The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (5 page)

In Eric Lax’s biography, Allen recalls the pleasures he experienced as child going to Brooklyn’s Midwood Theater on Saturdays. “I remember being the first person in line many times on a Saturday morning,” he reminisced:

I would be there at eleven o’clock and the theater would open at twelve. The theater would be lit up and it was amazing because in those days the theater was just beautiful—the carpets and brass and everything…. There was always a white-haired matron in a white costume with a flashlight that tended the children’s section, so your mother could bring you, put you in your seat, and go. Then four hours later you’d feel a tap on your shoulder and she’d be picking you up. And you’d say, “I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!”

Allen evoked the wonder of 1940s movie palaces in the Radio City Music Hall scene of
Radio Days;
the human wonderment at what appears on the screen is visualized in the enchanted expressions of Allan Felix in
Play It Again, Sam
as he watches Rick and Lisa, and in Cecilia’s rapturously adoring attention in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
to Fred and Ginger’s
Top Hat
choreography. That “your mother” will arrive to pull you out of such grand illusions is ever the irresolvable problem not only of Allan Stewart Konigsberg but also of many of Allen’s protagonists and may suggest why mothers generally come off so badly in Allen’s films. “The sense of dread in facing reality after hours of pleasurable escape,” Lax cites Allen as suggesting.

is the worst experience in the world…. You’d go into the theater at noon on a hot summer day, and you’d sit through
The Scarlet Pimpernel
and
The Return of The Scarlet Pimpernel,
and it would be nothing but sheer magical joy, eating chocolate-covered raisins for three or four hours. Then you would come out at three in the afternoon and leave the world of beautiful women and music, and, you know, bravery or penthouses or things like that. And suddenly you would be out on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn and the trolleys would be passing and the sun would be blinding and there was no more air conditioning. I remember that sense of coming out into the ugly light when I walked out of
Always Leave Them Laughing
With Milton Berle and after
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
.
¹

That Allen should choose for his two examples of movie magic culminating in disenchantment via reality’s “ugly light” these two films—a movie about the vicissitudes of a comedian and the film version of James Thurber’s story about a man incapacitated by daydreams—seems highly significant: laughter and indulgence in fantasy are what happens in movie theaters, and many of Allen’s own films are devoted to eliciting laughter or exploiting the fantasies of their audiences. These films, in effect, combine to provide the means through which Allan Stewart Konigsberg could stay inside the theater for good—by becoming a comic filmmaker. But then, even young Konigsberg may have intuited that living in the movie theater might not be an unequivocally good thing.

In
Play It Again, Sam,
Allan Felix’s wife files for divorce expressly because of her husband’s preoccupation with movies. She wants “to do things, to be a participant in life,“ but “All we ever do is see movies. You like movies because you’re one of life’s great watchers.” Another of Allen’s “great watchers” is Alvy Singer of
Annie Hall,
who indulges his morbid streak by repeatedly going to see
The Sorrow and the Pity. Stardust Memories
is unquestionably Allen’s most dyspeptic assessment of the interaction between human beings and movies;
The Purple Rose of Cairo
is his most ambivalent depiction of the audience’s fervent imaginative dependency on cinematic illusion;
Crimes and Misdemeanors
seems to cast a dubious eye upon Clifford Stern’s “playing hooky” by going to movies in the afternoon with his niece, the film’s ending equating Hollywood movies with perversely embraced delusions. Larry, the oddly phlegmatic protagonist of
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
seems to work up excitement only for the prospect of watching old Bob Hope films on cable television. Once Allan Felix finally gets a date in
Play It Again, Sam,
he attempts to lure her to an “Erich Von Stroheim Film Festival” before she drags him off to biker bar. “Movies,” Felix’s wife, speaking as well for other Allen protagonists, complains about her soon-to-be ex-husband: “that’s his whole life.”

This book’s later chapter on
Radio Days
offers a somewhat standard New Critical admonition against the necessary reductionism implicit in confusing Allen’s protagonists with Allen; at this point it can be suggested that Nancy Felix’s charge really is applicable to Woody Allen. Support for that claim can be found in Allen’s numerous, highly enthusiastic acknowledgments of the importance of movies in his childhood, the prevalence of movie-within-movie structures in his films, and his extensive knowledge of American and European film modes. More tellingly, there’s also the factor we’ve already considered: in producing twenty nine movies over the past thirty years, Allen has hardly experienced as much as a three month period in which he wasn’t either writing, shooting, or cutting a film. As
Husbands and Wives
was widely interpreted as obliquely dramatizing, Allen finds time while scripting and directing movies to pack in a good deal of personal experience; nonetheless, a life so completely dominated by filmmaking can provide just so much material for the development of new screenplays. Therefore, it seems reasonable that for Allen, even more than for the other movie-fixated directors of his generation (Scorsese, Levinson, Lucas, Coppola, Kubrick, and Spielberg), movies constitute source material which other artists find in lived experience. Nothing typifies better Allen’s ambivalence toward the power of his cinematic inheritance than that his own movies project this central influence in his work as both virtue and flaw, as source of energy and experiential deficiency.

Push the argument that Allen’s oeuvre is remarkably possessed by the spirit and substance of other films far enough, and we have another neat allegory to put beside the
Play It Again, Sam
movies-and-life dramatic antinomy: if Leonard Zelig derives his personality from the behavior and characteristics of others, Woody Allen’s films can be construed as being similarly imitative, a noticeable portion of their content being derived from other makers’ films. The elucidation of this Zelig/Allen parallel later in this book will demonstrate that Allen’s peculiar form of intersexuality reflects not, as many reviewers selfcongratulatorily maintain, his greatest limitation as a filmmaker, but his unremitting recognition of our late twentieth century, mass media in spired self-consciousness about other plots, other narratives, other movies, and the role they play in our construction of selves. Just as
Zelig
problematizes the existence of the individual, integral, uncontingent self,
²
Allen’s movies assume that film narratives are similarly and inescapably mediated by previously existing film narratives. The ways of seeing which are Bergman’s and Fellini’s movies, his screenplays suggest, inflect the ways of seeing which are Allen’s movies, which have, in turn, inflected the ways of seeing of films by Albert Brooks, Kenneth Branagh, Nora Ephron, Spike Lee, Rob Reiner, and Billy Crystal, among others. The Woody Allen constructed in this text, then, is a distinctly postmodernist filmmaker who—except in the title of
Deconstructing Harry—
devotedly eschews the lexicon of post structuralism, but whose films nonetheless repeatedly address and enact many of the issues debated within that critical field. The primary question his film career has dedicated itself to posing—and which is, thus, a crucial question of this study of his films—can be stated in remarkably untheoretical terms: Is our preoccupation with films psychologically healthful indulgence in bracing, reassuring illusions, or is it instead a means of artificially mediating, distorting, or protecting us against lived experience? To put the question differently, is Bogart an ideal that Felix must emulate if he is to be successful with women, or is he a fraudulent compendium of gender fictions which can only feed actual human beings’ feelings of inadequacy and insufficiency? For one of Allen’s many cinematic responses to that question, we need to return to
Play It Again, Sam
.
³

The Humphrey Bogart incarnation (Jerry Lacy) who appears intermittently in
Play It Again, Sam
to counsel Felix in how to imitate him is such a naturally comical invention that it’s easy to overlook how completely self-conscious a device it is. Allen’s films proliferate with such contrivances—imaginary characters who reflect projections of the protagonist’s inner life or scenes that dramatize conflicts through anachronism or imaginary confrontations. At one end of the spectrum are the relatively congruent and less self-consciousscenes in which Annie and Alvy amusingly visit Alvy’s Brooklyn childhood in
Annie Hall
and the more sober attendance of Judah Rosenthal at his father’s yesterycar seder in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
in order to have his father pass judgment on his conspiracy in murder. At the other end of the spectrum are the more extravagant devices of Tom Baxter abandoning the screen to inhabit Cecilia’s Depression era reality in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and Alice’s airborne date with a deceased lover in
Alice
. In short, Allen’s films consistently manifest their unwillingness to remain within the boundaries of cinematic realism and probability. Like the best of these devices in
Annie Hall
—Marshall McLuhan’sappearance to repudiate a pompous Columbia professor’s interpretation of his work, or the subtitles reflecting the sexual subtext of Annie and Alvy’s debate about the aesthetics of photography—the Bogart figure, rather than invoking the artifice of the film medium by puncturing its realistic illusion, hilariously directs the audience’s attention to the protagonist’s conflict. That conflict in
Play It Again, Sam
has been described most often, and quite justifiably so, as existing between Felix’s insecurity about his masculinity and the confident, charismatic manliness of which Bogart is Felix’s psychic projection. Without completely sacrificing that reading of the interaction between Felix and Bogart, we should also recognize Bogart’s inescapably cinematic character, and notice how Felix’s exchanges with him embody Allen’s ambivalence about his own—and our—psychic dependence upon the movies.
⁴

Evidence for that interpretation is provided not only by Nancy’s indictment but also by the fact that Felix writes for a film magazine and that his apartment is wall-to-wall movie posters; if there’s anywhere a shade of Bogart should feel comfortable, it’s at Felix’s place. As the movie proceeds, references to the disparity between actuality and silver screen images escalate: when Felix describes how thoroughly Bogart represents a role model for him, Linda Christie (Diane Keaton) lectures him, “Allan, that’s not real life. I mean you set too high a standard.”
⁵
He holds himself up to the same standard, invariably finding himself wanting: “It’s like Fred Astaire looks good in tails, and I look lousy,“ he complains at one point, never quite registering that he has no occasion to wear tails.
⁶
Felix’s self-recriminations culminate in a fantasy in which he imagines his ex-wife, Nancy (Susan Anspach), summarizing his character: “you’re a dreamer. You’re awkward. You’re clumsy. [Women] could see how desperate you are…. You may be very sweet, but you’re not sexy.”

That Felix’s self-assessment is delivered by a phantasm of his gorgeous ex-wife establishes an antinomy for which Bogart provides the opposition. (The contention between them for ascendancy in Felix’s soul is signaled by the one scene in which the two phantoms appear together: re-enacting a scene from
They Drive by Night,
Nancy shoots Bogart.) In another fantasy of his wife’s post-divorce freedom from him, Felix imagines her making love to a biker: “It’s been so long,” she rapturously moans, “since I’ ve been made love to by a tall, strong, handsome, and blue-eyed blond man.” Felix has attributed to this imagined biker all the qualities he so conspicuously lacks; thus, his fantasy Nancy expresses his inner voice of self-denigration, articulating his perception of himself as urban neurotic, hypochondriac, self-consciously Jewish, irredeemably uncool, and hopelessly unsexy. In short, she tactlessly invokes the negative/comic pole of the Woody Allen protagonist. It is in response to internal proddings of the self-doubts she embodies that Felix, anticipating Leonard Zelig’s chameleon tendencies, decides he should leave books open around his apartment for dates to see because “it creates an image” and because “carefully placed objects will create the proper impression.” It is the Bogart projection’s function in Felix’s psychic economy to offer him encouragement, to coach him in the virtues of self-assertiveness and masculine self-reliance, the
Casablanca
fugitive constituting a counterargument to the self-vilification which Felix’s Nancy projection consistently expresses. As we’ll see, however, Bogart often seems as much a symptom of Felix’s psychic conflict as a means to its remediation.

Nancy’s consummate indictment—” You may be very sweet, but you’re not sexy” —prompts the Bogart projection to materialize for damage control; he coaches Felix through an erotic encounter with Linda, encouraging him to disregard feelings of guilt over his friendship with her husband, Dick (Tony Roberts), by repeatedly urging him to abandon his equivocations and “Go ahead and kiss her.” Felix finally complies, but his erotic foray sends Linda fleeing from his apartment. Recalling the impassioned declaration of love in which his romantic advances culminated, however, Linda quickly returns, and the kisses they share at his front door are intercut with
Casablanca
images of Rick and Ilsa kissing. It’s difficult not to notice that Rick and Ilsa do it better, that there’s something clumsy and unattractive about Felix and Linda’s very mouthy kisses, but the point of the intercutting seems less to contrast oscillatory techniques than to suggest that even in moments of deepest passionate gratification, Felix’s pleasure is irremediably mediated by film. In other words, even when he gets what the movies have taught him to desire and to fantasize about attaining, the movie version in his head remains more compelling.