The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2 page)

In
Stardust Memories,
Allen’s sourest portrait of the artist before
Harry,
one of those attending a screening of Sandy Bates’s film-in-progress articulates a particularly cynical view of cinematic art in dismissing the work of Bates and other filmmakers: “His insights are shallow and morbid,” Bates’s producer, Walsh (Laraine Newman) insists, employing terms Allen not infrequently applies to himself, “I’ve seen it all before. They try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art.”
⁶
The fact that Walsh, like all the figures in this most surreal of Allen’s films, often seems less a distinct individual than a projection of Bates’s personal self-incriminations effectively reinforces the charge of solipsism with which Bates, the unstably demoralized artist, indicts himself throughout the film. Nonetheless, the possibility that artists are merely “documenting their personal suffering and fobbing it off as art” appears sufficiently often in Allen’s films to seem an issue he hasn’t resolved for himself, one which is at least in part responsible for his intransigently skeptical, highly conflictual attitude toward his own art. That ambivalence, so repeatedly dramatized in the content of his films and so often contested by their visual calculation, their formal balance and symmetry, is the central tension of Allen’s cinematic art, one obliquely summarized by a psychoanalyst in one of Harry Block’s stories. Assessing the fiction of her former patient and current husband, Helen Epstein (Demi Moore) explains that “What one comes away with is your total isolation, your fear of people, your panic over closeness, and that’s why your real life is so chaotic and your writing is so much more controlled and stable.” Although it may be risky to identify Allen too closely with the psyche of an artist fabricated by Harry Block, a fictional character in one of Allen’s films, this much can be asserted: each Woody Allen film from
Play It Again, Sam
onward constitutes the director’s highly self-conscious reconfiguring of the relationship between the chaos of experience and the stabilizing, controlling capacities of aesthetic rendering. Delineating and illuminating the evolution of that tension through Allen’s movies is the primary objective of this study. Accordingly, the Woody Allen who emerges from it is a devotedly Modernist filmmaker, whose movies gravitate incessantly—if reluctantly—toward the interrogation of their own conditions of postmodernist skepticism, disillusionment, and narcissistic self-reflexivity.

In
Manhattan,
the first of Allen’s films to dramatize the cultural decline from Modernist ideality to postmodernist circumscription, Isaac Davis’s ex-wife offers a denigratory take on the artistic enterprise similar to Walsh’s. Her book documenting the collapse of their marriage punctures her ex-husband’s artistic pretensions by revealing that Isaac “longed to be an artist but balked at the necessary sacrifices. In his most private moments, he spoke of his fear of death, which he elevated to tragic heights when, in fact, it was mere narcissism.”
⁷

The artistic impulse among Allen’s creators is never undefiled by narcissism, the most extreme exemplar of this attribute being Cheech, the mob hit man/dramatist of
Bullets Over Broadway
Because he’s convinced that she’s “a horrible actress” who is butchering the lines of dialogue he contributes to David Shayne’s play, Cheech executes Olive, thereby pushing his refusal to compromise his artistic principles to a homicidal extreme which none of this film’s—or any other Allen film’s—artists can approach. Although less murderous, Harry Block is little more sympathetic, his fiction constituting nothing but exploitations of and predations upon those he is supposed to love, the art he produces representing his primary means of feeding his rapacious ego. As his analyst, echoing Epstein’s analyst, summarizes Harry’s work, “You expect the world to adjust to the distortion you’ve become.”

Over the course of Allen’s thirty years in filmmaking, art and its valorization as a source of meaning to justify human existence have come progressively under assault on both thematic and formal levels. His movies constitute a veritable population explosion of artists and artists
manqué:
filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, an interior decorator, musicians, magicians and other circus performers, memoirists, poets, literary and art critics, screenwriters, and television producers proliferate throughout his oeuvre; their preponderance attests to Allen’s preoccupation with human lives, like his own, dedicated to the production of art. As if in corroboration of the line he borrows from Groucho Marx for the opening of
Annie Hall
—“I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”
⁸
—the artists in Allen’s movies are consistently depicted as self-obsessed individuals whose ultimate commitment to their art is indistinguishable from neurosis and whose obsession with gaining an audience is frequently attended by an utter indifference to the effect their work might have on the lives of the audience they attract. Accordingly, the art they create often constitutes a sentimental falsification of actuality or a repudiation of the very thing it was created to chronicle—life. At his most forgiving, Allen portrays art as an all-too-human means of imbuing existence’s random succession with the consolation of beginning-middle-end sequentiality and purposefulness. In more skeptical moods, he depicts it as the projection of the maker’s narcissism, or—most critically—as a medium the pursuit of and devotion to which becomes a high-minded excuse for the withdrawal from human contact and responsibility. Harry Blocks sister, Doris, could be characterizing a number of Allen’s artists in her indictment of her brother: “You have no values—your whole life is nihilism, it’s cynicism, it’s sarcasm and orgasm.”

At the opposite end of Allen’s artist spectrum are those protagonists who desperately seek but fail to locate any artistic capacity in themselves. They are victims of the American cultural privileging of the artistic, characters who, like Frederick Exley’s eponymous protagonist, could acknowledge that “Whether or not I am a writer, I have—and this is my curse and my virtue—cultivated the instinct of one … without, in my unhappy case, [possessing] the ability to harness and articulate” that instinct.
⁹
Joey in
Interiors,
Lane in
September
and the title protagonist of
Alice
are the most obvious of Allen’s characters who perceive their artistic deficiency as a deficiency of self, as evidence of interior emptiness. The most fortunate of the three, Alice Tate, ultimately repudiates her artistic ambitions in favor of “raising my children with the right values … exposing them to the things that matter most.”
¹⁰
Those things clearly don’t include the corruptions to which artistic ambition is vulnerable. Choosing life over art is a constant temptation not only for Allen’s artistically challenged protagonists but for his most successful artists as well, his later films coming increasingly to affirm the art of life over the life of art. “I’ll never be the artist you are,” Harry’s Luciferian alter-ego, Larry (Billy Crystal) tells him after marrying Fay (Elisabeth Shue), Harry’s former lover, in
Deconstructing Harry:
“You put your life into your work; I put it into my life. I can make her happier.”

Those Allen protagonists who manag to move successfully from expressive paralysis to artistic creation consistently create human difficulties for themselves in the process. In
Hannah and Her Sisters
, the first script Holly writes once she’s abandoned her abortive acting career reflects self-indulgent exploitation of others similar to that with which Walsh impugns Bates’s film and which characterizes Harry Block’s “art.” The play she “writes” is basically an elaborate appropriation of intimate family history: Holly defends as “a made-up story” derived from the “essence” of Hannah’s marriage “blown up into drama,”
¹¹
her narrative constructed largely out of Lee’s knowledge of the marriage gained through the affair she’s having with Elliot. Repeatedly in Allen’s films, artistic impulse and human relations are set at odds with one another, the devotion to art either disrupting existing relations, as in
Hannah and Her Sisters,
or preventing the formation of families. Alice Tate is not the only would- be artist in Allen’s films to renounce art in the name of family: “A family,” affirms Paul, the circus artist of
Shadows and Fog,
“is death to an artist.”
¹²
Like David Shayne in
Bullets,
Paul commits himself to marriage and children only after he has forsworn his artistic ambitions. Clearly, for someone who has devotedly turned out on average a film a year since 1970, Allen has used that work to articulate and dramatize a remarkably skeptical attitude toward the value of art to human beings. A scene in
Play It Again, Sam
nicely epitomizes this dismissive attitude: Linda Christie’s response to the art museum she and Alan Felix are walking through is “Do you realize we’re in a room that holds some of the highest achievements of Western Civilization?” Felix replies, “There’s no girls.”
¹³
Much of Allen’s work evokes a similarly derisive perception of art’s deficient relationship to life, the critique of
vissi d’arte
having become progressively pervasive in his movies. From
Play It Again, Sam
forward, Allen’s films often constitute a personal debate he’s waging with himself about the premises, promises, and capacities of art, and about the price exacted upon the artist and those around her/him for the commitment to it.

Lest that personal debate seem a purely intellectual or artistic contention, this book demonstrates that the crisis of attitude toward aesthetics consistently played out in Allen’s films has serious implications in terms of the evolution of his own career. It’s a testament to his honesty and integrity as an artist (and to the turmoil of his not-so-private life in the early 1990s) that Allen has painted himself into the aesthetic corner he has. His films have expressed such growing skepticism toward the possibilities of art as to make its creation increasingly problematic for him, so intently and single-mindedly has he narrowed the values of the artistic enterprise to which he enacts annual allegiance. In thematic terms, he has repeatedly dramatized artists as egotists whose products, at best, provide audiences either with images of impossible glamour to which they become addicted (
The Purple Rose of Cairo
) or an illusory solace about existence (
Shadows and Fog
). At worst, their creative spark is—according to the testimony of the doctor in
Shadows and Fog
and the example of hit-man-turned-playwright Cheech—indistinguishable from that impulse which prompts a psychopath to commit murder.

Nor is the impulse to create art in Allen’s films free of even more demeaning associations. “You can’t control life—it doesn’t wind up perfectly,” Sandy Bates proclaims in
Stardust Memories
. “Only art you can control—art and masturbation, two areas in which I am an absolute expert” (p. 335). The price of control in both art and masturbation, Bates’s comparison implies, is the diminution of life. Bates’s likening of art to onanism is reinforced by his mother’s forthright acknowledgment that when “The Great Sandy” as a boy practiced his art of magic alone in his room, his “paraphernalia” included photos of naked women. “It causes him great guilt,” Bates’s analyst abruptly responds to The Great Sandy’s mother’s admission, the shrink never quite clarifying whether magic tricks—Allen’s favorite shorthand for artworks—or his solitary pleasures are the source of this guilt. “I don’t know if I can cure him,” the analyst complains, “I’ve been treating him for years already” (p. 303)—the same years in which Bates has been practicing the therapy of artistic creation.

In Allen’s films, the magic of art is indicted not only for its confluences with self-abuse, but also for what it fails to achieve. Harry Block’s analyst responds to one of Harry’s patient’s confessions by asking, “So writing saved your life?”—a question which
Deconstructing Harry
answers with a broad, equivocal irony. In fact, Allen’s films consistently oppose the Modernist conception of the existence-redeeming capacities of art. A nurse in the closing fantasia of
Stardust Memories
articulates Bates’s consummate artistic self-reproach: “All those silly magic tricks you do couldn’t help your friend Nat Bernstein” (p. 364) who died suddenly of Lou Gehrig’s disease. As the failure of Irmstedt’s magic in
Shadows and Fog
demonstrates, art is helpless before the power of death. For Allen, as for many of his disaffected Modernist artist-personas, it is art’s specific impotency in the face of death which constitutes art’s irremediable and unforgivable insufficiency.

As if concurring in Bates’s analyst’s implication that artistic creation is indistinguishable from neurosis, David Shayne, in the concluding scene of
Bullets Over Broadway,
repudiates his playwright’s vocation with the enthusiasm of someone cured of delusions. No Allen film, in fact, projects a positive conciliation of the conflict which the characters in
Bullets
repeatedly invoke in debating whether a woman loves “the artist or the man,” the meeting ground between the two being consistently dramatized as a site of corruption for both.

Significantly, the farther the Woody Allen protagonist is from being an artist, the more likely is his narrative to result in a happy ending. Filmmaker Clifford Stern of
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
novelists Gabe Roth of
Husbands and Wives
and Harry Block of
Deconstructing Harry,
screenwriter Lee Simon of
Celebrity,
and jazz guitarist Emmet Ray of
Sweet and Lowdown
wind up desolate and solitary, largely because of the egocentric, elitist, and exploitative attitudes embedded in their art and the effects of those attitudes on those around them. On the other hand, unpretentious, thoroughly inartistic Leonard Zelig dies an untroubled, even happy death only slightly compromised by his failure to finish reading
Moby-Dick,
while the extravagantly unaesthetic Danny Rose—primarily as a result of his altruistic devotion to his utterly artless nightclub acts—is the beneficiary of the most gratifying resolution Allen has scripted. Arguably, Alice Tate, Leonard Zelig, and Danny Rose comprise the one club Allen would like to join, but he’s too much the artist to be admitted.