The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (32 page)

Given the Freudian assumptions of Allen’s perception of things, it’s no surprise that the secondary temptation Shayne experiences to the compromising of his artistic integrity is sexual. Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), a celebrated Broadway actress who hasn’t had a stage hit for a while, condescends to take on the lead female role of Sylvia Posten in Shayne’s play despite finding the character colorless, sexually unalluring, and lacking in passion. Helen establishes clearly at the first day’s rèhearsal that her status as theatrical veteran and stage star resolves the issue of whether she or the first-time director/ play-wright wields the greater power in dictating the evolution of this production. To bolster her command over the play, she proceeds to seduce Shayne by flattering his position relative to hers (“My God—who am I? Some vain Broadway legend? You’re a budding Chekhov!”) in an ill-concealed attempt to coerce him into rewriting her character as someone she believes more closely resembles the stage persona she has developed. “Audiences have come to empathize with me in a very personal way,” she tells Shayne the first time they have drinks together, his tacit acquiescence to her demand that her star quality dictate the production representing the first in a series of many compro-mises of his dramatic vision to her stars egotistical self-projection. That night he tells Ellen (Marie-Louise Parker), the woman with whom he lives, of his newly arisen doubts about Sylvias character; Ellen responds that Sylvia is the best female character he’s ever created. His mind throbbing with Helens disingenuously manipulative question, “You see through me, don’t you?” and her seductive assurance that he has “such insight into women,” Shayne decides that Ellen is insufficiently intellectual to appreciate the problem and sets about re writing Sylvias character, giving dramatic form to the concession he made to Helen as they separated that afternoon: “I don’t see why she has to be frigid.”

As their professional relationship warms into an affair, Helen increases her lobbying for further changes in her role, suggesting at one point that if Sylvia “succeeds in seducing the lieutenant rather than being rejected a second time, it might add some variation to the character.” Moreover, she makes Shayne promise that after this play is produced, he’ll write another: “a vehicle for Helen Sinclair. But it must have size—an important woman—Curie—Borgia—you name it.” (Midway through the film they seem to have settled on a drama about the Virgin Mary.) Shayne’s deepening infatuation with Helen blinds him to her resistance to his protestations of love, her explanation of this response reflecting her actual attitude toward the craft so crucial to his sense of himself: “Everything meaningful is in some unexplainable form,” she tells him, “it’s more primordial than mere language.” Thereafter, she responds, “Don’t speak, don’t speak,” whenever he tries to express his feelings for her. (Insofar as she loves him at all, she loves—in the terms of a running debate Shayne has with his Village friends—“the artist, not the man,” since it’s the artist who can further her career and merely the man who is regaling her with declarations of affection couched in “mere language.”) “To your play,” Helen toasts him as they drink together at her penthouse, “To an ideal world with no compromise.” Given her skepticism about language’s ability to communicate human ultimacy and her insistence upon shaping her roles to conform to her fraudulent temptress stage persona, Helen Sinclair is the film’s comic incarnation of the artistic compromise she pretends to abhor.

Shayne’s play is called
God of Our Father’s,
the Biblical pretension of the title invoking the thematic gravity of second-rate naturalistic American drama of the 1920s and ‘30s, plays whose earnestness of tragic purpose exceeded that of their models—O’Neill, Odets, Maxwell Anderson—and consequently re sulted in works of nearly oppressive solemnity.
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In his attempt to create a tragedy, Shayne has obviously pushed past solemnity into pomposity, encumbering his actors with lines like “What endeavors you to concoct a theory so tenuous?” and “The heart is labyrinthine, a maze beset with brutal pitfalls and mean obstacles.” Shayne’s defense of the play’s elevated language is that it represents “a stylish way of expressing a particular idea,” but the character who initially emerges as his antagonist, only to later become his collaborator, reads it differently: “You don’t write the way people talk,” Cheech (Chazz Palminteri) tells him.
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Compelled to sit through every rehearsal because Valenti wants his hit man to keep an eye on Olive, Cheech becomes a progressively vocal critic of Shayne’s play, and when he recommends a plot revision during rehearsal, Shayne is outraged by the actors’ unanimous support for the suggestion from “this strong-arm man with an IQ of minus fifty.” Secretly impressed by the suggestion, Shayne allows Helen to persuade him to incorporate the change (which, because it amplifies Sylvia’s character’s sensuality, she favors). It follows that Shayne comes increasingly to rely on Cheech’s script doctoring to improve his play by injecting into it what Shayne’s literary affectations and his overwrought obeisance to his theater models have drained from it: real life.

In order to establish the connection immediately, the initial scene in which Cheech appears depicts him enacting his hit man’s profession by executing Valenti’s enemies. That scene is framed, tellingly, by a lecture Shayne’s agent gives him: “Let me tell you something, kid. That’s a real world out there, and it’s a lot rougher than you think.” Cheech is the film’s chief incarna tion of that “rougher-than-you-think real world.” Although his Mafia con-nections introduce an anomalous element into his character, Cheech otherwise embodies what Lionel Trilling construed historian V.L. Parrington as representing to American literary history: opposition to the “genteel and academic” aspect of literature, an alliance with “the vigorous and actual.” Parrington, Trilling argued, had “what we like to think of as the saving salt of the American mind, the lively sense of the practical, workaday world, of the welter of ordinary, undistinguished things and people, of the tangible, quirky, unrefined elements of life. He knew what so many literary historians do not know, that emotions and ideas are the sparks that fly when the mind meets difficulties.”
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In Trilling’s view, the prejudice in favor of “reality” which led Parrington to champion Theodore Dreiser as a major American writer despite the infelicities and awkwardness of his prose style is the same prejudice which prompts the actors of
God of Our Father’s
to extol in the coarsest terms they can manage the script revisions they’re unaware are Cheech’s, each of them attempting to emulate his crude genius by generating appropriately earthy compliments. “In the American metaphysic,” Trilling continued, “reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. And that mind is alone felt to be trustworthy which most nearly resembles that reality by most nearly reproducing the sensations it affords.”
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Shayne also embraces this mythology, praising how “naturally” writing seems to come to Cheech: “You have a huge gift,” he tells the hit man,“It’s uncanny—your instincts—it’s really—enviable.” Allen’s commentary on the American prejudice toward associating reality with naturalness and instinct is to have the natural, instinctive artist turn homicidal in defense of his work.

Once Cheech has begun actively collaborating on
God of Our Fathers,
he confronts Shayne again on the issue of stilted dialogue, rejecting Shayne’s rationale for it as “taking poetic license”: “Poetic license, bullshit. People believe what they see when the actors sound real.” Cheech’s single aesthetic concept is distilled in this sentence, one which aligns him with the naturalist movement in American theater of the early 20th century and with Gil Shepherd of
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
whose identification with reality (“And I’m real,” he tells Cecilia in response to movie character Tom Baxter’s case for himself) is inseparable from his basic human inconsistency and untrustworthiness. Rather than remaining the proletarian artist who is able to value art in proportion to its worth (“It’s a play anyhow,” is his level-headed justification for an early revision: “It don’t have to be real, but it’ll be stronger”), Cheech eventually surpasses and exceeds Shayne as the ultimate aesthete non-compromiser, finally resorting to gangland solutions when the integrity of his theatrical work is irredeemably undermined by Olive’s incompetence. In a dual character reversal typical of Allen’s plots,
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Cheech and Shayne basically exchange places, the mob hit man transforming himself into the temperamental artist, the committed playwright arguing for the superiority of life to art and ultimately repudiating the theater altogether. Although Allen didn’t emulate his protagonist in disavowing his art, the movies that follow
Bullets
approximate dramatically Shayne’s resolution by consistently endorsing life over its artistic representation.

The actors’ reaction to the revisions they are unaware are Cheech’s is unanimous and metaphorically consistent: Eden Brent (Tracey Ullman) tells Shayne, “Congratulations—it finally has balls.” “I would give my body freely to the man who wrote those words,” Helen effuses. She later assures Shayne that the version of his play she gave to George S. Kaufman to read “was the rewrite—not the eunuch version,” and declares in their final scene together that, as a result of his recent maturation as a playwright, “the world will open to you like a giant oyster—no, like a magnificent vagina.” That the creation of effective art is so repeatedly likened to sexual potency simultaneously reflects the characters’ gut-level conviction that reality is inseparable from genitality and anticipates an idea introduced late in the film in the dialogue between Shayne and Ellen when he informs her of his affair with Helen Sinclair, and she in turn informs him of hers with his best friend, Flender.

ELLEN: You know [Flender’s] theory that art is relational, that it’s something that requires two people, the artist and the audience? Well, he feels that way about sex, too.

DAVID: Sex?

ELLEN: That between the two right people, it becomes an art form.

DAVID: You and Flender have raised intercourse to an art?

ELLEN: Not just intercourse. Foreplay too.

The artist whose greatest pride lies in the unproducibility of his plays has rendered sex and art indistinguishable through an act of will which many artists in the film seem to believe is the utterly appropriate privilege of the creative mind: “An artist,” Flender grandly announces to Shayne when the
God of Our Father’s
playwright confesses to him his affair with Helen, “creates his own moral universe.” Its only later in the film Shayne discovers that the freedom with which Flender privileges himself as “creator of his own moral universe” includes a sanction to have an affair with Shayne’s lover.

Throughout the film, Shayne is bookended by two views of art and the artist which are similar in the extremity of their claims for art’s ascendancy and inviolability, dissimilar in the work they do and don’t engender, and similar again in their indifference to the moral consequences of artistic creation. Flender’s file-cabineted theatrical creations give him the liberty to declare himself beyond morality and to define art as anything that suits his libidinal pur poses at the moment, lovemaking and foreplay included. When asked by Shayne what to do about loving both Ellen and Helen at the same time, Flender’s thoroughly relativistic solution is “What you gotta do, you gotta do”—which doesn’t, in Flender’s immediate circumstance, include telling Shayne he’s cuck olding him. Cheech at least is willing to question the morality of the situation he’s about to resolve immorally: “You think it’s right,” he asks Shayne, “some Tootsie walks in and messes up a beautiful thing like [the play]?” Shayne’s insistence that the audience doesn’t really notice Olive’s incompetence and that compromise is necessary in the real world only enrages Cheech further, eliciting the response, “Listen to me. Nobody is going to ruin my work—nobody.” At which point, it’s—to cite the tide of the Al Jolson song opening the film—“Toot, Toot, Tootsie, goodbye.”

“Olive, I think you should know this,” Cheech says before blasting her off his favorite execution pier, “You’re a horrible actress.”
Bullets Over Broadway,
then, contains two embodiments of uncompromising artistic integrity: a self-styled genius and conscientious objector from play production for whom an artistic vocation is merely an excuse for sexual libertinism, and an actual proletarian genius whose barbarous upbringing has provided him with no ethic to oppose the idea that execution is an acceptable means by which a dramatist can improve the performance of his play. In
Bullets Over Broadway,
the art of theater progressively comes to seem not a means of transcending life but a capitulation to life’s most lascivious and aggressive impulses.

Shayne expresses justifiable outrage at Cheech’s hit man’s mode of production enhancement, and when Cheech asks him “Who says?” you don’t murder to ensure your play’s greatness, Shayne responds, “I’m an artist, too—not a great artist like you, but first I’m a human being, a decent, moral…”

“You are?” Cheech answers, “So what are you doing with Helen Sinclair?”

In an early draft of
Bullets Over Broadway,
Allen included an extensive final meeting between Helen and Shayne, which in addition to establishing that Helen is no longer interested in Shayne because he’s been revealed to be so much less the playwright than Cheech, allowed the two characters to talk through (or more accurately, talk away) some of the film’s central themes. “When confronted with a truly creative individual in any field, many people have trouble distinguishing the man from the artist,” Helen, too neatly echoing the Bohemian artists’ debate, explains to Shayne. “You did with Cheech—but I’ve always fallen in love with the artist—that’s why so many love affairs have been with shitheels—you get what I’m saying?”
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That Helen’s speech reduces themes to “saying” is precisely its problem, and few viewers would lament Allen’s decision to delete it or the undramatically discursive scene in which it appears. The speech’s obvious intention to temper the film’s consistently satiric characterization of Helen is nonetheless interesting, and even more so is its unequivocal identification of artists as “shitheels.” Although generally speaking,
Bullets Over Broadway
is a brightly lit, highly colorful and cheerful comedy populated by comedic type characters (an actress who speaks baby talk to her Chihuahua, an actor whose stage fright provokes eating binges, prompting him to steal the Chihuahua’s doggie treats) reminiscent of those in Allen’s “early, funny movies,” its depiction of artists and the artistic vocation is remarkably and unrelentingly negative, there existing not a single creative person in the film who doesn’t seem worthy of Helen’s designation of “shitheel.”