) A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn. Ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Rev. P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hume, David (1975a) Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Enquiries), 3rd edn. Ed. P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David (1975b) Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. In Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Enquiries), 3rd edn. Ed. P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David (1980) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Ed. Richard H. Popkin. Indiana-polis, IN: Hackett.

Hume, David (1985) “The sceptic.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 159–180.

Kaufmann, Walter (ed.) (1975) Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian.

Lee, Sander H. (2002) Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Murray, Patrick, and Jeanne Schuler (2007) “Rebel without a cause: Stanley Kubrick and

the banality of the good.” In The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick. Ed. Jerold J. Abrams. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 133–148.

Oaklander, L. Nathan (1986) Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Savio, Mario (1964) “Mario Savio: Sproul Hall Steps, December 2, 1964.” Media Resources Centre, Moffit Library, University of California, Berkeley. www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/saviotranscript.html (accessed Oct. 19, 2012).

Schickel, Richard (2005) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Strawson, Peter F. (1974) “Freedom and resentment.” In P.F. Strawson, Freedom and Resent-

ment and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1–25.Stroud, Barry (1993) “‘Gilding and staining’ the world with ‘sentiments’ and ‘phantasms.’”

Hume Studies 19.2, 253–272.

24

What I’m really saying – and it’s not hidden or esoteric, it’s just clear as a bell – is that we have to accept that the universe is godless and life is meaningless, often a terrible and brutal experience with no hope, and that love relationships are very, very hard, and that we still need to find a way to not only cope but lead a decent and moral life.

(Woody Allen, qtd. in Lax 2007: 123–124)

I have always contended that there exists a dialectic between hope and despair in Woody Allen’s films and that, in spite of his often repeated public pessimism, some of those films continue to show us glimpses of the possibility of a “decent and moral” life for those who are willing to make the Kierkegaardian leap. Such char-acters (for instance, Mickey and Holly in Hannah and Her Sisters or Ben in Crimes and Misdemeanors) choose to act as though meaning exists, even as they acknowl-edge the impossibility of certainty. Sol, in Crimes, epitomizes this position when he admits that he would always “choose God over the truth.” I now propose to continue this “search for meaning” (both secular and religious) in two of Allen’s more recent films, comparing the positions in his classic oeuvre with those in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Cassandra’s Dream.

I will examine whether Allen takes a consistent philosophical stance on the moral issues raised by life in a meaningless universe. Ultimately, I will argue that, for Allen, neither romantic love nor immoral self-interest can justify our lives. My examination of Vicky Cristina Barcelona will demonstrate the failure of romantic love. Using the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to interpret the behavior of the characters in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I will explain Allen’s pessimism about

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Love, Meaning, and God in the Later Films of Woody Allen

Sander Lee

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the chances for successful romantic love and his ambiguity about a reliance on emotion alone.

Next, my analysis of Cassandra’s Dream will show the devastating consequences of lives lived with no regard for moral values. Allen clearly believes there is no possibility of a satisfying life for those who “cross the line” and engage in grossly immoral acts. In saying this, I am not claiming that those who follow morality necessarily live satisfying lives in Allen’s films; I am claiming, instead, that no one who commits an evil act (such as murder) can ever be happy. Such an act, for Allen, irrevocably removes the possibility of happiness from life. Yet, despite all this, I will contend there is some reason for hope, even if Allen himself isn’t always willing to admit it.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (hereafter VCB) begins with Allen’s usual white lettering on a black background. Spanish music plays in the background. We see two American tourists arriving at the Barcelona airport and taking a taxi to town.

A narrator (Christopher Evan Welch) tells us the following:

Vicky and Cristina decided to spend the summer in Barcelona. Vicky was completing her master’s in Catalan identity that she had become interested in through her great affection for the architecture of Gaudi. Cristina, who spent the last six months writing, directing, and acting in a twelve minute film, had just broken up with another boyfriend and longed for a change of scenery. Everything fell into place when a distant relative of Vicky’s family who lives in Barcelona offered to put both girls up for July and August.

The two best friends had been close since college and shared the same tastes and opinions on most matters, yet when it came to the subject of love, it would be hard to find two more dissimilar viewpoints. Vicky had no tolerance for pain and no lust for combat. She was grounded and realistic. Her requirements in a man were seri-ousness and stability. She had become engaged to Doug because he was decent and successful and understood the beauty of commitment.

As we hear this description, we see Vicky on her cell phone waking up Doug in America to tell him how much she misses him. The narrator proceeds to describe Cristina’s opposing philosophy:

Cristina, on the other hand, expected something very different out of love. She had reluctantly accepted suffering as an inevitable component of deep passion, and was resigned to putting her feelings at risk. If you asked her what it was she was gambling her emotions on to win, she would not have been able to say. She knew what she didn’t want, however, and that was exactly what Vicky valued above all else.

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This is by no means Allen’s first use of a voiceover narrator. Take the Money and Run (1969), one of his earliest films as a director, used a narrator for comic effect as did his other celebrated faux documentary, Zelig (1983). Radio Days (1987) has Allen himself as a narrator, nostalgically recounting humorous antidotes from the times of radio’s supremacy as main source of news and entertainment. While it has no narrator, Husbands and Wives (1992) is also a faux documentary containing interviews with the characters about their actions in the film.

I argue that Annie Hall (1975), Allen’s first masterpiece, takes the form of a therapy session with Allen’s character Alvy Singer narrating the tale of his rela-tionship with Annie. This is also his first attempt to seriously examine the subject of love as an antidote to life’s apparent meaninglessness. In that film, Alvy is clearly an unreliable narrator as the events we see often appear to contradict his claims.

The narrator in VCB appears to play a more traditional role than those in Allen’s other films. VCB is not a faux documentary nor is the narrator a character in the film. Allen could have chosen to narrate the film himself, as he has done before, but I would argue that he chose not to do so because he knew that the audience would then expect the narration to be humorous. By choosing a neutral voice and purposefully writing it without humor, Allen signals that he wants the audience to take the narration seriously. This narrator really is omniscient. He not only knows what happened but also exactly how each of the characters felt about the events in the film.

The use of the traditional form of narration suggests that Allen intends the film to be a vehicle for a message – in this case, a philosophical treatise on the nature of love. The narrator presents the film’s basic question in the first voiceover. This film will examine the competing attitudes of Vicky and Cristina on the nature of love. Indeed, like many of the films of the French director Éric Rohmer, VCB initially presents itself as a lesson on love. Because the narrator contrasts the views of Vicky and Cristina so clearly right from the beginning, the audience is led to expect that the film will ultimately resolve this dichotomy, either by demonstrat-ing that one or the other viewpoint is correct, or by presenting us with an alto-gether new perspective, perhaps one combining the best elements of both. Furthermore, by associating Vicky’s view of love with practicality while Cristina’s view appears more passionate, Allen reminds us of Jane Austen’s famous explora-tion of this topic in her appropriately titled Sense and Sensibility.

Vicky

The film wastes little time before directly confronting the characters with a situ-ation testing their different approaches. Juan Antonio Gonzalo ( Javier Bardem) is introduced as a celebrated painter whose tumultuous marriage and divorce has frequently been covered in the Spanish tabloids. His appearance and manner ini-tially identify him with the cliché of the romance novel’s passionate and primal

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hero who sweeps women off their feet. The mention of his tragic marriage places him fully in the tradition of Healthcliff from Wuthering Heights and Rochester from Jane Eyre. We first see him standing alone, brooding at an art gallery event, and, later the same evening, dining with friends at the same restaurant where Vicky and Cristina have gone for a late meal. Even though he is a stranger, Juan Antonio approaches Vicky and Cristina with a proposal that they accompany him on a weekend trip to Oviedo to see a sculpture that is “very inspiring to me.”

The role of art is an important theme in the film from its very beginning. Despite her supposed practicality, Vicky decided to pursue a masters’ degree in “Catalonian identity” because of her love of the architecture of Gaudí, and the women spend their first days in Barcelona visiting the works of Gaudí and the painter Miró. Thus, despite Vicky’s aggressive distrust of Juan Antonio and her condemnation of his openly hedonistic proposal that the three of them have sex, she agrees to accompany him to Oviedo, ostensibly to protect Cristina from Juan Antonio’s advances.

Once the three have arrived in Oviedo, we learn that Juan Antonio’s inspiring sculpture is a crucifix, but its inspiration is purely aesthetic:

CRISTINA: Are you very religious?JUAN ANTONIO: Juan No, no, I’m not. The trick is to enjoy life, accepting it has no

meaning whatsoever.CRISTINA: You don’t think that authentic love gives life meaning?JUAN ANTONIO: Juan Yes, but love is so transient. Isn’t it? I was in love with a most

incredible woman . . . and then in the end . . . VICKY: Yes?JUAN ANTONIO: Juan put a knife in me.

The lesson here seems to be that we should be willing to try anything that makes life worth living, even if the price includes a minor stab wound. This theme is also perfectly summarized in Allen’s film, Whatever Works. Rumored to have been written as a vehicle for the actor Zero Mostel, and shelved because of Mostel’s untimely death, the film finally appeared in 2009 with Larry David in the leading role as the pessimistic cynic Boris Yellnikoff. Through the course of the film, Boris comes to realize that people should be open to whatever kind of romantic rela-tionship that will sustain them in the face of the unavoidable horrors of life. Accordingly, the film shows us a variety of successful relationships, including an older man with a much younger woman, a gay relationship between two men, and a threesome with two men and one woman. VCB will at times seem to be making the same claim.

From this point, the film follows, in erotic terms, a somewhat predictable plot-line. With Cristina sidelined by troubles with her ulcer, Vicky is forced to spend time alone with Juan Antonio. By presenting Vicky as a woman who represses her passion, the film leads us to expect that when Juan Antonio’s attentions ignite that

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passion, she will succumb to his charms. Indeed, her interest in Catalonian identity has already told us that she is moved by that region’s romantic scenery, food, music, and art – all of which are identified with Juan Antonio. It is almost as though he is the physical manifestation of everything that Vicky loves about Cata-lonian culture. Of course, she is destined to be attracted to him and to question her commitment to Doug. We have already been told that Vicky chose Doug precisely because “he was decent and successful and understood the beauty of commitment,” and, consequently, it is inevitable that he will suffer in comparison with Juan Antonio.

Juan Antonio’s seduction of Vicky is reminiscent of Cary Grant’s relationship with Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember (1957). Like Juan Antonio, Grant’s character, Nickie Ferrante, is presented as a notorious playboy who pursues romantic conquests, while Kerr’s character, Terry Mckay, is a sensible woman engaged to be married to a wealthy industrialist. When their cruise ship stops on the Mediterranean coast, Nickie brings Terry to meet his aged grandmother, whose dignity and charm convince Terry that there is more to Nickie than she suspected. Juan Antonio woos Vicky in a similar fashion by bringing Vicky to meet his father, Julio ( Josep Maria Domènec), a poet who loves his language so much that he refuses to “pollute his words by any other tongue.” Vicky, like Terry, is moved by this glimpse into the upbringing and family of a man she has dismissed as a mere lothario. She is moved when Juan Antonio describes his early attraction to all the arts, including writing and music, because “all I knew is that I was full of, I don’t know, real emotion, and I had to find a way to express it.”

On the other hand, Allen goes out of his way to distinguish Julio from the optimistic grandmother from the earlier film. When Vicky asks to read some of Julio’s poetry, she is told that he refuses to publish it because

he hates the world and that’s his way of getting back at them, to create beautiful works and then to deny them to the public . . . Because after thousands of years of civilization, they still haven’t learned to love.

This reasoning is a bit reminiscent of the painter in Bullets Over Broadway (1994) who paints a new work every week only to slice it up with a razor once it is com-pleted. However, where the earlier scene is clearly meant to be humorous, Julio’s position here is initially presented seriously, as though it is we audience members who have failed to learn to love. This suggests that if only we pay close attention, this film will show us the way to a comprehension of love.

By the film’s end, however, Allen’s pessimism about love shows that what appears at the time to be a sympathetic portrayal of Julio is really a bit of misdi-rection. I think the initial impression we receive of Julio is a feint on Allen’s part. Julio’s protest against a world that hasn’t “learned to love” can only be taken seri-ously so long as we think that the film intends to show us the proper way to love. And yet, once we get to the end and the narrator acknowledges that neither Vicky

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nor Cristina have found an answer, it becomes clear that Julio is wrong to punish the world for not learning something that is unknowable. Thus, I would agree with those who claim that ultimately Allen considers Julio to be a bit mad. He may be happy, but Allen certainly isn’t suggesting that we will ourselves into insan-ity in order to find contentment.

After a romantic evening of food, wine, and Spanish guitar, Vicky gives in to her desires, as we knew she would, and allows Juan Antonio to seduce her. Fol-lowing their interlude in Oviedo, traditional dramatic complications arise, block-ing the romance between Vicky and Juan Antonio from going any further. Once back in Barcelona, Cristina, who knows nothing of Vicky’s seduction, starts seeing Juan Antonio and soon accepts his invitation to move in with him. Although she is tormented by the passions aroused by her involvement with Juan Antonio, Vicky pretends that nothing happened between them. Doug soon joins her in Barcelona with the idea of marrying there and having a short honeymoon before staging a more formal wedding for their relatives and friends back in New York. Unsurpris-ingly, Doug appears to be an extremely shallow person, obsessed with trivial matters like house decor, electronic communications, and golf. It is clear that Vicky, in spite of her best efforts, is as bored with him as we are.

Once they are married, Vicky is so restless that she flirts with an American diplomat she meets in a Spanish class. When he inevitably makes a pass, Vicky is forced to accept that she is still pining away for Juan Antonio. She admits as much to Judy (Patricia Clarkson), the distant relative of Vicky’s family with whom she and Cristina are staying in Barcelona. At a party, Vicky accidentally sees Judy kissing the partner of her husband, Mark. Later, Judy explains that she has not loved Mark for years and that she longs to escape to a more exciting life, although not with her husband’s equally boring partner. While Judy feels it is too late for her to get away, she comes to identify her longings with those of Vicky, so she arranges for Juan Antonio to attend a party where she knows Vicky will be present. By this time, Juan Antonio is once again alone and tries to seduce Vicky away from her unhappy marriage by inviting her to his home to see his paintings. Vicky agonizes over this invitation, but finally decides to go, lying to Doug by telling him that she is having a goodbye lunch with her Spanish teacher.

The audience is led to expect that Juan Antonio and Vicky, like Edward and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, will finally be brought together as they were meant to be from the beginning. Vicky’s practicality will be the perfect balance to Juan Antonio’s deep emotions, while his aesthetic passion will allow her to express her own feelings constructively.

The film defies these expectations when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), dramatically appears waving a pistol and inadvertently shoots Vicky in the hand. Vicky’s last words to Juan Antonio and Maria Elena (“you people are crazy!”) suggest that true love is a form of madness. We can now see that Juan Antonio loves Maria Elena so much because, for the sake of his art, he wishes to be as crazy as she is. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena’s love requires a

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blind leap into a madness so great that one is willing to risk death by stabbing or gunshot. Such a risk might be worth it if Allen showed us that such love could succeed. Instead, Juan Antonio and Maria Elena end up breaking up again just as they did before the film began. Their madness is not a solution; it is just another variation on the patterns of unsuccessful romance.

By the film’s end, Vicky has completed this lesson in love, and, consequently, there is nothing left for her but to return home to face a fate similar to Judy’s: a loveless marriage to a man who bores her.

Cristina and Maria Elena

When we last encountered Cristina, she had accepted Juan Antonio’s invitation to move in with him. After living with him for a time, their lives are disrupted when Juan Antonio is called to the hospital to retrieve his ex-wife, Maria Elena, who has attempted suicide. Although Juan Antonio accepts that they are incapable of being together, he still loves Maria Elena and feels obligated to take care of her in his home until she recovers. While the two women initially distrust each other, even-tually they develop a positive relationship.

Woody Allen’s films are infamous for his depiction of relationships of the “Pygmalion–Galatea” variety – that is, relationships between a mentor and an apprentice that always end in the emotional suffocation of the apprentice and the abandonment by the mentor. Usually, as in Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Husbands and Wives (to name but a few), these relationships are between an older man and a younger woman. In Annie Hall, Allen makes explicit reference to Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1973 book The Denial of Death to explain the appeal of these relationships.

Becker, through an analysis of such thinkers as Kierkegaard and the psycholo-gist Otto Rank, contends that a Heideggerian dread of death is the most natural human condition, and that we engage in actions that we perceive as “heroic” or “spiritual” in order to inauthentically escape that fear as opposed to honestly con-fronting it. Becker combines existential and psychoanalytic themes to suggest that the natural way to deal with this pessimistic yet honest realization is through “transference,” the drive to create meaning for one’s life by projecting one’s own chosen values onto the rest of the world. The most obvious way to engage in this creative transference is by shaping another person into a replica of oneself with all of one’s judgments and values. In Annie Hall, we see Alvy doing this with Annie as they sit in the park and Alvy neatly sketches the characters of passersby, sticking them into this or that clever category, just as we saw him reduce his former wife Alison to a “cultural stereotype.” Alvy succeeds in taking control of all of Annie’s thoughts and actions; when she says she likes him, he ups the ante by asking if she loves him. When Annie asks if he loves her, he says his feelings for her go beyond love; a new word is needed to describe his feelings.

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The problem with this solution, according to Becker, is that it stems from our species sameness; it submerges one’s individuality. Becker puts it this way:

Although he perpetuates himself in his offspring, who may resemble him and carry some of his “blood” and the mystical quality of some of his ancestors, he may not feel that he is truly perpetuating his own inner self, his distinctive personality, his spirit as it were. He wants to achieve something more than mere animal succession. The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritu-alize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal human plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms (Becker 1973: 231).

One way of doing this, Becker points out, is through what he calls “perversions” and “fetishisms.” By departing from the accepted norm of reproductive behavior, one asserts one’s individuality, one’s stamp of uniqueness. This accounts, in Beck-er’s and Rank’s view, for the Greeks’ high regard for homosexual relationships, especially boy-love, as an idealization of romantic love because they have no spe-cific reproductive purpose. The sole goal of a man–boy relationship lies in the man’s attempt to fashion the boy into a spiritual reproduction of himself:

In terms of our discussion we can see that this attempt represents the complete causa-sui project: to create all by oneself a spiritual, intellectual, and physically similar replica of oneself: the perfectly individualized self-perpetuation or immortal-ity symbol (Becker 1973: 232).

This may account for Alvy’s sensitivity about appearing naked in front of other men and his avid acceptance of the Playboy mentality with its glorification of “scoring” with women and its thinly disguised gay bashing. This is not to suggest that Alvy has any more repressed homosexual urges than do most heterosexual men. Rather, it implies that, although Alvy is not physically attracted to men, he is at some level aware of the Greeks’ approach to such idealized love and wishes to mimic its metaphysical advantages in his relationship to women. Alvy is aroused by the existence of the women’s movement in general, with its insistence that women are the equal of men, just as he is specifically attracted to Annie, who by her dress, manner, and aspirations seeks to be his equal. The rest of the film chronicles the results of Alvy’s attempt to mold Annie into a replica of himself while maintaining his individuality, and simultaneously prohibiting her from becoming her own person and realizing that she no longer needs him.

In VCB, Allen at last shows this transference with a woman playing the role of mentor. Maria Elena is a true artist in a Nietzschean sense. Like Cheech in Bullets Over Broadway, she is driven by her aesthetic passion to the point of self-destructiveness, as evidenced both by her suicide attempt and her attack upon Juan Antonio and Vicky at the end of the film. She claims that Juan Antonio stole his style from her and that she is the real genius. Importantly, Juan Antonio does not dispute these claims. Once Maria Elena moves in with Juan Antonio and Cristina,

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we come to realize that she is the true artist and that Juan Antonio’s art is only a crude copy of her own. Juan Antonio is successful because he is willing to dilute Maria Elena’s vision into a commercially palatable commodity. As a true artist, Maria Elena, like Juan Antonio’s father, places her aesthetic integrity above society’s material rewards and is therefore unwilling to compromise herself for the sake of social acceptance.

Initially, Maria Elena sees Cristina as a superficial American tourist. She is openly contemptuous of someone who would come to Spain without troubling herself to learn the language and who claims to have studied Chinese because it sounded “pretty.” Like Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) in Allen’s 1978 film, Interiors, Cris-tina describes herself as a person who has deep feelings but who possesses no aesthetic talents allowing her to express them. Maria Elena eventually loses her disdain for Cristina as she realizes that, despite her lack of self-confidence, Cristina has a genuine gift for photography (an interest she shares with Annie Hall). Under Maria Elena’s tutelage, Cristina blossoms into a confident photographer who may be gifted after all. The two women develop their own “Pygmalion–Galatea” rela-tionship, one that culminates in the same-sex love discussed by Becker. Maria Elena acts as both mentor and muse: she is herself the subject of Cristina’s best photos.

For a time, the unlikely threesome of Maria Elena, Juan Antonio, and Cristina actually seems to work. On their own, Maria Elena and Juan Antonio cannot be together, but the addition of Cristina adds just the right element to stabilize the relationship. Again, love is described aesthetically:

Maria Elena: Before you – before you, we used to cause each other so much pain, so much suffering. Without you, all this would not be possible. You know why? Because you are the missing ingredient. You are like the tint that, added to a palette, makes the color beautiful.

The message seems to be the same as in Whatever Works, yet, this hope for meaning, frail as it may be, is shattered when Cristina abruptly announces that she is dissatisfied and needs to leave the ménage. Even in such an unorthodox situ-ation, Cristina maintains her distrust of commitment and stability. She must torpedo each of her relationships in her desire to escape all forms of romantic responsibility. Indeed, Cristina seems to accept the film’s repeated claim that the only truly “romantic” situations are those that must remain unfulfilled. For Cristina, romance and satisfaction are diametrically opposed.

In the film’s finale, we see Vicky and Cristina back at Barcelona airport as the narrator explains:

Vicky went home to have her grand wedding to Doug, to the house that both finally settled on and to lead the life she had envisioned for herself before the summer in Barcelona. Cristina continued searching, certain only of what she didn’t want.

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Thus, we were misled in thinking that VCB would be able to instruct us in “learn-ing how to love.” The film’s end circles us back to the beginning of their arrival at the Barcelona airport, the two women’s faces manifesting the outcome of their experiences of romantic love. In a godless universe where life is meaningless, authentic love is “very, very hard” because all love is so transient. This message is very similar to those to be found in Annie Hall and Husbands and Wives. Famously, Annie Hall ends with Alvy Singer recounting this old joke:

This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken. And the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” And the guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs!” Well, I guess that’s now pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, but I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.

Husbands and Wives is even more pessimistic about the possibility of authentic love. I have argued elsewhere that it is in his films of hopelessness like Husbands and VCB that Allen’s perspective on love appears to be most in accordance with that of Jean-Paul Sartre.1 Sartre’s account of emotional consciousness as described both in The Emotions: Outline of a Theory and in sections of Being and Nothingness appears to claim that all emotional consciousness is a degradation of conscious-ness. When consciousness unreflectively chooses to attempt to magically trans-form the world, it is attempting to deny just what it is; it is attempting to pretend that consciousness is not capable of pure reflection (akin to rationality). One could object that this doesn’t sound much like Allen’s position in many of his films in which he has told us that he has little use for reason. In Manhattan, for example, Isaac (Woody Allen) tells Mary (Diane Keaton) that “nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind. Everything valuable has to enter you through a different opening.”

I agree that Allen often appears to value emotion over reason, and yet, in his most pessimistic films on romance (like VCB), I believe his description of love’s failures are remarkably similar to those offered by Sartre. In fact, in Husbands and Wives, Allen begins the film by showing one of the characters holding a book with Sartre’s name emblazoned across the cover. So, while Allen may not agree with Sartre in his universal condemnation of emotion, I would still contend that Sartre’s analyses of love’s failures will help us to understand Allen’s negative depiction of love in VCB.

In his description of love in Part III, Chapter Three of Being and Nothingness, Sartre states that in love, consciousness attempts to possess the consciousness of the person loved without reducing this consciousness to an object. In other words, the choice to love is an unreflective attempt to become just what consciousness knows in fact that it is not – a unified whole with the other.

Furthermore, at any point it is possible that the beloved might suddenly see the lover as only one object in a world of objects. The magic spell of love is

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very fragile. The strands of its web may be broken at any time. The lover is constantly aware of the possibility of the “awakening” of his beloved; hence, the lover is tormented by a “perpetual insecurity” which itself leads to love’s destruction.

Finally, love is constantly threatened by the look of a third person. When the lovers become aware that they are objectified by someone else, the spell is again broken, and each of the lovers is forced to see the other no longer as an absolute transcendence, but merely as a mundane object. Therefore, the spell of love is constantly under pressure because of the awareness of each of the lovers that others view them differently from how they view each other.

For Sartre, both love and sexual desire fail for basically the same reason: because they attempt to simultaneously capture the other’s mind and body. This cannot be done. I can never possess another person in any sense. Thus, for Sartre, rela-tionships of love and sex are always battlegrounds in which the two combatants vie for dominance. In fact, he contends that in every such relationship, one person ends up controlling the other. Using the disagreeable terminology of bondage, Sartre says that, in every relationship, one person plays the role of the “sadist,” while the other is the “masochist.” The relationships likely to endure for the longest time are those in which the roles of each of the participants have long ago been defined and accepted.

In VCB, all attempts at authentic love are doomed to failure. Despite Maria Elena’s hopes, Cristina’s relationship with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena ulti-mately embodies the threat of the look of the third person that Sartre describes both philosophically and in his famous play, No Exit. Each character wishes to be seen in a certain way but the presence of the third destroys the “magic” that might make this possible. In addition, as Sartre describes, “the magic spell of love is very fragile.” Consequently, the threesome is destroyed when one day Cristina sud-denly announces that she no longer wishes to play the relationship game with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena. The spell is broken and she must leave. Without her, Juan Antonio and Maria Elena cannot go on as the desire of each to control the freedom of the other is too great.

As for Vicky, her magical attraction for Juan Antonio is also destroyed by the appearance of the third, when Maria Elena arrives with her pistol. Vicky’s desire for Juan Antonio is gone but her dissatisfaction with Doug, whom she now sees as shallow, remains. She will follow in Judy’s footsteps, allowing herself to be trapped in a loveless marriage as she pines away for an escape that will never come. At the end of Husbands, Allen’s character Gabe tells the interviewer that “Ah, you know, I’m out of the race at the moment. I don’t want to get involved with anybody, I don’t want to hurt anyone, I don’t want to get hurt . . .” This implies that romantic relationships must involve the infliction of pain. Nothing in VCB suggests that Allen has changed his mind.

In a written exchange with me, Allen says this about romance:

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In relation to impossibility of authentic romantic commitment – this is a question of pure luck, the interfacing of two enormous complexities and the delusion that it can be “worked at” is just that. Efforts by the parties may aid in a small way but have the same relation to the success of a relationship that a writing class has to a real reader (qtd. in Lee 2002: 223).

Cassandra’s Dream (2007)

As in the earlier films Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point (2005), we have a murder committed for the sake of wealth and social advancement. Two brothers, Terry (Colin Farrell) and Ian (Ewan McGregor) find themselves in deep financial distress. Terry has an enormous gambling debt while Ian needs money to make an investment that will allow him to marry the woman of his dreams. To get this money, they turn to their wealthy Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson). Throughout their lives, their mother has endlessly compared Howard’s success and influence with the more modest achievements of their father. However, when they request help from Howard, they discover, to their surprise, that he is even more crooked than they have been, and that the price of his financial help is a murder for hire.

While Ian appears to be a man willing to do anything to get what he wants, Terry reminds us more of Judah from Crimes in that he struggles with his con-science even before the crime is committed. As in those earlier films, we are exposed to arguments about the lack of moral meaning in the world and the probability of God’s absence. As the brothers lurk in their victim’s house waiting to kill him, the following dialogue takes place:

TERRY: What if there’s a God, Ian? What if, all those nights we used to lay awake in the dark and curse the fate of every human soul, what if we were too angry?

IAN: No, don’t turn your back on what you know in your heart to be true just because we’re facing a difficult task.

TERRY: We’re crossing the line, Ian. There’s no going back, I’ve said it before.IAN: I don’t want to go back, brother. I don’t want to go back and neither do

you. We need to look to the future.

Terry starts drinking before the murder and, afterwards, through a haze of drugs and alcohol, he displays a guilt even more intense than Judah’s. He can’t sleep and continually relives the shooting. With him, we hear the shots as he sits on the edge of his bed in the middle of the night, unable to sleep. Soon he begins talking of turning himself in and, like Judah, virtually confesses, although, like Cliff in the closing scene outside the wedding reception, Terry’s wife doesn’t understand that the confession is real.

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Initially, Ian is sure he can talk Terry out of his guilt, or at least ensure that Terry doesn’t put him at actual risk; however, as the film progresses, Ian eventually comes to believe that Terry can’t be controlled. Meeting with Howard, Ian realizes that he must murder again, this time, like Cain, he must kill his own brother. This scenario was hinted at in Crimes when Judah tells his brother Jack ( Jerry Orbach) of his desire to turn himself in to the police. In response, Jack explodes in anger, urging Judah “to be a man,” and asserting that he’s not going to go to jail to satisfy Judah’s sense of guilt. Judah demands to know if Jack is threatening him. While Jack denies it, Judah realizes that his father was right in his claim that “one sin leads to deeper sin, adultery, fornication, lies, killing . . .” Judah now sees that the way he thought about Dolores, as a problem that could be solved by just one telephone call, could also be applied by Jack to Judah himself. In a sense, Judah’s intellect leads him to use the golden rule to see the ultimate wrongness of his act. By acting to murder Dolores when she became a problem for him, Judah realizes that he intellectually gave his permission to Jack to do the same if he, Judah, becomes a similar obstacle.

Ian has a similar realization when he tells Howard that Terry “was right about one thing. It was like crossing a line. There was no way back.” Ian arranges to murder Terry with an overdose of drugs and make it look like suicide. Terry’s wife already thinks he is suicidal, so convincing the police might not be very dif-ficult. Ian gets Terry to go on a cruise on their boat, Cassandra’s Dream, where he plans to drug his beer. At first, Ian tries once more to manipulate Terry into line, but he soon sees that it’s too late. Terry rejects Ian’s rationalizations in much the same way that we rejected those of Judah:

TERRY: We made the wrong decision.IAN: The way I see it, we didn’t have much choice.TERRY: You always have choice, Ian. I see that now. I mean I – I didn’t at first. I

thought . . . like you, that we had no choice but –IAN: All right, let’s say you’re right – which I’m not saying – but let’s say for the

sake of argument that we did make the wrong choice.TERRY: For the sake of argument? You really fool yourself, Ian, don’t you?

Ian tries to convince Terry that our actions are determined by our innate violent nature, but Terry sees through Ian’s feeble justifications and announces that he called the police last night and he plans to turn himself in as soon as they return to land. Ian prepares the poisoned beer for Terry but, in the end, he can’t murder his own brother: that’s a line he won’t cross. That’s not to suggest that Ian can return to the realm of traditional morality. While his recognition that he is unable to kill Terry does show that he is capable of moral feeling, it doesn’t redeem him – he still dies a murderer. So, in a fit of rage he breaks the bottle and attacks Terry, screaming:

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IAN: Why couldn’t you just let it go? Why couldn’t you just let it go?TERRY: Ian, what’s wrong?IAN: You’ve ruined everything, Terry.TERRY: Ian, what’s wrong?IAN: You’ve ruined it. You’ve ruined everything.TERRY: Ian, stop!IAN: We could have had everything!

With this, Terry throws Ian to the deck, accidentally killing him. In response to his act of fratricide, Terry can only respond by repeating, “Oh God! God!” We learn from the police that, after killing Ian, Terry drowned himself. There is no indication that the police have any awareness of the connection between the brothers and the murder of Martin Burns. Had Terry been able to live with his crime, or if Ian had been able to murder Terry, then the film gives us every reason to think that, as in the case of Judah, the police never would have solved the crime.

The film’s title, Cassandra’s Dream, is, of course, the name of the boat purchased by the brothers after a dog with that name won big at the races. What we know, and they apparently don’t, is that in Greek mythology, Cassandra had the gift of prophecy but was cursed by Apollo so that no one would ever believe her predic-tions. In this film, Terry is the Cassandra who accurately predicts from the begin-ning that God will punish them for crossing the moral line of murder by withholding from them, as He did from Judah, the possibility of a meaningful and satisfying life.2

Another way of interpreting this film is to see Ian and Terry as two sides of the same person. From this perspective, Ian represents hedonistic desire while Terry is the voice of conscience. Using this approach resolves an obvious weakness in the plot. Terry’s reluctance to participate in the murder is evident from the first moment that Uncle Howard suggests it. As plans for the crime escalate, Terry increasingly voices his moral and religious concerns. Given all this, one wonders why Ian doesn’t simply carry out the murder on his own. It’s not as though Ian’s plan requires Terry’s participation. There is no practical reason why Ian can’t shoot Martin Burns all by himself. Admittedly, Terry would probably realize that Ian had committed the crime when he heard of Burns’s murder, but, from Ian’s perspec-tive, it would be much easier to handle Terry if he had no direct role in the actual killing. It’s as though Ian must bring Terry along with him on the crime, as though they were inseparable, just one person. What I’m suggesting is that, in this film, Allen clarifies his position on murder by dividing his protagonist into two parts. While an internal conflict between conscience and desire is demonstrated within Judah, here this conflict is physically manifested in the two brothers. Apart, neither Terry nor Ian is a whole person. In VCB, I suggested that Allen used Jane Austen’s notion of Sense and Sensibility to associate Vicky with practicality and Cristina with passion. In Cassandra, however, it would seem that neither character represents “sense.” Terry is no Kantian. His arguments against murder are not rationally

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based on notions of intrinsic duty. Thus, the conflict between Terry and Ian is better understood as a battle between differing sorts of emotions. It is significant that Terry, like Judah in Crimes, brings the question of God’s existence into his debate with Terry. He doesn’t say he believes in God; instead, he asks, “What if there’s a God, Ian?”

It’s the possibility of meaning that haunts Terry, not its certainty. Terry realizes that murder “crosses the line.” Once a person has committed such an act, mean-ingful life is no longer a possibility. The universe may truly be purposeless, but if one acts as though meaning is possible, happiness still has a chance.

Mickey Sachs (Allen) puts it this way in Hannah and Her Sisters:

What if there’s no God, and you only go around once and that’s it? You know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? You know, it’s not all a drag, and I’m thinking to myself, “Jeez, I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I’m not ever going to get, and just enjoy it while it lasts.” And, after all  . . .  who knows? I mean, you know, maybe there really is something, nobody really knows. I know “maybe” is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but it’s the best we have. And I actu-ally began to enjoy myself.

For Allen, that “maybe” is our only hope. As long as one follows one’s moral intuitions, the chance for meaning (and even redemption) continue to exist. But once one “crosses the line” by committing an evil act, all hope is lost. No one who has a conscience can live a satisfying life haunted by an act of murder.

Conclusion

In these films, Allen shows us the futility of both love and self-serving immorality in a meaningless world. At the same time, Allen shows us repeatedly that those who commit horrendous crimes can never really be happy. Thus, while he tells us what not to do, he offers no blueprint for happiness. Indeed, it’s been a long time since Allen has depicted the possibility of genuine happiness as clearly as he did in Hannah or even in the conclusion of Crimes.

Mickey’s “maybe” in Hannah becomes Louis Levy’s “and yet” at the end of Crimes when he tells us the following in the concluding voiceover:

We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points, but, we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. We wince and fall so unpredictably, so unfairly, human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying, and even to find joy, from simple things like the

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family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.

I agree with Levy. Even if the universe is fundamentally indifferent to our human concerns, we can, and should, choose hope over despair. Yet, for Allen, family, work, and hope still don’t seem to be enough. Like Cristina, he continues searching, certain only of what he doesn’t want.

Notes

1 See my chapter on Husbands and Wives in Lee (2002).2 While Judah may tell Cliff that his murderer no longer feels guilt, I argue that Judah

is lying, not just to Cliff but to himself. For a detailed discussion of the issue of Judah’s guilt, see my essay “Woody Allen gets away with murder, or does he?” in Film and Philosophy 14 (2010). In the same issue, William Pamerleau responds to my essay by presenting opposing arguments. Mary Nichols and Mark Roche, among others, also present alternative perspectives on this topic.

Works Cited

Becker, Ernest (1973) The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New

York: Knopf.Lee, Sander (2002) Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Lee, Sander (2010) “Woody Allen gets away with murder, or does he?” Film and Philosophy

14, 1–16.

25

Throughout his long career, Woody Allen has used artistic means to explore some of the most urgent but unanswerable questions about life – from the intensely personal to the frighteningly cosmological. In the secular postmodern world, Allen has often assumed the traditional role of the creative artist who dramatizes or adopts the position occupied in other times by sages, rabbis, or prophets who consistently interrogate the universe and question its inhabitants about our situa-tion of chaos and flux, tragedy and injustice. Over several decades, Allen has reworked and revisited such themes, showing us that the quandaries depicted in his films defy immediate or apparent solutions. Allen’s art depicts a process of ethical and moral interrogation, as opposed to generating ready-made answers to pressing concerns.

In this way, Allen follows rabbinic thinkers and commentators who have tradi-tionally questioned not only the basis of our moral and ethical value systems, but also the nature and existence of a god whose laws provide us with an ethical framework but whose definitive silence regarding matters of the material world seems to challenge his own structure. A number of Allen’s films of the past decade are darker and more reflective, and drive home the importance of an ongoing process of ethical inquiry. Accordingly, Allen presides as an original artistic con-sciousness in film and American culture through his unique blending of the tragic and comedic, often using humor to express the deepest concerns about the ethical and moral meaning of modern life. As Sam B. Girgus has written,

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Hollywood Rabbi

The Never-Ending Questions of Woody Allen

Monica Osborne

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Allen made artistic and thoughtful films that also were hilarious. He not only could make films about conscience and moral consciousness without deadening his audi-ence, he also could imbue issues of subtle moral difficulty with cryptic humor and the sensibility of ordinary, everyday experience (Girgus 2002: 171).

Films from what some critics deem to be Allen’s classic period of success and achievement exemplify this special capacity for fusing humor and social and philo-sophical consciousness. Famous examples of this genius abound in such films as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

Much of Allen’s art seemed to take a radical break and diversion from this complex moral vision in the films of the 1990s that followed the scandal in his personal and professional life involving Mia Farrow, his lover and star, and her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. However, with the beginning of a new century and millennium, Allen’s work went through another major change. Perhaps as a result of a combination of factors including his aging, a period of extended moral condemnation from the public and the media over the Farrow–Soon Yi debacle, and the acceleration of tragic historic events such as 9/11, Allen’s work evidenced serious change that built upon but then moved significantly beyond the moral and ethical self-consciousness of his classic films.

Allen’s films from this later period of his life and work (2001–2011) indicate a critical shift in his sensibility to a darker vision of the complexity and difficulty of the ethical condition of the modern experience. Many of his films from the last decade reveal an ethical imperative of deepening challenge and uncertainty mixed with pessimism and fatalism. A number of his later films are dark meditations on the nature and possibility of achieving morality in human relations in a world that has been ravaged by the terrors and atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Particularly with films such as Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), and Cas-sandra’s Dream (2007), Allen transcends the comical to reveal the world with all of its dark realities. While it is certainly true that Allen exhibited a darker side in his earlier classic films, it can be argued that such pessimism dominates some of his most important later work, despite his continuing flashes of comic brilliance in such films as Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and Midnight in Paris (2011), the latter of which deploys a lighthearted comedic undercurrent to support its musings on our tendency to romanticize eras of a bygone age.

As an aging filmmaker, Allen now conceivably confronts with a new sensibility what French philosopher Maurice Blanchot understands as “the disaster” – that is, one’s own death, that which is impossible to imagine. Allen confronts death in Scoop, symbolically imagining his own death by writing the death of the character he plays, Sidney Waterman, in a car crash. Waterman, however, dies only to return in the afterworld with which the film opens. Allen kills death. That is, he faces death only to dismantle its larger philosophical and theological possibilities by projecting his own life after death in the very same film. Clearly, Allen finds it

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impossible to foresee the end of his own existence, even as he attempts to imagine it. His philosophical realizations about the inevitability of death are at odds with his artistic means. Death, of course, has been, at the very least, a vividly evoked concern in Allen’s films. However, in his more recent work, death becomes a focal point of reflection. While Allen’s darker meditations on death may be little more than an artist’s grappling with the inevitability of his mortality, as readers of this moment in Allen’s artistic life, we might identify a structure for seeking meaning in life through ethical and moral engagement. The darker Allen films of the last decade do not simply incorporate the theme of death as a plot device meant to titillate, rather, instances of death and murder are set in the context of larger questions about the nature and complexity of ethical responsibility. Consider, for instance, one of the final scenes of Cassandra’s Dream, in which Terry accidentally kills his brother Ian, who, unbeknownst to Terry, had planned to poison him. One might see this accidental murder as crisis averted, a necessary evil that will leave Terry free to follow through with his plan to alert the authorities to the earlier murder for which he and his brother are responsible. We are instantly relieved to discover that Terry will not become a murder victim. But it is a relief that is fleet-ing if we remember that Terry, despite the agony he endures as a result of his actions, is also a murderer. Allen, not unlike the ancient writers of Talmudic nar-ratives that reveal the nuances of ethical quandaries, leaves us with such instances of ethical ambiguity, and in this way we are led to ask ourselves questions similar to the ones that haunt the trajectory of the film.

The deepening ethical consciousness that Allen evinces in later films such as Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, and Scoop can be understood more fully by discussing them in the light of the insights of the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. For many students of modern ethics, Levinas has become a decisive figure in Continental philosophy for his rethinking the Western philosophical tradition in the context of ethical priority. In fact, it could be argued, Allen himself almost anticipates such a comparison of his own ethical position and development through the character of Professor Louis Levy (Martin S. Berg-mann) in Crimes and Misdemeanors. In the film, Levy is the subject of a docu-mentary being produced by Allen’s character, Cliff Stern. Throughout Crimes and Misdemeanors, the professor propounds a philosophy of ethics and responsi-bility until the end, when he casts doubt on the validity of his optimism by committing suicide. A question, however, is whether the professor’s suicide does indeed imply a squandering of his own ethically grounded philosophies, or whether it may be read as a symbolic admonition against relying entirely on one’s own ethical insights. Regardless of Levy’s outcome, he represents some of Allen’s earliest forays into questions and considerations of the ethical. Reading Allen’s films with an understanding of Levinasian ethical philosophy informs the complex ethical sensitivity of Allen’s work. Levinas, it turns out, describes the importance of the kind of growing ethical awareness that Allen’s films demonstrate.

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For Levinas, an understanding of the ethical begins with awareness – an aware-ness of our own asymmetrical relationship to another human being, and an awareness of our being summoned to responsibility. That is, I demonstrate both respect and responsibility for a person who is irreducibly different from me. I bear infinite responsibility for this Other. For Levinas, ethical responsibility is the ultimate starting point; it precedes ontology and questions of being and knowl-edge. “It is I who support the Other and am responsible for him,” Levinas argues, continuing:

My responsibility is untransferable, no one could replace me. In fact, it is a matter of saying the very identity of the human I starting from responsibility . . . a deposi-tion which is precisely its responsibility for the Other. Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what, humanly, I cannot refuse . . . I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one can substitute himself for me (1985: 100–101).

And later, in “As Old as the World?,” Levinas writes:

For the human world to be possible  .  .  . at each moment there must be someone who can be responsible for the others . . . You are not just free; you are also bound to others beyond your freedom. You are responsible for all (Levinas 1990: 85).

We come face to face with individuals on a daily basis, but it is recognition of the responsibility that accompanies this encounter that is necessary for an entryway into the ethical. Levinas, taking his cues from the long history of rabbinic inquiry and response that marks much of his later work, contends that responsibility is very much about dialogue, allowing the Other to speak and hearing the Other speak. Indeed, Levinas’ Nine Talmudic Readings (1990), a collection of talks to French intellectuals in Paris between 1963 and 1975, explicates and deploys the system of ethics laid out in both the Torah and Talmud, allowing the sacred texts to shed light on the issues of our time, while simultaneously allowing the events of the contemporary era to illuminate the nuances of the sacred text. In this way, Levinas essentially opens up a dialogue between ancient sacred texts and modern thought. For Levinas, perhaps the most effective way of ensuring that dialogue remains ongoing is to participate in the act of questioning, one of the most distinc-tive hallmarks of the writings of the ancient rabbis and sages in the Talmud and Midrashim.1 Levinas recalls the members of the Sanhedrin, who sat face to face in a semicircle. The dialogue was “never interrupted, nor did it get lost in an imper-sonal dialectic. It was an assembly of faces and not a joint stock company” (1990: 72). Certainly at a very basic level one can identify in Allen’s films a propensity for dialogue and a tendency to resist open–shut endings, but many of Allen’s later films also open up the potential for more complex ethical encounters.

The philosophical version of awareness that Levinas discusses proves crucial to defining and explaining the greater complexity and maturity of the ethical

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encounter in many of Allen’s later films of the past decade. The awareness that Levinas describes – what he frequently terms an ethical awakening to the Other – becomes indispensable to ethical discussion in Allen’s later films. The awareness occurs through several different events and actions that constitute a journey toward ethical consciousness in the films. Such moments in that trajectory that also are part of the Levinasian ethical encounter and philosophy include: question-ing, vision, witnessing, dialogue, listening, and introspection. Many of these ele-ments can be identified in Allen’s films as crucial points in the process of the construction of what Levinas terms “ethical subjectivity.”

Like both Levinas and the ancient rabbis and sages, Allen begins with question-ing. Questioning becomes a key motif that is especially pronounced in Allen’s later work. Built into the very structure of Judaism and its beginnings in Torah, the impulse to question pronounces itself, and in this impulse we discover the beginnings of the ethical: the acknowledgment that there is always another way, another question in response to each question. The Torah itself abounds with retellings of narratives, sometimes multiple times and from competing perspec-tives. Is not the second chapter of Genesis a retelling of – or at least a deeper explication into – the first?2 Implicit in the act of questioning is an acknowledg-ment of the importance of an ongoing exchange of ideas – that is, the importance of dialogue.

Allen has never shied away from dialogue. Since the beginning of his filmmak-ing career, Allen has demonstrated a propensity for portraying his characters through fascinating and often complex dialogue. For Allen, what may come across technically as a monologue might also be read as an internal dialogue with the self. As viewers, we bear witness to this dialogue and are compelled to determine our own place within it. Consider Larry David’s character, Boris Yellnikov, in Whatever Works (2009). Boris is constantly engaged in dialogues about the mean-ingless of the universe and the notion of blind chance among other larger than life subjects. Often, Boris has an audience of other characters – Melody, the naive 21-year-old girl who shows up on his doorstep and moves in with him, or his group of male friends. In many instances, however, he speaks directly to the audience. He looks directly into the camera and imagines the viewer into an intellectual sparring partner, albeit a silent one. As a character, Boris comes across as intel-lectually pretentious and egotistical, and yet a quality of his tone suggests the possibility of his self-awareness of some weakness, as indicated by conversational intimacy with the viewer. We are forced into a conversation with the thematic elements of the film, which, in this case, happen to be the bleakness of life, disil-lusionment, and the human condition. But the point is that for Allen, monologues often become structured as imaginary intellectual dialogues. This transformation becomes the entryway into the ethical for the filmmaker, a movement of great importance in his later films.

Allen’s unique approach to dialogue in film, however, is not enough to catego-rize his later work as more ethically aware. His history of self-criticism is equally

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important, and it is critical to differentiate between self-deprecation as a means to a comedic end – which is, of course, a hallmark of Allen’s films – and what might be read as the pungent intensity of authentic self-criticism. This form of self-criticism becomes especially apparent in Hollywood Ending. Premiering in May 2002 at the Cannes Film Festival, Hollywood Ending is not generally regarded as one of the more notable films of his career. Most critics turned up their noses at Allen’s project, while American viewers simply stayed home. “I think,” stated Allen in an interview with Eric Lax, “if people had gone to see it they would have enjoyed it. But they didn’t go to see it.” Allen, however, maintains an opinion quite different from that of his viewers: “It was one of my most successful ones in terms of an idea that was executed properly” (Lax 2007: 226). Many of his European fans must have shared similar sentiments, given the fact that Hollywood Ending was much more successful in Europe, particularly in France, where “part of the show [at the Cannes] was to be a tribute to the people of New York and the suffering they endured over September 11.” As one of New York’s “best known citizens,” Allen was asked to “represent his fellow New Yorkers. Allen not only showed up but delivered one of the funniest monologues in the history of the awards . . . When he walked off stage to thunderous applause, he was right back on his pedestal” (Veitch 2002). This is, of course, ironic since the film is about a director making a film that flops everywhere except for France.

But the financial success of the film is of less importance philosophically than appreciating its plot and overarching themes that provide a lens through which to understand the films that Allen would go on to make in the next half decade. Hollywood Ending offers an extensive exploration of how moments of ethical blind-ness characterize the era in which we live. The protagonist, Allen’s character Val Waxman, exhibits a distinct lack of moral vision, and Allen uses this shortcoming. Further, the notion of “executed properly,” in Allen’s term, compels further inves-tigation as to what Allen means by it. The statement apparently concerns the effectiveness of his theme of ethical blindness. In the film, Allen plays Waxman, a washed-up film director who once achieved a couple of great suc-cesses. Seeking a new project, he fortuitously gets one through the help of his ex-wife, played by Tea Leoni. The new project involves directing a big budget film in New York City. Waxman takes the project, but, in the first stages of moviemak-ing, he is stricken with an apparent psychosomatic ailment that robs him of his physical vision. Therefore, “executing properly” for Allen in the film apparently relates to the strength of his use of blindness in propelling the narrative and struc-turing its ethical argument.

From the beginning of the film, Val constantly draws attention to his shortcom-ings – not in the typical self-deprecating fashion often associated with characters played by Allen, but with a deeper awareness of the possibility of a deeper ethical failure. He considers that he may have been wrong all along in his professional choices, wondering at one point if he has simply been engaged in “artistic mas-turbation.” He entertains such doubts and self-criticism with a level of intensity

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that suggests a possible connection in his mind to events outside of the film of concern to him, including the shakiness of the country’s place in the world in the struggles that followed the attacks on 9/11.

While Allen seems to suggest in his interview with Lax that this idea – presum-ably that of a blind director – had “been around for years,” it is perhaps significant that it finally takes shape in the metaphorical ashes of the twin towers (Lax 2007: 56). Americans have often been criticized as being blind to the struggles and trag-edies of those in other less industrialized and democratic nations. While it is certainly transgressive to suggest that any meaning can be derived from the tragedy or from the suffering sustained by those who survived the collapse of the towers or the destruction of the Pentagon, it is clear that the event compelled many Americans to engage in a process of self-examination in a national context and from a global standpoint. The question of whether our collective blind-ness and narcissism played into the unforgivable acts of terror that touched our country became a question on the lips of many scholars, politicians, and even average citizens. While the answer to this question depends on which side of the political or economic spectrums one finds him or herself, it is the question itself that remains decidedly significant because it is a question that, followed to its logical end, compels us to ask even deeper questions about our own individual ethical universes. Hollywood Ending may be the playing field where such questions begin to take shape for Allen.

Early in Hollywood Ending, after Val has accepted the offer to direct the new film, which will take place on the streets of New York City and be about the city itself, he sits with his ex-wife in a bar, discussing the logistics of the film. To his ex-wife’s confusion and irritation, Val insists that “foreign camera men” be brought in, an idea which is borderline ludicrous considering that the film is supposed to be organically New York, and that the reason his ex-wife was able to convince the investors to allow Val to do the film was because of his deep and complex history with the city itself. But Val is beginning to take stock of his shortcomings as a director and as a human being, and has come to the realization that a “foreign” perspective is necessary if he is going to see the whole picture, as it were. Val has begun to agonize over his ability to see anything through his own eyes. He is learning to recognize that an artistic dialogue that transpires outside of the self not only holds a great deal of potential in the artistic grand scheme of things, but also is necessary if he wants to create a film that is, ironically, authentically New York.

It is well known that Allen, while outspokenly Jewish and clearly defined as such by his public, often challenges, and even ridicules, the rituals and mandates of Judaism as a religion. He also is a self-proclaimed atheist. However, there are indications of latent traces of the Jewish religious tradition in Val’s desire for another perspective. A significant hallmark of Jewish thought is the insistence that study must take place between two people. Study means dialogue. The notion of chavruta, a rabbinical approach to learning that describes pairs of individuals

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engaged in debate and discussion about sacred texts, forms the backbone of Jewish learning. One person’s opinion must never be privileged over that of another. The emphasis is less on product than process; the ethical is revealed in the movement between the question and the answer. The conversation – that is, the willingness to engage in conversation – transcends any “final” answers that may be derived from the process. Allen symbolically returns to his origins as a means of grappling with the question of his place and responsibility in a postmodern world.

Early in the film, Val cannot sleep because his mind is immersed in thoughts of death and blackness. Everything becomes, for him, a “matter of life and death.” He is caught up in his own personal fears connected to death and mortality, dark-ness and oblivion. But just as he is about to begin shooting the film about New York City, he loses his vision. “I’m blind!” he tells his agent, who becomes enraged and throws off his kippah as Val tells him that he sees “the end.” Of course, the question of Val’s actual control over his blindness persists. Is he faking blindness as a volitional act of choice? Has he been stricken with some form of psychoso-matic blindness? Val’s therapist accuses him of blinding himself to the situation – all while Val makes negative references to “agents’ ethics” and emerges as a blind, stumbling director.

But rather than announce his blindness to the producers and studio executives, Val decides to go forward with directing the film with help from a few select friends including his agent and, eventually, his ex-wife. The largest segment of the film is comprised of Val’s botched attempts at directing scenes that he cannot visu-ally witness and responding to questions regarding staging and set design to which he cannot possibly know the answer. When his agent is asked to leave the set, he helps Val employ the help of the Chinese cameraman’s translator, who “sees” things for Val and enables Val to make directorial decisions, even if these decisions result in scenes that are full of “random chaos,” according multiple characters and others on the set. After a day of directing, when Val asks the Chinese translator to tell him how the dailies were, the translator says that he is a business student and not a film student, and therefore not equipped to comment on the process of filmmaking. He continues, “But I must confess  .  .  .  there is a strong sense of  . . . incoherence,” to which Val responds, “Incoherence! Great. That’s exactly what I’m going for.”

With this emphasis on the theme of incoherence, Allen lends his influence to those who have seen in the idea of incoherence a form of response to the ethical and moral uncertainty of our times, especially following the Holocaust. Blindness as used by Allen in Hollywood Ending as well as other films such as Crimes and Misdemeanors becomes a graphic means of suggesting such incoherence as the inability to see or understand ethical experience. The drama of blindness suggests the trauma of such uncertainty. The continuing demand for ethical responsibility, even in the face of such trauma in fact exacerbates and becomes part of the trau-matic experience itself, as exemplified by Levinas’ argument for radical ethical responsibility.3

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The experience of blindness is crucial to narratives that are told in response to – or even in the wake of – tragedy because it is an implicit acknowledgement of the facets of trauma that always already elude our understanding. Writing one’s story – or, in the example of Hollywood Ending, directing one’s story – from the perspective of blindness reflects what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls the “lacuna” that exists in all testimony. Bearing witness to this lacuna, this blind-spot, means bearing witness to the trauma of the tragedy, whether personal or collective, and its fallout.

Allen does not fail to see the limitation of his own metaphor of blindness. As in both Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hollywood Ending, he must develop that meta-phor to cultivate the crisis of the relationship between the trauma and the ethical vision and demand. As Val’s son quips, “Blindness as a metaphor – that’s great!” Thus, the movement between blindness and sight further illuminates the capacity for an ethical encounter. While Val is blind for the largest portion of the film, he begins and ends with vision, demonstrating not only the fluidity of movements between the two polarities, but also the significance of the transition to a more ethically aware mode of being.

After Val’s film has been made – ironically, to mixed reviews in the United States and glowing reviews in France, where critics call it the “best American film in years” – he visits his 20-something son with whom he had had a falling out. Val walks into his son’s apartment and hands him a real olive branch. In so doing, Val returns literally to the space of the domestic, realizing that he must repair his relationship with his son, who mocks Val’s metaphor of blindness for its lack of originality. Importantly, in the scene immediately following Val’s ethical encounter with his son – an encounter in which Val takes responsibility for the broken rela-tionship – Val regains his sight and also realizes that he is still in love with his former wife, Ellie. The reunion of the couple perhaps signals a glimmer of hope from Allen’s film that learning can be gained from ethical conflict even in times of blind incoherence. Consequently, Val remarks, “Every husband should go blind for a little while.” We are not meant to wander indefinitely in blindness, but, in order to see, we must experience it and we must learn to tell our story from the vantage point of one who is blind. The question is to what degree this metaphori-cal blindness explored in this 2002 film continues to provide a perspective for Allen’s subsequent films, particularly those that delve deeper into the darker com-plexities of our world.

In Anything Else (2003), Allen’s next film, the sight-enabling blindness that Allen’s character experiences in Hollywood Ending gives way to a pervasive sense of fear, paranoia, and helplessness. Allen plays a character named Dobel, a schoolteacher and aspiring comedy writer who becomes friends with a young Jewish man named Jerry ( Jason Biggs) who is also looking to break into the comedy industry. Our immediate impression of Dobel is that he is generally paranoid and incredibly obsessed with and fearful of anti-Semitism. He is absolutely certain, for instance, that he overhears a man in a comedy club say that Jews start all wars. And he

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warns Jerry to beware of the “jack-booted menace” that is “lurking around the corner.” Further, Dobel is fixated on information – or perhaps the perceived lack of information. “What you don’t know will kill you!” he tells Jerry: “Like they tell you you’re going to the showers, but they turn out not to be showers.” Holocaust humor – and its accompanying tension between the known and the unknown – provides the foreground for the film’s dominant comedic thrust.

“We live in perilous times,” Dobel says, “You don’t want your life to end up in a black and white footage scored by a cello in a minor key.” Here, Allen’s inescap-able obsession with the Holocaust, Nazis, and the Jews perhaps conflates with the trauma of the terrorism of our own times. What could be read as Dobel’s (Allen’s?) post-9/11 paranoia manifests itself through repeated retreats into the darkness of the Holocaust.

Dobel inserts a comment or joke about the Holocaust every chance he gets, and, as a result, the film contains more explicit Holocaust humor than any of Allen’s films since Shadows and Fog (1991). But while Shadows and Fog is a film that explores death quite specifically, Anything Else is not such a film. Allen’s abrupt inclusion of countless Holocaust references in a 2003 film having nothing to do with death, individual or collective, seems symptomatic of something larger. The question of why in fact he decides to riddle the veneer of his film with an obses-sive smattering of allusions to Auschwitz is not easily answered, but his comments regarding the so-called mystery of the Holocaust in an essay (“Random Reflec-tions of a Second-Rate Mind”) that appeared in Tikkun in 1990 may offer some insight. Allen remarks on his inability to see the legitimacy of the “mystery” that had “confounded all of [his] relatives since World War II” – namely, the question of how or why the events of the Holocaust occurred. For Allen, the fact that the Holocaust happened – and that non-Jews, previously happy to live alongside their Jewish neighbors, suddenly turned their backs on Jews when it became “fashion-able” – reveals what is for him the least puzzling of all human characteristics: the “worm of self-preservation, of fear, greed and an animal will to power,” that lives inside the heart of every person (Allen 1990: 72). In other words, for Allen, the Holocaust is in part a symbolic manifestation of our most pronounced fears. The event – the murders, mutilations, persecutions, humiliations, and betrayals of the Holocaust – simply makes that fear and greed visible.

The perpetrators of the Holocaust were easy to distinguish if for no other reason than they typically wore uniforms and identified themselves as Nazis. They espoused a belief system mechanized and authorized by the state. In an era of global terror, where warfare takes place off of traditional battlefields, the faces of enemies are obscured and ambiguous. Therefore, the perceived threat of the unknown could be experienced as even greater. With little to no ability to pinpoint the source from which our devastation comes, we look instead for scapegoats. In this sense, the Holocaust becomes a kind of psychological scapegoat for Dobel as he acts out all of his greatest fears through conversations with Jerry. Dobel feels threatened in a way that reflects the fears of those who feel that they have been

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attacked in the intimacy of their own “home,” on their own soil, so to speak. Dobel asks Jerry whether he owns a gun. When Jerry asks why that might be necessary, Dobel retorts: “Why? To defend against those who conspire to harm you.” At which point, he takes Jerry to a surplus army rifle store to purchase a weapon – just in case “he’s at home masturbating” and someone comes to attack him, and “so that they don’t put [him] in a boxcar!” Again, Dobel’s legitimate feelings of concern following a violation must be couched in Holocaust rheto-ric in order to be expressed. “You’re a member of one of the most persecuted groups in history,” Dobel tells Jerry, further driving home what he experiences as Jewish persecution. When Jerry’s wild but passionate girlfriend comes home to find her boyfriend wielding a weapon, Dobel explains to her: “It was my idea that given the tensions in the world . . . he should own a means of self-defense,” and that he “didn’t mean to incite domestic strife” (although it turns out that inciting domestic strife is exactly what Dobel, through a number of carefully articulated suspicions, does). Dobel’s reference to “tensions in the world” is the closest he comes to insinuating that the threat is a contemporary one and not fully entrenched in the legacy of the Holocaust.

Allen uses the pervasive and overwhelming fear exemplified by Dobel to raise important questions about the nature of God, religion, theology, and philosophy in our era. “They’re all charlatans,” Dobel says of all the priests, shamans, rabbis, and others, who “want to help, but there’s nothing they can do for us.” Respon-sibility falls on the individual. Allen suggests that perhaps there is no one to whom we can turn other than ourselves. Jerry, it turns out, is working on a novel, the subject of which is “the absolute terror of confronting one’s death.” It is difficult not to see the younger Allen in Jerry, as a number of reviewers of the film pointed out, an idea which Allen himself has somewhat confirmed:

I’ve always had that idea. I think it came off fairly well. Jason Biggs was in the movie and he was another actor who people thought was playing me – and I was in the movie, playing a different part! I thought it came off and it surprised me that it didn’t do better. I thought it had everything . . . Somebody said it summed up everything that I always say in movies . . . and maybe it did and that was a negative for me (Lax 2007: 58–59).

But one reviewer takes the comparison a step further and argues that Biggs’s character Jerry is not Alvy Singer (Allen’s character in Annie Hall) redux, but is “Allen’s version of a new sort of Jewish male figure who extricates himself from the character patterns that Allen himself has been so apt at portraying” (Bronski 2003: 14).

In an effort to somehow fuse his past life and current life, Dobel tells Jerry to disconnect from everyone – his agent, his girlfriend, etc. – and do everything either on his own or with Dobel. Allen could be speaking to a younger version of himself, wishing he could rewrite his own narrative, and that he had done things differently. Ultimately, however, Jerry disconnects himself – at least tem-

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porarily – from Dobel and attempts to work on his book manuscript. We hear him read a line of his own writing to himself while we witness a scene of love-making between him and his girlfriend, Amanda: “If only certain moments in life could last, just stay frozen like some vase.” At this point, the scene freezes and then cuts to a shot of Amanda’s mother, who has come to stay with Jerry and Amanda, doing a line of cocaine and offering some to Jerry, who refuses it, saying that he is a “nice square Jewish boy.” Once again, Allen dismantles the domestic to create chaos and confusion even on the domestic front. Amanda, accused by Jerry of looking at her mother’s boyfriend, then becomes upset and confesses that she is not “making eyes” at her mother’s boyfriend. From this point on, we witness the advent of collective paranoia as the family unit devolves. We also bear witness to Allen’s exploration of the shared desire of so many Ameri-cans to return to a time prior to fears that we are not safe even in the most intimate spaces of our lives.4

At the end of the film, Amanda and Jerry break up, and Jerry decides to go to Los Angeles with Dobel. But before their scheduled departure, Dobel backs out of the move, saying that he cannot go because he had recently been out of state, then was speeding and stopped by two state troopers who “got rough” and “made a crack about his religion.” Dobel says that the troopers “implied that Auschwitz was just a theme park,” and so he went back to find them later and shot one of them, which makes it impossible for him to show his face. Dobel, it turns out, is still trapped within the grasp of the trauma and its accompanying fear, perhaps reflecting Allen’s own questions about the viability of authentically working through collective tragedy. And yet Jerry’s move to Los Angeles suggests that Allen envisions a transformative and regenerative process. However, we are left to speculate on whether Jerry – a “younger Allen” – simply represents lost potential, given the fact that Allen cannot go back in time. That Allen incorporates refer-ences to the Holocaust in this film is not overly significant – he has done it on other occasions – but what is most critical is the larger context in which these lines appear, as part of Allen’s deepening ethical consciousness.

In keeping with Allen’s increasing engagement with ethical questions, his next film, Melinda and Melinda (2004), becomes a crucial moment for exploring further the question of whether comedy is the most appropriate medium for responding to the changing ethical landscape. One critic has suggested that we might call Woody Allen’s entire oeuvre “Modern Times,” and if the problem for Allen’s city dwellers has shifted from the external one of finding a job and founding a home to the internal one of feeling secure enough to survive between appointments with the analyst, that shift is “symptomatic of five decades of change in American life itself ” (Mast 1979: 431). While Allen’s insistence upon tracking this trajectory began to take shape most recently with questions of blindness in Hollywood Ending and culminated (at least to this date) in explorations of the darkness of human nature in Cassandra’s Dream, the role of Melinda and Melinda is initially unclear. The film seems to have little to do with Allen’s holistic analysis of the changing

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ethical landscape, but buried within the film’s two competing Melinda narratives are his serious musings on the viability of both comedy and tragedy in this era. Further, the film taps into a Levinasian notion of responsibility that insists that we acknowledge with the sages and rabbis of antiquity that there is always another way – another perspective, an alternative way to tell the story. Allen’s refusal to rely on one mode of storytelling here may be yet another instance where the filmmaker is stepping back to gaze on his own cinematic oeuvre and allowing us to bear witness to his deepening ethical consciousness.

The film’s opening scene takes place in a French restaurant where a group of intellectuals discuss the topic at length. “The essence of life isn’t comic; it’s tragic,” is the first line of the film. But as the group continues to argue about the differ-ences between comedy and tragedy through recounting two different fictional stories about the same woman – Melinda – who struggles to straighten out her chaotic life, the differences between the tragic and the comedic begin to blur, suggesting a shift in the way we see the world. But the question remains centered on how we should see the world and through whose lens?

The juxtaposition of both Melinda stories sometimes makes it difficult to tell the difference between the tragic and comedic versions of the narrative. The problem becomes one of perspective: one person’s comedy is another person’s tragedy. But the deeper issue becomes anchored in the question of identities. Is Allen suggesting that we all have dual identities in this era, and that we must find a way to authentically account for both? “We have to move on with our lives,” says one character, despite the uncertainty that colors this possibility. The film ends with a discussion of how our collective fear of mortality underlies the reason that we laugh at all. One character says to enjoy life because it could “end like that,” and with a snap of the fingers the screen cuts to black, and, in the final shot, we witness proponents of comedy and tragedy in agreement: the only sure thing is death. This certainty provides a segue into what many see as Allen’s darkest film: Match Point.

In his conversation with Eric Lax, Allen suggests that Match Point was one of the most pleasurable films for him to make. “If I had made a career of doing films like this,” he stated, “I would feel better about myself ” (Lax 2007: 43). It is a sur-prising statement, given the dark nature of the film, whose main character, Chris Wilton ( Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a former tennis pro looking for work as an instructor, is characterized by a chilling impassivity that allows him to plot and carry out a double murder without a moment’s remorse. Indeed, Chris leaves the murder scene to meet his wife at the theater only minutes later, showing no visible traces of having just committed a crime. Earlier in the film, we learn that Chris’s wealth and social status are a direct result of his friendship with Tom, a wealthy young man whose sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), Chris marries, culminating in a radical improvement in his financial and social status. Chris embodies an utter lack of ethical responsibility. He is a character whose concern is only for himself in all matters. Fittingly, his marriage to Chloe is, unbeknownst to her, marked by

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infidelity. He begins an affair with Nola, Tom’s ex-girlfriend, played with explosive passion and sensuousness by Scarlett Johansson, which results in Nola’s pregnancy. In a display of pathetic self-pity as opposed to a guilty conscience, it is Nola whom Chris murders to avoid the inevitable consequences of accepting responsibility for his actions. For Chris, human lives become little more than pieces to be used in his plot to avoid responsibility. He also murders Nola’s neighbor to make the murder look like collateral damage of a burglary and coldly returns to meet Chloe at the theater. When news of the murders gets out, however, Chris becomes nervous, and the detectives nearly discover that he is indeed the culprit, until a homeless man is discovered with the neighbor’s ring in his pocket, the murders are attributed to him, and the case is closed. Chris goes unpunished.

Given Allen’s twenty-first-century fascination with questions of the ethical and issues of responsibility, the end of Match Point comes as an unsettling surprise. Chris breaches a number of ethical contracts but ultimately escapes the conse-quences – the legal ones, at least. Of Match Point Allen has remarked: “To me, it is strictly about luck. Life is such a terrifying experience” (Lax 2007: 43). Going on to lament the fact that humans can do heinous things and, if luck falls in their favor, emerge unscathed and unpunished, Allen reasserts: “I don’t believe in God. So this is what was on my mind: the enormous unfairness of the world, the enor-mous injustice of the world, the sense that every day people get away with the worst kinds of crimes.” Allen’s atheism does not prevent him from insisting on the need to continually interrogate the questions of ethics and morality as they relate to human – rather than divine – responsibility, which may in fact place him into a more appropriate and useful space for addressing questions of the ethical. In Totality and Infinity (1969), Levinas has suggested that passing through atheism is sometimes necessary for the sake of the ethical. Further, for Levinas, belief in God may sometimes hinder one’s capacity to recognize the responsibility to which he or she is summoned, given that belief in God is in many instances characterized by a childlike conception of the divine as an entity that doles out rewards and punishments. From this perspective, human beings are little more than children whose responsibility is absent, its burden resting instead on the parental figure. Atheism, in this regard, may exist as a space where one retains the capacity to acknowledge his or her – rather than God’s – responsibility for what happens in our world. By insisting on the formulation of a new set of ethics, stripped of religious and theological justification, Allen clears the way for serious considera-tion of human responsibility.

Allen’s darker films are not concerned with blaming God for the iniquities of humans. Instead, they peer deeply into the darker facets of human existence, diverging from stereotypical Hollywood-ending films that depict a good versus evil dichotomy in which the evildoer never goes unpunished. Allen deals implicitly with questions of theodicy by presenting an authentic world where so-called good people often find themselves in worse predicaments than their evil counter-parts, and where it is impossible to place blame on anyone other than the human

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perpetrators of heinous and irresponsible acts. Further, although the film contains two grisly murders, Allen refrains from depicting the murders – or the blood in their aftermath – visually, which sustains the focus on the human being responsible rather than the spectacle of the consequence. In November 1988, responding to Ingmar Bergman’s impression that “our world is about to go under” and that our “social behavior patterns – interior and exterior – have proved a fiasco,” Allen states,

I do think the salient feature about human existence is man’s inhumanity to man. If you were looking at it from a distance .  .  . I think that’s what you would come away with. I don’t think that [aliens would be] amazed by our art or by how much we’ve accomplished. I think they’d be sort of awestruck by the carnage and stupidity (Lax 2007: 82).

Thirteen years later, in September of 2001, Allen’s words proved prescient in the wake of the 9/11 tragedies, and, in the years that follow, we witness Allen’s inabil-ity to ignore the sharpest and most ominous notes of human existence.

Allen’s films provide nothing in the way of assuring us that there is a god; in fact, many of his characters insist on the impossibility of the existence of God. And while the character of Sid Waterman in Scoop finds himself in a version of the afterlife, it is unclear whether this afterlife includes the presence of a god. Regardless, we might infer from Allen’s films that if there is in fact a god, he has removed himself from the human equation if only to have one grand laugh at our darkly bumbling antics and ethical mess. Allen continues the themes of luck, chance, data collection, and death in Scoop, this time writing himself back into the narrative (he does not appear in Match Point) as Sid Waterman, an amateur magi-cian who goes by the name Splendini, allegedly “because it’s a comedy” and because it’s “automatically lighter” (Lax 2007: 41). The film opens with a eulogy and a group of men reminiscing about life in Afghanistan and praising the skill of their friend who has died, the journalist Joe Strombel, who always “got the info before everyone else.” In the afterlife, Joe’s ghost obtains information about a serial killer and attempts to convey that information to both Sid and Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), a young journalist. Both Sid and Sondra become entrenched in the process of trying to determine the identity of the serial killer, whom they suspect, based on Joe’s tip, is Peter Lyman, a wealthy young aristocrat.

Information – who owns it, who receives it, and how it’s disseminated – plays a significant role in Scoop. The question of what happens to information when its bearer passes on is an interesting one for Allen, but the larger question revolves around the question of what one actually gains as a result of obsessive data col-lecting. We typically expect knowledge to give us a modicum of control over a situation, but as Sondra and Sid garner more and more information about the serial killer, they begin to lose control of the situation as the film becomes darker and darker. The serial killer continues to murder more women and he eventually

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tries unsuccessfully to drown Sondra as well. Sid loses his life, and so while Sondra manages to swim to safety unbeknownst to Peter, alert the authorities, and deliver the killer to them, the film remains haunted by ghosts both literally and figura-tively. Unlike the killer of Match Point, Peter Lyman will face consequences for his actions, but lest we bask in satisfaction over what seems to be a just outcome to a dark tale of murder and deceit, Allen ends the film in the afterlife, a topic about which we have no information and over which we have no control. Sid, in the final scene, rides aboard a ship steered by the Grim Reaper, doomed to perform his tired magical illusions for eternity. A major misleading aspect of Scoop’s conclusion – the apprehension of Peter Lyman and the confirmation of his guilt – suggests that recovering all of the information will result in an ethical outcome, a happier ending. The resolution nearly satisfies the audience’s longings for justice and balance, but for Allen this film does not offer the gratification of previous films:

When I finished Scoop I thought to myself, What a nuisance. I’m wasting my time with this little comedy and I could be doing another piece of work like Match Point – another meaty thing .  .  . Now, I wish I had come to this conclusion twenty-five years ago, but I didn’t . . . there was a fierce pressure on me from many people to do comedy (Lax 2007: 185).

Yet despite Allen’s insistence that Scoop is a “little comedy,” and regardless of the fact that Allen teases us with a taste of justice for terrible deeds done, the darkly comical ending is not happy.

In 2007, Allen returns to the disturbingly dark thematic components of Match Point with his film Cassandra’s Dream, the story of two brothers Terry (Colin Farrell) and Ian (Ewan McGregor). This time, however – and unlike Chris in Match Point – the murderous impulses of the characters result in even darker conse-quences. If Match Point is Allen’s attempt to demonize a world based on luck – a world where murderers face no consequences if they are lucky enough – Cassan-dra’s Dream reminds us that even if we are fortunate enough to escape the legal or social repercussion of our behavior, we cannot escape ourselves. Terry is a London mechanic and obsessive gambler, while Ian spends his existence working away in their father’s small restaurant. They have invested in a boat that they name “Cassandra’s Dream,” but when both brothers find themselves in debt, they seek help from their financially successful uncle, who asks them to murder an associate who plans to testify against him in a hearing regarding embezzlement. The broth-ers go ahead with the crime and are rewarded lucratively by their uncle in addition to escaping legal punishment. However, the guilt associated with the murder becomes more than Terry can bear and he threatens to turn himself in. Ian, unable to dissuade him from going to the authorities, decides instead to kill his brother by offering him a drink laced with enough drugs to kill him. But once on the boat, Ian cannot go through with it; however, during a scuffle, Terry accidentally kills Ian and then takes his own life out of remorse.

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Cassandra’s Dream is in some ways a much darker exploration of the ethical terrain than Match Point because the murders transpire as a crime between and against brothers. The most primal beginnings of what we understand to be the ethical relationship – two brothers – are violated. In a modern-day retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, brother rises up against brother. One of the opening lines of the film – “All you have in this life . . . that you can count on, is family” – becomes ironic in the film’s conclusion, in which both brothers die. The financial success for which the two brothers strive together becomes the beginning of their demise, and, in this way, money becomes a dominant theme within the framework of the film. But it is difficult not to see in the brothers’ struggles for monetary acquisitiveness an implicit indictment – or at least a serious questioning – of our capitalist impulse. This, of course, is despite the fact that, as one character in the film says, the Chinese are “way more capitalist than we are.” The characters are self-aware enough to know that their drives toward monetary success are dangerous and destructive, but they lack the capacity to acknowledge responsibil-ity for the trouble this drive causes for other people and, ultimately, for themselves. The suggestion that the Chinese are more capitalistic belies a human tendency to obscure personal guilt in the experience of sharing it with others. If others share our lapses in ethical awareness – and especially if we can determine that their ethical failings are worse than our own – then we have somehow escaped the need to become responsible. Cassandra’s Dream illuminates the lie that others are worse than we are.

Terry agonizes over the thought of having to kill the witness: “I can’t look him face-to-face and then kill him,” he says to his brother, who says later, “As soon as you look at anything too closely, you’ll see all the ugly imperfections.” The truth is that although Terry’s agony over the potential murder offers at the very least a glimmer of an awareness of the ethical, ultimately both brothers choose not to look, so as not to see the “ugly imperfections” in themselves. And the greatest tragedy in this film is that the “Thou shall not kill,” which, for Levinas, is written on the face of every human being, is barely legible even when two brothers gaze into each other’s visage.

It is no surprise that Cassandra’s Dream marks Allen’s last “dark” film to date, or that although his next film – Vicky Cristina Barcelona – is dramatic, it returns to the safety of the comedic realm and becomes Allen’s first return into the sphere of the domestic after a foray into darkness. And later, Allen returns to New York City in Whatever Works and abandons instances of death and violence, opting instead for an extended cinematic musing on the “horror” of our era. Boris, played by Larry David, wants to be alone. He is jaded by the media saturation of death and violence. Love doesn’t last, according to Boris; we are simply reduced to “whatever works.” The film begins with a discussion of God and religion, broadly, but more specifically about how the institution of religion has failed us in this era. It has become a “corporate racket,” and Boris opts out. He makes numerous ultimatums regarding faith, God, and theology, but in hearing these brash and

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impassioned statements, we are perhaps compelled to ask the questions we should have been asking all along: to what degree are we responsible for our behavior? For the behavior of others? Does the absence or silence of God prohibit us from stepping into his place and becoming more ethically responsible than he has shown himself to be? Boris seems to ask all of the questions that we, readers of Allen’s recent darker films, are led to ask ourselves. Perhaps we, along with Allen, are still learning what it means to be ethical human beings, to acknowledge our own infinite responsibility. In many instances – in Allen’s films and in the real world – the answers are unclear. But at the very least we – like the rabbis of antiquity who so elegantly positioned one outcome against another, resulting in a purposely ambiguous outcome – can ask the right questions.

And this might be Allen’s Jewish way. Jewish thought moves us away from a mindset that encourages focus on an outcome, opting instead for an insistence on the value of experience – that is, on the process – placing far greater value on it than on what it produces. The tension, the struggle, the conflict, the need to investigate and interrogate – these are the impulses that have driven our greatest rabbis, sages, and Jewish thinkers since the beginning of Judaism. Perhaps these same impulses mark the artistic endeavors of Woody Allen, and perhaps, as a result, we learn to ask questions that matter.

Notes

1 The Talmud is comprised of two parts: the Mishnah, created in 200 CE; and the Gemarah, which was generated in 500 CE and is a discussion of the Mishnah and other Tannaitic writings. Together, the two parts form the basis for much of Jewish law as well as contain multiple inquiries into the Torah and the Hebrew bible. A page of Talmud is visually distinct, and illuminates the nature of the conversational compo-nent of the text. The structure of dialogue in the Talmud often takes on an if-then-but structure, often culminating in an implicit imperative for the readers to take up the discussion themselves. As such, this kind of structure tends to favor open-endedness as opposed to the restrictive nature of absolute answers. Classical midrashic teachings, on the other hand – including the Tannaitic, the post-Talmudic, and the Midrash Rabbah – were compiled at various points between the second and thirteenth centuries of the Common Era.

2 The first chapter of Genesis gives a day-by-day account of God’s creation of the world, ending with the creation of humans (1:26 “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God did he create it, male and female he created them”) and God’s blessing of the humans. The second chapter revisits the “day” on which God created humankind and offers an alternative explanation in which man is created first, and woman is created second as a byproduct from the man. Many scholars, including Rashi the legendary medieval Talmudic commentator, have suggested that the first chapter indicates the creation of one human being who was dual-gendered, and that the second chapter – arguably written much later than the first – is an attempt to provide an explanation for the ambiguity of the original text.

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3 Incoherence, it turns out, seems to be the narrative strategy of choice for artists striv-ing to respond both aesthetically and ethically to collective tragedies. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many artists attempted to depict the tragedy as it really was – to delineate through linear means the point of the traumatic moment. Recently, however, fragmented and metonymic narratives have begun to replace traditional modes of storytelling that relied on metaphors and representation. Carefully placed ellipses, moments of silence, and a hovering backdrop of incoherence now dominate the tra-jectories of some of the more ethical artistic responses to the Holocaust.

4 In Midnight in Paris (2011) Allen focuses precisely on our obsession with so-called golden eras – decades such as the modern era, which gave us great writers, artists, and thinkers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso – and our inability to understand that every era imagines the ones that came before to be grander. The complications that we imagine to be unique to our contem-porary era are to be found in every era. We lack the capacity to understand this because of the blind spots that inevitably characterize the present era.

Works Cited

Allen, W. (1990) “Random reflections of a second-rate mind.” Tikkun ( Jan./Feb.), 13–15, 71–27.

Bronski, M. (2003) “What it feels like for a boy; Woody Allen’s latest explores what it means to be a Jewish man in America.” Forward (Oct. 3), 14.

Girgus, S. (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lax, E. (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New York: Knopf.

Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne Univer-sity Press.

Levinas, E. (1985) Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Levinas, E. (1990) “As old as the world?” In E. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. A. Aronowicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 70–88.

Mast, G. (1979) The Comic Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Veitch, A. (2002) “The rise and fall of Woody Allen.” The Age (May 25). www.theage.com.au/

articles/2002/05/24/1022038476787.html (accessed Oct. 15, 2012).

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Annie Hall (1977) marks the arrival of the mature Woody Allen in several ways. First, its popular and critical reception ushered Allen into the mainstream of serious American filmmakers. He could no longer be dismissed as a quirky New York Jewish comedian who makes entertaining but otherwise forgettable films as vehicles for his one-liners. In addition, its complex narrative structure and memo-rable characters demonstrated his development as a serious screenwriter and director. But most important of all, in this film Allen introduced his theme of the random universe, which underlies almost every film he has made since then. By any measurement, Allen’s preoccupation with a universe without structure has become more prominent, and more oppressive, as his work developed through the years. By the time he reaches his European cycle, Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), his vision of a pointless universe has darkened to its bleakest degree ever.

In the earlier films, his characters cherished moments of happiness as tempo-rary respites from a grim, incomprehensible world. By the time he composes his European cycle, three decades after Annie Hall, he sees no escape from unrelieved pessimism. He regards life as utterly out of control; any quest for meaning must be exposed as a mere delusion. Even the most transitory moments of happiness are clearly doomed from the beginning. He offers much less of the verbal humor that made his earlier works accessible, as well as misinterpreted and undervalued. His vision has darkened. The material chaos provides an illuminating image for a chaotic moral order. Without coherence in the physical universe, the concepts of good and evil in human behavior become problematic. In a world with no reward

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Allen’s Random Universe in His European Cycle

Morality, Marriage, Magic

Richard A. Blake

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or punishment, what would motivate one to make decisions based on a sense of justice, much less altruism? The interaction of human beings holds no more con-sequence than the clashing of brute elements in the cosmos. While one may chose to lead a moral life or love another human being in such a world, the reasons for making these moral decisions remain irrational. For many of Allen’s characters, these irrational decisions frequently arise from their acceptance of some magic element that Allen regards as simply self-delusion.

In Annie Hall, Allen introduces his theme of a meaningless universe in a comic scene that puts Alvy Singer as a child ( Jonathan Munk) in a doctor’s office. Alvy explains why he stopped doing his homework: “The universe is expanding.  .  .  .  Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything” (Allen and Brickman 1983: 5). The script offers two responses to this childish concern. His mother comments: “What’s the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding.”1 The doctor, as a man of science, offers the more rational reaction: “It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy ourselves in the meantime – eh?” This advice echoes through Allen’s films like a musical motif that keeps recurring in different melodic contexts. The dialogue offers the usual Allen comic exchange, and visually Allen switches from the doctor’s office to the old family home, roosting under the Cyclone at Coney Island. The cars hurtle through space, supported only by a seemingly rickety wooden scaffold, just like the universe plunging through time into oblivion, while Alvy and his family cringe in their apartment, trying to create the illusion of stability amid the ominous rumbling of the rollercoaster. The comment on the human condition is grim, but the comic dialogue and amusement park setting rescue the scene from becoming lugubrious. In fact, it’s very funny. Allen articulates his philosophic conundrum through a precocious child and responds to it through the reactions of a protective Jewish mother and a sympathetic physician, who assumes the role of “man of science.” The film ends with Alvy’s recollections of the great times he had with Annie, and his resignation at losing her. Love passes, like the universe itself, but it brings pleasure while it lasts.

The “man of science” reappears regularly as Allen’s attempt to inject intelligibil-ity into a chaotic universe that preoccupies the protagonist, routinely Allen himself or an Allen surrogate. Examples abound: he can be a psychiatrist (Zelig, Oedipus Wrecks) or a physician (Hannah and Her Sisters, Alice), or a moral philosopher (Crimes and Misdemeanors). The “man of science” not only fails to rescue the Allen character from his melancholy, but often reveals personal inadequacy under the veneer of rationality. Louis Levy (Martin Bregmann), the Holocaust survivor and philosopher in Crimes and Misdemeanors, inexplicably commits suicide after offer-ing a plausible explanation of human existence to Allen’s character, Cliff Stern. The psychiatrist in Oedipus Wrecks (Marvin Chatinover) fails so badly in his attempt to help Sheldon Mills (Allen) that in desperation he turns his patient over to a psychic ( Julie Kavner), who by her own admission is simply a quack, and Dr. Yang

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(Keye Luke) in Alice relies on magic potions which only embroil further the chaos in which human beings exist. Since, however, Alvy’s initial observation of the expanding universe relies on contemporary physics, the physicist seems a particu-larly pertinent “man of science” for present purposes. Unlikely as they are to appear in Allen’s Manhattan world of writers, artists and successful professionals, two play prominent roles in his exploration of a random universe. Significantly, the physicist changes dramatically as Allen’s view sours.

Lloyd ( Jack Warden) in September (1987) visits the family country home as the latest husband of the boozy matriarch Diane (Elaine Stritch). A man of profes-sorial dignity, he tries to mediate the endless family quarrels with his rational approach to the issues, but never really manages to rein in his compulsively destructive wife. In a moment of quiet one evening, while half-heartedly playing a game of pool with Peter (Sam Waterston), the aspiring novelist who has taken the cottage by the lake in the hope of overcoming his writer’s block, the would-be author distractedly rolls balls around the table. The unpredictable interaction of their collision provides an image of the brute forces colliding mindlessly in the furthest reaches of space. As they play in the semi-darkness, Peter asks about Lloyd’s work, having been told by Diane that he was involved in the development of the atomic bomb. Lloyd tells him that he works on something far more ter-rifying than blowing up the planet. Peter asks if anything could be more terrify-ing than that, and Lloyd replies: “Yes. The knowledge that it doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s all random, radiating aimlessly out of nothing. Then it vanishes forever.  .  .  .  All space, all time, just a temporary convulsion.” When Peter, an aspiring artist, invites him to look at the beauty of the nighttime sky, Lloyd agrees with his perspective, but then continues: “I see it for what it truly is: haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.” Peter becomes upset, and comments that he has to sleep alone that night. Lloyd replies: “That’s why I cling to Diane.” The scientist admits that he stays with this difficult woman simply because she provides a point of human contact in an otherwise hostile world.

Two decades pass and the physicist returns in the form of Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) in Whatever Works (2009). Lloyd functions as one of the lesser char-acters in the ensemble cast of September, but Boris dominates virtually every moment of Whatever Works. He deliberately cultivates his persona as a loud-mouthed misanthrope – or, more accurately, a boor. He claims to have almost been nominated for a Nobel Prize but, because of politics, he never made the final list. He knows about string theory, and taught for a while at Columbia, but he presently occupies his time by teaching chess to children, whom he calls cretins, morons, and subhumans because of their inability to conceive of the chessboard in the same mathematical terms that he does. To Boris, their incompetent moves seem irrational, if not perverse. In frustration, he lashes out verbally and, on occa-sion, physically. Yet in contrast to his rational grasp of the random nature of the physical universe, the random nature of his human relationships baffle him. His

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first wife, Jessica, provided everything he could want in a partner, but even though their marriage seemed ideal, he tried to kill himself during one of his panic attacks. She left him. Boris reluctantly admits that his improbable meeting and marriage to Melody (Evan Rachel Wood) brought some happiness into his life, but the relationship is a farce. It is doomed from the outset. From the first flicker of affection between these two cartoonish characters, we know the simple country girl from an Evangelical family in Mississippi and the acerbic Jewish intellectual from Lower Manhattan cannot remain together for long. When Melanie finds someone closer to her own age and interests, the marriage ends, and Boris once again jumps out a window, only to land on a woman who would become his third wife. It’s all an accident of timing, even though the prospective bride claims to be a psychic who knew the precise time of his jump. Neither reason nor magic offer a plausible explanation of this random event.

Through their scientific knowledge Lloyd and Boris both appreciate the chaotic nature of the universe, but their reactions differ dramatically. As though fighting back, Lloyd cultivates a lasting personal relationship to make life endurable. He interacts patiently with Diane’s dysfunctional family. In contrast, Boris rants at his inexplicably loyal friends and turns to the camera to harangue the audience in the theater. When the principals gather for a New Year’ s Eve celebration at the end of the film, he berates them, and the audience, for failing to realize that the turning of the year is a sham. Everybody tries desperately to be happy, but the event simply marks but another steppingstone toward death.2 His sardonic response to existence is do “whatever works” to filch a few transitory moments of happiness that will vanish immediately. His only concession to morality is his proviso, “as long you don’t hurt anybody.” His vision reveals a consistent continu-ity: human relationships mirror cosmic forces; they are by nature unpredictable. To borrow Lloyd’s words, Boris sees them as haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent. Lloyd, however, makes a distinction between human and cosmic forces; Boris won’t, or can’t.

With Match Point, Allen moves the location from Manhattan to London, but he continues Boris’s reasoning. This film provides Allen’s most pointed comment to date on his conflation of the personal and physical universes as equally haphazard and meaningless. The opening image consists of a slow motion shot of a tennis ball soaring over the net. It strikes the upper rim, and flies straight up. It is not clear on which side the ball will drop, and that of course will determine the outcome of the volley. As the dramatic action starts, Chris Wilton ( Jonathan Rhys Meyers) presents his credentials while he applies for work as a coach in an exclusive London tennis club. He is the typical Allen hero. His modest success on the pro tour marks him as a man of some talent in his chosen line of work, just as Allen’s heroes are generally successful writers or artists. As a native of Ireland and a man of modest background, Chris feels himself an outsider in the sophisticated world of prosperous London society, just as the stammering Allen characters struggle to become accepted in a Manhattan world of beautiful women and

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articulate men. Sometimes talent and application do not guarantee success. In the earlier films, the heroes’ frustrations have comic overtones. Chris lacks any humor. In Allen’s random universe, without any grounded morality, Chris is deadly serious in his determination to do anything necessary to become accepted into this world of privilege.

Through his work at the club, Chris ingratiates himself with the Hewett family. Tom (Matthew Goode) takes tennis lessons, and introduces Chris to his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). They grow close. In a candid conversation with her, he describes his background and determination to better himself. He reads Dosto-evsky, two novels at a time. She volunteers to take him to galleries. Before long, they plan to marry. Tom also introduces Chris to Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) a sensuous but unsuccessful American actress. After one of her failed auditions, Tom takes the role of the “man of science” by explaining that success on the stage is not a matter of talent; it’s only a matter of chance, just like everything else in the universe. Nola’s floundering career and her modest family background make her an unlikely aspirant to the Hewett family. At his mother’s instigation, Tom drops her. Chris stands ready to take his place, even though Nola warns him that he could “blow it” with the Hewetts by “making a pass” at her. Chris wants both women and connives to have them. He marries into the Hewett family, while continuing a passionate relationship with Nola. The marriage accomplishes what he intended. He enters the family firm with a spacious office whose interlaced steel lattice external framework suggests his being imprisoned in a birdcage.3 At one point, he even suffers an attack of claustrophobia at work. He accepts his confinement as the price to pay for his success: a luxurious apartment in town and access to the Hewetts’ country estate, and, because of his job in the family busi-ness, a generous expense account and a car and driver.

Although the marriage is imaged as imprisoning him in a steel cage, it is in fact a fragile union. Chris continues regular trysts with Nola. Chloe clearly loves him, but soon their intimacy revolves around her desire to have three children while she is still young. She plans carefully. At breakfast she takes her temperature to gauge her fertility and asks Chris to have sex with her before he goes to work, since the morning offers the best chance for conception. Her careful calculations not only drain the romance from their marriage, but they are useless – they fail. Planning counts for little, since conception is as haphazard at the universe itself. While Chloe’s frustration deepens, Nola becomes pregnant, noting that just one time, because of his eagerness, they failed to use proper protection. Again, it is a matter of chance. Nola refuses to undergo her third abortion, nor will she be bought off. Always high-strung and moody, she becomes hysterical and deter-mined to replace Chloe as Mrs. Wilton. Chris lies continually to both women. Not willing to sacrifice everything his marriage has brought him, Chris concludes that he has no option but murder, and once he makes his decision, not the slight-est twinge of conscience will interfere with his carefully calculated plans. The woman in the next apartment will be sacrificed to make the murder appear as part

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of a drug-related robbery. Luck is on his side. With sly Hitchcockian touches of suspense, Allen has Chris deal with Chloe’s near-discovery of the murder weapon at home and with dropped shotgun shells and an intrusive neighbor at the crime site, but luck allows Chris to escape all these close calls.

In his earlier films, Allen frequently allowed his characters to gather moments of genuine love in their relationships, as fleeting as they might be. In Match Point, he constructs a thoroughly loveless universe. Chris uses Chloe to further his career, and Chloe soon allows their marriage to become merely the necessary means to her having a family. Allen makes Nola a most disagreeable woman. She is self-centered and ill tempered, and she makes little effort to be pleasant to anyone. She and Chris indulge in a spontaneous moment of passion after she realizes she will have no place in the Hewett family, and their ongoing liaison seems largely confined to the physical. Like Tom Hewett, her previous lover, Chris provides Nola with some touch of personal and social self-affirmation to prop up her fragile ego. Two singularly unlikeable people scarcely love each other; they may not even like each other. Their relationship, much like that of Boris and Melody in Whatever Works, holds little prospect for success.

While the themes of morality and marriage stand at the core of the film, Allen introduces the theme of magic only in the penultimate scene.4 In a dream sequence, suggesting a miraculous apparition of ghosts, both Nola and her murdered neigh-bor, Mrs. Eastley (Margaret Tyzack), appear as personifications of his conscience. Mrs. Eastley asks why she had to be killed along with Nola and his unborn child. By borrowing the familiar military explanation for civilian casualties, his response is chilling: they were merely “collateral damage.” He explains: “The innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme.” Life is meaningless, he con-tinues: “Sophocles said never to have been born may be the greatest boon of all.”5 Nola’s ghost tells him that his actions were clumsy, and it would be fitting if he were caught, but her remarks make no impression. Chris has already been defini-tively exonerated by the police through a series of lucky coincidences that connect the incriminating evidence to another criminal. He is confident in his reply: “It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. There would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.” But by this time he knows he will not be caught.

The cold, methodical murders, executed without remorse, show the final dis-integration of any morality whatever – not only for Chris, but, one might surmise, for Woody Allen as well. Allen seems to accept crime without punishment as part of the normal order in a universe without order, but he does not delight in this position. In the famous exchange at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Allen closes with a question mark. Dr. Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) has also gotten away with murder. Over time and after several rough periods, he gradually overcomes his guilt, and he prospers. Cliff Stern (Allen) has just suffered the col-lapse of his marriage, his romantic aspirations, and his film project. Although he is a man who has tried to live his life with some degree of moral integrity, his

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efforts lead only to a series of failures. In this film, Allen leaves the question open: if there is morality in a rational universe, how is it possible to find it, and what can motivate one to try to lead a decent life? Match Point ends with a period. Chris wrestles with his conscience only for a few moments in one bad dream, and then, like Judah Rosenthal, he too prospers. In its final scene, the Hewetts and the Wiltons gather for a champagne toast to welcome the arrival of his and Chloe’s first child, and Tom comments that he doesn’t care if the child becomes great, as long as he is lucky. Allen certainly does not condone murder, or any other form of amorality for that matter, nor does he make any attempt to justify Chris’s actions or values, but the scene does suggest that he has given up on his attempt to ground his ethics. There is no commentator like Cliff Stern to raise the possibil-ity of finding moral consequences for one’s actions and thus meaning in the universe.

Allen clarifies the distinction in his interview with Eric Lax in 2007. While they discuss the morality in Match Point, Allen challenges the notion that he has dis-missed any notion of morality in a godless universe:

What I’m really saying, and it’s not hidden or esoteric – it’s just clear as a bell – is that we have to accept that the universe is godless and life is meaningless, often a terrible and brutal experience with no hope, and that love relationships are very, very hard, and that we still need to find a way to not only cope but lead a decent and moral life (Lax 2007: 123–124).

Allen’s analysis seems more appropriate to Crimes and Misdemeanors. The unre-lieved nihilism of Match Point suggests that Allen has taken his search for morality into a blind alley, even though he might not be ready to acknowledge that inescap-able conclusion. In Match Point, unpunished crime happens as a fact of life. No one can do anything to alter the fact. One merely tries to keep a distance from criminality and continue trying to live a decent, moral life without trying to understand the basis of morality or its imperatives.

In a far more lighthearted treatment, Allen continues his exploration of moral consequences in a random universe in Scoop, the second of the London trilogy. With this film, he returns to familiar Allen territory. His principal characters might have come straight from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Allen appears as Sid Waterman, aka the Great Splendini, a tummler from the Borsch Circuit in the Catskills, who is taking a summer break from his usual round of birthdays and bar/bat mitzvahs to bring his magic act to London. He teams up with Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), who has given up her ambition to become a dental technician to pursue a career in journalism. She considers herself an ace reporter for her college newspaper. Her name (Sid keeps referring to her as “Mandelbaum”) and Brooklyn background enable Allen to revert to his trademark ethnic verbal humor and the familiar comic device of having his middle class Jewish characters trying to fit in with wealthy and refined gentile society.

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Since Scoop provides many of the comic elements of Allen’s lighter works, the film is fanciful in tone, and thus magic can provide the pretense of order in a random universe, since reason obviously cannot. Magic provides the catalyst for the action. The narrative begins with the death of Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), a famous investigative reporter. Joined by other newly deceased passengers, Strombel sails down the Styx with a hooded Charon, complete with scythe, at the helm on their way to the Underworld. Another traveler (Fanella Woolgar) tells Strombel that she has been poisoned because she discovered evidence linking her employer, Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), son of the wealthy Lord Lyman, to a series of murders by the notorious Tarot Card Killer. Intrigued by her story, Joe cannot resist the challenge of one last scoop. He slips overboard in order to return to London as a ghost to solve the crime, but of course he will need accomplices among the living.

The strands of the plot come together neatly when Sondra and her English girlfriend Vivian (Romola Garai) take Vivian’s nephew to Sid’s show. After a series of magic tricks involving the standard props, Sid turns to a magic box the size of a telephone booth that makes audience members disappear. The gimmick reprises the routine in his Oedipus Wrecks episode of New York Stories (1989), even to the point of citing “molecules” as the explanation for the vanishing, as did the assistant in Oedipus. In both cases, this “scientific” explanation is clearly absurd; magic is a series of inexplicable events, like the universe itself. In the earlier film, Sheldon Mills (Allen) sits in the audience while his mother (Mae Questel) disappears, only to reappear as an immense mirage floating over Manhattan. In Scoop, Sid’s decora-tive assistant leads Sondra to the stage, and after a few exchanges of Borscht Circuit banter not unlike the patter of the magician in Oedipus (George Schindler), Sid puts her into the box, where she meets Strombel and learns of his suspicions about Peter Lyman. Ever ambitious, she realizes that this story could make her career as a journalist. At home she goes online to learn all she can about the Tarot Card Killer and Peter Lyman, and she concludes that the ghost’s story is credible. Sondra decides to assume the role of an investigative journalist and crack the case. She returns to the theater and asks Sid to put her back in the box, where she hopes to gather further information from Strombel. He appears on stage and repeats his story to both Sondra and Sid, but Charon interrupts the conversation to retrieve his missing passenger. Against his better judgment, Sid joins Sandra to form an investigative team in a classic movie caper. They plan to gain access to the Lymans and get to the truth about Peter.

Magic rarely leaves the screen for long. Lacking social skills appropriate to his new social setting among Lord Lyman’s coterie, Sid avoids risky conversation by performing card tricks for the family and their guests. Sondra tells Peter of her interest in tarot and other forms of new age “mysticism,” a bit of information that allows Peter and Sondra to become involved with an antique tarot deck that will eventually lead her to identify the murderer. When the investigation becomes stalled, Strombel makes another appearance to Sid, giving him the combination

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to a vault that contains vital clues to the case. Only magic can explain how he obtained the information or how he knew that it had become crucial to the inves-tigation. In the final scene, Sid uses card tricks to entertain his fellow passengers on his own ferryboat ride to the Underworld.

Despite its being a light comedy, Scoop reprises several of the motifs of marriage and morality that Allen explored in Match Point. Sid and Sondra, as Americans, inhabit a world apart from the titled Lymans, as did Chris Wilton, as an Irishman, in the world of the Hewetts. This difference in social standing among the charac-ters runs through many of the comedies, but in Scoop the comic situation also involves two serious moral reflections. First, Sid and Sondra will do whatever is necessary to accomplish their objectives. This factor drives the plot and will be treated in some detail in a moment. Second, and briefly, Allen asks whether, in the absence of an ethical structure in the universe, class determines the outlines of morality. Chris, safely ensconced in the Hewitt clan by the end of the film, has murdered two women of lower social station. Peter Lyman, because of his fam-ily’s station, seems at first to be able to escape punishment for the murder of a series of prostitutes, which in fact he did not commit, as well as his actual murder of a former mistress and the attempted murder of Sondra, which finally proves his undoing. For Allen, the rich clearly enjoy a different relationship to conven-tional morality, the police, the media, and their own consciences than do those of lesser station.6

This caustic view of social class as determinative of morality reveals another element of Allen’s deepening pessimism. In Bullets over Broadway (1994), Allen explored the proposition that “the artist creates his own moral universe” in a comic format. Cheech (Chazz Palmnteri) plays a mafia hit man assigned to protect the leading lady, Olive Neal ( Jennifer Tilly), who has little talent beyond being the Boss’s protégée. Initially assigned the task of seeing that the playwright, David Shayne ( John Cusack), does not diminish Olive’s role, Cheech makes several artis-tic suggestions that clearly improve the Shayne’s work. After nearly rewriting the entire play, Cheech becomes possessive of his artistic creation, and does not hesi-tate to murder Olive to prevent her inept performance from ruining a work that he now considers his. Throughout his work, Allen routinely has the talented (at least talented in their own narcissistic self-image) exploit others for their own ends. In Scoop and Match Point, the justification of morality by talent morphs into some-thing quite different. Allen sees his amoral characters as claiming the right to define their own ethical boundaries not by talent but by social standing.

Finding moral principles in any of the characters in Scoop can be a challenging task; they do whatever they must to accomplish their goals. Sondra first appears as she tries to ambush a famous film director Mike Tinsley (Kevin McNally) to obtain an interview for her college newspaper. As a veteran celebrity, he initially dismisses this naive but pushy reporter as yet another annoyance, but he reconsid-ers. He takes her to his hotel room with the promise of giving her the interview she wants. The conversation scarcely begins when he offers her whiskey, with the

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inevitable result. In Tinsley’s mind, his artistic status justifies his taking advantage of an impressionable American college student. He leaves before she awakens, and her only regret, as she tells her girlfriend Vivian, is that she can’t remember the sex and never got the interview.

Sondra has grown wiser from her encounter with Tinsley, at least wise enough to use her attractiveness to her own advantage as she turns the tables on Peter Lyman. With Sid’s help, she plans a mock drowning incident in the pool of an exclusive London club while Peter swims his daily quota of laps. He rescues her; she looks smashing in her bright red swimsuit and without her glasses. She intro-duces herself as Jade Spence, of the Palm Beach Spences, and Sid as her father. As their relationship deepens, Peter clearly feels attracted to Jade/Sondra, and even though she deliberately uses her charms to try to convict him of murder, she finds herself gradually falling in love with him. Their romance is genuine, and satisfy-ing, from their point of view, but an audience cannot forget that it is founded on a series of lies, and, given their difference in social station, it has as little chance of enduring as did the marriage of Boris and Melody in Whatever Works. Strombel reappears to berate her for falling in love with the subject of her investigation. Through their relationship, Allen provides more evidence of his darkening pessi-mism. In Jade/Sondra and Peter, Allen argues that happiness that comes from love is not only fleeting, as he maintained in the earlier films – it is delusional, based as it is on deceit and self-interest.

The lies continue, and they become even more consequential. Just as Sondra decides to confess her assumed identity, Peter tells her he must leave town for a few days, but while Jade and Sid share a birthday dinner in a modest restaurant, they spot Peter striding toward an even less savory part of town. As they follow him, they hear a scream, and the police discover yet another victim of the Tarot Card Killer. That convinces Jade that she has been right. She takes the story to the editor of a prestigious London newspaper (Charles Dance), a friend of Vivian’s father, who points out that he would never run the story for two reasons. First, she presents only circumstantial evidence against a highly respected citizen; and second, the actual Tarot Card Killer has been apprehended and has confessed. While she believes the explanation and regrets her suspicions, Sid remains skepti-cal. With an insight that borders on the magical, he explains his theory that Peter had become a victim of blackmail by a prostitute, and to eliminate her, he merely mimicked the methods of the Tarot Card Killer, knowing the police would link his crime to the murders of the real serial killer. Sondra cannot believe such a wild story and returns to Peter. Sid cannot drop the case. Assuming yet another ficti-tious identity, he poses as an ace reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and bribes a prostitute to reveal information linking Peter to the victim, at least to the initials on an envelope he had stolen from Peter’s luggage during his first visit to the Lymans’ country estate.

The final deception backfires. When Sid telephones Sondra to warn her of the danger, Peter intercepts the call, and invites Sondra for a pleasant row on the lake,

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where he intends to drown her after telling the true story of his committing the one murder. He pushes her overboard and watches as she struggles to keep afloat. He calls the police to tell them of a terrible boating accident, but Sondra, who was captain of the Brooklyn Community Center swimming team, not the found-ering waif he thought he had rescued from the pool at the club, reappears just as the police prepare to leave. The web of deceptions, woven by Sondra and Sid, produces a successful outcome. Peter is arrested and Sondra’s story receives praise from her editor. During her final scene, Sondra reveals that Sid cannot share her success. Racing to her rescue in a Mini Cooper and driving on the left side of the road, Sid crashed and was killed. (Allen had not killed off his character since Love and Death [1975]. Could this be Allen’s way of telling his audience that he is finally laying to rest the nebbish character he embodied in dozens of films over the last 40 years?)7

Allen’s dark joke about his own demise that ends Scoop sets the stage for the even darker tone for Cassandra’s Dream. In it, Allen leaves behind the sunny garden parties and the breezy charms of Scoop and returns to the murky, airless world of Match Point. Magic in the form of an amiable ghost helps Sid and Sondra accom-plish their goals, but in the amoral universe of Cassandra’s Dream, Terry (Colin Farrell) and Ian (Ewan McGregor) find little outside help to enable them to escape the whirlpool of events dragging to them to destruction. As in Match Point, luck determines everything in Allen’s random universe. A run of good fortune in gam-bling lures two young men into a vulnerable state of self-delusion, and as they grow in confidence, their good fortune turns cruelly against them. They plan a perfect crime, but in fact they can do little to influence the ultimate outcome of their actions. As was the case with Chris Wilton in Match Point, circumstances force them to cross that invisible line of morality that keeps most men from com-mitting premeditated murder. There is a difference, however. Through his good luck, Chris gets away with murder and prospers. Terry and Ian succeed in eluding the police, but that matters little. Luck finds other ways to convict them of their crimes. In Allen’s stark version of a meaningless universe, some people are simply dealt a good hand at birth; others are not, and their luck changes capriciously and often. It’s simply the way things are, as Allen understands it.

The title of the film provides a clear indication of Allen’s perception of the events he portrays on the screen. In Greek myth, Cassandra had the gift of proph-ecy but, sadly, her gift did little good, because she also received a curse from Apollo, whose attentions she spurned. Because of the curse, no one would ever believe her prophecies. Virgil borrows the Greek material for his Latin epic, The Aeneid. The poet describes Cassandra during the final hours of Troy. While the Trojan leaders believe that their enemy has sailed away, she tries to warn them about the treachery of the Greeks with their wooden horse. Of course, the leaders of Troy regard her message as the ravings of a lunatic, and welcome the wooden horse within their walls as a parting gift from the vanquished army.8 Once within the city walls, the Achaean warriors, hidden within the huge horse, break out,

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open the gates, and let the destroying army enter. Cassandra thus represents a warning of doom that goes unheeded.

Allen uses her name as a title to underline his theme of hopelessness. Ian and Terry should have recognized the signs of their rapidly approaching doom, but they could not believe that they were headed for disaster. Cassandra’s Dream is the name of the greyhound that paid 60-to-1 in a race Terry bet on. With his win-nings, he has the money to buy a sailboat with his brother and, out of gratitude, they name their boat after the dog that made it all possible. In a terrible twist of irony, the boat eventually becomes the setting for both of their deaths. In this world that Allen creates for the two brothers, good fortune provides only delusion, like the Trojans celebrating the gift that they believe symbolizes a successful end to the war. For Allen, Cassandra’s dream of imminent catastrophe embodies a more accurate understanding of the universe in its mindless reality. Terry and Ian can do little to alter the outcome of their actions.

Terry’s gambling addiction makes his life a rollercoaster ride. Allen’s script emphasizes his sudden changes in luck. His run of winners at the track leads to the illusion that his streak of good luck makes him a sure bet in a high stakes poker game, in which he is clearly in over his head. His face changes from worry to panic, and he borrows heavily to continue playing. Although the scene closes with a sense of foreboding, it turns out that in fact his luck changed later in the night, and he actually won enough to finance a house with his wife Kate (Sally Hawkins). Before long, Terry loses heavily again, but this time his luck does not change. He must borrow £90,000 from loan sharks. His life begins to split at the seams. He drinks heavily and turns to prescription drugs to get him through the day. When the owner of the garage discovers Terry has been secretly lending out his customers’ cars, he loses his job. In an effort to help his brother, Ian takes money from the safe in his father’s restaurant, and tries to borrow from his mother, but even their combined efforts leave them desperately short of the amount they need.

Ian’s risk taking assumes a more subtle form. Like Chris Wilton and many other Allen characters through the decades, Ian longs to rise to another level of society, and he will take whatever chances he must to make it. He determines to move beyond helping his father with the restaurant as soon as possible. Despite his limited resources, he nurtures a fantasy about investing in a chain of hotels in California, and if he can’t realize his fantasy immediately, he can try to create the illusion that he has. At every moment, he risks having his lies uncovered. To impress his girlfriend of the moment, Lucy (Ashley Madekwe), a waitress at his father’s restaurant, he takes her for a ride on his boat and borrows an expensive Jaguar from the garage where Terry works, without the owner’s consent. During the ride home from a picnic in the country with Lucy, he stops on the roadside to help Angela (Haley Atwell), a beautiful actress, who by chance has broken down on his route. She thanks him by giving him tickets to her show. Lucy knows about the borrowed Jaguar, but Ian tells Angela that the car is his, and that he has made

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his money from investments, like a chain of hotels in California. Faced with the prospect of moving into an artistic set with a beautiful actress and model, Ian drops the waitress without a word. With a simple call to Angela, Lucy could destroy Ian’s web of lies in an instant, but his luck holds. Although she has been rejected without a word of explanation or apology, for some inexplicable reason she never speaks up.

The deception cuts in both directions, however. Angela’s role in her play involves nudity and simulated sex, as Ian discovers, but she denies any embarrass-ment by explaining that she is only acting. Ian may not suspect it, but in their romantic relationship she may be acting for him as well. She hopes that Ian will take her to California, where she may meet some film directors. His illusion of having found love, and someone who could help him live his fantasy, lasts but a short time. He eventually realizes that Angela merely uses her beauty to get what she wants. Visiting her flat one evening, he discovers that she is with someone else. Ian waits outside for hours to confront her about the man she has been with all night. She neither apologizes nor expresses regret for compromising their relationship. In a moment of candor, she admits she might be willing to sleep with a director to get a part in a film, depending on the part and the director. At one point, Angela tells him matter-of-factly that she plans to go to Morocco for a few days with someone else. Their relationship fits the pattern for Allen’s lovers during this period: it is based purely on self-interest, and will in all probability end very quickly, without the lingering pleasant memories found in, say, Annie Hall or Manhattan.

Terry’s debt, coupled with his physical and psychological disintegration, and Ian’s desperate need to make his fantasy a reality and hold on to Angela, have backed the brothers into a corner. They can be rescued only by a miracle, and that miracle appears as if by magic, like the classical deus ex machina, in the form of their Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), their mother’s brother. Allen’s presentation of the character makes him seem unearthly – perhaps godlike – from the begin-ning. Early in the film, at the dinner table, the family matriarch (Clare Higgins) boasts about Howard’s achievements, not only to prod her sons, but to humiliate her husband, whose restaurant continues to struggle. Howard started with nothing, she says, became a world famous physician, does cosmetic surgery in the third world, and has become fabulously wealthy in the process. His success rep-resents precisely the kind of transition to another social class that Ian yearns for. As a sign of his boundless intellectual energy, she mentions that even in middle age he is learning Chinese. Most admirable of all, she notes, he has remained loyal to the family. He has helped them financially on several occasions. She knows the terrible predicaments of her sons, but she believes her brother would be willing rescue them. If he seems too good to be true, he is. Howard is another of Allen’s examples of deception.

Howard arrives in London for a few weeks’ respite between his business activi-ties in China and those in California. At a three-way meeting in the garden, he

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seems amenable to helping his nephews, even though Terry has asked for £90,000 and Ian for £100,000, and neither has collateral or any proven business experience. His generosity borders on folly, but generosity does not motivate him. A sudden rain shower drives them to take shelter in a thicket that ensnares them, much like Chris Wilton’s latticed office windows. There, Howard reveals that he wants something in return. (To heighten the intensity of the scene, Tom Wilkinson recites his lines with the nervous stammer that Woody Allen has perfected when playing his neurotic characters, and that other actors try to imitate in Allen films.) He explains that Martin Burns (Philip Davis), a business associate, knows too much about Howard’s illegal activities and will talk to the police to save himself from prosecution. Howard fears that he may have to spend the rest of his life in prison. He concludes that Burns must be eliminated. The brothers gasp in disbe-lief, and Howard rages at their disloyalty to the family: “Family is family; blood is blood!” The brothers back away, but they eventually come to grips with the hope-lessness of their situation without Howard, and they conclude that they actually could commit murder and get away with it. In that case everyone’s problems would be solved.

Again, an interesting comparison shows Allen’s progression. Judah Rosenthal in Crimes and Misdemeanors is also a physician who filched money from his philan-thropic organization, but when confronted with the fact, he claims that he paid back every cent with interest. For some days he wrestles with his decision to murder Dolores (Anjelica Huston), as his brother Jack ( Jerry Orbach) had urged, but in the end he goes ahead, entrusting Jack to handle the details. Jack helps him because of family loyalty; he acknowledges that Judah has helped him in the past. In contrast, Howard makes no mention of paying back anything he has stolen. He shows none of Judah’s reluctance to authorize a murder. He presents his plan to his nephews forcefully as the only possible solution, and not only urges them, but essentially coerces them to undertake the project. Judah suffers remorse for a while; Howard simply disappears from the story. Once Burns has been murdered, Howard goes off to further business dealings in California, apparently safe from prosecution. The question of morality struggle never nuances Allen’s portrait of Howard, as it did Judah. Judah evokes some trace of sympathy for his plight; Howard does not.

Terry does not have Howard’s moral callousness. After the murder, he falls more deeply into drugs, alcohol, and depression. His wife tells Ian that he in fan-tasizing about having committed a murder and is talking about suicide. He rants about “breaking God’s law,” but Ian sees this explanation as the reasoning of a man who is clearly losing control of his life. Ian – and Allen – regard this kind of explanation as a desperate attempt to impose a moral value on their actions by citing a higher authority, an idea that Allen has already dismissed in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. Terry tells Ian that he intends to confess to the police; he telephoned once, but hung up before telling his story. Ian urges him not to do anything foolish. He argues that they inhabit a violent, cruel world, and that

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Terry has to come face-to-face with his own human nature. Making things right through confession and accepting punishment for crimes strikes Ian and Howard – and possibly Woody Allen at this point – as an absurd concept in a world without moral imperatives. When Ian tells Howard about Terry, Howard immediately concludes that they have only one possible solution: Ian must kill Terry to prevent his informing the police. The irony is blatant. Howard once cited family loyalty as the compelling motivation for murder. At the end of this cycle of crime, he cites self-preservation as the overriding value that justifies fratricide.

As if to mock the meticulous planning of his most horrendous crime, luck determines the outcome for Ian. He takes the prescription drugs from Terry’s bedroom with the idea of mixing them into a beer for Terry when they go sailing on Cassandra’s Dream. With Terry’s well-known history of alcohol and drug abuse, finding these substances in his body would raise few questions. During an afternoon of heavy drinking, Ian plans to doctor one last beer with the drugs and simply push Terry overboard in his stupor. After mixing the drink, Ian realizes the enormity of what he is about to do, and in the first moral decision he has made since they entered into their original conspiracy with Howard, Ian smashes the bottle before Terry can take it. His moral decision brings disastrous consequences. Terry stumbles down the ladder into the cabin and crashes into Ian, who falls backward, strikes his head and dies, as though paying a price for his own moral scruple. The police investigators on the scene conclude that Terry committed suicide by drowning after he killed Ian in an apparent fight in the cabin. Howard does not reappear in the film, but since he has no traceable link to the crimes, one can conclude that he will escape suspicion. A brief coda shows Kate and Angela, as yet unaware of the tragedy, shopping for clothes in a fashionable boutique. Their appearance suggests that life in this uncaring, morally indifferent universe goes on with all its mundane activities with little notice of treachery, deceit, and murder.

In moving from London to the sunny Mediterranean before returning to New York for Whatever Works, Allen might have been tempted to lighten his pessimism, but he resisted the temptation as he wrote and directed Vicky Cristina Barcelona. He certainly offers a brighter palette of color with the help of his cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe. He delights in the art and architecture of Barcelona, stages much of his dialogue in brightly lit verandas, parks, and gardens, and dresses his actors in colorful summer clothes. Arguably, this is Allen’s most visually appealing film. Appearances can be deceptive, however. Despite their beautiful setting and genial socializing, the characters remain desperately alone. Allen stresses the theme by repeatedly demonstrating the difficulties they have with simple com-munication: cell phones that don’t work, a poet who refuses to release his poems to the public, a failed documentary film project, a language barrier that proves not only an embarrassment but a weapon.

For Allen, authentic intimacy has always been the form of human communica-tion that is most difficult to achieve. In recent years, it becomes an impossible

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delusion. As the story of this film unfolds, each of the characters sees her/his illusions of romantic relationship shattered, and must face a future of unrelieved loneliness, which Allen continues to propose as the universal lot of humankind in this uncaring universe. Their actions have little effect on bringing happiness into their lives.

The plot follows the adventures of the two eponymous heroines. When Vicky (Rebecca Hall) comes to Barcelona to spend the summer with family friends, the Nashes, she is already engaged to Doug (Chris Messina), a very successful but dull young businessman from New York. Her life becomes complicated when a charm-ing artist, Juan Antonio ( Javier Bardem) invites her and her travelling companion Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) to Oviedo for a weekend of sightseeing, music, and sex. Vicky recoils at his crass invitation, but Cristina is intrigued by his candor and welcomes the adventure. After icily rejecting his advances for a time, Vicky finds herself seduced by the wine, guitar music, and the hypnotic, if not magical, per-suasive powers of Juan Antonio. Afterwards, she feels embarrassed about her momentary dalliance with a near stranger, but before long she discovers that she has actually fallen in love with him. Some days later, a conversation with a dreary young couple from New York, in which they talk of property values in the suburbs, interior decorators, bridge, golf, and Doug’s business connections, gives Vicky a glimpse into her own future. The message is reinforced when Judy Nash (Patricia Clarkson), her hostess for the summer, confesses that she finds her marriage to Mark (Kevin Dunn) barren, but that even with the help of psycho-therapy she hasn’t found the courage to leave her dull husband and start a life of her own.

Into this web of intertwined connections and relationships, Allen places Vicky as the central figure of the narrative. When Doug unexpectedly joins her in Spain, he rushes her into a civil marriage to satisfy his conventional sense of propriety. Their trip to Seville together thus becomes a honeymoon. Marriage only makes Vicky feel more repressed. She angrily rejects a harmless flirtation from a fellow language student, explaining that she is a married woman. Shopping in an outdoor market with Vicky, Doug buys a caged bird for Judy and Mark as a gesture of gratitude for their hospitality, and says he plans to get one just like it for their own home in New York. Vicky may or may not grasp the tragic symbolism of the gift. As the newlyweds prepare to return home for the formal church wedding they have planned for their friends and family, Juan Antonio makes one last attempt to rekindle his and Vicky’s romance. She almost succumbs, but Maria Elena (Pené-lope Cruz), Juan Antonio’s former wife, interrupts their tryst, firing wildly with a revolver. One bullet nicks Vicky’s hand, but she tells Doug the wound came from an antique gun her Spanish teacher was demonstrating for her during their fare-well lunch. For the rest of her life, the resulting scar will undoubtedly remind her of Juan Antonio, Barcelona, and the life she might have had. A voiceover explains that, in the end, Vicky returned to the Westchester suburbs of New York to

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embrace the dull dependable life she had envisioned for herself before her summer of awakening.

Before their vacation trip, Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) had spent three years making a 12-minute documentary film entitled Why Love Is So Hard to Define, but she was dissatisfied with the finished work. Always more of a free spirit than Vicky, she eagerly accepts Juan Antonio’s invitation to Oviedo despite Vicky’s objections. On the first night, she agrees to meet Juan Antonio in his hotel room, but as they embrace, she becomes sick with what may be food poisoning. Cristina must remain in her hotel room for the weekend, while Vicky and Juan Antonio continue without her. Back in Barcelona, Juan Antonio renews his pursuit of Cristina. He invites her to a wine tasting, and this leads to a tour of his studio and paintings, and love. Before long, Cristina moves in with him. Their romance takes a surpris-ing turn when Juan Antonio learns that his former wife Maria Elena, hospitalized after another suicide attempt, is being released. He explains that she has no money and nowhere to go; she must live with them until she becomes more settled. Neither woman is pleased with the arrangement. Hoping to ease the situation for Cristina, he immediately assigns Maria Elena to the guest room, and he insists that she speak English in deference to Cristina, but Maria Elena defies his request to spite Cristina.

Their rivalry takes an odd twist. Before long, Juan Antonio admits that he makes love to both women, and Maria Elena and Cristina also become intimate with each other. They all thrive in this irregular arrangement. Maria Elena and Juan Antonio enter into a productive period with their painting, and Maria Elena seems to become more stable. With the help of Maria Elena, Cristina discovers a talent for photography, and devotes herself to the work. When Cristina seems to have found a direction in her life, she simply leaves the house and goes to France for a while with no credible explanation. In the end, the voiceover explains that she is going back to America, still searching for what she wants, but clear about what she does not want.

Despite his self-confidence and undeniable charm, Juan Antonio loses all three women, but in different ways. Ever the restless wanderer, Cristina grew tired of their relationship and simply walked away. Maria Elena remains with him, but they resume their old pre-Cristina relationship in which they continually fight, even to the point of physical violence. Maria Elena becomes more unhinged and eventually leaves him. Alone once again, Juan Antonio tries to recreate his romance with Vicky. With Judy’s encouragement and assurance that Vicky knows her mar-riage will not bring happiness, Juan Antonio makes one last attempt to reach her before she returns to America. After a quiet lunch, they visit his studio, and they kiss. Vicky weakens for a moment. Juan Antonio might conceivably have per-suaded her to leave Doug and stay with him, but he never has the opportunity to find out. At the moment of decision, Maria Elena rushes in with the pistol she claims she initially intended to use to kill herself. With Vicky and Cristina gone,

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Juan Antonio has only Maria Elena, who may be homicidal as well as suicidal, and may never have the capacity to enter into a stable relationship.

Judy remains in Barcelona, trapped in a marriage she finds intolerable. Early in the film, she explains her feelings to Vicky, after she realizes that Vicky stumbled upon her in the embrace of a guest at one of her afternoon receptions. She claims the indiscretion, involving little more than a lingering kiss in an open veranda with several guests only a few yards away, should not be taken as a sign of an actual affair, but she admits it does reveal the emptiness of her marriage. Weeks later, in her effort to keep Vicky from entering into a hollow marriage like her own, she arranges a meeting between Juan Antonio and Vicky, and tries to persuade Vicky to leave Doug. Vicky sees through the ploy and tells Judy that her meddling is only an attempt to rewrite her own life. Both women express fear at the prospect of making a change, and in fact neither does.

Vicky and Cristina return to America with dubious prospects for happiness; Judy and Juan Antonio remain in Barcelona to find whatever satisfaction they can. For each of the principals, the summer in Barcelona provided but a momentary taste of happiness, but in the psychic world that Allen inhabits at this period in his life, that moment is illusory and leaves a bitter aftertaste. The memory of delu-sional love only heightens their awareness of their own emptiness. How, they might ask themselves, could they have been so foolish as to believe that happiness is possible in this loveless universe? At the end, no one survives unbruised, with the exception of Doug, who appears too shallow to look beyond his business, his properties, and his golf.

With these European films, Allen has reached the logical conclusion to the reflections he has been struggling with in his films for the past 30 years. He has become a quieter version of his creation Boris Yellnikoff, a man who sees no purpose to the universe and has become increasingly impatient with those who fail to see what he sees with utmost clarity. At this point in his life Allen may even be imposing his own thought into Boris’s closing words. After berating revelers for celebrating New Year’s, for not realizing they are “one step closer to the grave,” Boris looks into the camera and addresses the audience in the theater: “I’m the only one who sees the whole picture. That’s what they mean by genius.”

Notes

1 Annette Wernblad takes the title of her study of Allen’s development from this sen-tence. In her treatment of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) she includes a citation from Leo Tolstoy that might be the motif of Allen’s work, as explicated in her study and the present one: “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is mean-ingless” (Wernblad 1992: 115).

2 Leo Robson (2010) comments that all the characters end up “blissfully happy.” That’s true, but Boris dismisses their happiness as an illusion.

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3 The building at 30 St. Mary Ax, London, was constructed for Swiss Re, an international insurance corporation. Designed by Norman Foster, it has become a unique landmark, resembling a huge pineapple. Londoners refer to it as the “Erotic Gherkin.” Its rounded surfaces are sheathed in a web of steel rods that are clearly visible from within the building, giving one the illusion of being in a giant birdcage.

4 Richard Schickel (2003: 17) opens a lengthy analysis of Allen’s use of magic realism by citing “his belief that salvation is available to humankind only through the intervention of mysterious, inexplicable forces in our everyday lives.” In a universe where events are beyond human control, magic provides a way out. The magic often leads to comic situations; at times, however, preternatural interventions can have quite sinister impli-cations, as in Match Point.

5 Sophocles does not suggest that life is worthless to the extent that the elimination of the innocent as collateral damage is defensible, as Chris seems to imply. In Oedipus at Colonus, l. 1225 ff., the chorus offers a meditation on old age and death by decrying the folly of wanting to live on beyond one’s allotted time: “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, what hard affliction is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles and murders. Last of all fall to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries” (Sophocles 2007: 193–194).

6 Vittorio Hösle (2007: 59) observes that in Match Point and Scoop Allen depicts the nature of class-conscious society with “merciless realism.”

7 In Lax (2007: 184), Allen addresses his ambivalence about future appearances in his films. On one hand he maintains that having a Woody Allen character limits his crea-tivity: “It limits me when I’m conceiving a project to have to think there needs to be a Woody Allen character, because that immediately requires it to be a certain type of movie.” He leaves the door open for future roles, however, when he says that if someone read his script and said: “‘Oh, you’ve got to get Woody Allen to do that part,’ then fine, I would do it.”

8 Then, even then, Cassandra’s lips unsealed The doom to come; lips by a god’s command Never believed or heeded by the Trojans (Virgil 1984: 42, Book 2, 330–332).

Works Cited

Allen, Woody and Brickman, Marshall (1983) “Annie Hall.” In Woody Allen, Four Films of Woody Allen. New York: Random House.

Hösle, Vittorio (2007) Woody Allen: An Essay on the Nature of the Comical. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie Making. New York: Knopf.

Robson, Leo (2010) “The heart wants what it wants.” Times Literary Supplement 5896 ( July 2), 17.

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Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Sophocles (2007) Sophocles: Plays; Oedipus Colonus. Ed. and trans. Sir Richard Jebb. London:

Bristol Classical Press (facsimile of the Cambridge University Press edition, 1900). www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0190%3Acard%3D1225 (accessed Oct. 12 2012).

Virgil (1984) The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage.Wernblad, Annette (1992) Brooklyn Is Not Expanding: Woody Allen’s Comic Universe. Ruther-

ford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press.

The search Woody Allen began decades ago for an original cinematic art form to articulate his complex and often contradictory visions of the human experience continues, frequently taking him in opposing directions. In his senior years, he resembles a modern Wandering Jew, a genius of comedy and cinema racing toward and fleeing from truths about himself and the human experience that have haunted and hounded him from the beginning of his career. His more recent work suggests a circular pattern of return and what John Douglas Macready in this Companion calls Allen’s period of exile.

In his earlier major period of filmmaking, Allen became widely recognized as an original force in American film through his unique commingling of humor with the classic Western search for a meaning to life, experience, and the human condition. In a concrete and specific way, he created a fresh version of the New York, Jewish, intellectual schlemiel who came to embody the anxieties, values, hopes, and fantasies of his times. In a masterful coagulation of aura, persona, and image, Allen the movie character and public personality became part of a national and even an international conversation on how to act, think, and feel amidst the uncertainties of modern times.1 The energy and creativity of Allen’s film image and identity during this period of his work compare in cultural significance to the influence of earlier icons of comedy and cinema such as Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx.

In this stage of his life and work, a deeply personal investment in the image of Woody Allen occurred by much of the public and by the artistic and intellectual communities. The language of ideas and images that helps to structure his comedy

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Afterword

The Abyss: Woody Allen on Love, Death, and God

Sam B. Girgus

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came in part from the myriad of literature and humanities courses that still pro-vides much of the foundational thinking of generations of Allen’s movie audi-ences and readers. Such language about ego, sexuality, belief, anxiety also inundated the mass media. Partly through his own assiduous cultivation of appropriate New York and national media and partly as a result of the general obsession with celeb-rities and public figures in our culture, Allen the man became thoroughly identi-fied with his screen image.

Accordingly, the construction of subjectivity in the comedic context of classic Allen films acquired major cultural and aesthetic significance. The question of ethical subjectivity played an especially important role in the development of Allen’s characters at this time. Most of Allen’s films, but especially his classic comedies, dramatized the importance to identity of finding the ethical meaning in human relationships in the absence of absolute moral authority and inarguable ethical meaning.

In Allen’s films of the past two decades, however, the ethical search has gone in another direction with a different context and structure. The more recent films in what John Douglas Macready calls Allen’s “exilic” stage of moviemaking in London, Barcelona, and Paris externalize the ethical displacement and collapse of many of his films during this post-classic period of the past 20 or so years, including two prime examples for me of internal exile, Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Celebrity (1998).2 Loss and fatalism constitute major characteristics of these post-classic films. For many, Midnight in Paris (2011) marked a happy if nostalgic return to his earlier style of filmmaking.

The Abyss

In Midnight in Paris (2011), Allen covers some familiar territory. The film travels the cultural terrain of the literary and artistic environment of Paris in the 1920s. Audiences and critics alike apparently relished Allen’s funny fantasy presentation of the world of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, among others. Early into his introduction to this Companion, Peter Bailey notes that the film has become “Allen’s top-grossing film,” a box office smash by Allen’s usually “meager standards.” Bailey also notes how such critics as Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times have happily acclaimed the film’s success. Turan writes, “Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write again. Woody Allen has made a new picture, Midnight in Paris, and it’s his best, most enjoyable work in years.”3

Even if it comes after what critics such as Turan deem years of Allen’s limited filmmaking success, the critical and popular reception of Midnight in Paris perhaps should not be such a surprise. After all, the film sentimentally returns to Allen’s intellectual and artistic roots in American and European modernism. All through

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his best films and even in his writings of his classic period from the late 1970s to the 1980s, Allen affirms his interest in literary modernism. His work invariably projects a modernist consciousness and sensibility as he echoes the concerns of Freud, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Flaubert over the meaning of life. Using such mate-rials in his major classic films, Allen intrigued and entranced general audiences and cineastes by developing a new kind of signature comedy that built on his fractured engagement with the existential dread of death and desire.

During this period, in films such as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Allen faced existential crisis with humor. His existential and comedic strategy in this stage of his work exploits the dread of the existential encounter. In Hannah and Her Sisters, for example, the Allen character, a notorious hypochondriac named Mickey Sachs, imagines that a possible problem with his hearing must mean terminal cancer. Anticipating the results of his cat scan, the white lettering of a title appears on a blackened screen saying, “The Abyss.” Mickey’s voiceover moans, “It’s over. I’m face-to-face with eternity.” The acerbic terseness of the humor both reduces and exacerbates the tension of the moment. The stark title culminates the neurotic traits and actions of self-obsessed hypochondria that have marked Mickey’s character up to that point in the film. The idea of “The Abyss” with a capital A suggests melodramatic exaggeration. Yet as the same time, the humor mediates the fear and dread of the innate awareness of the reality of death and nothingness.

Divine Comedy

In this particular scene with the title, and throughout Hannah and Her Sisters as well as in many of his other films of the period, Allen achieves what ethical phi-losopher Emmanuel Levinas terms “divine comedy.” For Levinas, divine comedy suggests the power of the infinite at the core of the human experience. He maintains the infinite infuses desire. He says in “God and Philosophy” “divine comedy – hollows out a desire which cannot be filled” (Levinas 1996: 139). Such comedy both celebrates and mocks the effort to achieve the infinite in under-standing experience and in relationships with others. In Allen’s case, divine comedy takes humor beyond the incongruities, inconsistencies, exasperation, exaggera-tion, and stark contrast that Mark Twain famously espoused and practiced as humor (Twain 1967: 182–188). In fact, Allen compares to Twain in going beyond such fundamentals of humor to another dimension of the comedic that melds humor with a greater understanding of the human condition and experience.

The image of the abyss in Hannah and Her Sisters dramatically illustrates such comedy. Allen’s confrontation with the abyss accentuates the tension of the singular subject with infinite uncertainty. Mickey’s neurotic insecurity and fears lead him to a medical examination that forces him to face the idea of death even

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after the test’s positive results. An assistant expresses shock that he never thought about the inevitability of death before. The sudden recognition of the abyss as the end of life strikes Mickey almost like a religious revelation or awakening. One scholar’s view of the abyss in Levinas helps to explain its connection to both Levinasian divine comedy and to Allen. In her interpretation of “insomnia” in Levinas, which also readily applies to his idea of divine comedy, Megan Craig discusses “the riveting that wears away and dismantles consciousness points to a gap or abyss under-riding every intentional effort” (Craig 2010: 25). Thus, Mickey’s revelation initiates a prolonged, humorous search for meaning during which he considers converting to various religions, including Catholicism.

For Levinas, the abyss or gap emphasizes the ineluctable “proximity” of the subject to infinite ethical responsibility for the other. Infinite responsibility derives from the other’s endowment of meaning for the subject. Such infinite responsibil-ity persists even though Levinas also insists that the infinite in human experience forecloses on the possibility of total understanding and knowledge. Totalization and closure collapse before the unknowable and unspeakable. The subject faces the impossibility of conclusive meaning. Thus, for Levinas, divine comedy describes the struggle of desire to mediate the immanence of immediate empirical experience and temporal transcendence.

Philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva also articulates the significance of the abyss in a way that informs both the concept of the infinite desire of divine comedy and Allen’s application of it in Hannah and Her Sisters as well as in his other films. Kristeva writes, “Our gift of speech, of situating ourselves in time for an other, could exist nowhere except beyond the abyss” (Kristeva 1989: 42). Kris-teva’s use of the abyss concentrates on the inherent breaks in language itself involving the word, the thing, and meaning. As with Levinas, the abyss for Kristeva also suggests the possibility of endless construction of the subject through, in her case, investment in the interminable signifying process of searching for meaning and subjectivity.

Thus, in classic Allen films, several instances occur of an intersection of a kind of Levinasian awareness of the infinity of the other and of Kristeva’s con-struction of the ethical subject in language. Both processes occur as part of a discourse involving the relationship of the self to the other in the bottomless abyss of language.

In film after film in Allen’s classic period, divine comedy proposes the opening of a gap to suggest the infinity of desire, love, and language. The gaps compel rewriting and reimagining the subject in the ethical relationship to the other. In this pattern of philosophical and ethical discourse, such films as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Zelig (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), among others, become part of a broader cultural discussion about ethics and relationships in a media culture of instant gratification. Salient examples of the reconstruction of ethical subjectivity in the context of divine comedy can be discerned throughout these films.

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Thus, the potency and pain of the connection between desire and ethical rela-tionships prove central to the meaning of love in Annie Hall. The relationship between Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) remains one of Allen’s strongest and most credible portrayals of a loving and successful couple. Annie Hall brilliantly shows how great differences of taste, background, class, interests, intellect, physical appearance, and perspective can fuel and feed rather than impede love and connection in a couple. And yet after all the laughs, lovemaking, reading, talking, fighting, lobster chasing, and bug fighting that brings them together, the couple comes apart, a testimony in the film to the impassable gap of desire between them. Annie and Alvy end up untouchable and unknowable to each other while also staying profoundly responsible and accountable to one another. Their love and relationship make them one of Allen’s most persuasive and compelling examples of divine comedy.

Also in Manhattan, the question of “faith” in people as an example of divine comedy occurs at the end of the film when the youthful Tracy (Mariel Heming-way) tells the much older Ike (Allen) that she will be going to London, but he should have “faith” that they can get together again even after Ike already had dropped her for another, older woman. In the film, Ike sees the figure of a skeleton in a classroom as a sign of the ethical demand that death places on the individual’s relationship to others. In a manner that recalls the significance of “the face” for Levinas as the term for the ultimately unspeakable and unknowable infinity of the individual, Ike ponders the beauty of “Tracy’s face” and races to her over busy New York streets, only to learn of her impending departure.4 The ambiguity of Ike’s motivations and commitments, his mixture of self-obsession and moral insight internalize the abyss of the divine comedy that delineates the moral and ethical space of the film. Similarly, the contest between immanent demand and need and transcendent ethical aspiration plays a crucial role in Broadway Danny Rose and Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Indeed, it could be argued that the drama of the abyss of divine comedy becomes the basic concern of Allen’s classic films. Kristeva also addresses the abyss of comedy in ways that can inform understanding and interpreting Allen’s films. Kristeva synthesizes psychoanalysis and ethics to analyze the abyss of language, meaning, and ethics. Her method of analysis and her philosophy of comedy help to explain how in his best work, Allen’s ethnic and urban brand of mental, physi-cal, and visual comedy often can have a powerful psychological impact on a broad, universal audience.

Building on both Freud and Lacan, Kristeva argues that humor inheres in the pre-linguistic, unspeakable infantile stages of psychic formation and construction. Humor mediates between pre-verbal impulses, drives, and rhythms and the devel-opment of the ego. She sees humor as an energy force that operates to fill the gap language intimates between emotion and understanding.

At the same time, while humor mobilizes interior impulses and drives, it also subverts the symbolic and the law to create a “dialectical” encounter between

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chaotic energy and the symbolic. She writes, “There is one inevitable moment in the movement that recognizes the symbolic prohibition and makes it dialectical: laughter” (Kristeva 1984: 222).

Two words of special relevance to Allen and his comedy capture much of Kristeva’s sophisticated philosophy and its relationship to both humor and to modern thought and structures. She says, “laughter dethrones,” meaning that it undermines inherited truths and conventions. Laughter overturns hierarchies and entrenched power of all kinds. Laughter subverts structured thought and author-ity. Kristeva maintains that laughter enacts “the arbitrariness of the break establishing meaning” (Kristeva 1980: 181, 182; emphasis in original).

For Allen as well, it could be said that throughout his career “laughter dethrones.” Laughter and comedy in Allen’s films invariably destabilize and decon-struct conventional meanings and perceptions. Whether talking about sacred sub-jects such as God, religion, or ultimate human values like faithfulness or discussing taboos such as masturbation or other sexual acts, Allen inevitably executes a strat-egy of taking ideas or notions into unusual and unfamiliar domains.

Accordingly, with their continuous enactment and discussion of Freudianisms that dramatize the vitality and value of drives and the unconscious in comedy, Allen’s films become a kind of case study of Kristeva’s theories of the transforma-tion of pre-verbal impulses and drives into language and the symbolic. Allen’s visual and verbal languages give voice to and speak from the unconscious. Annie Hall as a singular example propels a fluid psychodrama of images and jokes that strives hard to infuse the abyss of divine comedy with significance. What Kristeva describes as an energy hermeneutic of the movement from drives to language becomes, as seen through her theory, a humor hermeneutic in Allen’s films.

Exile

Allen’s extended period of exile on his journey as a filmmaker began at home years before he started making films in London, Barcelona, and Paris. Many of his films in his post-classic period of directing and writing suggest a form of self-exile, of what Kristeva describes as being “a foreigner from within” (Kristeva 1991: 14). Before Allen felt compelled to remake his social and cultural environment and situation as a filmmaker by travelling to work in some of the great cities of Europe, a number of his films of the past two decades already internalized a form of self-alienation and Freudian denial that can be interpreted as a move away from the ethical encounter with divine comedy that characterizes his most important and influential work. As already noted, for me works such as Celebrity and Decon-structing Harry would head a list of films of self-exile.

Exile in Allen’s work, whether in Europe or New York, marks the turn from the challenge of divine comedy and from the Levinasian argument of radical

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ethical responsibility for the other. The juxtaposition of Levinasian ethics and Kristevan ethical psychoanalysis provides instruments to help explain the signi-ficance of this shift in Allen’s work. In internal and external exile, his work settles on confinement within the boundaries of immanent subjectivity and experience.

Kristeva’s language and critical apparatus, which sometimes resonate with reli-gious meaning, elucidate Allen’s journey in exile as consistent with the trauma of the perennial tensions and fluctuations between the body and soul. For Kristeva, this interaction between biology and psyche proves fundamental to the processes of reimagining individual subjectivity in the construction and experience of desire, love, and meaning. In a statement that perhaps gets closer to conveying Allen’s crisis of belief, identity, and action than some might initially expect, Kristeva writes, “Echoing Jewish messianism, this emerging of the subject of desire, through the splitting that is generative of catastrophic anguish, was to be experi-enced as a journey.” She emphasizes that such a journey refers not so much to physical movement but rather to “a theory in the sense of spiritual contemplation and mutation” (Kristeva 1991: 82–83; emphasis in original).

Allen, of course, never espouses or promulgates messianic Judaism in his films. Jewishness, however, is more than a mere theme in his work. Jewishness helps define the contours and textures of Allen’s aesthetic and ethical imagination as a director and writer. For Allen, the centrality of Jewish identity to his relationship to the world perhaps even encapsulates the exilic experience for him. For Allen’s characters, the ambivalent and sometimes tortured meaning of identity as a Jew epitomizes the Kristevan theme of the self-estrangement of the inner foreigner. Allen himself certainly has been accused over the years of Jewish self-hatred.5 In this light, Allen’s use of obviously Christian, even WASPish surrogates for himself, such as Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity, perhaps even Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Match Point, and more recently Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, all raises interesting possibilities about some of the psychological sources in Jewish identity of his various forms of exile, including his travels overseas to work. Saul Bellow brilliantly describes the idealization of the “English gentleman – that curious mixture of striving, asceticism, and rigor” who helps define “an era of hardboiled-dom,” and Jackie Mason has an even funnier schtick on such gentile masculinity. Allen’s Christian surrogates, however, do not so much want to follow “the code of the athlete, of the tough boy.”6 They want instead, like Allen’s Jewish characters in his major films, to be loved and adored.

The need of Allen’s characters for approval and acceptance feeds into a moral masochism that also relates to Jewishness and the search for self and identity. In many of his films, Allen, visually and verbally as a famous Jewish personality and character, embodies the tensions and uncertainties of the moral significance of the psychological engagement with others. Jewishness, as Monica Osborne says, insinuates a sensibility in Allen’s work about ultimate issues of life, death, and meaning, as in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hannah and Her Sisters. Thus, religious

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sensibility and awareness help shape the power of desire and the psychological processes that go into the formation of relationships and the construction of ethical subjectivity in Allen’s work.

For Kristeva as well as Levinas, the spiritual journey compels a temporality that breaks with conventional linearity and structure. In Allen’s case, the possibility of transcendence in human relations dissipates with the emergence in his post-classic films of what Kristeva describes as ethical nihilism.

Kristeva situates her theory of modern nihilism in a sedulously conceived understanding of the condition of modern society. In Intimate Revolt (2002) she argues “power is vacant and values” corrupt in a time when “man has become a simple conglomerate of organs.” Developing a phrase from Guy Debord, she says that today “the society of the spectacle” submerges the “moral and aesthetic dimension of life.” The impervious presence and power of “entertainment culture, performance culture, and show culture” stifle healthy fantasy and imagination. Kristeva further claims our “robotizing and spectacular society” of consumerism has become a “culture of the image” with transmogrified values of “nihilism” (2002: 4, 5, 6, 7).7

Kristeva also distinguishes between destructive nihilism and the “negation internal to judgment” as well as the “negation proper to thought” (Kristeva 2002: 8). Kristeva proffers a philosophy of the intimacy of revolt to engender the renewal of the psyche. She writes, “I am seeking experiences in which this work of revolt, which opens psychical life to infinite re-creation, continues and recurs, even at the price of errors and impasses” (2002: 6). For Kristeva, “regenerative revolt” can be gained through the signifying process and a new subjectivity to overcome the “crises of modern man” (2002: 8, 11). She blames “the conditions of modern lives – with the primacy of technology, image, speed, and so forth, inducing stress and depression” for reducing “psychical space” and “the faculty of representation” (2002: 11).

From a Kristevan perspective, Allen’s shift in exile from concerns about divine comedy to acquiescing to the currents and tides of contemporary nihilism nur-tures a false stability. Under the conditions that Kristeva describes, such stability becomes “totalitarian” (Kristeva 2002: 6), the stability of death. Allen’s films often mirror such conditions as his own social and cultural commentary on our times.

The ultimate importance attributed to “luck” in Match Point dramatizes the significance of the surrender to nihilism. When Thoreau in “Life Without Princi-ple” (1972: 289) chastised California miners and other Americans for living by luck, he thought they were accepting a passivity that differs radically from the ethical passivity Levinas proposes as a welcoming recognition of the open-endedness of infinite experience.8

Match Point presents at least a provisional answer from Allen to a dilemma that Levinas poses at the very beginning of Totality and Infinity (1961), a major work of ethical phenomenology that put him at the center of the thriving debate in Continental philosophy at that time over the direction of modern thought on

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language, ethics, and society. Levinas writes, “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality” (1961: 21).

Match Point clearly suggests that luck supersedes morality. The idealistic days and visions of Frank Capra’s and Jimmy Stewart’s Jefferson Smith and George Bailey represent a lost world from Allen’s London in Match Point.9 The film indeed suggests that if one has luck and can get away with murder or adultery or anything else, as in Crimes and Misdemeanors as well as in Match Point, then morality and ethics should be the concern only of unlucky suckers and dupes. Match Point indicates a fearsome ethical ontology, a horrific reality and way of being in the world that differs from Allen’s ethical and moral concerns in some of his earlier films.

The change in Match Point, however, goes beyond the difference between classic Allen the New Yorker and exilic Allen. The film reflects a change in American culture that also confirms Kristeva’s social and cultural critique of modern life. Thus, several intelligent and informed critics quickly noted the similarity between Allen’s film and A Place in the Sun (1951), George Stevens’s film version of Theo-dore Dreiser’s great naturalistic novel, An American Tragedy.10 In both films a young man of little means and great ambition impregnates a girl who will stand in the way of a marriage to another woman with all the money and luxury in the world. The latter qualifies only as a slight exaggeration for Allen’s film in light of the ostentatious and apparently endless wealth and luxury of the setting and world of Match Point.

Although crucial narrative and amatory differences obtain between the two films, the most significant variation involves the change in ethical and moral expectations. In A Place in the Sun, the young man, George Eastman, as played by the amazing Montgomery Clift, ultimately will die in the electric chair. While the jury in the film condemns him to death for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend, Alice (Shelley Winters), the language and ethical view of the film condemns him for the evil and self-centeredness in his mind and his heart. In fact, the film makes clear that the young man’s offense involves what he failed to do by not trying harder to save Alice from drowning in a boating accident, having wanted to see her dead all along.

In Match Point, of course, Chris Wilton, the tennis pro played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, gets away with the premeditated murder of his girlfriend, Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), who is pregnant with his child, and the planned murder of another innocent victim, Nola’s neighbor, who was part of his scheme to make the murder look like the result of a burglary gone bad.

In the final scenes of Match Point, the dead return like a Greek chorus to bemoan their fate and the living speak of the importance of luck. The camera at the end focuses on Chris’s face, revealing great ambiguity with dark signs of con-siderable distress and alienation. No evidence manifests itself, however, of the ethical capacity for what Levinas calls “substitution,” of placing the priority upon

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the other rather upon the self.11 Like Helen of Troy in Homer’s Iliad, Chris clearly feels misfortune over his situation, in his case being caught between two women, his wife and his mistress. He never escapes the narcissism of his own needs, wishes, and fears. Even worse than Judah (Martin Landau) in Crimes and Misdemeanors in being able to suffer and feel only for himself, Chris lacks any sense of self.

Given the absence in Chris’s life of the kinds of relationships that enable the formation of a coherent ethical subjectivity toward others, his existence entails a psychic vacancy of meaningless relationships. He personifies the deadened psyche of modern man that constitutes the recent focus of Kristeva’s philosophical and therapeutic attention. The physical murder of the pregnant Nola has its counter-part in Chris’s relationship to his wife Chloe Hewett Wilton (Emily Mortimer) who has struggled throughout much of their marriage in the film to become pregnant. Killing part of his future in the murder of the pregnant Nola, Chris emotionally and ethically also forecloses on his future through the absence of love and meaning in his relationship to Chloe, the mother of his child. Comfortably ensconced in the unimaginable wealth, luxury, and security provided by Chloe’s family, Chris has stabilized and solidified his physical space into a temporality without renewal or hope.

In contrast, for all of its moralisms, rigid religiosity, cruel unfairness, and perversely punishing conscience, the film from the very middle of the last century, A Place in the Sun, also insists on the existence of a moral dimension to life and a transcendent ethical responsibility toward real people in society. Match Point, however, seems to insist on nothing, a void that fulfills Kristeva’s vision of purposeless nihilism. The game in Match Point disavows any possibility of a realm of transcendence in the immanence of experience or of an identity through relationships that exceeds the boundaries of the immediacy and pressure of being.

The moral and ethical cynicism of Match Point has its parallel in the social and cultural life of its characters. The mise-en-scène of the film suggests the consum-erism, predatory values, and corporate culture of Kristeva’s society of the image and spectacle. Match Point also insinuates an ambiance of the kind of nihilism that Kristeva describes as annihilating interior psychic space and strength. The film depicts a society without ethical structure and moral meaning. Much the same probably could be said for Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Levinas and Kristeva suggest an alternative to such ethical exile. They both envisage a journey of redemption, an alternative that clearly was present for Allen’s consideration in several of his earlier films, most especially in Broadway Danny Rose in which the Allen character Danny celebrates Thanksgiving in an apartment filled with losers, offering them turkey TV dinners and a message of forgiveness, love, and the other. As Danny might say, “My hand to God” as though by invoking God it becomes possible to ward off any imputation that ethical thinking constitutes illusionary thinking.

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Interestingly, in Broadway Danny Rose, the philosophy that counters Danny’s ethical consciousness comes from the female lead, a mob girlfriend, Tina Vitale, played by Mia Farrow. She speaks the world of the later Allen when she tells him,

You know what my philosophy of life is?  .  .  .  It’s over quick, so have a good time. . . . You see what you want, go for it. . . . Don’t pay any attention to anybody else. And do it to the other guy first, ’cause if you don’t, he’ll do it to you (Allen 1987: 254).12

For some, the happy, romantic ending of Broadway Danny Rose, when Danny chases down the guilt-ridden Tina by the Carnegie Delicatessen in New York to bring her back to the Thanksgiving dinner, resonates in the fun of Allen’s recent hit, Midnight in Paris.

Midnight in Paris, which audiences apparently enjoyed so much, however, also could be called “Midnight of the Soul.” It suggests an attempt to escape from time through fantasy. That effort encapsulates Allen’s crisis of immanence and nihilism. As he turns modernists into mannequins of celebrity culture, Allen’s manipulation of time in Midnight in Paris also invites thinking about the place of time in his exilic journey.

In a manner reflective of Henri Bergson’s idea of time as duration as opposed to the time of abstract linear spatialization, both Levinas and Kristeva in different ways aver the rethinking of time for the prospect of a new life for the individual subject and culture. As a response to what she terms “the new maladies of the soul,” Kristeva advocates a search for a modern form of soul by accepting “a tor-tuous time, a time that incorporates the atemporal unconscious” (Kristeva 1995: 110). She seeks “the road to renewal” at “the intersection of time and the time-less,” in other words a spiritual time of transcendence (Kristeva 2002: 21, 38). She says a fresh “register” of subjectivity makes this time for renewal accessible and possible through “the reconstruction of the personality in a new relationship” (Kristeva 2002: 21).

Levinas also wants to find a time of renewal and redemption. He seeks it through a rethinking of the relationship between time and death. Levinas chal-lenges Heidegger on time. Levinas wants “to think about death on the basis of time rather than time on the basis of death, as Heidegger does.” He asks,

Can one seek the meaning of death on the basis of time? Does this meaning not show itself in the diachrony of time, understood as a relationship to the other? Can one understand time as a relationship with the Other, rather than seeing in it the relationship with the end? (2000: 106).13

Levinas thinks about death as a spur to going beyond individual being to the relationship to the other as a form of transcendence. He says, “Time is not the

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limitation of being but its relationship with infinity. Death is not annihilation but the question that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced” (Levinas 2000: 19). Levinas here calls not for a mere acceptance of the inevitability of death but for a new understanding of death and time as a lesson for the relationship with others.

In introducing the concept of death into the conversation, Levinas hopes to insinuate the idea of the infinite into life. He hopes such thinking about time and death can lead to a fresh thinking about the transcendent relationship of ethical subjectivity to others. Time makes the subject and the other possible but also makes the infinite and the unknowable – in other words, the face – part of the relationship. Out of this relationship of time, death, and love, Levinas makes a case for recognizing the inescapable relationship and responsibility to the other that would enable the subject to break out of the restrictions of self hood, the same, and immanent subjectivity. Such boundaries perpetuate the sickness that Kristeva describes as the maladies of the soul and corruption of the culture of the spectacle.

The obsession with death in Allen’s films helps to make the case for the impor-tance of both Levinas’ and Kristeva’s arguments. Some of Allen’s greatest jokes relate to death. Allen says, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying.” An equally famous joke that Adam Gopnik repeats significantly recalls Levinas. The joke actually paraphrases a line from Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher who, as Levinas quotes him, says, “If you are there, then death is not there; if it is there, you are not there.” In contrast, Allen says, “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens” (Gopnik 1993: 88). Levinas quotes Epicurus on the impossibility of ever knowing our own death to emphasize the temporal aporia of time’s inexorable sameness and difference. He writes, “Time is at once this Other-within-the-Same and that Other who cannot be together with the Same; it [time] cannot be synchronous” (Levinas 2000: 19). Allen’s joke turns this profound paradox of the unknowable upside down; he concretizes, humanizes, and simpli-fies it as being all about him and his fear of death, thereby also undermining its ethical significance.

For Levinas, the paradox of time and death compels going outside the self to the idea of the infinite and its significance for ethical subjectivity. Levinas describes this as “a deference of the immemorial to the unforeseeable” (Levinas 2000: 19). Levinas’ understanding of death, time, and the other constitutes one possible response to what Kristeva sees as “evil” – specifically a “nonsymbolized death drive” (Kristeva 2002: 79).

Allen by contrast as a director in exile remains locked inside himself. For Allen in exile, a return would entail a journey on a different road toward a temporality of renewal that goes from the self in a new relationship to the other. This way home proffers an openness to experience, rather than enclosure and closure. It suggests a vision of ethical subjectivity in relation to the infinite and the respon-

Afterword: The Abyss: Woody Allen on Love, Death, and God 571

sibility to the other. As an artist, home from exile for Allen could mean a return to the earlier work of creating extraordinary film art that looks into the abyss and considers the possibility of a transcendent ethics.

Notes

1 For my discussion of the significance of Allen’s public image and aura, see Girgus (2002: 1–19, 148–173).

2 Girgus (2002) includes further discussion of this interpretation of these two films. See also my essay-review of Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona in Cineaste (Girgus 2008).

3 See Entertainment Weekly ( July 29, 2011), 62; See also Turan (2011). 4 For a discussion of the meaning of “the face” in Levinas and how some scholars

engage and understand Levinas on the face as well as other terms see Girgus (2010).

5 For a discussion of such questions as Allen’s Jewishness and its relationship to his films and life, see Girgus (2002).

6 See Bellow (1975: 7). 7 Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine

Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 4, 5, 6, 7. See also Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1970). Kristeva writes that the “nihilistic suspension of questioning” accommodates culture to the dehumanization of the media and spectacle of “consumer society” (Kristeva 2002: 6, 7). She writes, “The pseudorebel-lious nihilist is in fact a man reconciled with the stability of new values. And this stability, which is illusory, is revealed to be deadly, totalitarian” (Kristeva 2002: 6).

8 Henry David Thoreau, in “Life without Principle” (1972: 289), writes, “That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living.” Thoreau goes on to ask, “Did God direct us to get our living, digging where we never planted, and He would, perchance, reward us with lumps of gold?” (290).

9 For a contrast with Allen over Levinas’ statement involving another American direc-tor, see my discussion of Frank Capra on the same issue in Girgus (2010: 49–76). See also Megan Craig’s discussion in Craig (2010: 1–2).

10 See A.O. Scott (2005); David Denby (2006). For a discussion of the ideology and art of A Place in the Sun, see Girgus (1998: 193–209). See also Macready, chapter 5 in this Companion.

11 See Levinas, “Substitution” (Levinas 1996: 79–95).12 Tina’s words in some ways echo one of Marlon Brando’s first important speeches to

Eva Marie Saint in the bar when they have their first drink in Eliza Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954).

13 See Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time (2000: 106). For a discussion of dia-chronic time in Levinas as nonsynchronic, nonlinear time see Girgus (2010).

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Works Cited

Allen, Woody (1987) Three Films of Woody Allen. New York: Vintage.Bellow, Saul (1975) Dangling Man. New York: Bard.Craig, Megan (2010) Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology. Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press.Debord, Guy (1970) Society of the Spectacle. Oakland, CA: Black & Red.Denby, David (2006) “Game playing.” The New Yorker ( Jan. 9), 91–92.Girgus, Sam B. (1998) Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Age of Ford,

Capra, and Kazan. New York: Cambridge University Press. Girgus, Sam B. (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Girgus, Sam B. (2008) “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” Cineaste 34.1 (Winter), 55–57.Girgus, Sam B. (2010) Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine.

New York: Columbia University Press.Gopnik, Adam (1993) “The outsider.” The New Yorker (Oct. 25), 88.Kristeva, Julia (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans.

Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, Julia (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller, intro. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, Julia (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, Julia (1991) Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, Julia (1995) New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Colum-bia University Press.

Kristeva, Julia (2002) Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1996) Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriann T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Uni-versity Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel (2000) God, Death, and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stan-ford University Press.

Scott, A.O. (2005) “London calling, with luck, lust and ambition.” The New York Times (Dec. 28), B1, B5

Thoreau, Henry David (1972) “Life without principle.” In Thoreau: The Major Essays. Ed. Jeffry L. Duncan. New York: Dutton.

Turan, Kenneth (2011) “Movie review: ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” Los Angeles Times (May 20), B1.

Twain, Mark (1967) “How to tell a story.” In Great Short Works of Mark Twain. Ed. Justin Kaplain. New York: Harper & Row.

Index

Titles of films are entered with the director’s name in parentheses, e.g., Bananas (Allen). Page numbers referring to figures are in italics.

ethics and morality, 6, 76–7, 81–5, 88–91, 97–113, 125–7, 130–2, 170–85, 370–3, 423n, 428–30, 452–3, 478n, 483–4, 489–500, 501n–2n, 504–19, 520–37, 539–56, 559–71

family relationships, 29–30, 41, 43–5, 51n, 73, 78, 83, 84, 521

as flâneur, 321–37and France, 2, 11n, 21, 53–72, 137influences on, 29, 32, 59–67, 71, 84,

157–8, 172, 194–6, 207–25, 230, 259, 280, 286, 339–56, 359–79, 381–401, 403–6, 457n

autobiographical themes, 29–30, 40–2, 162–3

Jewish theology and law, 523–4, 526–7, 537n

Nouvelle Vague cinema, 62–7, 88, 89

interviews, 58–9, 382–5, 446–7, 452–3, 461–4, 485–6, 494, 497–8, 526

late films, 73–92, 95–113, 116–41, 521–37, 560–71

Abrams, Jerold, 502nAdolfsson, R., 285Adorno, Theodore W., 147, 155, 156–7,

163, 165–6, 168nadvertising, 147–8, 149aesthetics, 157–8, 214, 301–2, 466–9, 470Affron, Charles, 183African Spaniards, 290Agee, James, 19Albanel, Christine, 59Albee, Edward, 377–8Alice (Allen), 230, 250–1, 252, 253–4All About My Mother (Almodóvar), 426,

434–5Allen, Carol, 193Allen, Tony, 24Allen, Woody, 202

as actor, 35–6, 37–9, 42as auteur, 15, 16, 20–32, 36, 39–43,

57–9, 69–70, 71–2, 460–77, 491–2, 520–1

as comedian, 15–16, 21–6, 27–8, 37, 57, 58, 98, 171–2, 258, 359–62, 486

documentaries about, 63–4

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

574    Index

motivation for filmmaking, 10, 57–8, 95–6, 220–1, 461–2, 467, 494, 502n

philosophy, 3–4, 59, 86–7, 116–17, 139–41, 154, 157–60, 209–14, 220–1, 223–5, 274–5, 378–9, 382–5, 413, 420–2, 443–57, 460–77, 481–500, 501n–2n, 504–19, 520–37, 539–56, 559–71

private life, 28, 29–32, 40–5, 51n, 73, 77–8, 384, 521

public image, 15–16, 21–4, 35, 37–9, 43–5, 57–9, 73–4, 75–7, 294–5, 361, 385, 559–60

relationships with fans, 30–2, 43–5, 135reviews and criticism, 1–2, 4–9, 28,

29–30, 73–6, 81, 95, 135, 142n, 143n, 188, 190–2, 193–6, 229–30, 247, 248, 270–1, 284, 285–6, 287, 296–7, 314–15

in French media, 57–9, 67–72, 214self-criticism, 5–6, 7–11, 21–2, 27–30, 42,

47, 57–8, 75–7, 83, 188–203, 224–5, 282, 295–6, 346, 366, 452–3, 477n, 524–5

self-reflexivity, 163–4, 170–85, 188–203“Woody Allen character,” 20, 22, 24–6,

29–31, 35–6, 37–8, 40–50, 51n, 96–7, 103, 177–8, 210, 212, 224–5, 262–3, 304, 557n, 565

Allison, Terry L., 261, 263, 266Alloway, Lawrence, 17Almodóvar, Pedro, 289–90, 426, 434–5Altman, Robert, 220Amago, S., 290American film culture, 16–26, 147–9,

154–7, 192–3, 207–25, 230, 335–7Ames, Christopher, 6, 215, 225nAmiel, Vincent, 69Andreu, Anne, 62Andrew, Dudley, 17Annie Hall (Allen), 24–5, 41, 47, 56, 59,

171, 180, 224, 258, 322, 324, 325, 326–7, 328, 332, 336, 444, 451, 468, 475, 510–11, 513, 540, 541, 563

narrative techniques, 64–5, 67, 203reviews and criticism, 68

Another Woman (Allen), 229, 230, 247–50, 252–3, 258, 264–7, 451

anti-Semitism, 296, 303–7, 340–1, 348, 350–6, 357n, 412, 528–31

Antonioni, Michelangelo, 426, 430–2Anything Else (Allen), 25, 69, 79–80, 528–31Ardisson, Thierry, 58Armstrong, Louis, 219, 222–3Arostegui, Maria del Mar, 265art

and comedy, 137–41definition, 470and high/low culture, 26–32, 55–6,

120–1, 154–63, 166–7, 334–7and immortality, 453, 454, 458n, 497–9and values, 81–3, 131–2, 189, 204n,

209–14, 220–1, 269–71, 274–5, 296–315, 408–11, 418–20, 466–9, 491–4, 511–12, 538n

Astaire, Fred, 218–19atheism, 445–7, 448–9, 461–2, 471–6,

489–90, 533Audiard, Michel, 57audience, 27, 30–2, 38–9, 42, 174, 175, 192,

199–200, 217, 277–9, 468auteur cinema, 15–32, 62–7, 71–2, 157

definition, 15, 69–70authenticity, 37–8, 39, 148–9, 154–7, 165,

279–81, 282–91, 464–6Ayer, A.J., 488

Bachman, Gregg, 6, 8, 171, 184Baecque, Antoine de, 69Bagnetto, Laura Angela, 309Bailey, Peter J., 22, 27, 30, 48, 75–6, 81,

161–2, 188, 191, 208–9, 224, 242, 255n, 424–6, 484, 502n

Bananas (Allen), 57, 172Band of Outsiders (Godard), 64–5Barcelona, 277, 279–81, 289–91, 426–40,

553Barcelona (Stillman), 426, 432–4Bardem, Javier, 436Barrault, Marie-Christine, 58Barthes, Roland, 31, 32, 170

Allen, Woody (cont'd)

Index    575

Basinger, Jeanine, 231Bassett, Angela, 284Baudelaire, Charles, 321, 322–5, 331,

332–3, 337nBaxter, John, 20, 29Bazin, André, 61beauty, 129–32, 223, 261, 262–3Becker, Ernest, 510–11Beckett, Samuel, 376, 378–9Benayoun, Robert, 68, 277Benjamin, Walter, 155, 321, 322, 324–5,

334, 342, 403, 422Bergen-Aurand, Brian, 4Berger, Joseph, 143n, 305Berger, Peter, 331Bergman, Ingmar, 19, 29, 59, 64, 255nBergo, Bettina, 105Bergson, Henri, 569Berkeley, George, 489Berman, M., 149Bernstein, Mashey, 170Bhabha, Homi K., 97Biale, D., 281Biette, Jean-Claude, 69–70Birds, The (Hitchcock), 235–6Biutiful (Iñárritu), 283, 426, 435–6Björkman, Stig, 76, 220, 229, 230, 242, 243,

244, 254, 255n, 264, 265, 266, 283, 309, 446–7, 452–3, 502n

Blake, Richard A., 7, 352Blanc, Michel, 58Bleiweiss, Mark, 171blindness, 111–12, 211–12, 214, 303–7,

408–11, 452–3, 455, 525–9Bloch, Ernst, 421blood libel, 357nBloom, Allan, 154Bogart, Humphrey, 65Bois, Yve-Alain, 305Bottiroli, Giovanni, 179Bourdieu, Pierre, 157Boyarin, Daniel, 422nBranagh, Kenneth, 35, 48–9, 81breaking the fourth wall, 38–9, 217–18,

336Breathless (Godard), 65Brigham, William, 4

Broadway Danny Rose (Allen), 568–9Brod, Max, 343Brode, D., 162Bullets Over Broadway (Allen), 48,

285, 547Burke, Kenneth, 195Burr, Ty, 309, 314

Cadwalladr, Carole, 453Cahiers du cinéma, Les ( journal), 68–9, 71Camus, Albert, 351, 354Canby, Vincent, 229Cannes film festival, 59, 63Carroll, Kathleen, 39Casino Royale (Allen), 54Cassandra’s Dream (Allen), 69, 84, 85–6, 87,

97, 110, 127–9, 202, 372–3, 492, 515–18, 535–6, 549–53

Cavell, Stanley, 181Celebrity (Allen), 48–9, 80–2, 164–6, 221celebrity culture, 31–2, 35, 37–9, 43–5,

152–3, 163–6, 294–5, 313Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 424,

429–30, 440Champlin, Charles, 340character stereotypes see stereotypesChekhov, Anton, 373–6children, 108–10, 111–12, 121, 126, 233–44,

262–3, 267Ciment, Michel, 257, 265, 307, 469circus, 342, 355–6, 377Cixous, Hélène, 258Cohen, Sarah Blacher, 171Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 58Collins, James, 487comedy, 15, 16, 23–6, 67, 98, 171–2,

359–62comic faith, 116–41Jewish humor, 24, 171, 403–22and tragedy, 117–19, 132–5, 141n, 142n,

208, 521–2, 531–2, 561–4Conard, Mark T., 16Cooper, Sarah, 99Corngold, Stanley, 342, 345Craig, Megan, 562Crews, L., 321Crickenberger, H.M., 321

576    Index

crime, 84–7, 109–12, 121, 124–7, 128, 175, 178–80, 181–3, 209, 234–5, 347–9, 351–2, 370–3, 462–3, 515–18, 532–3, 534–6, 543–5, 549, 551–3

Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen), 41, 69, 120, 170–85, 208–12, 214, 215, 328, 336, 370–1, 452–3, 455, 458n, 461–3, 478n, 484, 489–90, 492, 493, 494, 518–19, 522, 544–5, 552

criticism, 17–21, 99camp and cult criticism, 18–19critical theory, 7, 147–67feminist criticism, 230–55, 257–75,

306–7French media, 57–9, 67–72

Cruz, Penélope, 284–5Cukor, George, 19Curnutt, Kirk, 302Curry, Renée R., 9, 261, 263, 266Curse of the Jade Scorpion (Allen), 25Cusack, John, 35, 48

Dadoun, Roger, 58Daney, Serge, 68, 69David, Larry, 35, 49–50, 91Day in the Country, A (Renoir), 61death, 9–10, 46, 84–7, 109–12, 175, 178–80,

181–3, 209, 220, 234–5, 347–9, 370–3, 446–7, 449–50, 462–3, 475–6, 497–9, 521–2, 532–3, 534–6, 543–5, 549, 551–3, 569–70

and comic faith, 116–41suicide, 61, 132–3, 136, 178, 239, 242,

245, 269, 273, 450, 494Deconstructing Harry (Allen), 30, 45–8, 62,

65, 80, 82, 445, 455, 493–4reviews and criticism, 68–9, 74

Delvaux, André, 64Denby, David, 29–30, 270–1Derrida, Jacques, 100, 429Desser, David, 277Dirty Pretty Things (Frears), 287–8Doane, Mary Ann, 231, 238, 239, 240, 245,

247, 250, 253documentaries, 92n, 172, 177–8, 209–10Dolce Vita, La (Fellini), 101, 113n

Donizetti, Gaetono, 112, 120Donoghue, Denis, 87Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 209,

370–1, 485, 489, 501n, 502nDouble, Oliver, 24Douglass, B., 181Doukhan, Abi, 100, 106, 109–10Dowd, Maureen, 44, 73–4Dunne, M., 162Dyer, Richard, 38, 281, 285, 286, 288

Ebert, Roger, 237, 247, 248Eco, Umberto, 58, 170Edelstein, David, 191Eden, R., 284editing, 45, 63–4, 176–7, 178, 185n, 200,

201Eliot, T.S., 295, 297–301, 364Elisir d’amore, L’ (Donizetti), 112, 120Elsaesser, Thomas, 231, 232, 233, 234, 245,

246, 249, 250, 251, 252endings, 161–2, 196, 203, 207–25, 231–2,

263, 271, 273, 274–5, 355–6, 412–13, 417–18, 419–20, 449–50, 458n, 533–4, 535, 545, 569

Epicurus, 486, 489–90, 570ethics and morality, 6, 76–7, 88–91,

97–113, 121–2, 130–2, 170–85, 209, 211–12, 370–3, 423n, 428–30, 452–3, 474–6, 478n, 483–4, 489–500, 501n–2n, 504–19, 520–37, 539–56, 559–71

ethnicity, 151, 161, 333–4Everyone Says I Love You (Allen), 55evil, 86–7, 125–6, 533–4, 570see also ethics and moralityEwen, Elizabet, 161Ewen, Stuart, 148, 151, 161exile, 95–113, 427–40, 561, 564–71existentialism, 484–500, 501n

factoring philosophy, definition, 482–4Farber, Manny, 18, 32Farrow, Mia, 29–30, 43–4, 73, 78, 83, 251,

254, 265, 521fathers, 249–50, 266Faulkner, William, 367

Index    577

Feeney, F.X., 35Feldstein, Richard, 258Fellini, Federico, 25, 27, 32, 101, 113n, 219feminist criticism, 230–55, 257–75, 306–7feminist movement, 260, 278Feuer, Menachem, 4film industry see American film culturefilm theory, 17–21, 99, 154–7, 180–1film-within-a-film, 65–6, 173–7, 209–10,

214–25, 335–7, 483Fine, Cordelia, 472Fiske, John, 283–4Fitzgerald, Scott and Zelda, 305, 308Flanner, Janet, 367flashback, 180, 181, 182, 185n, 198, 202Flaubert, Gustave, 364–5flux metaphysics, 444–7Folon, Jean-Michel, 58Ford, John, 207Ford, L., 283fourth wall, breaking, 38–9, 217–18, 336Fox, Julian, 340, 351framing, 66, 181–2, 214–25France, 2, 11n, 21, 53–72, 137, 213–14,

303–7, 310, 311, 312–14, 331, 332–3, 335, 367–9, 412

and high culture, 55–6, 334, 418media response to Woody Allen, 57–9,

67–72, 214Nouvelle Vague cinema, 20, 62–7, 88,

89, 172Frankfurt School (critical theory), 7,

147–67Frears, Stephen, 287–8Freethinking, 489–90, 492–4, 501nsee also skepticismFriday, Jonathan, 179Friedman, Lester, 277Fromm, E., 148, 150–1, 152, 153, 154Frus, Phyllis, 170, 180Fuller, Graham, 271Fusco, Katherine, 9

Galchinsky, M., 281Galow, Timothy, 306Garbarz, Frank, 257, 265, 469Gates, Henry Louis, 285

Gelula & Co., 176Gerber, Eve, 360Gherkin (London), 557nGilman, S., 341, 405–6Gilmore, R., 211Girgus, Sam B., 3, 16, 37, 39, 44, 47, 81,

86, 92n, 99–100, 101, 103, 113n, 208, 211, 258, 259, 263, 278, 290, 294, 521

Gleber, Anke, 328, 335Glenn, Colleen, 6global skepticism, 491–2God, 87, 171, 174–5, 179–80, 209, 211–12,

413, 416–17, 445–57, 458n, 461–2, 471–6, 478n, 489–90, 533–4, 536–7, 561

Godard, Jean-Luc, 11n, 17, 62–7, 172Goffman, Erving, 151Goldman, William, 214Gopnik, Adam, 570Gothard, J. Andrew, 4Goyios, Charalampos, 141nGrand Illusion (Renoir), 59–60Green, Daniel, 191–2, 193Grimsted, D., 157Groen, R., 196guilt, 83, 85–6, 87, 109–12, 209, 234–5, 492,

501n, 515–18, 532–3, 535–6, 552–3Guthrie, Lee, 467

Haberski, Raymond J., 18Hampe, Barry, 178Hample, Stuart, 57Hannah and Her Sisters (Allen), 30, 56, 63,

65, 117, 258, 261–3, 275, 287, 322, 326, 328–9, 332, 373, 443, 448, 449, 461, 462, 467, 470–1, 493, 518, 561–2

Harbou, Thea von, 347–9Harvey, Adam, 112Hedges, Inez, 258, 278Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 482Heidegger, Martin, 423n, 569Hemingway, Ernest, 304, 305, 308, 309,

368, 419, 420Heraclitus, 444Hermes, J., 285

578    Index

Herschel, S., 281Herwitz, Daniel, 313heuristic inquiry, 180–1Higginbotham, Adam, 39high and low culture, 21–3, 55–6, 71,

120–1, 154–63, 166–7, 297–301, 328, 418

canonical writers and artists, 334–7, 359–79, 381–401

Hill, Logan, 76Hirsch, Foster, 103, 189Hitchcock, Alfred, 173–4, 180–2, 185n,

194–5, 235–6Hollywood, 208Hollywood Ending (Allen), 21, 25, 53, 54,

207, 208, 212–14, 312, 406–13, 418, 525–8

Hollywood film industry see American film culture

Holocaust (Shoah), 350, 351–6, 529–30, 538n

see also anti-SemitismHoneycutt, Kirk, 195–6Horkheimer, Max, 147, 156, 157, 163,

165–6, 167n, 168nHornaday, Ann, 314Hösle, Vittorio, 98, 299, 557nhospitality, 100, 109–10, 111–12, 429–30Hovet, Ted, 288Howe, Irving, 404Howe, Lawrence, 174Hume, David, 482, 487–8, 492–500,

501nhumor see comedyHusbands and Wives (Allen), 54, 77–9, 80,

185n, 327, 329, 331, 513reviews and criticism, 29–30, 44, 68

Hutchings, William, 4

identity, 163–6, 189–90, 195–6, 239–40, 252–3, 259–63, 284–5, 290–1

Jewish identity, 281–2, 565–6Ihde, Don, 179immigrants, 151, 161Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 282–3, 290,

426, 435–6inequality, 161–2

infidelity, 43–4, 49, 79, 81, 194–5, 209, 210–11, 237, 238, 250–1, 260, 484

Interiors (Allen), 10, 157–8, 163–4, 166, 191, 229, 230–3, 235–42, 244–7, 251–2, 255n, 373, 453, 498

intertextual references, 55–6, 62, 65, 84, 99, 111–12, 120–1, 127–8, 135, 173–7, 180–2, 188–203, 209–10, 217, 239–40, 250, 259, 266, 275, 294–315, 478n, 508, 510–11, 546, 549–50

canonical writers and artists, 334–7, 339–56, 359–79, 381–401

Irigaray, Luce, 240–2, 243Itzkoff, Dave, 40, 383

James, Caryn, 43Jameson, Frederic, 148, 164, 165, 309, 312,

404–5Jarvie, Ian, 466Jay, M., 147jazz, 149, 160, 168n, 202, 218–19, 221–3,

364Jenks, C., 321Jews, 281–2, 296, 303–7, 340–1, 348, 350–6,

357n, 523–31, 565–6humor, 24, 171, 403–22theology and law, 523–4, 526–7, 537n

Johansson, Scarlett, 59Johnston, Claire, 257Johnston, R., 151Jones, J.R., 190, 193, 197Jones, Kent, 4–5Joyce, James, 363Jules et Jim (Truffaut), 62, 88, 89jump cuts, 65, 78

Kael, Pauline, 19, 32, 242Kaf ka, Franz, 339–56, 357n, 376–7Kakutani, Michiko, 465, 467Kant, Immanuel, 482, 488Kaufman, Walter, 485Keaton, Buster, 217, 225nKeaton, Diane, 68, 274Kelley, Ken, 39, 300–1, 464Kelley, R.E., 307Kennedy, Christina, 279

Index    579

King Lear (Truffaut), 63Knight, Christopher J., 3, 4Kristeva, Julia, 59, 240, 562, 563–4, 565,

566, 568, 569, 570, 571nKruth, P., 333“Kugelmass Episode, The” (Allen), 364–5

“Lady in Red, The” (song), 204nLahr, John, 22, 274, 275, 486Landau, Martin, 58Lang, Fritz, 346, 347–8, 349–51, 353–4LaSalle, Mick, 190, 193, 196, 197Lauder, Robert E., 378–9, 384, 464, 472–3Lax, Eric, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 21–2, 30,

40, 41, 42, 47, 96, 119, 137, 142n, 181, 208, 218, 222, 257, 263, 264, 265, 287, 312, 326, 383, 477n, 533

Lechte, John, 98Lee, Sander, 170, 305, 486, 501nLefcourt, Peter, 214Lengel, Kenny, 314Lerner, Melvin J., 471Levinas, Emmanuel, 98–9, 101, 102–3, 104,

105–6, 108–9, 110, 113n, 421, 423n, 428–9, 522–4, 532, 533, 561–2, 564–5, 566–7, 568, 569–70, 571n

Librach, Ron, 191Linden, George William, 177London (England), 287–9Longstreet, Stephen, 367Love and Death (Allen), 56, 117, 369–70,

446, 451–2love and sex, 54–5, 62, 78–83, 122–3, 154,

180, 265–73, 275, 453–4, 499, 505–15, 541–4, 547–8, 551, 553–6

family relationships, 231, 233–47, 266, 373–6

infidelity, 43–4, 49, 79, 81, 100–12, 194–5, 209, 210–11, 237, 238, 250–1, 260, 484

marriage, 78–9, 236–8, 250–1, 509–10, 542, 543–4, 547, 554–6

masturbation, 82, 222ménage à trois, 88–9, 90–1, 130–2,

290–1, 514, 555–6remarriage, 213

Love on the Run (Truffaut), 62

Lucia, Cynthia, 8luck, 84–5, 101–2, 121, 123, 159–60, 271–3,

477n, 486–7, 545, 549, 550, 551, 566–8

Lumenick, L., 197Lyotard, J., 163

MacCabe, Colin, 17Macready, John Douglas, 560magic, 9, 10–11, 346–7, 355–6, 377, 481,

486–7, 500, 544, 545–7, 557nManhattan (Allen), 55, 56, 57, 59–60, 62,

66, 79, 117, 139, 223, 258–61, 278, 286–7, 314, 324, 327, 329–32, 337n, 383, 424–6, 440, 451, 458n, 466–7, 563

Manhattan Murder Mystery (Allen), 22, 25, 56, 498

Marchand, R., 149Marcuse, H., 147, 155marriage, 78–9, 236–8, 250–1, 509–10, 542,

543–4, 547, 554–6Marxism, 150, 156Masculin/féminin (Godard), 65, 66Mast, Gerald, 171, 531masturbation, 82, 222Match Point (Allen), 56, 59, 84–5, 86, 87,

97, 99–112, 119–27, 287–9, 290, 371–2, 486, 487, 492, 532–4, 542–4, 545, 566–8

influences on, 99, 120–1reviews and criticism, 69, 141n

McGrath, Douglas, 1, 76–7McLuhan, Marshall, 25, 26, 336, 468meaning of life, 28, 189, 262–3, 304, 322,

326, 378–9, 381, 449–57, 460–1, 463–9, 474–6, 491–2, 494, 504–19, 524, 536–7, 539–56, 561–71

Meetin’ WA (Truffaut), 63Melinda and Melinda (Allen), 118–19, 208,

531–2melodrama, 229–55, 373–6ménage à trois, 88–9, 90–1, 130–2, 290–1,

514, 555–6Menegaldo, Gilles, 11nMerton, Robert K., 278Metcalf, S., 287

580    Index

Meyer, E., 335Meyers, Erin, 38Michaels, Walter Benn, 304Midnight in Paris (Allen), 11n, 50, 56, 70–2,

97, 137–41, 202, 267, 294–315, 330, 331, 332, 334, 335, 336–7, 360, 367–9, 418–20, 538n, 560–1

reviews and criticism, 1–2, 71–2, 143n, 191, 296–7, 314–15

Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Allen), 54–5, 56, 60–1, 447–8, 451, 488

Mighty Aphrodite (Allen), 22, 44, 364Miller, Arthur, 128Mills, C. Wright, 151misanthropy, 2, 7, 91, 132–6, 142n, 294–5mise-en-scène, 20, 97, 244–8, 279–91misogyny, 46, 257, 259, 314, 413–18Mitchell, J. Allan, 102Mitchell, Radha, 119mockumentary, 153–4, 172modernity, 7, 147–67, 294–315, 560–1Modleski, Tania, 250, 252Molière, 132–3, 142nmontage, 61, 64, 175–6, 183–4, 438Moore, Roger, 190Morgenstern, Joel, 314Morris, C., 196Morris, Wesley, 193, 197Morse, Susan, 59Mostel, Zero, 91, 142nmothers, 233–44Moustakas, Clark E., 180, 181, 185nMr and Mrs Smith (Hitchcock), 173–4,

180multiculturalism, 161, 277–91Mulvey, Laura, 142n, 240, 244, 257, 263,

274murder, 84–7, 109–12, 121, 124–7, 128,

175, 178–80, 181–3, 209, 234–5, 347–9, 351–2, 370–3, 462–3, 515–18, 532–3, 534–6, 543–5, 549, 551–3

Murray, Patrick, 11music, 117, 172, 175, 176–7, 197, 201, 297,

298, 313, 314, 328–9, 347, 353, 437–8

American Songbook, 78–9, 80

jazz, 149, 160, 168n, 202, 218–19, 221–3, 364

opera, 112, 120–1, 125My Life to Live (Godard), 65–6

Naficy, Hamid, 96nature, 446–7, 457n–8n, 464New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) cinema, 20,

62–7, 88, 89, 172New York, 208, 278, 286–7, 324, 325–7,

329–35, 337n, 424–6, 440Nguyen, Ky N., 286Night and Fog (Resnais), 67nihilism, 566–7North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 180–1nostalgia, 200–2, 294–315, 331–4Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) cinema, 20,

62–7, 88, 89, 172

Oaklander, L. Nathan, 484Oedipus Wrecks (Allen), 546O’Hehir, Andrew, 190, 203, 315O’Neill, Eithne, 65, 68, 72nopera, 112, 120–1, 125Ophüls, Marcel, 67oral sex, 82Orr, Christopher, 197Orth, Zak, 197, 198Osborne, Monica, 565O’Sullivan, Michael, 197

Pappas, John, 178Papson, Stephen, 7Paris, 2, 54–5, 70–1, 303–7, 310, 311,

312–14, 322–5, 331, 332–3, 334, 335, 367–9, Parkinson, D., 284

Passenger, The (Antonioni), 426, 430–2Pennies From Heaven (Ross), 219Peretz, I.L., 403Perlmutter, R., 152philosophy, 3–4, 59, 86–7, 116–17, 139–41,

154, 157–60, 209–14, 220–1, 223–5, 274–5, 378–9, 382–5, 413, 420–2, 443–57, 460–77, 481–500, 501n–2n, 504–19, 520–37, 539–56, 559–71

Picnic on the Grass (Renoir), 60–1Piegay, Baptiste, 69

Index    581

Pierrot le fou (Godard), 65Pirandello, Luigi, 365–6Pivot, Bernard, 58–9Place in the Sun, A (Stevens), 92n, 105, 567,

568Play It Again, Sam (Allen), 62, 65, 225n,

362–4, 461, 485–6Pogel, Nancy, 60–1, 67, 171Polhemus, Robert M., 2political commentary, 23–4, 28, 58, 125–6,

128–9, 141n, 142n, 303–7, 312, 339–56, 419, 421–2, 485, 528–31

Positif ( journal), 67–9, 71, 72npostmodernism, 148, 164–6, 321, 333–4Previn, Soon-Yi, 43, 51n, 73, 77, 81, 84,

384, 521Professione: Reporter (Antonioni), 426,

430–2projection theory, 499–500psychiatry, 153–4, 540–1Psycho (Hitchcock), 181Puig, Claudia, 314Pulver, Andrew, 74–5punishment, 83, 85–6, 87, 109–12, 209,

234–5, 492, 501n, 515–18, 532–3, 535–6, 552–3

Purple Rose of Cairo, The (Allen), 10, 65, 160–2, 166, 208, 215–19, 222, 231, 365–6, 450, 458n, 474–5

race, 161, 277–91, 333–4anti-Semitism, 296, 303–7, 340–1, 348,

350–6, 357n, 412, 528–31Radio Days (Allen), 41, 69, 162–3Rampling, Charlotte, 58Rapf, Joanna E., 9Rascaroli, Laura, 170reality cut, 215, 219–20Rear Window (Hitchcock), 181–2, 194–5Recchia, Edward, 172reflexivity, 170–85, 188–203, 231–2, 245,

255nreligion, 171, 174–5, 179–80, 209, 211–12,

413, 416–17, 489–90, 493–4, 495, 533–4, 536–7, 565–6

Jewish theology, 523–4, 526–7, 537nand science, 443–57, 458n

Renoir, Jean, 59–61Resnais, Alain, 67Rich, Frank, 464Richard, Pierre, 58Riddles of the Sphinx (Mulvey), 257Riesman, David, 151Rilke, Rainer Maria, 250, 266Riverside Drive (Allen), 377–8Robinson, David, 44Robson, Leo, 556nRoche, France, 57–8Roche, Mark W., 87Rodowick, David, 231Rogers, Ginger, 218–19romance see love and sexRose, Jacqueline, 240Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski), 251, 253, 254Rowe, Amy Carillo, 290Rufus, 58

Saada, Nicolas, 68Said, Edward W., 73, 82Santaolalla, I., 289Sarris, Andrew, 19, 157Sartre, Jean-Paul, 470, 478n, 486, 513–14Savio, Mario, 501nSchaeffer, Francis, 472–3Schatz, Thomas, 192Schickel, Richard, 10, 11, 38, 160, 162, 258,

263, 264, 271–3, 355, 361, 366, 484, 485–6, 557n

Schiffer, S., 279, 286schlemiels, 403–22Schopenhauer, Arthur, 457nSchuler, Jeanne A., 11Schumpeter, J., 150science, 443–57, 458n, 495–6, 539–42Scoop (Allen), 9, 10–11, 96, 97, 521–2,

534–5, 545–9Scott, A.O., 95, 143n, 287, 360screen passages, 217, 225nSeib, Kenneth, 19Seidman, Steve, 257, 274self, 149–54, 163–6, 482–4September (Allen), 10, 54, 69, 229, 230–2,

234–5, 242–7, 249, 252, 373, 374–6, 445, 461, 495, 501n, 541

582    Index

sex see love and sexSforim, Mendel Mocher, 407Shadows and Fog (Allen), 67, 339–56, 376–7,

447Shakespeare, William, 61, 63, 87, 125, 135,

198, 359, 383shot composition, 231–2, 248shot/reverse shot, 174, 181Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Wollen),

17silencing, 237, 241, 257, 284–5Sisco King, Claire, 6skepticism, 404–5, 413–18, 421, 422n,

445–7, 482–4, 488–500Skoble, Aeon J., 16Sleeper (Allen), 25, 56, 57, 361–2, 495Small Time Crooks (Allen), 23, 486Sobchack, Vivian, 26sociocultural commentary, 21–32, 123–7,

147–67, 231–55, 258–75, 277–91, 303–15, 538n, 547

Sollers, Phillipe, 59Sontag, S., 331Sophocles, 557nSpignesi, S.J., 327, 340split screen, 64, 203, 213Sragow, Michael, 143nStam, Robert, 16, 19–20, 27–8, 170, 172,

185nstand-up comedy, 15, 16, 23–6, 171Stanfield, Peter, 17Stardust Memories (Allen), 22, 26–32, 41,

56, 58, 65, 158–60, 164, 219–25, 452, 453, 454, 457n, 497–8

influences on, 62, 64reviews and criticism, 28, 68, 191

Staunton, Terry, 204nStein, Gertrude, 302, 305–7Steiner, George, 353Stella Dallas (Vidor), 239stereotypes, 193–6, 210–11, 231, 258–61,

282–91schlemiels, 403–22

Stevens, Dana, 296Stevens, George, 92n, 105, 567, 568Stewart, Garrett, 202Stillman, Whit, 426, 432–4

Stolen Kisses (Truffaut), 62Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock), 183Strawson, Peter F., 491Strindberg, August, 259Stroud, Barry, 487, 491structuralism, 17–18Sturges, Preston, 19, 220–1suffering, 158–9, 220–1, 463–4, 471–2suicide, 61, 132–3, 136, 178, 239, 242, 245,

269, 273, 450, 494Sullivan, Shannon, 280, 281, 283Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges), 220–1,

225nSweet and Lowdown (Allen), 56,

82–3

Take the Money and Run (Allen), 58, 172

Talmud, 537nTaylor, Ella, 314Taylor, Greg, 18Tester, K., 324Thoreau, Henry David, 571nthought experiments, 471–2Threepenny Opera (Pabst), 347To Woody Allen: From Europe with Love

(Delvaux), 64Tobias, Scott, 188, 271Tobin, Yann, 307Todo Sobre mi Madre (Almodóvar), 426,

434–5Tolkin, Michael, 21Tolstoy, Leo, 369–70, 556nToppman, Lawrence, 190, 193, 197Toubiana, Serge, 69tragedy, 86–8, 91, 113n, 117–19, 127–9,

141n, 208, 468–9, 521–2, 531–2, 561–4

Trouble We’ve Seen, The (Ophüls), 67Truffaut, François, 17, 62, 88, 89Turan, Kenneth, 1–2, 91, 141n, 314, 315Turner, Graeme, 45Tutt, Ralph, 191Twain, Mark, 561Two English Girls (Truffaut), 62Tyler, Imogen, 242Tyler, Parker, 18–19, 32

Index    583

utopias, 421–2, 423n

Van Dusen, Wanda, 306–7Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen), 62, 88–9,

97, 129–32, 188–203, 260, 266, 267–71, 274–5, 279–85, 290–1, 426, 430, 432, 433, 435–9, 505–15, 553–6

Vighi, Fabio, 178Vigo, Jean, 19Villeret, Jacques, 57Vipond, Dianne L., 178Vogel, Joseph Henry, 141n, 142nvoiceovers, 38–9, 64–5, 66, 67, 121, 153–4,

181, 183, 184, 197–200, 257, 258, 264, 266, 268–9, 324, 506

Waldman, D., 156Weide, Robert, 35, 41, 44Weinstein, Sol, 384Welch, Christopher Evan, 197, 198, 203Wells, H.G., 362Wernblad, Annette, 556nWeyergans, François, 59Whatever Works (Allen), 25, 49–50, 89–91,

97, 132–6, 142n, 271–3, 274, 328, 337n, 413–18, 445, 450, 455, 458n, 486–7, 507, 524, 536–7, 541–2

What’s New Pussycat? (Allen), 54, 361Wheelwright, Philip, 444white privilege, 277–91Whitfield, Stephen J., 171Whyte, William, 151

Wiene, Robert, 346, 349Wiest, Dianne, 257, 274Willemen, Paul, 174Williams, Linda, 232, 238Wilson, Calvin, 196Wilson, E., 321, 322Wilson, Owen, 36, 50, 304Wisse, Ruth, 403–4, 419, 422nWollen, Peter, 17Woman in Red, The (Wilder), 204nwomen, 161–2, 229–55, 257–75, 366, 422n

agency, 244–55and the male gaze, 129–31, 142n, 231,

259–63, 337nsilencing of, 237, 241, 257, 284–5

“Woody Allen character,” 20, 22, 24–6, 29–31, 35–6, 37–8, 40–50, 51n, 96–7, 103, 177–8, 210, 212, 224–5, 262–3, 304, 557n, 565

Woody Allen Looks at 1967 (TV special), 24Wright, Robert, 458n

Yacowar, Maurice, 16, 171, 294“Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do

This?” (Allen), 382You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

(Allen), 9, 42, 56, 97, 142n, 188–203, 373

Zacharek, Stephanie, 143nZelig (Allen), 25, 66, 68, 149–54, 166,

303–4, 495–6