The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (34 page)

In Allen’s cinematic universe, the human choice nearly always consists between embracing illusion or—as the pragmatists in his films recommend—living with the bleakest truths of this dark period of human history. Allen sought to articulate those truths as he perceived them in an essay published in
Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society
in 1992, his essay imaging up a world approaching Jack Rosenthal’s in its bleakness. Composed during the year he was writing and filming
Shadows and Fog,
“Random Reflections of a Second Rate Mind” is Allen’s only prose reaction to the Holocaust, his response—as Mashey Bernstein has pointed out
⁵
—echoing the position of Frederick in
Hannah and Her Sisters
that the only serious question raised by “the systematic murder of millions” is “why doesn’t it happen more often?” (
Hannah,
p. 101). “The mystery that had confounded my relatives since World War II was not such a puzzle,” Allen wrote, “if I understood that inside every heart lived the worm of self-preservation, of fear, greed, and an animal will to power. And the way I saw it, it was nondiscriminating. It abided in gentile or Jew, black, white, Arab, European, or American. It was part of who we all were, and that the Holocaust could occur was not all so strange. History had been filled with unending examples of equal bestiality, differing only cosmetically.”
⁶

So bleak is the anatomy of the human heart in Allen’s essay, in fact, as to summon up the judgment of Judy in
Husbands and Wives
in response to a pessimistic assertion of her husband, Gabe: “You really trust no one. No wonder people accuse you of cynicism.”
Shadows and Fog
dramatizes this atomis- tic stance through Kleinman’s inability to determine who is in what faction, the only certainty he reaches being that everyone in town is equally out for himself and equally murderous—equally willing to emulate the killer who is their quarry and putative enemy. Kleinman, understandably seeking refuge from the social Darwinist actuality Allen’s essay invokes, abandons the town of “real-world” pragmatism and brutal political machinations to enlist in the circus of Irmstedt’s illusions, resolving, in the formulation of
Shadows and Fogs
philosophical student, to “tell jokes” rather than “facing death.” (Felice, the brothel madam of
Shadows and Fog,
counters the student’s brief for con- templativeness by insisting that “The trick is to have as much wine, as many men, as many laughs as you can before they carry you out in a pine box.”) Although the field in which Woody Allen makes his choices is significantly more complicated than Kleinman’s, it’s nonetheless clear that his
post-Hus-bands and Wives
films, with the exception of the art-negating
Bullets Over Broadway,
have largely mirrored the decision of that “ink-stained wretch” to identify himself with “wonderful illusions.” The crucial point to acknowledge here is that Allen’s decision to align himself with the big top of artistic performance and the illusory comforts of generically defined contrivance is a self-conscious artistic decision. Rather than invoking the ability of imaginative artifice to conquer the bleak reality of death, his resolution affirms the inherent human necessity to distract the self from grim actualities with saving illusions. The visualization of Cecilia at the end of
The Purple Rose of Cairo
being gradually reabsorbed into the romantic
pas de deux
of
Top Hat
is Allen’s most compelling emblem of the human need to recover sanity through engagement with cultural fantasy. In
Manhattan Murder Mystery, Mighty Aphrodite,
and
Everyone Says I Love You,
Allen filmically adopts the illusion-affirming perspective of Cecilia/Kleinman, conjuring up movies that deliberately seek to deflect the audience’s attention from their personal spectres of the omnipresence of Monk, the Depression, the killer.

Allen’s determination to accentuate the comical and minimize tragic potentials in these movies is not without additional repercussions and conflicts. An antinomy he is as likely to discuss in interviews as that between illusion and reality is the distinction between entertainment and serious art, and his devotion to creating the latter. In the late 1980s, Allen told Eric Lax, “I’m going to try before my life is over to rise to the occasion and make one or two [films] that would be considered great by any standard…. Maybe now that I’ve moved into my fifties and I am more confident, I can come up with a couple that are true literature.”
⁷
In 1996, Allen reiterated this idea, telling John Lahr, “The only thing standing between me and greatness is me. … I would love to do a great film. I don’t feel I’ve ever done a great film.”

Citing
Citizen Kane, Rashomon, The Bicycle Thief,
and
Grand Illusion
as his benchmarks of great films, Allen continued, “I’m still in pursuit, and the pursuit keeps me going. If it happens, it’ll happen by accident, because you can’t pursue it head on.”
⁸
However, this objective is complicated by Allen’s conviction that “the only thing standing between me and greatness is me.” Allen’s comic self-deprecation here focuses the conflict at the heart of his filmmaking and his perception of art: “My conflict is between what I really am and what I really would like myself to be. I’m forever struggling to deepen myself and take a more profound path, but what comes easiest to me is light entertainment. I’m more comfortable with the shallower stuff…. I’m basically a shallow person.”
⁹
His films aren’t better, he repeatedly contends, because of his inability to be “good enough, or not deep enough on subjects.”
¹⁰
One way to describe Allen is as a Modernist by doctrine and a postmodernist by inclination and practice. He is a filmmaker whose aesthetics are permeated by Modernist notions of depth and the aspiration toward a “transcendence of phenomenal experience,”
¹¹
but whose impulses constantly drive him toward the production of movies he considers “shallow” because they are predominantly comic rather than serious—because their primary objective is to entertain rather than to inspire and enlighten.

The films Allen has produced since the early 1980s constitute a debate he has been conducting with himself over his desire to make movies such as
September, Another Woman,
and
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
which “take a more profound path,” and the contrasting impulse, reflective of his unregenerate “shallowness,” to provide his audience with vehicles in which to lose themselves—magic lantern entertainments like
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Mighty Aphrodite,
and
Everyone Says I Love You—
the predominating tendencies of which are to charmingly distract viewers from life’s dark enigmas rather than to seriously confront them.

The Modernist Allen wants to make serious films which attempt to answer significant human questions; the Postmodernist Allen doubts the utility of posing the questions. “Sometimes I’ve had the thought that to try to make films that say something, I’m not doing my fellow man a service,” he told Anthony DeCurtis in a 1993 interview. “I would be better off abandoning asking the audience to try to come to grips with certain issues because those issues finally always lead you to a dead end. They’re
never
going to be understandable, they’re
never
going to be solvable. We all have a terrible, fierce burden to carry, and the person who really does something nice is the guy who writes a pretty song or plays a pretty piece of music or makes a film that diverts.”
¹²

Perhaps in tribute to his professional beginnings, Allen’s cinematic tales, as we’ve seen, tend to celebrate popular culture much more frequently than serious art. Og’s advice to Sandy Bates in
Stardust Memories
—“You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes”—represents both a central thematic argument of that movie and a summary of the direction in which Allen’s films in the 1990s have gravitated. Consequently, the boundaries of the cor- ner into which Allen has painted himself are, at least in part, demarcated by a tension between Og’s admonition and Allen’s highly traditional, hierarchical perception of artistic achievement, that canon-revering stance obliging him to minimize his own accomplishments in film for the purpose of exalting the work of his cinematic inspirators.
¹³
Without worrying about the irresolvable issue of whether Allen has created any film remotely comparable to the best of Welles, Bergman, Godard, Kurosawa, or Truffault, it seems clear that his in-sistence that he hasn’t done so partakes of the attitude expressed in the Groucho Marx joke Allen borrowed to open his first “significant” film,
Annie Hall,
a one-liner which sometimes does seem a key to his career: “I wouldn’t wanna be a member of a club which would have me for a member.” In other words, if he made a film worthy of Welles et al, it would minimize their achievements rather than elevating his.

There is more to this conflict between “what I really am and what I would really like myself to be” than professional self-effacement, however. It’s difficult not to believe that, for Allen, making a great movie would necessitate resolving the dilemma that
Hannah and Her Sisters
“copped out on” through the convenient miracle of the restoration of Mickey’s potency manifested through Holly’s pregnancy, a dramatic closure he perceived in retrospect as influenced by the “American films” he’d grown up with, which try “to find a satisfying resolution. It may not be happy, but it’s satisfying in some way. But as I’ve gone on, I’ve started to resolve the films less.”
¹⁴
In the view of its director/screenwriter, what invalidates that movie is that
Hannah
is ultimately a symptom of the human desire to transcend the problem of mortality rather than the solution itself; finally,
Hannah
is one more narrative with a contrived ending which, rather than resolving the existential bind, reinforces and confirms the irresolvability of that condition.

In the aggregate, Allen’s films seem to dramatize an irreducible choice to which every artist is limited: s/he can either create artworks imitating the formlessness of human experience, thus affirming the omnipotence and inescapability of suffering and death, or s/he can assume the irrelevance of any artistic artifice to the essential human condition and continue to create what Sandy Bates terms “my stupid movies” because people need the resulting diversions—the consolations of aesthetic design—“like they need the air.”
¹⁵
To create the first kind of artwork, in Allen’s experience, has been to ensure himself a minuscule audience because, as Bates’s producer, Walsh, puts it in
Stardust Memories,
“Too much reality is not what the people want” (p. 335). On the other hand, to produce artworks which basically sketch fetching designs on the void is to capitulate to the human desire for illusion, falsification, and bogus reassurance; and although Allen’s films clearly establish that there
are
distinguishable degrees of illusion-mongering (a generic romantic kiss film ending being relatively less mendacious than the wasteland’s inhabitants get- ting transported to a preposterous “jazz heaven”), in the end, an artwork lies, which doesn’t—as
Stardust Memories
does—close on an image of human solitude and circumscription. To adopt Allen’s favorite metaphor for artworks, if the magic trick works, it’s a trick and therefore invalid as a suspension of the physical laws that oppress us; if the film reassures or consoles us about the human condition, it’s done so by falsifying it.

Each of Allen’s films delineates a slightly different configuration of the issue of art’s capacity for celebrating human existence and falsifying it, but both inside of these movies (in the dramatization of the illusions underlying
The Purple Rose of Cairo
as well as in Alvy Singer’s and Sandy Bates’s imposition of unmotivated, unrealistically romantic resolutions on their artworks) and outside of them (in the “too neat and tidy finish” Allen accused himself of imposing upon
Hannah and Her Sisters),
Allen’s cinematic art seems preoccupied with the possibility—or perhaps inevitability—that art lies.

As we’ve seen, that lie, in the dialectic Allen’s films create, is not without its virtues. As Friedrich Nietzsche argued in an idiom different from Allen’s but from a stance that the filmmaker would readily endorse, “From the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, lack of scruple and caution, heartiness and gaiety of life—in order to enjoy life! And only on this solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far—the will to knowledge on the founda-tion of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue!”
¹⁶
Even when we recognize the falsity of these artistic constructions—once we fully understand how tendentiously constructed they are, how much they are themselves products of the human desire we in the audience seek to gratify by entering the movie palace in the first place—we look outside the theater of illusions, see Monk and the Depression, or the Killer, or the un-air- conditioned, cacophonously clamorous streets of Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue waiting. Like Cecilia, we snuggle back comfortably into the ersatz glamour of
Top Hat,
desperately embracing it even though we know that the set on which Fred and Ginger dance
is
a movie set, that the champagne they’ll drink to slake their thirst is ginger ale, and that the “Heaven” their graceful choreography of male/female union projects so perfectly is only a word in a pop song lyric.