The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (16 page)

Renata’s and Flyn’s defections in the name of art relegate the creatively infertile Joey to the role of Eve’s caretaker, since, as she explains, “I feel a real need to express something, but I don’t know what I want to express” (p. 125). Renata concurs in this assessment, avowing that Joey “has all the anguish… and the… anxiety, the artistic personality, without any of the talent” (p. 141). As a result, Joey and her mother have established a relationship in which Joey’s tireless solicitousness to Eve’s substantial needs is constantly shadowed by their mutual recognition of the artistic incapacity that leaves Joey time to play her mother’s keeper. Add to these profiles the frustrations of Frederick (Richard Jordan), Renata’s husband, in his failed attempt to live up to his promise as a novelist, and its plain to see that the “artistic personality” consisterftly depicted in
Interiors
is a neurotically conflicted one, the film offering not a single example of artistic creation resulting in personal gratification. The closest the movie comes to the dramatization of artistic fulfillment is Renata’s placing of a poem in
The New Yorker;
its publication, however, only serves to convince her the work is “too ambiguous” and must be completely revised.

The film’s major embodiment of the artistic enterprise, of course, remains Eve, who spends the narrative seeking to resurrect her marriage with Arthur, a project which increasingly comes to seem a desperately nostalgic and ultimately futile effort to restore the lost “world she’d created around us..” The forfeited humanity of that “world” is perhaps best symbolized by her desire to show Arthur a majestic Manhattan church she’s discovered, insisting that they get there “before the place gets all cluttered up with people” (p. 157). Her suicide attempt immediately following one of the merely solicitous visits in which Arthur offers no promise for their reconciliation only exacerbates her family’s penchant for perceiving Eve as—in Joey’s characterization—“a sick woman”; as a result, her significance in the film begins to recede simultaneously with the emergence of her replacement and spiritual antithesis.

Allen has acknowledged that a structural weakness of
Interiors
was the belated introduction of Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), the woman whom Arthur obtains a divorce from Eve in order to marry. This highly demonstrative, utterly down-to-earth character who possesses “possibilities for great sorrow or joy” creates a counter-texture to the self-important gravity of the WAS Pish family in general and to Eve in particular, a contrary presence which, Allen conceded, would have been welcome earlier in the film.
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Twice in
Interiors,
Eve closes windows because “street noises are just unnerving” (p. 117), and her first attempt at suicide by asphyxiation necessitates taping over the windows of her apartment. During the dinner party at which Arthur introduces Pearl to his family, Joey, claiming to be warm, opens a window, the conflation of these scenes suggesting that the “unnerving street noises” have entered with Pearl and that Joey, Eve’s ever dutiful daughter, is seeking to force them back out.
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Pearl enters the film wearing a dress so jarringly red as to terminally disperse the earth tones color scheme Eve’s aesthetic has imposed on her family and with which Gordon Willis’s answering cinematography has saturated the movie’s visual field. When asked what sites of cultural import she and Arthur visited while in Greece together, Pearl admits without apology that she’d seen enough “ruins” and was happy to lie on the beaches instead. At dinner, an off-Broadway play that everyone at the table has seen is debated, the family members offering interpretations of it spanning a spectrum of sophisticated ambiguities (“The writer argued both sides so brilliandy,.” is Joey’s gloss, “you didn’t know who is right”) which Pearl missed completely. Not one to get becalmed at the center of irresolvable aesthetic paradoxes of the sort in which a number of Allen’s own films—
Stardust Memories, Radio Days, Pufple Rose of Cairo,
and
Crimes and Misdemeanors
among them—can be seen to conclude, Pearl locates an obvious moral contest in the play and casts her vote without experiencing a second’s cognitive dissonance. “I didn’t get that,.” she explains, “I mean, uh, to me it wasn’t such a big deal. One guy was a squealer, the other guy wasn’t. I liked that guy that wasn’t” (p. 152).

It might be argued that it is only in the context of Eve’s superesthete, hyperrefined family that Allen’s work could seriously solicit sympathy for a character as forthrightly unreflective and blithely anti-intellectual as Pearl. In fact, his films contain a number of characters—Dulcy in
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,
Cecilia in
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
Cheech in
Bullets Over Broad-way,
Linda Ash in
Mighty Aphrodite,
and Hattie in
Sweet and Lowdown—
whose virtues are inseparable from their want of cerebralism, though none of them save Hattie is expected to carry the burden of dramatic redemption assigned to Pearl. Delighting Frederick and Joey’s husband, Mike, with a card trick after dinner, Pearl explains that she’s “a gal that’s been around. I’ve picked up a lot of useless information,” including the ability to tell fortunes with cards. Frederick asks her if she also conducts seances, to which she responds, “Oooh, not me. I figure whatever’s out there, it’s their business. Besides, you—you think I want to bring back my ex-husbands?” (p. 154).

This is as close as the relentlessly somber script of
Interiors
ever comes to a joke, and it’s significant that the congenial scene of Pearl with the family inlaws from which the one-liner emerges is juxtaposed against an excruciatingly tense confrontation occurring simultaneously in Renata’s bedroom—a scene in which Arthur is demanding respectful treatment of his fiancee from Renata, who terms Pearl an “indiscreet” choice for him, and Joey, who dismisses her as a “vulgarian.” Significantly, it is this vulgarian who restores Joeys capacity for self-expression to her, in addition to restoring her to life on the beach after her failed effort to avert Eves second, successful, suicide attempt.

Despite their obvious differences, what Pearl and Joey have in common is epitomized in Pearl’s one-liner and in much else that she says in the film: honesty. Pearl is willing to acknowledge to her fiance’s family the existence of her former, humanly imperfect husbands, one of whom was an orthodontist, she explains deadpan, the other an alcoholic. Joey analogously refuses to humor her mother’s desperate need to believe in the imminence of her reconciliation with Arthur. While Renata and Flyn nurture Eve’s self-delusory impossible dreams, Joey courts her mother’s wrath by expressing the truth that Arthur has left Eve for good. The character in
Interiors
capable of performing magic tricks with cards (a capacity which in Allen’s characterizational economy always confers a special, artist-approximating status) and who is responsible for the film’s two moments of Allenesque Jewish humor converges with the non-artist whose name associates her with clowns and clowning
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to compose an aggregate personification of candor, truthfulness, and tough-minded integrity. Joey’s more dramatically named artist sisters consistently align themselves with deceptions and untruths associated with their aesthete mother: Renata hypocritically flatters Frederick’s writing talents despite his deepening awareness of his literary limitations; Flyn uses her only artistic capacity to encourage physical intimacies with Frederick which result in his brutal, drunken attempt to rape her. In the film’s dramatic climax, Joey alone of the sisters is present to attempt to prevent Eve’s self-destruction, Gordon Willis’s camera visualizing Renata and Flyn obliviously sleeping as Eve walks into the sea. Joey’s attempted rescue of Eve necessitates Pearl’s more efficacious rescue of her.

The disjunction between Eve’s repressive aestheticism and Pearl’s forthright unsophistication prompted many of the film’s critics to posit an allegorical contrast between these alternative mother figures.
²⁰
“In
Interiors
,” David Edelstein suggested, “Allen had the wit to make his subject the war in his nature between the cold and cerebral (WASP) and the warm, materialistic, and embarrassingly vulgar (Jewish). Art leads to death, life to philistinism (and, by implication, comedy). ”
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Although perhaps excessively schematic, the antinomy Edelstein suggested in 1987 seems to have accurately characterized the film’s central dualism while predicting the trajectory of Allen’s subsequent films, an energetic philistinism being consistently preferred to life-denying aestheticism. Edelsteins formulation has two other virtues: first, it suggests how Pearls arrival revitalizes the film—at the reception following her and Arthur’s wedding, “Keepin Out of Mischief Now” and “Wolverine Blues” suddenly burst through the Bergmanian silence which has pervaded this most musicless of Woody Allen films; second, it points up Allen’s emotional investment in Eve. The
Radio Days
chapter of this book cites Allen’s assertion that Eve is one of the three film protagonists with whom he most identifies, and its clear that he was expressing through her the side of himself sympathetic to her comment about one of her interior decoration projects: “I’m not going to accept anything until I’m sure I can maintain the level I expect of myself” (p. 126). She is a projection of the relentlessly committed artist in Allen, the aesthete chronically dissatisfied with his cinematic achievements who routinely subordinates human relationships to that work; he might have been speaking in Eve’s voice when he told an interviewer, “I’m not social. I don’t get an enormous amount of input from the world. I wish I could get out but I cant. “
²²
A major difference between character and creator is that, through her, Allen is able to critique his own penchant for closing windows.

His ultimate disapproval of this self-projection is clearly represented in the fact that the film construes Eve’s suicide as something which is, in its results, unequivocally positive. Her self-annihilation spurs the affecdess Flyn to the single moment of authentic emotion—grief—she experiences in the film as she lays a white rose on her mother’s casket. The suicide also unites Renata and Joey in a passionate embrace of shared sorrow, which dissolves the estrangement existing between them throughout the plot and liberates Joey to express on paper powerful memories of her childhood elicited by emotions stirred by her mother’s absence.
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In order to perceive Eve’s incontestably auspicious suicide as something other than an act of screenwriting cruelty, it’s necessary—as Edelstein and others have recognized—to perceive
Interiors
as allegory rather than melodrama. Such a reading of the film is supported not only by Allen’s comment that “I was more interested in the symbolic story. This is one of those things that takes place more metaphysically.”
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More evidence is provided by the undramatically explicatory nature of Joey’s final speech to her mother, her dialogue in too obvious and calculated a way for a mimetic aesthetic tutoring the audience in how to interpret the cinematic narrative coming to a close. “I thinkyou’re uh, really too perfect… to live in this world,” Joey tells Eve, who has somewhat improbably appeared at the family house in Southampton shordy after the celebration of Arthur’s remarriage. “I mean all the beautifully furnished rooms, carefully designed interiors… everything so controlled. There wasn’t any room for… any real feelings. None… between any of us” (p. 172). As the film’s central embodiment of aesthetic standards which human beings are too flawed to achieve and of an utterly life-denying commitment to artistic cre ation, Eve must be sacrificed to the greater good of her family’s spiritual and emotional liberation from her aesthete’s perfectionist imperatives. Her life’s quest, like that of Donald Barthelme’s Dead Father—another incarnation of Modernist aesthetic imperatives
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—must be repudiated because its effort to subject and subjugate reality to consciousness, to shape a disordered world according to the dictates of the human imagination, ultimately imprisons the self in its own projections, rendering the world outside it so alien and insufferably chaotic that the self’s only recourse is to keep closing windows until
everything
is interior and there’s no outside there anymore. The ultimate fulfillment of Eve’s aesthetic—if it isn’t her self-destruction—is the experience Renata suffers: “It was like I… was here, and the world was out there, and I couldn’t bring us together.”

Eve’s chosen mode of suicide, losing herself in the ocean’s violence, replicates Virginia Woolf’s means of compelling life to stand still, the film’s final scene visualizing Eve’s daughters, united at last, looking out on the scene of her death and commenting on how tranquil the ocean has become. The film’s more resonant affirmation of her act, however, is that its aftermath allows Pearl to save Joey’s life. “In Europe they call mouth-to-mouth resuscitation the kiss of life,.” Allen told Diane Jacobs, “and that’s what I wanted to convey—I wanted Pearl to breathe life into Joey.”
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Pearl is no human exemplar—she seems at points oblivious to the emotional dynamics of the family she’s marrying into, symbolically enacting this failing by drinking excessively at the wedding and mindlessly smashing a vase holding a white rose which is all that remains of Eve in her former summer home. Her Manichean squealer/non- squealer moral dichotomy isn’t much help in sorting out the ethical conundrums posed by Allen’s other films, either.
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But this much Allen is willing to give her: she doesn’t try to breathe art into a woman who’s nearly stopped breathing. It’s for her willful confusion of life and
vissi d’art
that neither Allen nor his movie can ever forgive Eve, or even work up much sympathy at the passing of this emblem of the complete inability of art to transcend life. In Eve, Allen created his most unambiguous and least compassionately drawn symbol of the inseparability of unconditional artistic commitment and self-delusion.