The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (47 page)

Harry (Allen) and Lucy (
Judy
Davis) are on the roof of his apartment building in the continuation of the scene addressed in the introduction to this study, she having raised the ante of her attack on his novel exploiting their now-terminated affair by pulling a gun on him. In an attempt to calm her, Harry recounts the plot of one of his stories, which is then dramatized cinematically: the protagonist, Harvey Stern (Tobey Maguire), assumes the iden-tity of a hospitalized friend whose bachelor digs he’s using for a tryst with a prostitute. “Donning the other man’s silk robe,” Harrys narrator explains, “Harvey became the swinger Mandel Birnbaum.” The impersonation backfires when Death arrives, mistaking Harvey for the apartments inhabitant and bearing him off instead of the hospitalized Birnbaum.
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Harry recalls for his psychiatrist that the story made Lucy laugh, deflecting her anger. The analyst replies, “So writing saved your life.”

Deconstructing Harry
is very much about ways in which writing saves Harry Block’s life, but the movie constitutes no reversal of Allen’s consistendy articulated position on the meaninglessness of literary reputation, on the fraudulence of the Modernist credo that art confers upon the artist the only form of immortality available to humanity. Harry’s narration of his “Death Knocks” story earns him not literary immortality but a very tangible prolongation of his mortality—Lucy desists from shooting him; nowhere else in
Deconstructing Harry
is art depicted as having anything more than purely material effects upon artist or audience.

A gaggle of adoring Adair University academics gathered to give Harry an honorary degree burble pompously about the cultural contributions of their former student and present honoree, but no one else in the film—Harry included—has anything remotely positive to say about his art. We have already considered Lucy’s excoriation of Harry’s novel on the ground that it callously exploits and exposes his friends and lovers, its author, in her words, having “not even cared enough to disguise anything” of the actual events he fictionalized. In general, the excerpts from Harry’s fiction dramatized through out the film are marked by a cynical belittling of their characters: Harvey Stern is a married sexual-obsessive who imagines copulating with all women except his wife; Helen Epstein (Demi Moore) is a psychiatrist so titillated by the fantasies her patients divulge in therapy that she terminates their treatment in order to initiate erotic relations with them; Max Pincus (Hy Anzell) is a bourgeois Jewish family man who has concealed from his wife of thirty years that he murdered his initial family and devoured their corpses. Harry’s characters are, in short, cartoonish incarnations of the Freudian notion which pervades Allen’s films: that whatever their aspirations toward idealism, integrity, or decency, human beings are finally no better than their basest impulses. Harry has turned this concept into a personal and artistic
raison d’tre
.

As his third wife, Joan (Kirstie Alley) characterizes him, Harry is their son Hilly’s “alcoholic, pill-popping, beaver-banging excuse for a father.” Harry has, as he acknowledges, “squandered everything I had on shrinks and lawyers and whores”; consequently, he confesses, exceeding the demoralized conditions of Larry and Lenny and Joe Berlin, “I’m spiritually bankrupt—I’m empty … I got no soul.” His sister, Doris (Caroline Aaron), agrees: Harry has “no spiritual center” and is “betting everything on physics and pussy.” As if in confirmation of Doris’s characterization of him, Harry numbers among his achievements his affair with Lucy, the sister of his second wife, Jane (Amy Irving), and his affair with the patient of psychiatrist Joan—wife number three—which prompted her to initiate divorce proceedings. Harrys literary output—which represents anything but “entertainment on a very, very high level”—is little more than a fictionalized catalogue of his own enormities and the dramatization of the deficiencies of and resentments he holds against those with whom he is intimate. Harry’s life and art are summarized most succinctly by Doris’s later assessment of her brother: “You have no values. Your whole life is nihilism—it’s cynicism, its sarcasm and orgasm.”

Elliott Goulds unavailability to play Harry and Allen’s decision to take the role himself increased the likelihood, as he put it, that “everybody will think—I know this going in—that [Harry]’s me.” Reviewers of the film had difficulty accepting Allen’s portrayal of the self-proclaimed “worst person in the world,” Harrys profanity-spouting and incessant drinking consistently conflicting with Allen’s familiarly genial gestures and inflections in such a way as to render the characterization unconvincing. In other words, Harry is to Allen what Harry’s fictional characters are to their models—caricatures exag-gerating their originals’ most antisocial and self-serving tendencies.
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As Allen’s hyperbolized projection of the “bad Woody” of the Mia Farrow crisis, Harry is a sexual transgressor of familial boundaries, a “self-hating Jew” whose putatively anti-Semitic art is accused of compounding the sufferings of Jews
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; he is a man so depraved that he can contest with the Devil over who has committed the foulest and most unforgivable acts, Harry at the time clearly having never quite comprehended that he’d done anything wrong. There are at least three possible explanations for the fact that Harry Block can’t remain in the unregenerate condition the film ascribes to him: because underlying
Deconstructing Harry
is another film in which an unsympathetic character achieves self-knowledge and thus a modicum of redemption; because Allen is a sufficiently traditional screenwriter that his plots gravitate toward character reversal
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; and, because of Allen’s ambivalent attitude toward art-as-redemption-of-life, Harry’s concluding reversal and recognition are a thoroughly ambiguous event.

Isak Borg, the protagonist of Bergman’s
Wild Strawberries,
undergoes a similar one-day voyage of self-discovery in traveling to the University of Lund to be honored on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation from the institution.
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En route to the ceremony, Borg tells his daughter-in-law, Marianne, “I have no respect for mental suffering, so don’t come lamenting to me.” A man whose life has been completely dedicated to his work, Borg has cultivated an experimentalist’s objectivity, his “love of science” severely delimiting his human sympathies. “Your judgments are very categorical,” Marianne responds to his dismissal of “mental suffering,” “I’d hate to have to depend on you.” No one can depend on Harry Block, either, and for somewhat parallel reasons. As his sister suggests, something like half of Harry’s belief system is comprised by physics, the other half by a similarly physical reality. Harry assures a friend that, “between the Pope and air-conditioning, I’ll take air-conditioning,” and insists subsequently that “I’m all quarks and particles and black holes—all that other stuff is junk to me.”
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Borg spends much of his day experiencing memories of his past and dreams which confront him inescapably with the suffering, loneliness, and heartache his unfeeling, passionless life have brought on others and himself.
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Harry spends his day reliving the deeds that have resulted in his current demoralized and solitary condition, many of them being configured as scenes from his fiction which gradually mutate into the experiences of Harry’s life that they literarily reconstruct and consistently misrepresent.
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In a dream that Borg suffers toward the close of his journey, he is judged incompetent as a doctor because he can’t see beyond the image of his own eye in a microscope and mistakes for a corpse a fully alive woman; he is also found guilty of the similarly narcissistic minor offenses of “callousness, selfishness, and ruthlessness.” Harry indicts himself with these vices and more, repeatedly judging himself “a failure at life” and “a shit” OD’ing on himself.

At the end of
Wild Strawberries,
Borg prepares for bed following the ceremony and is serenaded by three young people who have been his traveling companions, the girl among them—who bears the name of a fiancee who once rejected him—telling him that, of the three men who have shared her life today, “I love you most of all.” Intuiting that this Sara has redeemed the original Sara’s desertion of him, Borg determines to write down his impressions from the day because “they seemed to be a jumble in which I could discern an extraordinary logic.” That logics ultimate reward consists in his dreaming that the Sara of his young manhood has led him to a childhood fishing spot where his parents await him. Just as the imagining of the stories he never wrote provides Ernest Hemingway’s Harry with a redemptive fantasy death in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Borg’s reluctant but genuine gestures toward others in
Wild Strawberries
have earned him regeneration—not of his life, but through his dreams.

Allen’s Harry’s parallel redemption occurs, similarly, through the inter-cession of a dream, Allen’s script diverging from Bergmans in having Harrys dream precipitate rather than follow the “writing down of impressions.” Before explicating Harry’s dream-induced redemption, however, we need to consider the significance of the fact that Harry’s honorary ceremony—unlike Borg’s—never occurs, as well as his sardonic observation upon arriving at Adair University: “I can’t believe it—my old school wants to honor me, and I show up with a hooker and a dead body.”

Threading through
Deconstructing Harrys
oscillation between the dramatization of Harrys trespasses against others and scenes from his stories and novels is a plot: Harry meets a fan of his work in an elevator, telling her, “If this were one of my stories, the elevator would get stuck between floors, we’d start a major affair and then fall in love.” As if it
were
one of his stories, he and Fay Sexton (Elisabeth Shue) do have an affair, Harry constantly warning her against falling in love with him because he’s like the boy in one of his stories who is incapable of love. Fay had already fallen for his work, she explains—“I love your imagination”—and, reprising a debate from
Bullets Over Broadway,
she mistakes this infatuation for love of him. Harry introduces her to his friend and alter ego, Larry (Billy Crystal), and the Amazon explorer and “fun guy” soon steals her heart. Depicting Larry as a demonic anti-Harry allows Allen the fun of projecting cinematically the Hell over which this Devil rules, with Harry acting out the part of Goldberg, the protagonist of a story he’s writing who seeks to recover his wife after the Devil has dragged her off to Hell.

Deconstructing Harry
(again like
Wild Strawberries)
takes place over forty-eight hours, spanning the day on which Fay tells Harry that tomorrow she will marry Larry and the day on which both the marriage and the honorary ceremony are scheduled to occur. Harry spends these two days desperately seeking to persuade Fay to marry him rather than Larry, and his grudging acceptance of their marriage is one of the climactic steps in his psychic catharsis and revival.

Harry is so generously provided with character deficiencies that it’s difficult to decide which is most deserving of redemption, but the primary symptom of his current malaise is an appropriately named condition—writer’s block. “For the first time in my life,” he complains, employing a sexual pun we noticed in the films opening scene, “I can’t seem to write—it’s not coming.” One of the characters from his latest novel offers his gloss on his creators psychic/artistic dilemma, his judgment getting validated by the plot’s unfolding. “You picked [Jane] so [the marriage] wouldn’t work,” Ken (Richard Benjamin) explains to Harry, “—so you wouldn’t have to give up sport fucking and chronic dissatisfaction and grow up.”
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The central defect of Harry’s work, clearly, is the cardinal defect of his life: narcissism. Because it is so busy indicting others for what Harry believes they have done to him, his work never moves beyond the closed circle of egotism to register the reality or complexity of other lives. Therefore, his characters are caricatures expressing Harry’s resentment at their models’ refusals to fulfill his desires. To “grow up,” accordingly, would be to acknowledge in fiction and in life the subjectivity of others and to be able to love them as he loves himself. By falling in love with Fay, Harry takes his first halting move away from narcissism, though he remains as bewildered by her refusal to reciprocate his ardor as a child at denials of affection by its mother.
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Accompanying Harry on the voyage of self-discovery which is his journey to Adair University are his son, Hilly (Eric Lloyd); Cookie Williams (Hazelie Goodman), a prostitute Harry has befriended; and Richard (Bob Balaban), a crony of Harry’s who fears his heart is giving out on him and in fact dies just as they arrive at the campus. Acting as a spiritual guide from beyond the grave, Richard articulates the form that Harry’s self-transfiguration must take: “Make peace with your demons,” Richard’s specter admonishes Harry, “and your block will pass.” In order to comply with Richards instruction, Harry must go to Hell.
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