The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (18 page)

Bates’s housekeeper has prepared rabbit for his dinner, to which he responds vehementy, reminding her that he doesn’t eat rodent. Allen’s description of the remainder of this scene describes an intention not many viewers intuited: “He looks at this dead thing and it reminds him of his own mortality. And then the rest of the film takes place in his mind.”
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The film cuts to Bates’s arrival at the film festival, Gordon Willis shooting the faces greeting him through a fisheye lens, which heightens the grotesquely predatory nature of their intense interest in Bates. The remainder of the film largely adheres to this surrealistic cinematic mode reflective of Bates’s demoralized condition and utter disaffection with people; the nature of its perspectival aesthetic parallels that described by Tennessee Williams’ explanation of his staging of
The Glass Menagerie:
“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”
¹¹
Stardust Memories
may also be “seated predominantly in the heart,” but Bates’s heart is one brimming not with nostalgia and longing but with repulsion and despair. That fact allows Allen’s film to pose an inverted version of the question it is dramatizing through the tension between comic and serious art: if art has nothing to convey other than self-indulgent despair and hopelessness, the movie asks, is there any purpose in its creation? The first scene of
Stardust Memories
establishes this question as one of the film’s central grounds of inquiry.

The opening scene is the one that Bates intends as the closing scene of his movie: the character Bates plays is on a train populated by passengers who seem less human beings than Bergmanesque incarnations of human anguish and hopelessness. Outside the window he notices another train, this one carrying celebratory, beautiful passengers drinking champagne and exchanging Academy Awards. His efforts to convince the grim-visaged conductor on his train that he belongs on the other train are met with stony indifference.

Bates’s desperate attempt to escape his train of misery and the grotesques who share it with him—his parents and sister included—is equally futile; the train deposits them at a beach-lot junkyard, a wasteland infested by scavenging seagulls, where they meet the passengers from the celebratory train approaching them from the opposite direction. “The whole point of the movie,” Bates explains later in the film, “is that no one is saved” (p. 334), which is not what Bates’s film’s producer, Walsh (Laraine Newman), wants this film slated for an Easter release to express. On that account, funny movies with happy endings are presented as being what corporate America expects of Bates. One of the plot strands of
Stardust Memories
which carries through the Sandy Bates Film Festival weekend is Bates’s attempt to exert control over the end of his movie and to fend off the studio heads’ effort to transform the junkyard wasteland, which in Bates’s imagination is the final destination of all passengers, into a musically redemptive “Jazz Heaven.”

Like his creator, Bates refuses to be coerced into the mythology of art-as- salvation, into the Modernist notion of art as the conferrer of immortality. “Oh, well… Sandy Bates’s work will live on after him,” Vivian Ornick (Helen Hanft), the festival director grandly declares after Bates’s assassination, prompting him to reply, “But what good is it if I can’t pinch any women or hear any music?” (p. 370). Allen’s own attitude seems to be summed up by a nurse who watches Bates perform magic toward the end of the film. “All those silly magic tricks you do,” the nurse, one of Bates’s many self-projections who employs the same metaphoric elision of magic with art that Allen creates in
Shadows and Fog,
rebukes Bates, “couldn’t help your friend Nat Bernstein” (p. 364), who died young of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
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Allen has, in fact, been quite explicit in acknowledging the rejection of the redemptive power of art which
Stardust Memories
dramatizes: “I didn’t want [Bates] to be necessarily likable,” he told Graham McCann, “I wanted him to be surly and upset: not a saint nor an angel, but a man with real problems who finds out that art doesn’t save you.”
¹³
Although the comic/serious art polarization continues to resonate throughout
Stardust Memories,
as the film proceeds, that issue is gradually subsumed into a larger accusation: that art not only fails to “save” its maker, but as Bates’s producer, Walsh, contends early in the movie, artists merely “document their private suffering and fob it off as art” (p. 283). Among Allen’s films, only
Interiors, Deconstructing Harry,
and
Celebrity
approach the negativity of
Stardust Memories
exploration of the nature, uses, and value of art, the film finding in the inescapable subjectivity of artworks the principal source of their unreliability.

Before leaving New York for Connecticut and the Sandy Bates Film Festival, Bates’s response to the idea of a festival of his old films is “it’s absurd. It’s … ridiculous,” Allen’s visual projection of the entire event through Bates’s unremittingly subjective perspective providing consistent confirmation of that description. Like Guido Anselmi at the end of Fellini’s
8½
Bates is besieged by fans, filmmakers, actors, and would-be friends and lovers, all of whom perceive in his artistically inspired celebrity a means toward whatever form of happiness they imagine for themselves, and for many of whom his shift away from making his “early, funny movies” is understood as a betrayal. Their appeals range from the grotesque (one man has an idea for a comedy about the Guayana massacre/suicide, another a screenplay about jockeys) to the deadly serious (many want him to support charitable causes such as leukemia research, aid to the blind, and a global project seeking to free Soviet scientists incarcerated in insane asylums), the realms of the comic/pathetic and the tragic with which he’s continually confronted proving postmodernly consecutive and impartible.

Bates’s visit to his sister’s Connecticut home is introduced by a declaration similar to that which prefaces his trip to his festival, Bates in a flashback responding to Dorrie’s accusation that he had been flirting with her fourteen- year-old cousin at dinner, “You know how ridiculous that sounds?… I mean, doesn’t that sound—it’s, it’s, it’s absurd” (p. 231). Once again, Bates’s recitation of the “ridiculous … absurd” formula seems to spawn a Eugene Ionesco reality. The film cuts to Debbie’s apartment, where she and her sweatsuited friends (one of whom fled Manhattan out of fear for her personal safety, only to get raped in Connecticut) are doing yoga led by their Indian guru, where her husband is riding the exercise bicycle he apparently never gets off despite the fact that he’s had as many heart attacks while using it as he’d had before he started, and where Debbie tells him of her worries about her runaway child who is selling stolen cameras in Texas. The scene culminates in the arrest of Bates’s chauffeur, who is driving Bates and Isobel back to the Stardust Hotel, for mail fraud. Allen never dramatizes the reality of which these scenes are Bates’s psyche’s grotesque distortions. One cost of this decision was Allen’s being branded an anti-Semite and worse by those who construed the film (and its admittedly unattractive depictions of Bates’s Jewish admirers) as cinematic realism. Allen’s intention seems to have been less to distinguish between actuality and Bates’s perceptions of it than to use the film’s immersion in Bates’s point of view to intensify questions he is posing about movies and their relationship to life.
¹⁴

In the film’s most explicit articulation of Bates’s condition, he complains, “I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of my lawyer and my accountant, and I’m- I’m-I can’t help anybody. I can’t help the Cancer Society and I can’t help the blind people and the-the kidney victims. I can’t help my sister.” It’s the disparity between his actual capacities as a human being and his fans’ completely disproportionate adoration of him that prompts him to ask the interplanetary traveler Og, another self-projection he encounters at the flying saucer conven-tion, “But shouldn’t I stop making movies and do something that counts, like-like helping people or becoming a missionary or something?”(p. 366). Having read in the
Times
that matter is decaying and the universe is breaking down, Bates places the value of his own work and that of canonical art in that context of apocalyptic ultimacy: “There’s not gonna to be anything left…. I’m not talking about my stupid little films here. I’m, uh—eventually there’s not gonna be any more Beethoven or Shakespeare or—” (p. 286). Og’s response—“You want to do mankind a favor? Tell funnier jokes”—prefigures Mickey Sachs’s invocation in
Hannah and Her Sisters
of the possibility of watching Marx Brothers movies as reason enough to continue living. But
Stardust Memories
is a distinctly less sanguine film than
Hannah
, one in which, rather than representing film as a solution to human misery, the movie medium itself is implicated in the confusions that make answering ultimate existential questions so impossible. Rather than dramatizing art in high Modernism’s terms as that which stabilizes and clarifies the vertiginous turmoil of life,
Stardust Memories
insists that art—film in particular—constitutes just one more projection of indeterminacy, of irresolvable enigmas, and of consequent human bewilderment. Actuating those enigmas and imposing that sense of bewilder-ment on his audience is Allen’s primary objective in the last fifteen minutes of
Stardust Memories
.

Batess complaint about his movies’ affective uselessness continues, “and I don’t wanna get married, Isobel. That’s the last thing I need now, is a—is a family and commitment” (p. 369). Juxtaposed against
Stardust Memories
dramatization of Sandy Bates’s crisis of confidence in his artistic vocation are the erotic relationships Bates has with three women, his interactions with them constituting the primary plot this free associationally structured film can be said to have. Bates’s romantic relationship with Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling) is stricdy past tense, dramatized through Bates’s mental flashbacks: the film suggests that her mental collapse terminated their relationship and that she’s now recovered and living with her husband in Hawaii. She represents what Allen will characterize in
Husbands and Wives
as a “kamikaze woman,” a lover who is “trouble” because her mental instability is inseparable from her erotic appeal. Allen’s protagonists repeatedly involve themselves with kamikaze women out of the deluded belief—as Isaac Davis puts it in
Manhattan
—that he’ll “be the one who makes ‘em act different” (p. 261), whose love will be able to save them from the erratic impulses which make them so alluring. Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault) is Dorrie’s opposite, a practical-minded French mother of two children whom Bates associates with family and commitment and whose leaving of her husband raises the stakes of this weekend, pressuring Bates to make a choice concerning his relationship with her. Bates acknowledges that Daisy (Jessica Harper) reminds him of Dorrie: both come from the American upper middle class (unlike Isobel, who demonstrated her proletarian sympathies by joining the insurgent workers at the barricades in France in 1968); both are artistic (Dorrie is an actress, Daisy a concert violin-ist); and both are involved with drugs (Dorrie with lithium for her depression and speed for her figure, Daisy with recreational amphetamines) in a way which makes Bates (for whom drugs are “show business tranquilizers”) highly uncomfortable. In telling Daisy at the UFO cultists’ convention that he wants to run off with her, he’s attempting to regenerate the absoluteness of his self-destructive emotional commitment to Dorrie. But before they can take off together, Isobel appears with the rest of the Sandy Bates Film Festival contingent, each of them rebuking him, raising questions, or making demands. He expresses his disenchantment with his career, his sense of the purposelessness of his art, and admits his reluctance to marry Isobel. He is then mercifully put out of the misery of all the choices these others are demanding of him by the fan (still another self-projection) who shoots him.

Given the risks to his emotional and psychological well-being embodied in the “kamikaze women,” it’s clear that Bates’s reconciliation with Isobel represents the only happy ending possible for him, and so Bates rises from the dead to pursue that very conclusion.
¹⁵
The question that I posed in the
Annie Hall
chapter remains unanswered, however: Why does Bates choose to close his film, one originally intended to dramatize the idea that “nobody is saved,” with a happy ending? The answer seems to be that the happy ending Allen has Bates create is far more ambiguous than it originally appears to be.