The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (12 page)

“Six months isn’t so long,” she repeats before delivering the prevarication which reinforces that untruth: “Not everybody gets corrupted.” It’s not merely that the characters of Allen’s movie provide no supporting evidence for Tracy’s resonant declaration, thus invalidating it. Her subsequent admonition that “you have to have a little faith in people” (p. 271) is precisely what Isaac a few weeks before proved to her she couldn’t have. His recognition of the disparity between what she knows and what she says in order to get away from him to the airport elicits the sadly bemused smile on Isaac’s face in the film’s final dramatic frames: in telling him disingenuously that not everybody gets corrupted, she’s proving that she has been. Isaac’s pained, crooked smirk silently registers his realization that “that thing I like about you” he feared would change over six months in London has changed already.
²⁵

As if in corroboration of the link between the now-tainted Tracy and the Gershwinized New York,
Manhattan
ends with “Rhapsody in Blue” swelling up once again, providing soundtrack for three concluding images: the city skyline in dazzling morning sunlight, the skyline shrinking into the distance as ponderous clouds descend upon it, and the city barely visible beneath a dense, dark overcast. That this closing montage is intended to evoke the lyrics (“With love to show the way, I’ve found more clouds of gray/ than any Russian play could guarantee”) of Gershwin’s “But Not for Me,” which played underneath Isaac and Tracy’s closing encounter, is highly probable; that the movie’s last five minutes have all but simultaneously dulled the glow of Tracy and the romanticized New York seems incontestable. The teenager whom Isaac credited with being God’s answer to Job seems to have descended just far enough into adult erotic legerdemain to no longer represent the ground on which God could justify the mysteriousness of His ways to humanity. She has fallen sufficiently in Isaac’s estimation no longer to constitute the saving exception to the “decay of contemporary culture” epitomized by himself and his friends, his single extant proof that the creation is good having undergone the ultimate betrayal: change.

As for the film’s idealized New York, its visualization culminates not in a repetition of the fireworks that close the stunning opening montage but fades into distance and obscurity despite the reprise of “Rhapsody in Blue,” the musical artifice alone sustaining the emotional exaltation associated with the city throughout the film. 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 than 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.

5

Strictly the Movies II

How
Radio Days
Generated Nights at the Movies

It’s me thinly disguised. I don’t think I should disguise it any more—it’s me.

—Harry Block acknowledging the autobiographical basis of his fiction in
Deconstructing Harry

In
Manhattan
, Isaac Davis is, as was Allen at the time, in the process of creating an artistic document culturally anatomizing Manhattan, one deliberately romanticizing its subject. The similarity of the artistic projects of Isaac and Allen—“Chapter One,” Isaac/Allen opens the film without identifying himself—tends to blur the boundary separating protagonist from screenwriter, this elision having become one of the primary devices Allen’s films employ to further complicate their exploration of the relationship between art and life. Since Charlie Chaplin, no other film actor has been more popularly and consistently conflated with his on-screen persona than Allen, who dresses his part every day on the set whether he’s appearing in the film he’s shooting at the moment or is only directing it. As a result, few moviegoers who have seen any of the films in which Allen appears would be confused by the term “Woody Allen protagonist.” Even when Allen plays characters bearing personal histories divergent from his own in films set in other lands or eras
(Love and Death, Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Broadway Danny Rose, Shadows and Fog),
the small, Jewish, self-doubting, God-seeking, death-fixated egocentric who stutters when threatened and unaccountably attracts the screen’s most beautiful women ultimately emerges, becoming the figure we conceptualize as that aggregate cinematic fabrication, “Woody Allen.”

As Allen’s biographers have clearly established, the “Woody Allen” persona was largely formed by the time television gag writer Allan Konigsberg changed his name to Woody Allen in the mentally trying process of transforming himself into a stand-up comedian,
¹
his then agent Jack Rollins suggesting that “Woody’s material was always about the person behind it.”
²
Allen later cinematically confirmed the autobiographical connection between himself and this “Woody Allen” self-projection by incorporating into
Annie Hall
three different flashbacks: two in which Alvy Singer delivers jokes Allen used in his own stand-up routine in the 1960s,
³
and another in which a clip of Allen’s appearance on
The Dick Cavett Show
impersonates a guest appearance by Alvy Singer.

Partly because of deliberate cinematic choices like these that Allen has made, the filmgoing public’s identification of him with the protagonists he portrays in movies is so automatic as to seem transparent. What makes this issue worth delving into is Allen’s awareness of that identification and his calculated exploitation of the relationship for rhetorical purposes in films such as
Radio Days
and
Deconstructing Harry
. That Allen’s films to some degree reconfigure his personal experiences
is
self-evident,
⁴
a fact no more startling than that Truffaut’s or Fellini’s movies construct aesthetic artifices out of the raw material of these auteurs’ lives; what Allen manages to do in
Radio Days
and
Deconstructing Harry
is to manipulate the audience’s assumptions of the autobiographical nature of his work to generate subtextual tensions reinforcing the dynamics of his plots. Consequently, for the viewer, speculating about where actuality recedes and fabrication begins is one of the central interpretive pleasures of
Radio Days
and
Deconstructing Harry,
one only slightly less central to the rhetorical designs of
Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors,
and
Husbands and Wives
. Because so many of his major films deliberately exploit the ambiguous relationship between Allen’s life and art, it seems necessary to briefly summarize what Allen’s biographers delineate in much greater detail: the convergences and divergences between Allen’s biography and how he fictionalizes it in movies.

Most significantly, perhaps, Alvy Singer’s and Isaac Davis’s pilgrimages from popular entertainment (stand-up comedy and scripting a television variety show) to play and novel writing roughly approximate the trajectory of Allen’s own career. His professional transmutation from comedy writing and comic performance to the production of comic and then serious films is one also reenacted in truncated form in
Hannah and Her Sisters
by Mickey Sachs, who follows Isaac’s lead in repudiating television by quitting his lucrative producer’s job. In a more oblique parallel, Clifford Stern of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
rebels against his glitzy showbiz brother-in-law, Lester, by producing a PBS documentary on him so venomously satirical that Lester refuses to approve its airing and fires him from the project. Cliff’s expulsion places him in the same circumstance his fellow protagonists have more consciously chosen: he has exiled himself from the world of television. We never see the ramifications of Cliff’s self-exile from television, but it is obvious that Allen’s own similar move away from pop culture to serious art carried a significant personal cost.

Of course, Allen himself abandoned television scriptwriting for stand-up comedy and, ultimately, serious filmmaking. However, it’s difficult not to see in the defections of Bates, Sachs, and Stern allegory as opposed to autobiography: Allen is figuring another conversion from pop culture for serious art in those films. The preponderance of negative responses of film critics and reviewers to
Interiors
and to Allen’s overall defection from comedy in the late 1970s figures centrally in the repeated admonitions of attendees at the Sandy Bates Film Festival in
Stardust Memories
that he should return to making his “early, funny movies,” the existential preoccupations of Bates which incited the change clearly reproducing Allen’s own frequently acknowledged depressive tendencies. Allen is never more autobiographical than when his films debate the virtues of entertainment vs. the culturally superior claims of serious art.

More personal details from life emerge in Allen’s films as well. Allen experienced the loss of hearing in one ear, which Isaac briefly complains of in
Manhattan
and which Mickey Sachs undergoes a battery of tests to diagnose, both
Hannah
protagonist and his creator fearing that they had a brain tumor.
⁵
Allen’s relationship with Diane Keaton (born Diane Hall) inspired
Annie Hall;
commentators and gossip columnists differ on which scenes and how much. Isaac’s relationship with Tracy in
Manhattan
has its antecedent in Allen’s late- 1970s relationship with a seventeen-year-old actress named Stacey Nelkin, who saw little similarity between Tracy and Isaac’s affair and hers and Alien’s.
⁶
Nonetheless, one Allen associate found that film most closely approaching an autobiographical version of Allen’s life: “Maybe he was most like himself in
Manhattan
,” Alien’s longtime producer, Rollins, told Julian Fox, “I can’t be specific but in my mind it’s the closest to what he actually is.”
⁷
Allen is right to object that critics identified him excessively with Sandy Bates in
Stardust Memories
and with Harry Block as well, but in doing so he often minimized the inducements those films offered to make them “think it’s me.”

That Allen’s films—like Harry Block’s fiction—appropriate lives other than his own for artistic purposes is easy to substantiate. Eve of
Interiors
was partly inspired by Louise Lasser’s mother,
⁸
Mia Farrow has acknowledged that her parents and sisters provided the model for Hannahs family,
⁹
and
Alice
is interpretable as the narrative of a pampered, wealthy New York woman possessed of Farrow’s Catholic girlhood who, through the magic realism intervention of Dr. Yang, gradually acquires Farrow’s widely acknowledged virtues of maternal devotion and social conscience.
Husbands and Wives
draws at the very least its aura of fractiousness and acrimony from the emotions resulting from the disintegration of the Allen/Farrow relationship, from which
Manhattan Murder Mystery
seems in a highly self-conscious way to offer light comedic distraction. Diane Keaton’s replacement of Farrow in the female lead of
Mystery
created a palely nostalgic resurrection of the Alvy/Annie pairing in the marriage of Larry (Allen) and Carol, Carol’s adventurous pursuit of a neighbor’s murder being repeatedly counterpoised with her husband’s largely unexplained passivity and reclusiveness.
¹⁰
And then there is
Deconstructing Harry
a film inconceivable—and unintelligible—without the background of the Allen/Farrow public melodrama which transformed Allen into a tabloid villain. As this brief survey suggests, autobiography figures significantly in Allen’s scripts, a fact he has infrequently acknowledged. One such instance: “Maybe it’s because I’m depressed so often that I’m drawn to writers like Kafka and Dostoevsky and a filmmaker like Bergman. I think I have all the symptoms and problems that their characters are occupied with: an obsession with death, an obsession with God or the lack of God, the question of why are we here. Almost all of my work is autobiographical—exaggerated but true.”
¹¹