The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (45 page)

“The songs, sweetly romantic chestnuts,” Janet Maslin argued, “are mostly a way to evoke the madcap impossible world that Mr. Allen means to conjure. It’s a world both of serene privilege and surreal possibility, and it offers a delightful and witty compendium of the filmmaker’s favorite things.”
¹⁷
Maslin’s characterization of the film perfectly catches both the mood of enchantment
Everyone Says I Love You
seeks to project while acknowledging simultaneously the expressionistic excesses which make it all difficult to believe despite the fact that—as Skylar recommended—the film
is
a musical. It’s when the films “world of serene privilege and surreal possibility” seems most unbelievable that we begin to notice that
Everyone Says I Love You
perpetuates a significant tendency in Allen’s recent films, one manifested in the perplexities of their male protagonists.

In
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
Larry tells Carol, “I don’t need a murder to enliven my life at all,” and thus largely absents himself from the detection plot until the end of the film. Of the protagonists Allen has played, Larry seems unquestionably the least individually characterized (he dislikes stamp collections; he likes Father’s Day and Bob Hope movies) and the most perfunctorily derivative of previous Allen portrayals. In
Bullets Over Broadway
David Shayne loses confidence in his own dramatic writing and becomes increasingly dependent upon Cheech to rewrite whole sections of his play for him, pretending the revisions are his own. In
Mighty Aphrodite,
Lenny, the most effectual of the four protagonists, tells the chorus leader that “I take action, I act,” and although he bears out this claim through his intervention with Linda Ash, at home there seems to be no alteration of the familial power structure he delineates for Max: “I’m the boss. Mommy says what we do, and I have control of the channel changer.” A certain withdrawal, or self-effacement, is what the three protagonists seem to share in common, one epitomized by Lindas insight about Lenny: “You only talk about me—you never talk about yourself.”

The same basic passivity is noticeable in Joe Berlin. When he and DJ arrive in Venice, she worries that “he just seemed to hang around the hotel,” and she is relieved when Von’s appearance inspires the scheme to shake him from his doldrums. Joe prepares for his pursuit of Von by steeping himself in her fantasy life via DJ and by pretending a knowledge of Tintoretto which he doesn’t possess. When Von explains why she is leaving him, he tries to disown his ideal man pose by asking her what she’d say if he admitted that his “magical” quality was only a “facade,” that he’d merely had special “access to your deepest feelings and thoughts” and had been “playing this character just to win you over and make you like me, to make you happy?”

“I’d say you were crazy,” is her response.

If that is crazy, its a form of crazy Allen anatomized in detail in one of his most memorable protagonists.

In her attempt to begin treating Leonard Zelig’s neurotic imitation of other human beings’ physical and mental traits, Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) is confronted first with his identification of himself with her as a doctor. Telling him he’s not a doctor fails to have any effect, so she hits upon the clever plan of using the psychic material she’d gathered from interviews while he was under hypnosis to reverse the identification dynamic at work between them. She asks for his help as a doctor, confessing that she lied to others about having read
Moby-Dick,
hoping those who had read the novel would like her because she had read it as well. Zelig, noticeably discomfited by his unconscious mind’s recognition that its contents are being mirrored back as another’s experience, suggests that, as a doctor, she can handle her problem. Eudora pursues her strategy by explaining to him that she isn’t actually a doctor—that she only pretends to be a doctor because she wants to fit in with her friends, who are doctors. Since Zelig’s greatest fear is that, beyond his imitations of others, “I’m nobody—I’m nothing,”
¹⁸
Eudora is confronting him with the terrible anxiety of surrendering the parameters of the self he has appropriated by disavowing them herself. The cognitive dissonance created in him by her counter-chameleon plan is hilarious to watch; it also represents the first step en route to his recovery and to their romance.

In order to effect a cure for Zelig and to generate a romance for herself, she has to do for him precisely what Joe does in courting Von: she transforms herself into the contents of his psyche.
¹⁹
The difference, of course, is that in Zelig’s case, the strategy results in a cure and a marriage. (Among other things,
Zelig’s
comic resolution commemorated the recent romantic union of Allen and Farrow, a relationship that would see them make thirteen films together.) Unlike the resuscitated and happily coupled Zelig, Joe is abandoned in Paris, inhabiting an apartment he moved into because it represented Von’s dream of an artist’s garret, her final words to him as she departed echoing in the place: “I’d say you were crazy.”

Arguably, even when Allen tries to make a light confection of a film, full of reassurance and bright Broadway show tunes, the old anxieties and questions inevitably resurface. The similarity between Fletchers initiatory Zelig therapy and the mechanics of DJ’s matchmaking scheme is striking; even more so is how closely Joes courtship of Von replicates Zelig’s trademark interpersonal dynamic: mirror the other back to herself to earn her approval and affection. Given the centrality of the psychological issues dramatized so effectively in
Zelig
both in terms of contemporary humanity’s anxieties and in Allen’s career as well, it’s probably not surprising that Zeligian characteristics begin reemerging in his films at the point that they do. Before returning to those more recent movies, it’s worth briefly considering how the themes so powerfully addressed in
Zelig
illuminate the choices and challenges of Allen’s post-
Husbands and Wives
career.

For Allen, a filmmaker whose participation in the Freudian revolution of the twentieth century has meant modeling his work on that of artists such as Eugene O’Neill and Ingmar Bergman in focusing on the interior landscapes of human beings as the primary subjects of his films, Leonard Zelig represents both the ultimate joke and the quintessential threat. In artistic terms, the question Zelig allowed Allen to pose to himself was this: how to make films about the self if the self is only a reflection of other selves, if the self has come to be understood as nothing more than a mirror of its surroundings?
²⁰
In more personal, psychological terms, the question becomes whether the narcissism so widely interpreted as the ascendent psychological symptom of the age isn’t an elaborate compensation for anxiety about the self’s integrity, if not about its very existence. In Zelig’s various self-metamorphoses into a Greek, an Indian, an African-American, a fat man, and a Nazi, the viewer perhaps recognizes his/her own experiences of adaptive coloration, of assuming the attitudes, ideas, or styles of others in order to flatter them or to impress some other audience. And—if s/he is honest about it—the viewer acknowledges as well the sobering moment of doubt as to whether there is an integral self behind the imitations at all. That Allen’s film hilariously mined a source of real cultural anxiety of the early 1980s seems undeniable; whether
Zelig
replicates a significant characteristic of Allen’s own filmmaking career is necessarily more conjectural.

Were Zelig a filmmaker, the form that his neurosis might be expected to take would be the creation of movies which closely resemble other filmmakers’ movies: he might make a period comedy, for instance, about three couples cavorting in the green world of the countryside which would recall Bergmans
Smiles of a Summer Night;
a grim family drama set at the seashore might remind some viewers of Bergmans
Persona;
the narrative of a demoralized filmmaker attending a film retrospective in his honor might evoke Fellini’s
8;
the process of self-confrontation experienced by the title character of
Alice
would conjure up
Juliet of the Spirits,
and so on. At least two of Allen’s movies—
Interiors
and
Stardust Memories
—can be fruitfully discussed with only minimal reference to the films which influenced their creation; however, there is no getting around the fact that Allen is a filmmaker whose films incessantly and unapologetically invoke other films.

The setting of the emotional climaxes of three of his finest films—
Stardust Memories, Purple Rose of Cairo,
and
Hannah and Her Sisters
—in movie theaters reflects Allen’s profoundly postmodern assumption of how completely our lives are mediated by cinematic narrative, how significant a role films play in our construction of selves. (Had Allen wanted to insist on this point, he might have had Zelig begin imitating the characteristics of the Leonard Zelig in the Hollywood biopic produced on Zelig’s life, thus reinforcing the films argument that the self is partially a construct derived from images of self projected on the silver screen.) Whether Allen’s films’ evocation of the emotional colorations of earlier movies represents effective cinematic homage or the Zeligian imitation of moods in the absence of tonalities of Allen’s own is a question which
Everyone Says I Love You
does not alone raise. But to dismiss his movies on the ground that they’re derivative or imitative of classic European or Hollywood films is to ignore how deliberately his work addresses and complicates precisely these questions of artistic derivation and imitation and also investigates their relationship to the artist’s mental stability. That a culturally ascribed deficiency may be a virtue is the point of many of Allen’s fables as well as the self-defined object lesson of Leonard Zelig’s story: “It shows,” Zelig explains at the end of the documentary creating him, “exactly what you can do if you’re a total psychotic.” For Joe Berlin, of course, the chameleon strategy culminates—far less happily—in the same characterization: Von’s response, “I’d say you were crazy.”

Given the movie preoccupation of Allen’s movies, it seems appropriate that the resuscitation of Leonard Zelig from non-being (“Devoid of personality, his human qualities long since lost in the shuffle of life, he sits alone, quietly staring into space, a cipher, a non-person, a performing freak”) to the hero for whom a New York ticker tape parade is held is so much a process of filmmaking. When Eudora Fletcher’s assistant asks her why she can’t simply take notes on Zelig’s responses once his therapy has been initiated, she explains that she must have his progress on film because “when a man changes his physical appearance, you want to see it.” That progress gets recorded not only on her assistant’s film but by the newsreel cameras which, in the process of filming his receiving the key to Manhattan and cavorting at the Hearst mansion with Tom Mix, golfer Bobby Jones, and others, authenticate his evolution from “non-person,” “cipher” and “performing freak without a life of his own” to American celebrity. “Ultimately,” Daniel Green argued, “Zelig the ‘human chameleon’ is a unique creation of film, a character whose ‘life’ is completely dependent upon its manifestation in filmed images. We never actually experience Zelig’s transformations; rather, we laugh at them as
fait accompli
which have been caught by a camera. In a very real sense, we accept Leonard Zelig as an authentic subject for a documentary because of our willingness to accept the authenticity of the cinematic image itself.”
²¹

The adherence of
Zelig to
the structure of documentary is probably the only reason the film isn’t routinely considered among Allen’s best—ironically, this movie constructed out of documentary footage depicting what Bruno Bettleheim characterizes as “the ultimate conformist” often seems like Allen’s most original and intensely creative work. That Zelig is so completely the creature of film clips significantly limits his compellingness as a dramatic character, his two disappearances from the movie (during which he insinuates himself into the Pope’s inner circle in Rome and into the Nazi high command) comprising what the film has for plot development. However, anyone watching the film recently will be surprised to find that the formulaic character of Zelig’s progress has become weirdly inflected by extratextual coincidence: the scandal resulting from the exposure of Zelig’s many marriages and other indiscretions while acting out his numerous personalities seems depressingly familiar, the screenplay suddenly proliferating with newspaper quotations which now seem cruelly like art/life
double entendres:
“ZELIG’S PAST CATCHES UP,” “CLAIMS AGAINST ZELIG MULTIPLY,” “Zelig says that he will fight it in court, but public opinion begins to shift subtly against him.” Apparently one of Allen’s less autobiographical characters, Zelig anticipated Allen’s own immersion in violent cultural controversy. Zelig redeems himself in the public’s perception by reverting to his neurotic condition and flying himself and Eudora back to the United States by imitating her abilities as a pilot. As Saul Bellow interprets Zelig’s reclamation in the film, “His sickness was at the root of his salvation, 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.”
²²
Who would better understand this idea than a comedian-turned-film-maker whose fame continues to be predicated upon his calculated deviance from mainstream ideals of human behavior and self-image?