The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (51 page)

Given the shallowness of his impulses and the drubbing his literary commitments take, Lee’s best moment in
Celebrity
happens in the first five minutes. Nicole Oliver tells him that she won’t betray her husband by letting Lee penetrate her sexually, but adds, “what I do from the neck up—that’s a different story.” Nothing that happens to him in the next ninety-three minutes surpasses Nicole’s fellatio. The structuring dirty joke at the heart of this relentlessly sleazy satire is revealed when Robin—who has paid a prostitute to instruct her in effective methods of oral sex—is asked by the celebrity interviewer at the premiere to what she attributes her triple success: “using my head,” she explains. (Using her head earns Marion Post a perhaps ironic redemption; the best Lee and Robin are capable of is being given and giving head.) A blow job initiates Lees downfall and facilitates Robins rise to happiness and celebrity, and few viewers are likely to long remember either the loser or winner in this incessantly sour and soulless comedy. (Harry Blocks sister claims that Harry has staked everything on physics and pussy; Lee doesn’t even believe in physics.) The contrasting fates of
Celebrity’s
alternating protagonists seem to dramatize one amoral lesson: serious literary aspirations betray Lee into despair and solitude, while the glitzy pop culture world gains Robin a husband, a career, and a child. Robin’s prosperity may exemplify nothing other than luck, but it also suggests that teaching literature is as self-defeating as confusing real people with the creations of the writerly imagination. Allen must have been tempted to insert the sound of a toilet flushing as “HELP” fades to black and
Celebrity
ends.

Woody Allen’s most cynical film condemns the human capacity for blur-ring art and life, while providing absolutely no positive alternative to riding the superficial values of media culture as far as they will take you. “My book,” Lee grandly informs an editor in the film, “is about a country gone astray—it’s all show business, everything’s show business.” It’s one of the dreary truths of
Celebrity
how thoroughly Lee Simon is implicated in his own cultural condemnation.

Roger Ebert’s review of the film suggests that
Celebrity
doesn’t completely rise above the corruptions of the world it depicts, Ebert contending that “the screenplay isn’t as sharp as the movie’s visuals. As the movie careens from one of Simon’s quarries to the next, Allen pauses on most scenes only long enough to extract the joke, and the film begins to seem as desperately promiscuous as its hero.”
¹³
That Woody Allen lined up the largest celebrity cast since
Around the World in Eighty Days
to produce this bleakly ironic anatomization of the pervasiveness of show business in America is perhaps
Celebrity’s
darkest element; that he resisted the temptation to declare himself completely above all the corruptions to which celebrity culture is subject is perhaps provisionally redemptive. But that remains a very long way from “For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace.” As Allen’s films have consistently demonstrated, even a fictionally inspired illusion of peace is preferable to the bleak truth of human corruptibility.

20

Allen and His Audience

Sweet and Lowdown

LINDA CHRISTIE: Do you realize we’re in a room that holds some of the highest achievements of Western Civilization?

ALLAN FELIX: There’s no girls.

—Metropolitan Museum of Art scene in
Play It Again, Sam

No element of Woody Allen’s filmmaking career has been more markedly Modernist than his aesthete’s principled inattentiveness to the issue of audience. Allen’s interviews proliferate with genial disavowals of accountability to his audience, with affirmations of his greater commitment to craft than to effect. Responding to the charge that his movies embody anti-Semitic attitudes, Allen characteristically sidestepped the concern by invoking the imperatives of art over audience sensibilities: “I’ve … had an enormous amount of criticism from Jewish groups who feel that I’ve been very harsh or denigrating or critical. So there’s a lot of sensitivity always on these matters. But the only thing I try to let guide me is the authenticity of the scene.”
¹

The authenticity of the scenes in
Stardust Memories
led critics as astute as Pauline Kael to conflate Sandy Bates’s subjectively distorted perception of his audience with Allen’s attitude toward his, provoking Allen to acknowledge that “Some people came away [from
Stardust Memories]
saying I had contempt for my audience. This was not true. I never had contempt for my audience; if I had contempt for my audience, I’d be too smart to put it in the picture. I’d grouse about it at home. I’ve always felt that the audience was at least equal to me or more. I’ve always tried to play
up
to the audience.”
²
The Pirandellian interfusings of real life and filmicly constructed reality pervading
Stardust Memories
and the fiction/autobiography conflations of
Deconstructing Harry
are testament enough to Allen’s willingness to challenge his audience’s assumptions about the distinguishability of actuality and illusion. That Allen has, however, often experienced substantially greater ambivalence toward viewers than his “playing
up
to the audience” assertion acknowledges is a central point of Adam Gopnik’s
New Yorker
essay on Allen, “The Outsider.” “It was a complicated dance,” Gopnik contended, one we’ve often glimpsed in these pages: “On the one hand, [Allen] was reaching toward the audience and its experience. On the other, he was working hard to set his values off from theirs.”
³
Allen’s effort to distance his values from those of the audience is summarized by his comment to Tom Shales in an
Esquire
interview that “the best film I ever did, really, was
Stardust Memories
” the proof of whose superiority was “It was my least popular film. That may automatically mean it was my best film.”
⁴
This peevish attitude toward his American audience has more recently been translated into the complaint, which Allen has articulated in interviews and enacted through Barbara Kopple’s
Wild Man Blues
documentary, that—like Dixieland jazz—he and his films are more appreciated and loved in Europe than they are in their country of origin.

Typically, when Allen has fretted publicly about the effect of his movies on the audience, his ruminations carry an undercurrent of condescension. “Sometimes,” he told Anthony DeCurtis, rehearsing Sandy Bates’s central dilemma, “I’ve had the thought that to try to make films that say something, I’m not doing my fellow man a service. I would be better off abandoning asking the audience to try and to come to grips with certain issues because these issues finally always lead you to a dead end. They’re
never
going to be solvable. We all have a terrible, fierce burden to carry, and the person who really does something nice is the guy who writes a pretty song or plays a pretty piece of music or makes a film that diverts.”
⁵
The same slightly patronizing disposition is noticeable in Allen’s invocation of the difference between artist and audience: “The vision of the audience is never as deep as the vision of the artist involved. They are always willing to settle for less than you want for yourself.”
⁶
Accordingly, when Allen discusses films he considers unsuccessful
{Manhattan Murder Mystery,
for instance), it is himself that he feels his want of ambition has betrayed more than the audience, whose disappointment doesn’t trouble him much: “So they’ll pay their six dollars and it’ll stink and they’ll go home. It’s not the end of the world.”
⁷

This is not to suggest that for Allen all fault lies on the audience’s side of the screen. In the Stig Bjorkman interviews, Allen conceded that “to me, artists frequently are selfish. They need time alone, they need discipline, and they need sometimes to behave with people in ways that are important for them but are not really very nice for other people.”
⁸
Consequently, the artist as Allen conceives of her/him must ultimately ignore the audience: “And then I started to think, that the less I know what people think of my work, the better off I am. I should just keep my nose to the grindstone and do the films I want to do. And put them out there. If people like them—great! It does not mean that I’m a genius, just because some newspaper writer says, ‘This is a work of genius!’ And it doesn’t mean I’m an idiot if he says I’m an idiot. Just forget about what people say! I told the studio, ‘Don’t call me on the phone and tell me who’s coming and how many people. I don’t care.’”
⁹

In
Broadway Danny Rose,
Danny confesses to Tina his disbelief in God, and then adds, “but I’m guilty over it.” In
Sweet and Lowdown,
Allen drama tizes his Modernist’s disdain for his audience; the playing out of the film narrative’s central allegory affirms the fact that he’s guilty over it.

Emmet Ray (Sean Penn) is, by his own reckoning, the world’s second greatest jazz guitarist, a musician so utterly devoted to his art that he faints when the world’s greatest jazz guitarist—Django Reinhardt—materializes. As an artist, Emmet is closer to Sheldon Flender, the
Bullets Over Broadway
proponent of the notion that “the artist creates his own moral universe,” and to Harry Block, whose ex-wife characterizes him as a “pill-popping, alcoholic, beaver-banging excuse for a father,” than he is to Eve of
Interiors,
for whom art and morality converge in a chilling, lifeless existential stasis. Among his character flaws, Emmet boasts pimping, kleptomania, egotism, obsessive gambling, alcoholism, murderous intentions toward garbage dump rats, and complete unreliability both as a professional musician and as an erotic partner.
¹⁰
As for Harry Block, so for Emmet Ray: all weaknesses are redeemed—perhaps even validated—by the fact that he’s an artist. “I cant settle down here, I cant,” he tells Ann (Molly Price), a lover he’s about to discard, “I gotta be free. I’m an artist.”
¹¹

When she complains that Emmet (like Eve in
Interiors,
like Marion in
Another Woman,
and Harry Block, too) keeps his “feelings all locked up and cant feel anything for anybody else,” Emmet responds, “I love ‘em [women]. It’s just I don’t need ‘em. I guess that’s just how it is when you’re a true artist.”

Allen, clearly, was not breaking any new ground in
Sweet and Lowdown,
a film whose title seems to invoke both the modesty of its intentions and the bleakness of its dying fall resolution. The juxtaposition of life and art throughout the movie recalls most clearly Harry Block’s debate with Larry in
Deconstructing Harry,
in which Harry’s demon tells him, “You put your life into your art; I put mine into my life.” Because Harry’s “no good at life,” he’s “only interested in fiction,” and consequently Fay loves Harry’s work but is in love with Larry, sentencing Allen’s narcissist novelist to a life of art rather than of life. Harry’s inspiration for writing a novel about a character “who can’t function in life but only in art” provides an indecisively upbeat ending for
Deconstructing Harry
the protagonist reprising Zelig’s redemptive trick of transforming himself in such a way that, as Saul Bellow glosses the feat, “it was his very disorder that made a hero of him” (
Zelig,
p. 126). Allen revisits and reverses that resolution in
Sweet and Lowdown,
largely through allegorizing Emmet’s dedication to art as the very attitude that alienates him from the audience which holds out his best hope for salvation. If Harry Blocks’s life is saved by his art, Emmet Ray’s seems to get sacrificed to his.

A criticism that Emmet repeatedly suffers in
Sweet and Lowdown
is that his feelings are so “locked up” that the unemotionality adversely affects his playing. “I’ve been trying to analyze what separates your playing from Django’s,” Blanche (Uma Thurman) tells him in the last stages of their marriage, “and I say that it’s that his feelings are richer, he’s not afraid to suffer in front of anybody. He doesn’t hold his feelings in check.” Sean Penn plays Emmet as a man whose face is constantly fixed in a derisive smirk, and whose voice is a gravelly, affectless croak. Upon meeting Emmet, Blanche comments, “not only are you vain and egotistical, but you have genuine crudeness”—a crudeness which seems the complete antithesis of the stunning music he generates from a guitar modeled on the one Django’s brother, Joseph Reinhardt, played in the Hot Club of France. The disparity between substance and surface which Emmet embodies is probably best conveyed in the scene in which he performs lead accompaniment behind a jazz diva doing “All of Me” for a Hollywood short of the kind in which Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Lena Home appeared in the 1930s. Intent upon catching the eye of Hollywood studios in hopes of becoming a star, Emmet produces dazzlingly beautiful riffs which just escape being nullified by his outrageously goony mugging for the cameras.