The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (15 page)

As we’ve seen,
Radio Days
can be read as Allen’s cinematic answer to the question, “What was the effect of radio on its listeners?” the film enacting visually the imaginative flights that popular medium fostered in him. The moral of that story, arguably, is that pop culture precipitated Allen’s art. At the end of
Another Woman,
Marion Post’s reading of Larry’s treatment of their affair in his novel fills her with “a strange mixture of wistfulness and hope” such that “for the first time in a long time” she feels “at peace. “
⁷
Her contentment with the transformation of her most intense emotional experience into art, however, leaves the viewer, as we’ll see, with nagging questions about the authenticity of the conversion she undergoes from a bookish sublimator of feeling to someone who freely acknowledges and expresses her emotions. In other words, it’s possible that reading a fictionalized version of herself as a “woman capable of great passion” is the only passionate experience of which Marion is capable.
⁸
Otherwise, we are left with the endings of
Play It Again, Sam
and
The Purple Rose of Cairo
as examples of resolution through artistic intercession, both protagonists remaining helplessly in the thrall of Hollywood illusions, or with Harry Block’s closing affirmation that his art has saved his life once again,
Deconstructing Harry
’s incessantly sour narrative prompting the viewer to ask what sort of art it is which could save someone so unworthy of salvation. For all their preoccupation with art and the artist, Allen’s films are utterly lacking in conclusions affirming the redemption of high culture art, their endings most typically—as in
Another Woman
and
Deconstructing Harry
—simultaneously ironizing the putatively redemptive artwork and its artist as well.

The gratuitously happy ending of Sandy Bates’s film leaves its filmmaker standing in the Stardust Hotel auditorium in an incongruously demoralized solitude; the second script Holly has written in
Hannah and Her Sisters
provides a pretext through which she and Mickey achieve a reunion culminating in marriage, but neither it nor her writing ambitions figures in the film’s completely domestic resolution. The title character of
Alice
abandons completely her literary ambitions in favor of social activism without a hint of ambivalence or regret; nearly half of the characters in
September
are hopelessly frustrated artists, their expressive paralyses and attendant interpersonal estrangements remaining painfully unresolved at the film’s close. In reconciling with his wife at the end of
Bullets Over Broadway,
playwright/director David Shayne could be expressing the unconscious desires of all these characters in affirming that, as a consequence of his experience producing his drama,
God of Our Fathers,
on Broadway, “I’m not an artist. There—I’ve said it, and I feel free. I’m not an artist. “
⁹

The notion of artist which Shayne repudiates here is very much a product of his era—the 1920s—in which Modernist art had already inaugurated its project of elevating the magnitude of the artist’s cultural contribution,
Bullets Over Broadway
proliferating with pretentious discussions among artists of the superiority of art and artists to ordinary life. Although many aspects of the art/life tension are open to debate in Allen’s films, the Modernist assumption of the artist’s transcendent significance is a belief which is embraced by only his most unsympathetic or satirically conceived characters—Frederick in
Hannah and Her Sisters
being perhaps the most extreme example.
¹⁰

“I don’t believe that the artist is superior,” Allen told Stig Bjorkman, “I’m not a believer in the specialness of the artist. I don’t think to have a talent is an achievement. I think it’s a gift from God, sort of. I do think that if you’re lucky to have a talent, with that comes a certain responsibility.”
¹¹
It’s the arrogant self-congratulation of the Modernist aesthetic, the extravagant claims made for art and artists, which Allen consistently rejects, his repudiation of its pseudoreligious aura and pretentions emerging repeatedly in interviews. “Art is like the intellectual’s Catholicism, it’s the promise of an afterlife,” he contended in 1978, “but of course it’s fake—you’re only doing it because
you
want to do it.”
¹²
“I hate when art becomes a religion,” he explained to Michiko Kakutani eighteen years later. “I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than on people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel that the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in
Interiors
. I always feel that the artist is much too revered: it’s not fair and it’s cruel.”
¹³
Eve, the matriarch of
Interiors,
is Allen’s most compelling avatar of the cultural overvaluation of art, his dramatic negation of the Modernist creed affirming art’s transcendence of life. Ironically, she appears in the film of Allen’s most markedly dedicated to emulating the canons of high Modernist art.

The near unanimity of Allen’s films in their affirmation of popular culture over serious art and their skepticism about the value of art’s contribution to human emotional well-being is complicated by the existence of a number of public comments Allen has made in apparent contradiction to these attitudes. Assessing his work to date in the late 1980s, Allen distinguished between his films and those of filmmakers he considered his superiors: “They’re not A films, they’re B films, though not in the way one usually talks about B films as second features; they’re all solid pictures, they work in terms of what they set out to do, and there’s inspiration in some of them. But I don’t have a
Wild Strawberries
or a
Grand Illusion
. I’m going to try before my life is over to rise to the occasion and make one or two that would be considered great by any standard…. Maybe now that I’ve moved into my fifties and I am more confident, I can come up with a couple that are true literature.”
¹⁴
The conclusion of
Stardust Memories,
with its exemplification of a cacophony of audience reactions to Bates’s film, surely problematizes the idea expressed here of a film “great by any standard,” but the sincerity of Allen’s ambition to make films comparable to “true literature” is clear, even if it’s an ambition about which he has elsewhere expressed ambivalence.

Allen’s effort to “take a more profound path” in filmmaking began with the production of
Interiors
in 1977 and continued in
Another Woman
and
September,
films concentrating on an intensely sober analysis of the inward lives of their characters. If the influence of Bergman on these films wasn’t largely self-evident, Allen’s account of Bergman’s major contribution to cinema confirms their shared purposes in art filmmaking. Bergman, Allen suggested, “evolved a style to deal with the human interior, and he alone among directors has explored the soul’s battlefield to the fullest.”
¹⁵
Allen’s characterization of Bergman’s work also delineates Allen’s own objectives in his three “chamber movies.” Admittedly, many critics judge
Interiors, Another Woman,
and
September
among Allen’s least effective efforts. If these movies aren’t completely successful, it’s arguably not because Allen is too corrupted by comedic, pop culture impulses to make serious films, but because his major gifts as a filmmaker work against the creation of a
Wild Strawberries
or
Grand Illusion,
because the cultural circumstances and epistemologies necessary to the generation of such cinematic masterpieces have vanished, and because even when Allen tries to make such a film, the themes dramatized in it gravitate against the notion of art-as-transcendence inherent in his invocation of film’s aspiration to “true literature.” For all of its pretensions to Bergmanesque seriousness and its ambition to use drama “to rise to the occasion” of the creation of high an, the best of these films,
Interiors,
dramatizes nothing more eloquently than the aridity of lives aspiring to the condition of art. Because of Woody Allen’s very real ambivalence about this issue, however,
Interiors
employs a self-conscious artistry unprecedented in his films to communicate the insufficiency of the aesthetic.

The opening images of
Interiors
seem an incarnation of Mrs. Ramsay’s
To the Lighthouse
injunction “life stand still here”: a starkly decorated living room, its window looking out on an ocean whose turbulence is imperceptible, dissolves to five vases aesthetically spaced on a mantle. The voice-over of Arthur (E. G. Marshall), the father of the film’s unnamed protagonist family, implicitly ascribes the immobility of these analogues of the family members to the efforts of his wife, Eve (Geraldine Page). “By the time the girls were born… it was all so perfect, so ordered,” Arthur explains. “The truth is, she’d created a world around us that we existed in… where everything had its place, where there always was a kind of harmony” (p. 114). Unlike the artistically coherent world Stevens’s “single artificer… singing made,” the harmony of Eve’s projected cosmos is colorless and aesthetically oppressive. This harmony is expressed visually through Gordon Willis’s cinematography and Mel Bourne’s sets, which conspire to ensure that nothing in the frame—from the fine strawberry blond sheen of Mary Beth Hurt’s hair to the predominant mauve caste of the family’s wardrobe to the burnished gleam of their homes’ hardwood floors—transgresses the “subtle statement of pale tones” which is Eve’s signature color scheme. That the world she’d created for them to inhabit approximates an artwork is reinforced by the terms her husband uses to describe her, his diction continuing to invoke the terms formalist critics typically employed to compliment successfully executed aesthetic strategies. “She was very beautiful,” Arthur explains, “Very pale and cool in her black dress… with never anything more than a single strand of pearls. And distant. Always poised and distant.” The overall effect of the world she projected for them was one of “great dignity,” Arthur concludes, “it was like an ice palace.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald used the trauma Sally Carrol Happer experiences getting lost in a northwest ice palace to provoke her flight back to the South of her youth, away from the “Ibsenesque” Minnesotans who are “freezing up” into “righteous, narrow and cheerless” people “without infinite possibilities for great sorrow or joy. “
¹⁶
It isn’t physical chill but a grotesquely exaggerated attempt to transform the gross materials of human life into artistic perfection which has sunk Eve’s family into their emotional deep freeze. When her daughters lover moves a lamp which Eve bought to complement “what we were trying to do in the bedroom” into the dining room of his apartment so that he can work there, Eve aggressively returns it to the bedroom because “the shade is just wrong against all these slick surfaces” (p. 118). The scene epitomizes, in microcosm, Eve’s chief blind spot, one that Allen invoked in arguing, “When you start putting a higher value on works of art than on people, you’re forfeiting your humanity.” It is the characters’ conflicted attempts to deal with Eve’s tyrannical, emotion-repressing privileging of the artistic which provides a primary dramatic trajectory for the first half of
Interiors
. That Eve’s life-remediating project was impossible to begin with is conveyed by the emotional breakdown the effort has cost her before the film’s opening: “An enormous abyss opened up beneath our feet,” as Arthur recalls her mental collapse, “and I was staring into a face I didn’t recognize” (p. 115). The episode of psychic dissociation has rendered Eve recuperative for life, her family seeking dutifully to foster her recovery by encouraging as therapy her rededication to the very source of her breakdown: a manic devotion to transforming human habitats into artworks through interior decoration.

As the film opens, Eve has been plying her craft in the apartment of her daughter, Joey (Mary Beth Hurt), and Joey’s lover, Michael (Sam Waterston). She first appears with a vase which will complement the prevailing palette—“my beiges and my earth tones”—she has introduced in blatant disregard of Michael’s obvious impatience with her foisting of expensive art objects upon him and Joey and his clearly expressed opposition to paying for endless renovations to the place in the name of nurturing Eve’s aesthetic territoriality. Her daughters have responded to her with far greater ambivalence. All three of them regularly dress in “her beiges and her earth tones” while enacting their individual psychic strategies for winning her approbation at the same time that they’re attempting to evade the emotional cost exacted for her approval.

The strategy of Renata (Diane Keaton) has, until recently, been the most successful: she’s managed to become a widely published, prolific poet whose literary dedication justifies her withdrawal from the family’s New York home to Connecticut on grounds of the artist’s need for concentration and isolation, an argument her mother could contest only at the price of self-contradiction. The year-long writer’s block Renata has experienced manifests her unconscious mind’s refusal to play by her mother’s rules any longer, her habitual artistic isolation beginning to extract its toll as she undergoes a terrible moment of complete estrangement between self and world: “It was like I… was here, and the world was out there, and I couldn’t bring us together” (p. 141).

The success of Flyn (Kristin Griffith) as an artist is considerably more equivocal, the acting career which has allowed her similarly to escape Eve’s dominion having lately reduced her to roles in television movies which she is all-too-aware she has landed less for her acting prowess than for her physical beauty. “Form without content” is Renata’s husband’s assessment of his unsuccessful novels, and its inevitable that he will take out his creative and sexual frustration on another artist—Flyn—whose art is characterized by the same deficiency and who therefore represents for him “a woman I [don’t] feel inferior to” (p. 171).