The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (48 page)

One obstacle impeding Harrys attainment of maturity is his unresolved resentment against his father, who held against Harry the fact that his mother died giving birth to him.
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In Harrys eyes, his fathers hostility rendered him “a terrible parent,” and, as Doris recognizes, Harrys fictional depiction of the cannibalistic murderer Max Pincus represents the son’s attempt to avenge himself on his dead father. In order to progress beyond this psychic block, Harry has to reconcile himself with his father’s memory; thus, his descent into Hell begins with a confrontation with his father. He has been cast into eternal damnation because, as his infernal jailer explains, “he behaved unconscionably toward his son, accused the boy of a capital crime just by being born.” “Look,” Harry responds, “I forgive him. What’s over is over. It’s finished. Let him go to Heaven, please.” Harry’s father reminds him that Jews don’t believe in Heaven, and they settle for sending him to a Chinese restaurant instead. “Take him to Joy Luck,” Harry instructs his father’s warder, “I love him in spite of everything.”

This prototypical Allen one-liner, yoking the eternal with the finite in comic juxtaposition, exhausts Allen’s interest in the Oedipal tensions underlying Harrys block; nonetheless, the scene reflects how deliberately Allen’s script is preparing for Harry’s redemption. The more significant step in his progress toward restored creative fluency involves his other major confrontation in Hell with Larry, the ruler of the underworld. Enacting the self-invented part of Goldberg, Harry confronts Larry (resentment against whom for stealing Fay inspired the original narrative), the two contesting each other for the title of the universes most unregenerate creature. Larry concludes that Harry will never try to kidnap Fay back from him because “it’s not your style. You’re not a fun guy, too serious—Fay knew that. Too angry at life.” Harry objects, “I got a lot to be angry at,” but Larry has a ready response: “Who doesn’t? Sooner or later, Harry, you got to back off. It’s like Vegas. You’re up, you’re down, but in the end, the house always wins.”

In the subsequent scene, Fay and Larry bail Harry out of jail—Joan has had him arrested for kidnapping his son so that Hilly could attend the Adair ceremony—prompting Harry to do the mature thing: he backs off, “making peace with his demons.” Initially balking at the realization that Fay and Larry have gotten married earlier in the afternoon, Harry suffers Fay’s explanation that she loves him but is in love with Larry. She asks for Harry’s blessing on their union, and Harry, draping his arms around the couple, finally groans, “I give up, I give up.” What he is giving up is the belief that his desires dictate events in actuality, the conviction that his love for Fay will automatically provoke reciprocal love from her as it might have in one of his stories; what he’s giving up, in other words, is the assumption that reality can be manipulated as his fiction is, the belief that he can ever beat the house odds against personal happiness.

Right before Fay and Larry bail him out, Harry has his conversation with Richard’s ghost, their dialogue preparing him to make his saving gesture of renunciation and resignation. “I’m no good at life,” Harry confesses:

RICHARD: “No—but you write well.”

HARRY: “I write well, but that’s a different story, because I can manipulate the characters.”

RICHARD: “You create your own universe, but that’s much nicer than the world we have, I think.”

HARRY: “But I can’t function in the world we have—I’m a failure at life.”

RICHARD: “Oh, I don’t know. I think you bring pleasure to a lot of people. That’s good.”

The debate between Harry and Richard’s spirit reprises issues—the artist’s creation of her/his own universe, the justification of art as valuable insofar as it “tells funnier jokes”—Allen’s films repeatedly confront, but Harry’s emphasis is somewhat different: he portrays the artist as someone who can’t function in life and who uses his art as compensation for that fact. Seeking to win his blessing on their marriage, Larry tells Harry, “I will never be the writer that you are. I know that. You put your art in your work. I put it into my life. I can make [Fay] happier.”

Fay beams her agreement, and Allen’s movie similarly affirms this judgment: with his “chronic dissatisfaction,” Harry is, as Larry earlier insisted, “not a fun guy. Too serious.” He would never cruise the Amazon, never take his bride to Santa Fe for a honeymoon as Larry has promised to do.
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Larry embodies an affirmation of the idea that emerges regularly in Allen’s later films: his suspicion that the unexamined life
is
worth living; he incarnates the antimeditative side of Woody Allen earlier incarnated by the series of characters played by Tony Roberts, whose basic position is best articulated by Tom Baxter in
Purple Rose of Cairo:
. “I don’t want to talk any more about what’s real and what’s illusion. Life’s too short to spend time thinking about life. Let’s just live it.”
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Harry’s bitter acknowledgment that life won’t submit to his imagination in the way that it does in his fiction constitutes significant growth, and his progress in embracing this truth is registered by the fact that Harry decreasingly translates his experience into fictional comic narratives as the movie proceeds. His reward for resigning himself to the differences between fact and fiction is not long in coming, but, given his investment in his imagination, the reward is a thoroughly equivocal one: it consists in a restoration of the condition Harry worked so hard to escape. That is the concluding irony of
Deconstructing Harry
.

Harry’s incarceration for kidnapping Hilly has caused the cancellation of the honorary ceremony at Adair, but adulterous Ken and Leslie and Helen Epstein the libidinous psychiatrist and Harvey Stern the would-be-swinger and Max Pincus the murderer/cannibalist and all the other characters from Harry’s fiction join to stage an alternative observance. Harry asks if he can bring Hilly, prompting one of the academics ushering him to this substitute ceremony to reply, “Its your dream.” Like Bergmans Isak Borg, Harry is on the verge of experiencing a dream redemption: reality having failed to carry through on its pledge to honor him, Harry compensates by dreaming his own self-celebration. Another of the welcoming party admonishes him that “Everyone is waiting to honor you—after all, you created them.” Greeted by the warmly enthusiastic applause of his fictional projections, Harry responds, “I love all of you—you’ve given me the happiest moments of my life, and you’ve even saved my life at times.” Without a doubt, this ceremony is one of those times.

Harry is referring not only to his “Death Knocks” story having literally rescued him from Lucy’s murder threat, but to the way in which his art—as in the substitute honoring ceremony—has occasionally offered a sort of compensation for the reversals of his real life. Spurned by Fay, who ultimately proved herself to be an independent, real-world free agent rather than a projection of his literary imagination, Harry seeks refuge in the world of fiction he’s always preferred because it’s given him “the happiest moments of my life”; accordingly, its inhabitants salute his preference by celebrating him. Harry’s dream of an honoring ceremony, of course, turns into one of those life-saving compensations he invokes in attending it: his expression of gratitude to his characters for honoring him inspires in him the concept for a new novel, about “a guy who can’t function well in life, but can only function in art.”
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Mulling over this idea back at his apartment once the ceremony has spun its regenerative magic, Harry has clearly emerged from his writer’s block: “Rifkin had a fragmented existence,” Harry’s “notes for a novel” voice-over in the film’s closing lines records: “He had long ago come to this conclusion: all people know the same truth—our life consists of how we choose to distort it. Only his writing was calm—his writing, which had more than once saved his life.”

In his twenty-seventh film, Allen finally dramatized the Modernist affir-mation of art as an antidote to life’s confusions, as the redemption of existence, as compensation for the pain of living.
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Harry’s deliverance from writer’s block, then, provides
Deconstructing Harry
with a saving catharsis, but what Harry’s characters have actually redeemed him from is his life—they’ve restored him to the fun-bereft, insularly narcissistic world of his artistic fantasizing, to his barren, antisocial, and loveless “world of fiction.” They have helped him rededicate himself to an existence fixated upon “how we choose to distort [life].” Like the fate of Ambrose in John Barth’s short story, “Lost In the Funhouse,” it is Harrys destiny to “construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.”
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Its evident that, for Allen, “creating funhouses for lovers” is the best a self-confessed “failure at life” can expect, just as the best celebration of himself that Harry—and by implication, Allen—will ever experience is one hosted by creatures of his own imagination.

The thoroughly straightforward and remarkably peevish message of
Deconstructing Harry
is that radiant Elisabeth Shue—Fay—is not whom you end up with if you’re an aging workaholic artist. She may love his work, but in the end she loves more the younger demon who is out in the world living life instead of being cooped up in his “sewer of an apartment” fictionalizing his experience and attempting to avenge the slights of his existence on paper. At the end of his comparison of life to Las Vegas, Larry adds that the fact that “the house” always wins “doesn’t mean you didn’t have fun.” Because he’s “too serious”—too preoccupied with the unfairness of “the house” inevitably winning—Harry’s “not a fun guy.” Larry’s right: he “can make [Fay] happier,” and it’s not merely Fay’s beauty which makes Larry’s reward seem so incontestably superior to Harry’s. In the conclusion of
Deconstructing Harry,
Larry is sentenced to life; Harry is sentenced to art. The climax of the film very effectively brings together the pervasive anxiety
of Everyone Says I Love You
—that aging excludes the would-be Aphrodite worshipper from reality’s romantic sweepstakes—with a devastating critique of the only compensation Woody Allen can possibly imagine for that expulsion: the creation of art.

In the end, it’s Allen’s view that the artist—like all human beings—brings to a celebration of his cultural achievements only two things: “a hooker and a dead body”—he brings, that is, sexual desire contained in a living receptacle destined to die.
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The artist’s work constitutes no transcendence of the physical—he’s accompanied to the ceremony by projections of the inescapability of the corporeal, which is really all Harry’s fiction was ever about. The characters an artist creates may, by providing distraction from this existential truth, briefly offer deliverance from the despair it occasions: as Allen told John Lahr, his continual filmmaking “keeps [him] from the fear here and now.”
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But once the latest narcissistically indulgent production has been completed, the artist—recall the image of Sandy Bates at the end of the screening of his film—is returned to the awareness of human physical vulnerability and isolation. Any other outcome, Allen insists, is as substantial as the honorary degree Harry’s characters never give him.

In describing the self-referential ploys of Vladimir Nabokov’s
Ada,
John Updike suggested that in the novel’s conclusion, as in
Invitation to a Beheading
and
Bend Sinister,
“the cardboard flats and gauze trappings collapse, and the author/hero, heavy with death, lumbers toward the lip of the stage.”
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It’s not only Allen’s prediction “they’ll think [Harry’s] me” which confers some of the quality Updike invokes upon
Deconstructing Harry,
nor the fact that many of Harrys most negative characteristics—narcissism, nihilism, self-hating anti-Semitism—are precisely those which unsympathetic reviewers have ascribed to Allen’s films over the years. Allen’s script invites the comparison by consistently dramatizing how thoroughly Harry’s fiction derives from his life experiences, a fact which Harry acknowledges in admitting to the Adair faculty that Goldberg, his protagonist pursuing his wife to Hell, is “me thinly disguised. I don’t think I should disguise it any more. It’s—you know—me.”

In the sense that a fictional character’s actions can neither predict nor replicate an author’s, Goldberg isn’t Harry any more than Harry is Woody. In
Wild Man Blues,
a documentary of Allen touring Europe with his New Orleans Jazz Band produced shortly after
Deconstructing Harry
was completed, Allen’s mother offered a balanced characterization of her son’s relationship to his films: “He adds or subtracts from his life. He doesn’t want to make a movie of his life.”
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And yet, Ingmar Bergman was surprised to realize that he had given his
Wild Strawberries
protagonist his own initials, and although Allen has burdened Harry with a plethora of vices he apparently doesn’t possess, one nonetheless recognizes in Helen Epstein’s analysis of her husbands short stories exaggerated characteristics which both Harry and the screenwriter/director who created him seem to some degree to share: “What one comes away with is your total isolation, your fear of people, your panic over closeness.”
Wild Man Blues
dramatizes a semblance of Helen’s characterization, presenting its subject as withdrawn and taciturn offstage, the documentary with noticeable resentment eliding Allen’s films and New Orleans jazz as art forms more appreciated abroad than they are in their homeland. Allen’s 1991 essay, “Random Reflections of a Second-Rate Mind,”
Deconstructing Harry
and
Wild Man Blues
combine to delineate a more autobiographically forthright and candidly pessimistic Woody Allen than the scriptwriter of
Manhattan Murder Mystery Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite,
and
Everyone Says I Love You;
the disjunction is most apparent in the contrasting enactments/perceptions of art found in these works.