The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (22 page)

As early as 1963, William K. Zinsser described the persona projected by Allen’s stand-up routine as that of “a born loser… who walks onto a stage and immediately makes his presence unfelt”
¹⁷
; the first critical book published on Allen’s films was titled
Loser Takes All,
and contains the sentence, “Despite all the failures, however, it should not be concluded that Allen’s persona is always a loser,”
¹⁸
which clearly implies that he usually is one. Maurice Yacowar did point up the paradox of Allen’s having ridden himself of the “loser” persona to great personal success, but the glib characterizing of his characters as “losers” continued. Does categorizing Allen’s characters as losers help to clarify anything about them or about the films in which they appear? More particularly, is this derogatorily fatalistic judgment consistent with the tone and spirit of
Broadway Danny Rose?

Perhaps there’s some justice in characterizing the one- dimensional hapless bunglers of
Take the Money and Run, Bananas,
and
Sleeper
as unredeemed, unreconstructed losers, though it’s difficult not to think that even there the term serves primarily as an excuse for critical—not to mention humanistic—imprecision. But what makes Allan Felix of
Play It Again, Sam
a loser? He’s nervous around women, he fails to deliver the appropriate insincerities when the moment and his erotic advantage demands them, and California beauties spurn his attempts to dance with them—he’s not, in short, Bogart. What makes
Annie Hall’s
Alvy Singer a loser? He’s obsessed with death, he’s hypochondriac, and hypersensitive, and—like many of us in the audience—his desire to be loved exceeds his loveability. What makes Danny Rose a loser? He’s dedicated himself to supporting performing acts because he cares about the performers more than he does about the quality of their performances or about the financial rewards which might accrue from his representing them, and—as his obviously delighted hosting of the Thanksgiving feast dramatizes—he derives obvious pleasure from his relationships with them. (Not coincidentally, he lives in an apartment reflective of his indifference to the money they don’t make for him.) That these are comic characters, presented to us partly for laughs, suggests that their sensibilities are extreme, exaggerated for the purpose of humor. To dismiss them as “losers,” however, is to ignore the fact that, throughout Jewish American comic literature, the unWASPish “deficiencies” of Jewish protagonists, in addition to being excellent material for jokes, also satirically reflect upon the mainstream culture from which they represent significant deviations. The obsession Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts develops with the sufferings of the letter-writers to his newspaper column pushes well into comic excess, even though the novella never suggests that he isn’t responding to a terrible American reality which those around him refuse to acknowledge or which they callously reduce to jokes. Moses Herzog’s obsessive letter writing
is
funny, but the sensibility it expresses (one more literary than, but not unlike Holden Caulfield’s) also critiques WASP ideals of masculine reticence and expressive self-inhibition. Alexander Portnoy’s incessant masturbation makes us laugh while satirizing the Puritan abjuration of the physical promptings of the body he somehow failed to internalize; Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern has so completely introjected American anti-Semitism that his ongoing struggles with it are as hilarious as the cultural bigotry with which he is contending is real.

These “losers” all have in common their recognition of—or perhaps more accurately, their obsession with—human or cultural realities the denial of whose existences is a cultural code to which those around them have conformed. The excess of their overreaction to those realities is both what makes them comic
and
the works’ primary documentation of their non-American mainstream humanity. While laughing at the disparity between the conduct of these protagonists and national norms of behavior and belief, we are obliged by Jewish American literature to scrutinize the validity of those values, invited to find them wanting.

In the fictional worlds through which these protagonists move, they may be perceived as losers, but is the reader intended so uncritically to adopt the values of those worlds? After all, isn’t it these characters’ imperviousness to the values of mainstream American culture which constitutes the very source of their “loserness?” That would seem to place those imposing the term “loser” on them in the anomalous position of defining winning as conformity to, or the achievement of success in, mainstream American culture. Lou Canova is experiencing success in that world by singing “Agita,” a song which he (actually Nick Apollo Forte) wrote about indigestion, his exploitation of the 1970s nostalgia craze allowing him to dump Danny for the more powerful management of Sid Bacharach. Is this the point of the “parable of how losers can become winners?”
¹⁹
Bacharach, whom Tina knows through her murdered husband, the Mafia hit man, expresses agreement with her ethic of “You see what you want, go for it,” and “Do it to the other guy first, ’cause if you don’t he’ll do it to you” (p. 254); if Bacharach represents the film’s epitome of winning, Danny Rose and his stable of performers will remain losers. What Tina’s appearance at Danny’s apartment at the end of the film affirms with a truly Chaplinesque sentimentality unprecedented in Allen’s work is Danny’s Uncle Sidney’s belief in “acceptance, forgiveness, and love,” a moral stance which makes no provision for discriminations between winners and losers. Surely one of the objectives of art is to demonstrate the bankruptcy of simplistic, superficial, and essentialistic conceptions of humanity;
Broadway Danny Rose
’s touching demonstration that fellow-feeling and compassion for others
are
rewarded, not in heaven but in front of—or inside—the Carnegie Deli, should have been sufficient to quash for good the “loser” rhetoric mindlessly applied to Allen’s protagonists.

That so-called “loser” deficiencies may constitute a manifestation of an inverted form of personal redemption is a major point not only of
Broadway Danny Rose,
but also of the Allen film that preceded it,
Zelig
. Saul Bellow’s assessment of the Zelig phenomenon in that movie has to be understood as a view mediated by the fact that a real author is discoursing straight-facedly on a fictional character, the ironic inversions implicit in the clip dictating that we should take his mock judgment quite seriously, both as a comment on Leonard Zelig and—arguably—as a gloss on some of Bellow’s own protagonists. “The thing was paradoxical because what enabled [Zelig] to perform this astounding feat [flying over the Atlantic Ocean upside down] was his ability to transform himself,” Bellow explains. In other words, the psychic pathology of imitating the world around him for which Zelig had to be treated was what allowed him to emulate Eudora Fletcher’s piloting of the plane after she had passed out and to fly them safely back from Germany. “Therefore, his sickness was at the root of his salvation,” Bellow continues, “and … I think it’s interesting to view the thing that way, that it, it was his … it was his very disorder that made a hero of him.”
²⁰
Just as the “sicknesses” of West’s, Bellow’s, Roth’s, and Friedman’s obsessives are “at the root of their salvation,” so it is Danny Rose’s eccentric loyalty to and celebration of show business rejects—the one- legged tap dancer and one-armed juggler and stammering ventriloquist, all of whom, just like the rest of us, attempt to make art out of our various impairments—which constitutes the heroism the comedians implicitly reward him for and culminates in the Broadway apotheosis of his becoming a Carnegie Deli sandwich. It is his deviation from the inhuman values of American show business which makes a hero out of Danny Rose.

In the end, the best corrective to the critical tendency to reduce Allen’s protagonists to “losers” is to invoke his own use of the term. “Basically,” Allen said as early as 1969, discoursing on his favorite topic of human mortality, “everybody is a loser, but it’s only now that people are willing to admit it.”
²¹
In making this assertion, Allen was implicidy declaring his solidarity with the Jewish American literary tradition that had for years been using the satirical portraiture of Jewish characters to backhandedly skewer the WASP values which they so hilariously failed to emulate. Their inability to accommodate themselves to those values proves, ironically, that the “disorder” Bellow attributes to Zelig is in the culture rather than in them. More than any other film of Allen’s,
Broadway Danny Rose
finds in the admission that “everybody is a loser” not grounds for self-hatred or narcissistic withdrawal but, instead, an affecting rationale for human solidarity.

9

The Fine Art of Living Well

Hannah and Her Sisters

Poor fool, he’s dead and he never found the meaning of life.

—A nurse eulogizing the assassinated Sandy Bates in
Stardust Memories

This dilemma is so repeatedly invoked in Allen’s films that it has practically come to seem a familiar Woody one-liner, a predictable component of the repository of jokes we watch his movies to enjoy. It’s part whine, part existen-tial interrogation. Mickey Sachs (Allen), the producer of a television show resembling
Saturday Night Live,
rehearses it with his assistant (Julie Kavner) early in
Hannah and Her Sisters:
“Can you understand how meaningless everything is? Everything! I’m talking about… our lives, the show… the whole world, its meaningless…. I mean, you’re gonna die, I’m gonna die, the audience is gonna die, the networks gonna—The Sponsor. Everything.”
¹
Partly because of Mickey’s hilarious search for meaning through his hapless attempts to convert to Catholicism and Hare Krishna,
Hannah and Her Sisters
became an audience favorite, its emergent good spirits leavening the quest for spiritual answers much more affirmatively than in Allen’s other seriocomic film of existential inquiry,
Stardust Memories
.

Hannah and Her Sisters
is also the film of Allen’s about whose ending he has been most forthrightly critical. When asked by Bjorkman whether he perceived the movie as confirming or disputing the Tolstoy quotation—“The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless”—used in the film as an interchapter title, Allen replied, “It was not a point of departure for
Hannah,
but it was certainly what my story was about, what my thread was about. I think, if I’d had a little more nerve on that film, it would have confirmed it somewhat more. But I copped out a little on that film, backed off a little at the end I tied it together at the end a little too neatly. I should have been a little less happy at the end than I was.”
²
Although
Hannah and Her Sisters
is less concerned with art—except as a negative life dedication—than Allen’s other films, its exemplification of artistic resolution as an act of falsification makes it highly relevant to a study of Allen’s skepticism toward the promises of artistic rendering. Accordingly, in discussing
Hannah and Her Sisters,
the emphasis of this text continues to be on closure, making Allen’s opting for such an uncharacteristically buoyant close for
Hannah
the focal point. The unpersuasiveness of
Hannah’s
resolution, it can be argued, reflects Allen’s Mickey Sachs-like attempt to convert not to a new religion but to another creed in which he ultimately can’t believe: the family.

Given that the dramatic momentum of the film ordains their romantic convergence, it seems fairly obvious that the ending Allen is regretting is not the closing scene’s disclosure of the marriage of Mickey (Allen) and Holly (Diane Wiest), but Holly’s confession that she is pregnant. A flashback earlier in the movie establishes that during his marriage to Hannah (Mia Farrow), Mickey was medically diagnosed as infertile, his friend Rob (Tony Roberts) providing sperm for the twins Hannah produces. Since the artificial insemination has no further dramatic repercussions and Mickey and Hannah’s divorce has resulted in no conflict over Mickey’s right to see his sons, it seems clear that the only necessity for the infertility subplot is to prepare for the reversal generated by Holly’s concluding disclosure.

The circumstantial improbability of her revelation (Holly is joining Mickey at Hannah’s annual Thanksgiving celebration, which makes it seem highly unlikely she could have seen a doctor earlier in the day to receive the news) is reinforced by what seem like signals of the misgivings Allen had about ending his film so happily.
³
For one thing, the entire closing scene is shot in a mirror, the fact that it is Mickey’s and Holly’s reflections we’re watching calling into question the reality of the moment.
⁴
Further, Mickey refers explicitly to the story quality of the scene he and she are living out: “It’d make a great story, I think… a guy marries one sister… doesn’t work out… many years later … he winds up … married to the other sister” (p. 180). His gloss seems to reflect Allen’s self-conscious awareness of how close his narrative’s ending has come to imitating sentimental art rather than life. These evidences of something bordering on authorial bad faith raise an important question about the film, which audiences and a number of critics alike have judged to be Allen’s best: why impose the improbable pregnancy on an ending that, because Mickey and Holly (like Lee and her new husband) have recently married, already contains numerous reasons for “thanksgiving,” already constitutes a gratifyingly comedic resolution? Perhaps the only convincing answer to this question is that Holly’s pregnancy constitutes the sole solution Allen could imagine for Mickey’s existential anxieties, the child she will bear him implicitly providing a remedy to his fear that mortality wipes him out entirely, rendering his life meaningless and leaving nothing of him behind to be remembered. Having in earlier films repudiated art as a source of symbolic immortality, in other words, Allen is seeking in the conclusion of
Hannah and Her Sisters
to determine whether paternity—the family way—works any better than artistic creation does as an antidote to personal extinction.