The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (10 page)

People are always telling me that they don’t know the New York I write about, that they don’t know that it really ever existed. It may have only existed in movies, I don’t know.

—Allen interview with Anthony DeCurtis in
Rolling Stone

The idea that, as Garp phrases it in John Irving’s
The World According to Garpy,
“Fiction”—and thus, art in general—“has to be better made than life,”
¹
is one of the central tenets of Modernism, a concept which, in a roundabout way, assumes the compensatory capacity of aesthetic creation and the superiority of crafted art to gratuitous, inchoate existence. It is a notion to which Allen adheres in his own filmmaking practice, but one which provides his artist-characters with remarkably little compensatory solace for their sufferings.

Alvy Singer’s play is, presumably, “better made than life,” but it doesn’t alter the actual circumstances it distorts; it’s just a play, human existence manipulated into the patterns and rhetorical expectations of theatrical literature, a well-intended but disingenuous artifice. In
Bullets Over Broadway,
Cheech articulates a similarly irreverent attitude toward art, agreeing to a revision in his and David Shayne’s play by replying, “Sure, why not? It’s a play anyhow, but it’ll be stronger.” Whether the film for which Sandy Bates is seeking an ending in
Stardust Memories
is particularly “well-made” is difficult to determine given the brief scenes we see; what is certain is that this is an artwork which, once it has run its onscreen course, definitely seems to have a negligible effect on the lives of those who have watched it and apparently even less upon the life of its creator.

For Eve of
Interiors,
the pursuit of art’s superiority to life culminates in complete alienation from life. The disparity between the disorderliness of human life and the “well-madeness of art” also provides a central dramatic tension in Allen’s
Manhattan
, though in that film Allen has absorbed the aesthetic artifice so effectively into the film’s narrative—which is to say into the consciousness of the movie’s protagonist—that the tension between them becomes largely indistinguishable from the movie’s plot. 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.

The film opens with a series of images of New York—the skyline at dawn, the Empire State Building silhouetted against the sun, the neon lights of Broadway, Park Avenue on a snowy morning—cinematically framed in anamorphic long shot evoking a romantically inflationary distance, Gordon Willis’s visualization of the ideal city synchronized with the soaring magnificence of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on the soundtrack. The scale of these images and of Gershwin’s composition complement each other perfectly, sight and sound culminating in a Central Park fireworks display which is this effusion of urban grandeur’s apotheosis. Should the viewer wonder whose extraordinarily idealistic vision of the city this is, Isaac Davis’s voice-over quickly resolves the mystery: “Chapter One,” is his highly literary way of introducing himself. “He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no, make that, he—he … he romanticized it all out of proportion.” The opening three minutes of the film have dramatically visualized Isaac’s romanticization of Manhattan, his perception of it as “a town that existed in black-and-white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.” As anyone who has watched
Hannah and Her Sisters, Another Woman, Alice, Manhattan Murder Mystery,
or
Everyone Says I Love You
can attest, romanticizing New York City “all out of proportion” is a proclivity Allen shares with his
Manhattan
protagonist. One distinguishing feature of his more substantial films is that they do what
Manhattan
does: they deliberately place under ironic scrutiny their own tropism toward 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 repeatedly invoked disparity between surface and subject, form and content, generating its major thematic dynamic. To demonstrate that point, we need to move from the prologue’s inspiring images of the New York cityscape to the tawdry domestic melodramas for which they provide an incongruously romantic backdrop.

In
Manhattan
we meet a number of characters who are, narrator Isaac Davis (Allen) posits in writing a short story, creating emotional and almost exclusively erotic difficulties for themselves—“unnecessary neurotic problems” which distract them from having to confront “more unsolvable, terrifying problems about… the universe”(p. 267). Yale Pollock (Michael Murphy) is having an affair with Mary Wilke (Diane Keaton) of which his wife, Emily (Anne Byrne), may be aware but refrains from confronting him about it. Yale’s best friend, Isaac (whose ex-wife, Jill [Meryl Streep], publishes a tell-all book about their marriage and thoroughly acrimonious divorce), is seeing seventeen-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a girl he knows he’s using but with whom he can’t break off until he has the opportunity to replace Yale as Mary’s lover, the warm friendship between the two men shattered by Yale’s subsequent, covert, and successful attempt to win Mary back from Isaac.
²

The film abounds with scenes evocative of human duplicity and betrayal, but one of the most striking is that in which artistic perfection is contrasted with human perfidy and deceit. Isaac and Mary, who have become a couple following the breakup of her affair with Yale, attend a concert with Yale and Emily. Allen’s framing of the scene juxtaposes the knowledge of the three against the ignorance of the one, the situation causing Isaac, Mary, and Yale to squirm with awkwardness and embarrassment through the performance of the
Jupiter
Symphony while Emily listens intently to a concert evoking an order and harmony utterly absent from these audience members’ lives. (Emily, we subsequently learn, knows about Yale’s affairs, but remains silent about them out of a conviction that they are testimony to her inadequacy as a wife, her self-destructive marital strategy replicating Mary’s in a former marriage.) “Not everybody gets corrupted,” Tracy tells Isaac at the end of the film when he makes a last-ditch effort to revive his love affair with the film’s single embodiment of human innocence: “Look, you have to have a little faith in people” (p. 270). As the image of Isaac’s skewed smile on which
Manhattan
affectingly closes clearly communicates, he can think of not a single reason provided in the last hour and a half’s narrative for “having a little faith in people,” everyone in the movie—himself included—having acted out ethics ranging from the unapologetically narcissistic to the helplessly neurotic.
³

The jaded egotism of the characters in
Manhattan
is so deliberately combined throughout the film with aesthetically stunning images of New York that a substantial dramatic tension establishes itself between the morally tangled interior realms of the characters and the lush exterior urban landscape luxuriantly imaged up throughout the film, the soundtrack complementing the images with stunning Gershwin melodies such as “’SWonderful,” “Embraceable You,” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
⁴
“Visually, and with glorious help from an often ironically used Gershwin score,” Richard Schickel argued in his review of the film, Allen “has turned Manhattan, which is one of Allen’s passions, into a dream city, deliberately contrasting the awesome aspirations implicit in its construction with the distracted lives he sees taking place in it.”
⁵
In addition to being masterful artistic compositions evoking the musical craftsmanship of a past era, these “great tunes of George Gershwin” conjure up relationships of greater stability and permanence than the self-indulgent, emotionally tenuous, and largely temporary erotic liaisons depicted in the film.
⁶
(Tracy’s suggestion that “maybe people weren’t meant to have one deep rela-tionship. Maybe we’re meant to have a series of relationships of different lengths” [p. 197] is both naively formulated and contrary to the emotional and thematic trajectory of the film, her view of human commitment intersecting with Mary’s inability to plan ahead as far as four weeks.
⁷
) The prominence of Gershwin’s songs in
Manhattan
is partly a function of the film’s having been inspired by Allen’s listening to them one day,
⁸
and it reflects an even more intense attention to musical detail than Allen—who takes complete responsibility for the soundtracks of his films—regularly exercises. The perfect architectures of these melodies project a conception of musical affect approximating that described by Stanley Elkin in
The Living End
. “He had forgotten about music,” Elkin wrote of a character who, being dead, hasn’t heard any for a while: he had “forgotten harmony, the grand actuality of the reconciled. Forgotten accord and congruence—all the snug coups of correspondence. He did not remember balance. Proportion had slipped his mind and he’d forgotten that here was where world dovetailed with self, where self tallied with sympathy and distraction alike.”
⁹

The “grand actuality of the reconciled,” the creation of which constitutes art’s primary beneficence for Elkin, is something
Manhattan
’s characters never experience. These selves with their “unnecessary neurotic problems” and erotic distractions from existential anxieties are too fragmented, too tenuously constructed, and too self-absorbed to dovetail with exterior reality. This point is perfectly visualized by Willis’s image of the shadows of Isaac and Mary framed against a planetarium backdrop of deep, star-studded space as she laments the frustrations of “having an affair with a married man” (p. 222). So it’s entirely appropriate that the movie opens with Isaac’s attempt to craft the first paragraph of the autobiographical novel on Manhattan he’s trying to write. In seeking that beginning, Isaac is searching, as Sam B. Girgus noticed, for “an adequate single voice and identity for himself”
¹⁰
among his perceptions of the place. Consequently, the prologue’s positioning of the completely achieved musical authority of “Rhapsody in Blue” with Isaac’s halting, improvisatory attempts to identify with his melodramatic projections of Manhattan introduces the film’s central conflict between the wholeness of art and the inescapable fragmentariness and indeterminacy of life unmediated by it. Isaac’s self-revelatory and self-reconstituting efforts to make self dovetail with the world of New York City continue:

“To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles.” Nah, too corny… for… my taste. I mean, let me try and make it more profound. “Chapter One: He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity to cause people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams into—” No, it’s gonna be too preachy. I mean, you know… let’s face it, I wanna sell some books here … “Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.” I love this. “New York was his town, and it always would be” (pp. 181–82).

Like
Annie Hall,
then,
Manhattan
opens with a Woody Allenesque monologue. However, the differences between Isaac’s monologue and Alvy Singer’s are instructive not only for the disparate tones they establish for the films they introduce, but also for the disparate levels of sympathy they elicit in the two films’ audiences for their narrators/protagonists. Alvy addresses the movie audience directly, offering us jokes tinged with self-parody and the confession that he “can’t get his mind around” losing Annie. The primary impression his monologue conveys is that of sincerity: through humor and self-revelation, he is honestly expressing his basic human vulnerability.
¹¹
(The film’s antimimetic emblems tend to reinforce its overall aura of genuineness, the instant empathy viewers experience with Alvy making colder and more cryptic subsequent Allen films such as
Interiors
and
Stardust Memories
seem, to
Annie Hall
devotees, a particularly unforgivable betrayal.) Although
Annie Hall’s
dramatization of the evolution of Alvy’s relationship with Annie exposes less than ideal character traits in him (condescension toward her want of intellect inspiring his project of reshaping her in his own image, for starters), Alvy remains merely humanly flawed, a protagonist whose predominantly sympathetic nature is never seriously questioned.
¹²

In contrast, the more emphatically judgmental disposition of
Manhattan
is signaled by an opening monologue characterized by markedly greater rhetorical equivocation than is Alvy’s. Rather than a forthright address to the audience, Isaac’s monologue is, quite appropriately, internal, and its honesty derives not from a desire to deal plainly about himself with others but from his rapt attentiveness to his own personal agendas. Anyone who has ever tried to write seriously can empathize with Isaac’s incessant revising of his book’s beginning; what makes his restarts troubling is how completely they dramatize his self-consciousness about his task, the extent to which they are dictated by the response he expects others to have to them. As Isaac circulates through a
film noir
narrator’s hard-bitten self-romanticizing to the diction of a moralizing cultural critic to an admission of his desire “to sell some books” and then on to his successful—in fantasy, at any rate—identification of himself with the city’s sexual energy, it becomes patently evident that what he seeks is a construction of Manhattan which expresses him—the self, as Elkin suggests, seeking to dovetail with the world in a thoroughly narcissistic and fraudulent way. What’s distinctly lacking from Alvy’s monologue in Isaac’s continual self-reconceptualizations is the sincerity manifested by Alvy’s consistency of self-presentation, and if Isaac’s rewrites fall well short of Leonard Zelig’s chameleon like responsiveness to and mimicry of others, they’re nonetheless gravitating in that direction. What Isaac is doing, which Alvy never does, is trying to be someone he’s not, and the Manhattan of the film which is his projection (or self-projection) can be said to manifest the same tendency: fictionalized inflation.
¹³