The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (46 page)

That Allen is unlikely to set a world record by flying upside down over the Atlantic Ocean probably eliminates any possibility of his becoming a hero with the American public; of course, it isn’t even clear that the largely upbeat movies he produced between
Husbands and Wives
and
Deconstructing Harry
represent what numerous reviewers have seen in them: attempts on his part to restore himself to the moviegoing audience’s good graces. (If this was Allen’s objective,
Deconstructing Harry
and
Celebrity
constituted the introduction of a concerted counterstrategy.) And yet, as we’ve seen, there was an aura about
Manhattan Murder Mystery
that seemed to emphasize both the felicitous restoration of the Allen/Keaton team and their return to security once they’d outlasted the murder plot, their retreat behind the glass doors of their apartment building all but bearing a subtitle epitomizing the entire film’s mood: “We’re all right.” The ending of
Bullets Over Broadway
includes what can be read as Allen’s guilty identification of himself with Cheech, the film’s ultimate proponent of the “artist creates his own moral universe” ethic, while
Mighty Aphrodite
seems to repudiate the tragic imperatives of vengeance and retribution invoked by Mia Farrow’s preoccupation with
The Trojan Women
in favor of the more comedic inevitabilities of love and romance. Can such elements of Allen’s films be read completely in isolation from Allen’s very public private experience? Only at the cost of ignoring the considerable evidence pervading his movies that art derives in subtle and not so subtle ways from artists’ lives.

Joe Berlin’s Zelig-like effort to spark a little love and romance in the heart of Von runs afoul of its own self-subsuming falsity in a movie which otherwise celebrates Eros as the only thing in the world (besides wealth) worth celebrating. “There are only eight little letters in the phrase, you’ll find,” as the Burt Kalmar/Harry Ruby song, “Everyone Says I Love You,” expresses it beneath the film’s closing scene, “but they mean a lot more than all the other words combined.” It is Allen’s very real anxiety that the ability of that phrase to imbue the world with the only magic in which he’s ever completely believed is faltering, the impulse to love or be loved becoming as remote as the origins of the songs which are his films’ non-visual means of asserting the impulse’s validity. This worry manifests itself in his films through the increasing passivity, self-effacement, and confusion of the protagonists of
Manhattan Murder Mystery Bullets Over Broadway Mighty Aphrodite,
and
Everyone Says I Love You,
Harry Block of
Deconstructing Harry
might be said to represent a calculated counteraction to the passive tendencies of Larry and David Shayne and Lenny and Joe, Allen having described the film a year before its release as being “about a nasty, shallow, superficial, sexually obsessed guy. I’m sure that everybody will think—I know this going in—that it’s me.”
²³
His eponymous symptom—writing block—unites him with them, however. As we’ll see in the next chapter, it’sleft to Harry to fashion a life without love predicated on the one other form of magic in which Allen has intermittently sought to believe—art.

Allen’s work, consequently, promises to continue to do what Diane Jacobs suggested it was doing as early as
Annie Hall:
inviting while refusing to confirm analogies between himself and his protagonists.
²⁴
Therefore, his films will continue to confront his personal anxieties in a way which seems simultaneously to accuse him and the viewer of contemporary psychological deviances in a way unlikely to make either completely comfortable. (Compare the inducement Zelig’s sister uses to attract crowds to view the spectacle that is her brother: “SEE ZELIG TURN INTO YOU.”) “His story,” Irving Howe comments about Zelig, “reflected the nature of our civilization, the character of our times … yet it was also one man’s story.” Saul Bellow adds, “He was of course fairly amusing, but at the same time touched a nerve in people…. Perhaps in a way that they would prefer not to be touched” (p. 5). Of all the contradictory and often self-canceling interpretations of Zelig, however, the one most unambiguously confirmed by the film narrative is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s closing impression. Zelig and Eudora are pictured in a home movie framed by the porch of a house on the day of their wedding, the couple finally disappearing arm-in-arm around the corner of the building. The narrator, in voice-over, delivers Fitzgerald’s judgment: “In the end, it was, after all, not the approbation of many but the love of one woman that changed his life.”

“Just he, just she,” Holden croons to Skylar at the beginning of Allen’s 1996 movie musical, “And what a perfect plot, just say you love me.” That “perfect plot” played itself out nicely in the close of Sandy Bates’s movie in
Stardust Memories,
in
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Zelig, Hannah and Her Sisters,
. “Oedipus Wrecks,”
Mighty Aphrodite,
and in the prevailing spirit of
Everyone Says I Love You
. The predominantly upbeat ending of that film is engendered by the story’s reversion to DJ’s girlishly ebullient narrative, its energy having been juiced up by her encounter with her latest inamorata—“Talk about sexy!” Harpo. Joe and Steffi can’t appear in this closing emblem of youthful romantic union and sexual felicity, largely because the conclusion of their dialogue on the Seine has identified them as being beyond all that, their agreement that it’s time to head home because “it’s late” sparking in the viewer’s ear the admonitory lyric, “it’s later than you think.” In retrospect, their post-dance conversation seems to have had the effect of redefining for each of them the meaning of “Just You, Just Me.”

For Woody Allen, then, it sometimes seems true that everyone says “I love you,” and that subjective impression can feel like “the sweet honey dew of well-being” settling upon him. But he also knows that sometimes
she
stops saying “I love you,” and that sometimes
he
says it in order to have something to say so as not to fall silent; other times he’s saying it because others have said it in the medium of film, and when they did, it sometimes made him and everyone else feel better. So they “invoke love, call out for it, beg for it, cry for it, try to imitate it, think they have it, lie about it.” Allen’s films—these two in particular—agree in spirit with the explanation John Updike once offered for the preoccupation with eroticism in Western society: “Might it not simply be that sex has become involved in the Promethean protest forced upon Man by his paradoxical position in the Universe as a self-conscious animal? Our fundamental anxiety is that we do not exist—or will cease to exist. Only in being loved do we find external corroboration of the supremely high valuation each ego secretly assigns itself. This exalted arena, then, is above all others the one where men and women insist on their freedom to choose—to choose the other being in whose existence their own existence is confirmed and amplified.”
²⁵
Zelig
and
Everyone Says I Love You
use very different means to make the same dramatic point that pervades Allen’s films: the idea that everyone says “I love you” out of the fear that not to love or be loved is to be no one at all.

18

How We Choose to Distort It

Deconstructing Harry

I didn’t want this guy to be necessarily likable. I wanted him to be surly and upset: not a saint or an angel, but a man with real problems who finds that art doesn’t save you.

—Allen describing Sandy Bates of
Stardust Memories

It’s one of the oddities of Allen’s film oeuvre that his primary objection to the perception of art in Western culture is so seldom directly articulated in his movies. Renata, the poet of
Interiors,
offers its most explicit summation in asking her analyst, “I mean, just what am I striving to create, anyway? I mean, to what end? For what purpose? What goal? … I mean, do I really care if a handful of my poems are read after I’m gone forever? Is that supposed to be some sort of compensation? Uh, I used to think it was, but now for some reason, I-I cant.” (p. 124). The same idea is presented with allegorical indirection in Irmstadt’s invocation of the human dependency on illusions in the closing line of
Shadows and Fog,
and few arguments surface so regularly in Allen’s interviews, but the exchange between Vivian and Sandy Bates in
Stardust Memories
briefly following the nurse’s eulogy—“Poor fool, he’s dead. And he never found the meaning of life”—is, before
Deconstructing Harry,
its only other explicit articulation in his films.

Vivian, the director of the weekend Film Festival, delivers her funereal judgment upon him, telling the audience, “Sandy Bates’s work will live on after him.” In attendance at what has become his memorial service, Bates objects, “Yeah, but what good is it if I can’t pinch women or hear any music?” Intent upon validating her thesis of art’s redemptive efficacy, Vivian ignores his objection, proceeding to introduce one of the film clips which to her mind will constitute Bates’s immortality: “And now, in this classic scene from his Academy Award-winning motion picture—” “I would trade that Oscar,” Bates impatiently interrupts, “for one more second of life” (p. 371). Bates’s casually defined yet utterly unwavering existentialism—a philosophical stance shared by most of Allen’s protagonists—admits of no substitute for being: as the ghost of one of Harry’s friends assures him in
Deconstructing Harry,
. “To be alive is to be happy—take it from me.” Like his creator, Bates would much prefer to live on not in the minds of men but in his apartment.
¹

“I sometimes feel that art is the intellectuals religion,” Allen told Stig Bjorkman in 1994, a point dramatized in
Interiors
by Eves experience of a crisis of faith when the aesthetic contemplation of a Romanesque church she invited her estranged husband to share with her suffers an abrupt deflation through his actuality-intruding request that they finalize their divorce. Allen might have been characterizing Eve’s desperate, futile faith in the aesthetic as he continued:

Some artists think that they will be saved by their art, that they will be immortalized through their art, that they will live on through their art. But the truth of the matter is, art doesn’t save you. Art for me has always been entertainment for intellectuals. Mozart, Shakespeare or Rembrandt are entertainers on a very, very high level. It’s a level that brings a great sense of excitement, stimulation and fulfillment to people who are sensitive and cultivated. But it doesn’t save the artist. I mean, it doesn’t profit Shakespeare one iota that his plays have lived on after him. He would have been better off if he were alive and the plays were forgotten.
²

Given these sentiments, it’s not surprising that the search for meaning so pervasive in Allen’s films—“Yeah, but I’ve gotta find meaning,” Sandy Bates objects when the extraterrestrial Og urges him to make funnier movies—never culminates in the affirmation of art-as-preservation, art-as-bulwark against time’s incessant passage, art as—in T.S. Eliot’s formulation—“fragments shored against my ruins.” The closest an Allen film comes to concluding on a celebration of aesthetic preservation is the ending of
Radio Days,
in which the narrator’s implicit declaration of his film’s memorializing of the radio voices of his youth is equivocated by his admission that even for him, the memorializer, those voices have grown dimmer as each year has elapsed since he last heard them. As we saw through
Stardust Memories,
for Allen the fallibility of human memory necessarily adulterates the Grecian urn perfection that art is supposed to be able to achieve; it is one of his central and most consistently dramatized aesthetic axioms that the creations of imperfect beings must necessarily be correspondingly imperfect.

There is no contradiction, then, in the fact that a vicious mob hit man can be also—in the estimation of David Shayne of
Bullets Over Broadway
and the actors in
God of Our Fathers,
at any rate—“a great artist,” since Allen’s scripts deny any necessary causal relation between personal morality and artistic capacity. In fact, Cheech, that great proponent of art’s responsibility to reflect “how people really talk,” seems to live on in the increased sexual explicitness of
Mighty Aphrodite
and in the heightened profanity and carnality of both
Deconstructing Harry
and
Celebrity. As
if in reaction against the artistic compromises and filmic civility of the
Hannah
era, Allen’s post-Farrow films have sought deliberately to reflect the deepening vulgarity of the world he depicts, Allen opting for the opposite choice from the one he attributes to David Shayne by opening his art to cultural crudity. Shayne’s ringing declaration toward the end of
Bullets
that “I’m an artist—but first I’m a human being” says as much about that film’s depiction of the vulnerability of art to human corruption as it does about his personally held moral commitments. Accordingly, Shayne saves himself by fleeing the artistic vocation that had been the principal source of meaning in his life. Like Harry Block, Allen’s alternative course has been to make cultural corruption the subject of his art, leaving it to Harry—of his artist/protagonists, arguably the most imperfect and surely the least deserving of salvation—to be saved by art.