The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (19 page)

As we’ve seen, what viewers have to hold on to as ballast amid the erratic shifts between Bates’s real world experiences and the fantasies into which those scenes of his life seamlessly blend, as well as the oscillations between Bates’s films and his life, are the three women he has either romanced or is considering romancing. Each of them is introduced as being a participant in his real life, in other words, and if we’re disoriented by the constant shifts of time, place, or mode of reality in the film, the appearance of one of the three women tends to relocate us in a largely accessible romantic plot. Consequently, we believe we know exacdy where we are when we watch Bates waking from his fantasy assassination and following Isobel as she angrily hurries her children toward the Stardust Hotel train station. Inside a train car indistinguishable from the one that bore the Hogarthian inconsolables to the junkyard, Bates tells Isobel that as a result of the weekend, “I feel differently about a lot of things:

I had a very, very remarkable idea for the ending of my movie—you know? We’re-we’re on a train, and there are many sad people on it, you know? And-and I have no idea where it’s headin’ … could be anywhere … could be the same junkyard … But it’s not as terrible as I originally thought it was because-because, you know, we like each other, and … we have some laughs, and there’s a lot of closeness, and the whole thing is a lot easier to take.

His teasing description of the train they’re on and the experience they’re undergoing charms her into a smile, and he then predicts that they’re on the verge of a “big, big finish” which needs only a reconciliatory kiss to achieve consummation. “Here at last,” Allen’s audience might well think, “we’re released from the spiraling, self-conscious obliquities of this movie by a generic boy-commits-himself-to-girl finish anyone can understand!” But then this kiss is greeted by applause from the Sandy Bates Film Festival audience, and as the film dissolves to the Stardust auditorium, we gradually come to understand that the scene constitutes the new ending of Bates’s movie. I’ve already argued that no one in the audience seems transfigured by this ending, which Bates has defended to Isobel as being “sentimental in a good way,” nor can they know how close they came to being stranded by the film at the wasteland junkyard. More significantly, what this scene has done is transform Isobel from a character in Allen’s film into an actress in Bates’s film, while it collapses completely any distinction between Bates’s life and his movie. In other words, if the scene he is describing to her is the scene they re simultaneously playing, who are they? They re just part of the cinematic machinery that has betrayed Allen’s audience into sentimentally embracing a romantic ending which is abrupdy revealed to be only a movie approximation of resolution, the recycling of a too-familiar cinematic convention.

The deliberate confusion between reality and film created in this scene is exacerbated by the impossibility—in instrumental terms, at any rate—of the Bates movie ending existing as
Stardust Memories
presents it. By the logic of Allen’s films chronological narrative, the film festival audience is watching a filmed version of a scene which, if it ever happened, could only have taken place on the very afternoon on which they’re watching it. (Additionally, since Bates spends much of the festival weekend worrying about his film’s ending, how could the festival audience possibly watch a completed version of that ending?) Without a doubt, the thematic issues of
Stardust Memories
—questions concerning the meaning of life, the purposefulness of art, and the possibility of personal redemption—begin to blur as the film/reality confusions proliferate. It’s important to note that the scene Bates perceives as the source of his regeneration and his shift toward the existential affirmation he expresses to Isobel on the train—the most intensely emotional scene in
Stardust Memories
—is adulterated by precisely the same ambiguities.

Casting about for moorings amid the psychological conflicts and insta-bilities which comprise his
Stardust Memories
pilgrimage, Bates experiences a memory. “I guess it was the combination of everything,” Bates says in describing his response to the film’s title “Stardust” epiphany,” the sound of that music, and the-the breeze and how beautiful Dorrie looked to me. And for one brief moment, everything seemed to come together perfectly, and I-I felt happy, almost indestructible, in a way” (p. 372). There is no more affirmative moment in Allen’s films, no more lovingly dramatized cinematic celebration of the randomly experienced moment of beauty which is Allen’s most compelling affirmation of life. It is an intensely and, for Allen’s films, unprecedentedly lyrical moment in which the screen image of the gorgeous Dorrie is conflated with Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “Stardust,” the cinematic elision of the Hoagy Carmichael popular standard and human beauty coming as close as Allen’s films ever do to evoking what Stanley Elkin termed “the grand actuality of the reconciled,” the convergence of inward, imaginative fantasy and external, worldly perfection. However, the authenticity of that moment depends on our disregarding of the fact that the film has already conditioned us to be skeptical of such emotionally and generically overdetermined scenes.

In an earlier scene of
Stardust Memories,
Bates and Dorrie are kissing beneath an umbrella in a rainstorm, the movingly romantic moment gradually revealed to be a movie take, the camera pulling back to expose klieg lights and a rainmaking machine beyond the boundaries of the original frame. It follows that if as viewers of
Stardust Memories
we are drawn into the even more beautifully epiphanic “Stardust” memory which expresses the film’s ultimate existential affirmation, then its sudden interruption by the exclamations “Cop-out artist!” “That was
so
beautiful,” and “Why do all comedians turn out to be sentimental bores?” from Batess audience pours the cold water of mediation upon our intense emotional involvement. What we’ve been so wrapped up in is just another scene in Bates’s movie to which numerous contradictory audience responses are possible. Sandy Bates’s sentimental affirmation of life is framed and parodied by Woody Allen’s deflationary irony; increasingly, we come to recognize that
Stardust Memories
is a film deliberately mined with cinematic booby traps set to snare the generic expectation, the unwary emotional investment. Unquestionably, it’s not the sort of film that Pearl,
Interiors
incarnation of uncritical artistic responses, would enjoy, though her new daughter-in-law-to-be, Joey, would understand it completely: “The writer argued both sides so brilliantly,” she says of a play the family is discussing, “you didn’t know who was right” (.
Interiors
, p. 152).

The self-reflexive ironies produced by the ending of Bates’s film are reinforced and amplified by the ending of Allen’s. Among those in the festival audience whose responses to Bates’s “big, big finish” reflect no awareness of or interest in the issues to which Bates’s film is most committed are characters the published screenplay identifies as “Dorrie,” “Isobel,” and “Daisy,” but who seem no longer to be acting completely in character. “Dorrie,” like her anorexic character in the film, is preoccupied with her weight, worrying that she looked fat in the movie; “Isobel” is pleased when “Daisy” tells her she looked beautiful on-screen, but she feels her pronunciation of English wasn’t good, and both agree that when “he” (an extremely ambiguous pronoun suddenly) played romantic scenes with them, he wiggled his tongue unpleasantly around in their mouths and “never lets you go” (p. 378). For Bates, who recalled (or, more likely, fantasized) a scene earlier in the movie in which Dorrie describes him as “the best kisser” (p. 278), these actresses’ collective critique of his smooching would represent a particularly humiliating rebuke; more significandy, it thoroughly deflates the film’s “big, big finish” of romantic reconciliation by reducing its metaphoric resonances to matters of Bates’s personal osculatory techniques. But then, precisely what the scene throws into question are the identities of “Dorrie” and “Isobel” and “Daisy“—and of course, of “Bates” as well.

Viewers of Allen’s film have been encouraged to believe throughout much of the narrative that they understood the difference between Bates’s films and his life, the scenes from his “early, funny movies” being clearly bracketed as what they are—brief routines which, except for a self-parodying, exaggerated comedic emphasis, could have appeared in
Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex
.
¹⁶
Besides those moments in which romantic embraces with Dorrie are exposed to be scenes from Batess films, the first all-out assault on the stability of that distinction occurs when the Isobel and Bates reconciliation on the train turns out to be the end of Batess untitled movie. Unlike Dorrie, whom Bates met while making a movie and who acknowledges that “I guess I’m always acting” (p. 306), Isobel has no apparent connection to filmmaking, and much of her appeal for him—as for the viewer—seems located in her complete uninvolvement with that world of role-playing narcissistic self-aware- ness and illusions. Accordingly, for Allen’s audience, as for Og, Isobel seems “someone you can count on.” But then, that his heartening, life-affirming choice of her over the kamikaze Daisy is not, as we briefly thought, the romantic closure of Allen’s film but of Bates’s, is deeply disorienting; even more so is the appearance of the three female characters at the end of the film presenting themselves no longer as Bates’s intimates but as actresses, as professionals no less oblivious to the film’s themes and romantically affirmative conclusion than is the rest of the festival audience. Nowhere in Allen’s movies is there a more unequivocal dramatization of the utter inability of film (or, as we saw earlier, filmmakers) to raise the audience above their personal agendas and narcissistic preoccupations—of, that is, the impotence and inefficacy of art.
¹⁷

It therefore seems ironic that Allen described the work which makes that point as “the best film I ever did … It was the closest I came to achieving what I set out to achieve.”
¹⁸
That irony is, of course, the source of the effectiveness of
Stardust Memories
. More than any other Allen film,
Stardust Memories
operates on a dynamic of assertion and retraction, affirmation and negation, one perfectly dramatizing Allen’s ambivalent attitude toward the art-related themes he habitually addresses. The content of Bates s closing speech to Isobel—“It’s not as terrible as I originally thought it was because-because, you know, we like each other, and … we have some laughs, and there’s a lot of closeness, and the whole thing is a lot easier to take”—reflects a belief in the redemptiveness of human relationships sporadically affirmed in Allen’s films. The exposure of this assertion as a scripted scene in a movie reveals it to be not an image of how human beings actually interact in the world but merely as Sandy Bates’s hopefully romantic projection of that reality. It reflects his desire of how things should be rather than an image of how they actually are. The intensely emotional “Stardust moment” delivers its affectively compelling conviction that “for one brief moment, everything seemed to come together perfecdy, and I-I felt happy, almost indestructible, in a way.” Our realization that this too is a created cinematic moment exposes it as well as the product not of unmediated life but of artistically calculated, reconstructed human desire.
Stardust Memories
is less a film affirming life than one dramatizing the human desire artistically to affirm it.

That point is reinforced, in fact, by the lyrics of the song creating the “Stardust memory” itself. “Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely nights dreaming of a song,” Louis Armstrong sings, the metonymic substitution of song for lover fitting perfectly in a film in which lovers are repeatedly preempted by others’ constructed visions of them. “And I am once again with you. When our love was new, oh babe, it’s an inspiration. But that was long ago, now my consolation is in the stardust of a song.” “Stardust,” the very song which generates the “Stardust memory” itself, expresses the irrecoverability of such moments; even as Bates is experiencing the beauty of “everything seeming to come together perfectly,” the content of the song eliciting that feeling in him is asserting the inescapable mutability of such moments. “Though I dream in vain,” Armstrong concludes the Hoagy Carmichael lyric, “in my heart it will remain, my stardust melody, the memory of love’s refrain.”

Following the montage of some of Alvy’s and Annie’s happy moments together at the end of
Annie Hall
—the montage visualizing “the memory of love’s refrain”—Alvy Singer affirms his relationship with Annie (“It was great seeing Annie again, right? I realized what a great person she was and-and how much fun it was just knowing her” [
Annie Hall,
p. 105]) by suggesting that his memories of their love affair are valuable and sustaining.
Stardust Memories
complicates that affirmation of human remembrance by dramatizing how often it constructs, rather than recovers, past events. “Just before I died,” Bates explains in introducing his “Stardust memory,” “I was on the operating table, and I was searching to-to try to find something to hang on to, you know?… ’cause when you’re dying, uh, life suddenly does become very authentic…. I was searching for something to give my life meaning and-and a memory flashed through my mind” (p. 361). The fact that the “Stardust memory” that follows is a scene from a film suggests the level on which memory, like film, may represent the solution to human dilemmas, or may constitute nothing more than a symptomatic expression of our desperate need to solve them. For Allen, in other words, the desire to find meaning in the world always threatens to compromise the validity of the meaning ultimately found. The experience of beauty achieved may be actual, or it may be only a cinematic construct of an artist seeking to remedy his “Ozymandias Melancholia”; the reconciliation of lovers may be a human potentiality or just a generically defined way to end movies; love may be a human reality, or it may simply be “in the stardust of a song.”