The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (31 page)

Whereas the townspeople’s rival plans are either impotent before the threat the killer poses or contributory to it, Irmstedt is able to use his magician’s illusions to capture the killer (Michael Kirby) temporarily when he appears on the circus grounds. (Irmstedt’s name and accent identify him with another Swedish magician, one less equivocal than Allen about the limits of artistic creation. Ingmar Bergman described his own craft in these terms: “I am either an impostor or when the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjuror. I perform conjuring tricks with apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.”
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) Irmstedt and Kleinman first hide in a trick mirror, transforming themselves into images unaffected by the killer’s subsequent destruction of the prop; then Irmstedt entraps the killer in a circular cage before making him disappear and rematerialize (“He was here—and now he’s there!”), chained hand and foot to a stool. “We have captured the beast!” Irmstedt exults, but by the time the other circus personnel arrive to witness his triumph, the killer has slipped his bonds and fled. “No man could have escaped,” Irmstedt complains, confirming that it wasn’t a man he’d shackled, “Those were the real locks. Even I could not have escaped.” Taking up this cue, the roustabout replies, “Looks like he’s a greater magician than you”—perhaps invoking Death’s ability to make people disappear for good.

“Meanwhile,” the roustabout later goads Irmstedt, “your tricks didn’t stop the killer.” “No,” the magician admits, “but we checked his reigns for a moment. Perhaps we even frightened him.” In other words, art’s illusions can distract us briefly from the inevitability of death, making us believe that through the imposition of artistic permanence upon materiality, we have immobilized the passage of time, defeating mortality. But Irmstedt’s magic, by his own admission, allows him only to escape from trick locks, not from the real ones, which can’t contain death. (“[A]ll those silly magic tricks”
still
can’t help Nat Bernstein when it’s his time to die.) As for Irmstedt’s bravura claim of having frightened the killer with what the magician derisively calls his “paraphernalia,” its only necessary to recall Irmy’s initial description of him after Kleinman has told her what a great artist he believes Irmstedt is: “He’s a great artist when he’s sober.” Irmstedt is a drunk, Paul—the champion of the responsibility which comes with great talent—is a womanizing philanderer,
¹⁷
and the circus incarnating the saving power of human fantasy is, in Paul’s estimation, “a completely mismanaged stupid traveling show.” Art, Allen’s films consistently insist, is no more pure or perfect than the artist who creates it; therefore, art is utterly incapable of achieving the triumph with which Modernist aesthetics often credited it: the transformation of temporal progression into humanly intelligible meaning. The typical attitude of Allen’s films toward the artistic process, instrumentally considered, is perhaps best summarized by the character of Rain, Gabe Roth’s writing student in
Husbands and Wives
, who disparages the mimetic achievement he finds in her stories: “It’s just a trick, you know,” she replies. “When I was ten I wrote this whole story on Paris. It’s just a trick—you don’t have to know [Paris in order for the trick to work].”
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Having heard everyone else’s theory about the killer and how to capture him, Kleinman offers his own—and his creator’s—summary at the end of the movie: “My theory is that nothing good is going to happen until we catch him.”
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However, the fact that Irmstedt’s magic/art can’t “catch” the murderer/Death does not, in Kleinman’s—or in Allen’s—view, render it useless. Admittedly, Irmy and Paul have chosen to leave the circus to raise a family, their decision constituting the extinction of their artist-selves since, as Paul earlier argued, “a family—that’s death to the artist.” But the conclusion of
Shadows and Fog
also contains a compensatory countermovement dramatizing with great effectiveness Allen’s real ambivalence toward the necessity of illusions—of art—to human happiness.
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As Irmy and Kleinman say good-bye to each other at the end of the “strange night” dramatized in the movie during which Irmy feels “like my whole life has changed,” she asks what will become of him, and he responds with a summary of his circumstances, one more desperate but otherwise similar to Cecilia’s at the end of
The Purple Rose of Cairo:
“I should be all right—apart from the fact that I’m wanted by a lynch mob, and the police are after me, and there’s a homicidal maniac loose, and I’m unemployed. You know, everything else is fine.” (Kleinman neglects to mention that in distracting the murderer from making Irmy his next victim, the “ink-stained wretch” has demonstrated courage which redeems the cringing cowardice and passivity that have characterized him throughout the film, and which reached their culmination in his impotency with one of Felice’s prostitutes.) After considering what the “real world” of the town holds in store for him, Kleinman—like Cecilia sitting in the Jewel Theater, shifting mentally from her confrontation with actuality’s unremitting ugliness back into the fantasy of “Heaven, I’m in heaven” as it is danced by Astaire and Rogers—reverses his decision declining Irmstedt’s job offer. In a world whose dominant characteristics are inscrutability, unintelligibility, the impossibility of making distinctions, and violent human contentions resulting from that incapacity—in a world, that is, in which you can know nothing but that “the killer lurks in the fog,” Kleinman’s life- transforming choice is obvious. “What better way to spend the rest of my life,” he asks Irmstedt rhetorically, his eyes as wide as Cecilia’s as Hollywood’s most glamorous couple swirls across the screen before her, “than to help you with those wonderful illusions of yours?”

12

Poetic License, Bullshit

Bullets Over Broadway

This is a work of art. The ropes come off, and I tie sash weights to her ankles with soft catgut. She disappears two weeks, maybe three. Then up she pops, none of this stuff on her anymore, no marks—a suicide. Isn’t that beautiful?

—Scene from
This Gun for Hire,
watched by Halley and Cliff in
Crimes and Misdemeanors

One of the limitations of the allegorical mode of
Shadows and Fog
is that the necessarily abstract assertion the film makes about the human dependency upon art allows it to provide only a minimum of insight into the nature of the magic illusions on which its conclusion turns. (The German Expressionist films—primarily
Nosferatu
and
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
—whose influence pervades
Shadows and Fog are
similarly blunt instruments, works as dedicated as Allen’s to atmospherically externalizing a condition of soul and as little concerned with the detailed exposition of complex ideas.
¹
) Because of its more realistic aesthetic,
The Purple Rose of Cairo
is able to give the viewer a fairly comprehensive sense of the components of the cinematic illusion, including some unromantic behind-the-scenes realities that Cecilia never sees: the egotism of the characters in the film who, divested of their narrative by Tom’s defection, acrimoniously dispute each others’ claims to being the central character of the movie’s plot, and the bottom line cynicism of the producer and studio heads, whose contempt for the movie audience is exceeded only by their indifference to everything but box office receipts.

In contrast, Irmstedt, the magician—and thus the central artist—of
Shadows and Fog,
whose illusions people need “like they need the air” and who carries much of the conclusion’s thematic burden, appears only in the final ten minutes of the film, his assertion about illusions giving the viewer little insight into how his illusive art of diversion/consolation works. He affirms that people not only love but also need his illusions, a contention the film’s viewers have been conditioned to accept largely through their introduction to the alternative “real-life” realm of inscrutable purposes, bureaucratic terrorism, and senseless murder that is the town—a realm from which any sane person would willingly flee. Allen is content, then, to dramatize a single Irmstedt trick—the one that fails to stop the killer/Death in his tracks—be cause that failure so effectively epitomizes Allen’s ambivalent conception of art’s value to humanity: we need its illusions in order to live, but we’re only deluding ourselves if we believe they can redeem us from death. (To reformulate the final line of
Annie Hall
and title of Diane Jacobs’ critical study, we need the eggs despite the fact that they won’t alleviate our hunger.)

Partly because of its more realistic aesthetic,
Bullets Over Broadway
not only makes an assertion about art, but through its dramatization of the gradual evolution of a work of literary drama, it illuminates in detail both the operation of an individual creative mind and the interventions of corrupt reality which comprise—and compromise—the final product, which is David Shayne’s play. Although a more cheerful film than
Deconstructing Harry Bullets Over Broadway
enacts the same anatomization of the tawdry mongrel of appropriated life and self-serving fantasy that is the work of art, while simultaneously depicting artists as men and women vulnerable to particularly virulent forms of corruption. Released right in the middle of the decade,
Bullets Over Broad way
provides the best explanation for the propensity of Allen’s 1990s movies to affirm life over art.

“I’m an artist,” David Shayne (John Cusack) asserts in the opening line of
Bullets Over Broadway,
and, having reached this point in Allen’s cinematic oeuvre, we should be prepared to regard with some skepticism the artist’s self-congratulatory declaration of his personal integrity: “I will not change one word of my play to pander to a commercial Broadway audience.” The artists in Allen’s films who make such extreme claims are either utter recluses (Eve, of
Interiors,
for whom art creates a life-denying, actuality-displacing perfectionism, or Frederick, of
Hannah and Her Sisters
, who “can’t stand to be with people” other than his lover, Lee), or hypocrites like Paul, in
Shadows and Fog,
whose avowals of artistic integrity are belied by his habitual sexual betrayals of Irmy. It is to Shayne’s credit that he—unlike his friend, Sheldon Flender (Rob Reiner), whose proof that he is a true genius consists in that none of the twenty plays he’s written has ever been produced—is willing to subject his work to the external testing of production and the vicissitudes of the Broadway marketplace. But if there’s anything
Bullets Over Broadway
doesn’t dramatize, it’s a playwright impervious to commercial and other pressures, an artist constitutionally incapable of altering his play for personal or professional gain. In a movie that Allen characterized as “a comedy with a serious point to it, a philosophical point,”
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the “serious point” at its core dramatizes the moral hypocrisy underlying artistic ambitions.

The central motivating joke of
Bullets Over Broadway
is that the uncompromisingly idealistic artist who believes that “it’s the theater’s duty not just to entertain but to transform men’s souls” consents to sell his own soul by agree ing to have the production of his play financed by a murderous Mafia boss (Joe Vitirelli) whose nonnegotiable stipulation is that his talentless chorus- line-reject girlfriend, Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly), be given a role. When Shayne initially balks at the terms of the deal, his agent, Julian Marx (Jack Warden), gives him a lecture on the relationship between art and reality—a lecture that Allen could have written for delivery to a number of elitist aesthetes in his films: “Let me level with you, Mr. Artist. This is a dog-eat-dog world, not an ideal world. Now if you want to get your play on, you re going to have to make a few concessions. Life is not perfect—plus, it is short. And if you can’t figure that out, you might as well pack up right now and go back to Pittsburgh.” The “few concessions” to reality Shayne has to make in order to see his play staged, the nature and magnitude of which ultimately do send him packing for Pittsburgh and the adoption of a middle-class life as unlike his Bohemian Greenwich Village playwright’s existence as he can make it, begin with Olive, whose single theatrical credit prior to Shayne’s play consists in a Wichita musical review titled
Leave a Specimen
. (To his credit, Shayne wakes in the middle of the night following his acquiescence to Valenti’s terms screaming, “I’m a whore! I’m a prostitute!”) Exacerbating Olive’s complete theatrical incompetence is the fact that the only role in Shayne’s play small enough to hide her in is that of a psychiatrist whose professional assumptions are as incomprehensible to Olive as her diction is foreign. (When a line of hers referring to a masochistic patient is explained to Olive, she declares the patient “retarded.”) Olive’s complete unsuitability to this tragic drama and Mafioso Nick Valenti’s improbable casting of himself in the role of theatrical angel combine to create one of the most inspired satiric premises that Allen, working with co-writer Douglas McGrath, has ever fabricated. The recurring class confrontations throughout the film between elitist Broadway cultural pretension and streetwise untutored gangland brutishness generate a succes sion of extraordinary comic scenes. However, as in his other most substantial comedies—
Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah and Her Sisters,
and
Mighty Aphrodite
—the jokes in
Bullets Over Broadway
support and reinforce the film’s organizing theme: the impartibility of destruction and creation, the interdependence of art and life, which Flender affirms in claiming that the work of art “is not an inanimate object. It’s art. Art is life—it lives.”
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