The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (11 page)

In case we’ve failed to notice the moral critique implicit in Isaac’s literary self-reconfigurings, the film’s first dramatic scene portrays the protagonist even more dubiously than does the prologue. The “Rhapsody in Blue” fireworks extravaganza opening the film dwindles to a scene in Elaine’s, where Yale and Emily are insisting that Isaac is in a condition nearly unprecedented for protagonists Allen plays: “You’re drunk. You know you should never drink.”
¹⁴
His attempt at hypercorrect diction (“I-I’m dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father” [p. 184]) confirms their perception. Like Isaac’s opening monologue, the Elaine’s scene dramatizes a discontinuity between Isaac’s professed and actual selves, his mock explanation that he’s smoking only because “I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette” seeming narcissistic in a way more irritating than amusing. Subsequently, his assertion that “the most important thing in life is courage” is immediately trivialized by his self-proclaimed ex-emption from the moral test he has himself posited: if the four of them saw someone drowning in the icy waters on their way home, Isaac would “never have to face” the challenge to his courage the situation embodies because he can’t swim.
¹⁵
Despite the moralistic poses he occasionally strikes in the film,
¹⁶
Isaac
does
perceive himself as being exempt from moral norms; that fact makes
Manhattan
the first of Allen’s films in which the character of the protagonist he is playing is configured in such a way as to continually invite the viewer’s ethical scrutiny and evaluation.
¹⁷

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 emotional inconstancy, faithlessness, and
ex tempore
egocentrism of its actual inhabitants. Isaac’s tendency to disregard substance in favor of romantic surface also characterizes his perception of Tracy and of his relationship with her. He allegorizes her great beauty as “God’s answer to Job,” attributing to her a loveliness so cosmically significant that He could use it to justify His ways to humanity. “I do a lot of terrible things,” Isaac’s God acknowledges as Isaac gestures toward Tracy, “but I can also make one of
these
.” Isaac’s God’s Exhibit A leaves Job with no response except, “Eh, okay—well, you win” (p. 227). Tracy’s physical beauty is unquestionably the solitary grounds for Job’s conceding God’s case.
¹⁸
Isaac spends much of the movie denying any future for his relationship with Tracy, insisting that she is emotionally too young for him to take seriously. It follows that in a relative way, Isaac is able to dismiss the emotional devastation he visits upon Tracy in rejecting her in favor of Mary (“You really hurt me,” she acknowledges to him at films end) as “just the way I was looking at things then” (p. 271). His justification constitutes nothing resembling the ethical stance of someone who is, in Yale’s characterization, so moral, so “perfect,”
¹⁹
and so “self-righteous” that “You think you re God” (p. 265). If Isaac thinks he’s God, it’s one who insists that physical beauty—surface appearance—is creations best argument. When his ex-wife, Jill, reminds him that he knew her bisexual history when he married her, Isaac responds, “Yeah, I know. My analyst warned me, but you were so beautiful that I—I got another analyst” (p. 217).

Two other comments from Isaac epitomize his penchant for valuing surface and superficialities over substance, appearance over interiority. At a Museum of Modern Art reception, a discussion of orgasms prompts Isaac to acknowledge that even the worst ones he’s had have been “right on the money” (p. 205), his assertion implicidy dismissing the claims of a partner to self-gratification. He articulates a similarly absolute preference for the purely physical in repudiating reason to Mary Wilke: “Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind,” he tells her. “E-e-everything really valuable has to enter you through a different opening … if you’ll forgive the disgusting imagery.” For someone putatively writing a book excoriating “decaying values,” Isaac situates himself in anything but an elevated vantage point from which to deliver moral maxims. “No, no … you rely too much on your brain,” he concludes in his antirationalist sermon to Mary: “The brain is the most overrated organ, I think” (p. 223).

Perhaps the central emblem of the film’s thematic surface/substance antinomy is the one visual gag Allen allowed himself to leave in the movie as it evolved from what producer Charles Joffe described as “a drama with comedy rather than a comedy with drama.”
²⁰
Isaac and Mary are rowing across the placid surface of a lovely Central Park lake; languorously trolling his wrist beneath the water’s surface, Isaac withdraws a handful of mud. “Isn’t it beautiful, Ike?” Mary asks him earlier in the film as they watch the dawn illuminating the 59th Street Bridge while a lushly orchestral “Someone to Watch Over Me” plays on the soundtrack. “Yeah, it’s really—really so pretty when the light starts to come up,” he answers, “This is really a great city … it’s … really a knockout,” (p. 212). The deeply poignant moment they’ve shared is abruptly annulled by Mary’s announcement that she has to get home—she’s meeting her lover, Yale, for an intimate lunch later that day. Nowhere in Allen’s films is there a more compelling symbol of the idea that the human capacity to perceive—or create—beauty is not necessarily accompanied by a corollary moral capacity; in contravention of Keats’s poetic equation,
Manhattan,
like Allen’s other movies, suggests that beauty is beauty, and truth—if it exists at all—is something else.

What Allen crafts in
Manhattan
is a drama forged out of the disparity between his own romantic, nostalgic conception of New York (“I had a real urge to show New York as a wonderland,” he told Eric Lax, “and I completely exorcised that feeling in
Manhattan
”
²¹
) and his opposed conviction of the debased, neurotic souls of late-twentieth-century New Yorkers whom Isaac characterizes as reflective of “the decay of contemporary culture.” (
Manhattan,
Julian Fox quotes Allen as saying, sets the “romantic vision of New York against the mess that people make out of their lives.”
²²
) Until the very last images of the film, the only thing in
Manhattan
that survives corruption is the aesthetically perfect conception of New York which Isaac carries in his head and which Allen—in concert with Gordon Willis and George Gershwin—projects cinematically on the screen. That this conception of “New York as a wonderland” was intended to have a corresponding repository of images in the film is suggested by the major reservations Allen has, in retrospect, expressed about this movie.

Allen’s two complaints about
Manhattan
seem to exist in inverse relation to each other: he had trouble finding sites to photograph beautiful enough to match the ideal image of New York in his mind, and he failed to capture on film the real magnitude of Mariel Hemingway’s beauty. In the one instance, reality failed to live up to the filmmaker’s imagination; in the other, an imaginative cinematic projection failed to do justice to the human reality.
Manhattans
reviewers’ unanimous acclamation for the film’s complete success at “roman ticizing New York out of all proportion” suggests that others saw no disparity between intention and achievement in the film’s deliberate cinematic idealization of the city. Allen’s second self-critique is more intriguing.

Shortly after hearing that Allen felt Mariel Hemingway’s beauty had been shortchanged by the film, Pauline Kael told Allen that Hemingway looked perfectly lovely in it. Subsequently, Kael saw the actress in a restaurant. Declaring the young woman “a goddess,” she confirmed Allen’s conviction that
Manhattan
falls short of conveying the young actresss beauty. But perhaps even Kael couldn’t imagine what the magnitude of that beauty was in Allen’s eyes. Having seen pictures of Hemingway in
Interview,
Allen acknowledged, “I thought—and still do think—that she’s probably the most beautiful woman the world has ever seen.” If convincing the viewer of that perception was what Allen’s film had to achieve in order to work,
Manhattan
seems to have been doomed to failure.
²³

Allen’s ambitions for Tracy’s visual presence in the film may suggest that Tracy and the Manhattan of George Gershwin were intended to correspond to each other more compellingly, to function more nearly as equivalents—Tracy representing in visual terms as much as the idealized city does an exception to and antidote for the corruption Isaac finds at the city’s heart. That such a conception exists in the film is reflected in Tracy’s association with the beautiful face of New York—particularly through the museums which she and Isaac frequent and through the Central Park hansom cab ride she insists they take together—and in Allen’s comment that New York City “is sort of one of the characters in the film.”
²⁴
If one can imagine a character carrying the symbolic weight equal to a place Isaac and the Gershwin soundtrack have “romanticized out of all proportion,” it becomes clear what is at stake in the final scene of
Manhattan
. Isaac not only fears losing Tracy while she’s studying at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in London: “You’ll be with actors and directors,” he tells her, “You’ll eat lunch a lot… and, and well, you know, attachments form.” He also dreads losing that element of Tracy which is as precious to him as his Gershwin-embellished conception of New York and which, in the film’s symbolic economy, is indistinguishable from it.

If she carries through her plan to go to England for six months, he tells Tracy, “I mean, you-you’ll change … in six months you’ll be a completely different person…. I-I just don’t want that thing I like about you to change” (p. 271). In
Shadows and Fog,
Max Kleinman responds to the assertion by Irmy that the sky is beautiful when the fog clears and the stars shine through, “Yes, but it passes so quickly … even now the fog is starting to go back in … everything’s always moving all the time, everything’s constantly in motion—no wonder I’m nauseous.” In
Husbands and Wives,
Judy dismisses the assertion of her husband, Gabe, equating change with death as a “bullshit line” which would convince only his impressionable twenty-year-old students. In
Mighty Aphrodite,
Amanda accuses her husband, Lenny, of being “opposed to change in any form.” That Allen attributes to four different characters he portrays a fear of change is certainly not an insignificant fact. Having rejected Mary in favor of his marriage before reversing himself again, Isaac’s former best friend, Yale, is
Manhattan
’s central embodiment of inconstancy, Isaac telling his friend sarcastically that he can “change his mind” about Mary and Emily “one more time before dinner” if he likes (p. 264). Earlier in
Manhattan,
Isaac and Mary stop in front of a construction site, Isaac dismally reflecting that “The city’s really changing” (p. 252). Ironically, the other agent in which Isaac has invested his preoccupation with fixity and permanence is the one in whom change is even more inevitable than it is in a major metropolis: a seventeen-year-old girl.

As Isaac confronts Tracy in the lobby of her apartment building in an effort to dissuade her from departing for London, the change he dreads is already noticeable in her response to him. For one thing, she’s turned eighteen and is, as she points out, “legal.” Isaac’s attempt at a joke that “in some countries [at eighteen], you’d be …” fails to generate a punch line, assumedly because he doesn’t relish pondering what she’d be eligible to do in other countries at eighteen. Discomfited by this thought, he shifts to more familiar, comfortable ground: “Hey, you look good.” (When interiority unnerves you, Isaac believes, resort to appearances.) Isaac finds her response to his reappearance equally disconcerting. When he breaks off their relationship earlier in the film, she accuses him of making the severance sound “like it’s to my advantage when it’s you that wants to get out of it” (p. 245). What she intuits and rebukes there is Isaac’s penchant for rhetorical indirection and prevarication, the nearly complete antithesis of the innocent ingenuousness he has so valued in her. Her reaction to his attempt to coerce her into staying in New York is to remind him of the arguments he previously offered her in support of her studying in England. The effect of her response demonstrates how closely Isaac has replicated Mary’s incapacity to plan four weeks ahead, since it seems little longer ago than that that Isaac was urging Tracy to go to London, precipitating the breakup he’s seeking to repair now. The film’s central antagonist against impermanence is being given a lesson in his own inconstancy and changeability, one he ignores because of his intentness upon preventing Tracy from walking out the door to the limousine awaiting her. “We’ve gone this long,” she replies, “What’s six months if we still love each other?” Tracy’s response to Isaac conveys dissimulation more than love, enacting her newly developed ability to turn Isaac’s own choices and arguments against him. “Hey,” Isaac responds irritably, exposing the
idée fixe
she represents for him, “don’t be so mature, okay?” Ultimately, he resorts to pleading: “Oh, come on … you don’t have to go.”