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Woody Allen by Victoria Loy Victoria Loy wrote about Dogme95 and surrealism for her MA dissertation at Sydney University. She is interested in emerging paradigms in film criticism. |
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Is Woody Allen a misanthrope? [The universe is] haphazard, morally neutral and
unimaginably violent
–September (1986)
In 2002 Woody Allen received the prestigious Palme des Palmes, the Cannes Film Festival's lifetime achievement award. His career spans five decades and has earned him fourteen Academy Award nominations and three Oscars personally; his cast and crew have won six Academy Awards. Allen has won eight BAFTA (British Academy of Film) awards and his films have consistently won prizes and acclaim from the New York and Chicago Film Critics Circles, the Writers Guild of America, the Cesar Awards in France and the Bodils in Denmark. His films are taught in the departments of philosophy as well as film in universities in Europe and North America (1). Apart from the substantial body of feature film work (over thirty films with director and/or screenplay credits) Allen has written numerous plays and short stories. In 2002 Time film critic Richard Schickel produced Woody Allen: A Life in Film for the 'Turner Classic Movies' station on cable television. He has continually downplayed the notion of congruity between himself and his filmic persona but Allen is definitely an auteur, serving as director, screenwriter and star of most of his films. He regularly employs the same key crew – cinematographers Sven Nyquist, Gordon Willis and Carlo DiPalma; producer Jean Doumanian, and of course his actors, among them Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, Dianne Weist, Judy Davis and Alan Alda. In a circumstance unusual for Hollywood cinema, Allen wields a notoriously tight control over all aspects of his work – casting, writing, shooting and editing – and, beyond this, is so exalted that he is not required to submit a script for studio approval. After a disastrous experience on 1965's What's New, Pussycat? (which he wrote but felt he lost control of during shooting) Allen has demanded and received virtual autonomy (2). In her review of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) the late film critic Pauline Kael suggests that the reason New York critics love Woody Allen is that “they're applauding their fantasy of themselves” (3). In some of his films, including Stardust Memories (1980) and Deconstructing Harry (1997) Allen has explored being a prisoner of his own persona (whilst denying the likeness). Although the persona secured Allen a loyal audience, he has fallen in and out of favour with the film community partly, as Kael suggests, because of his appeal to the urbane quasi-intellectuals who critique cinema; a familiarity that has over time moved from intimate to contemptuous. Too often in recent years 'criticism' of Woody Allen's films has virtually forsaken content wherever it does not fit into a discussion of what seems to have become more important: his scandalous personal life (4).
– Selections from the Allen Notebooks'
– Y'know, in France I could run on that slogan and win. – Deconstructing Harry
– Love and Death
These quotes encapsulate Allen's philosophy – he undercuts his own existential angst with absurd humour that provides distraction or comic relief and is in its own way an answer to these unanswerable questions. It is almost as if he is sending up the more austere philosophers who formulated these enquiries. His films are largely comedies – but, as one of his characters maintains, what is comedy but tragedy, plus time? (5) The spectre of death haunts many of Allen's films, as thanatos, the essential flipside to the forces of life and love that are irresistible. Mother: Tell doctor [?] It's something he read. Doc: Something you read, heh? Alvy: The universe is expanding. Doc: The universe is expanding? Alvy: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything! Mother(shouting): What is that your business? (to doctor) He stopped doing his homework. Alvy: What's the point? Mother: What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding! – Annie Hall
Irony and fate, two other aspects of our existential predicament, are recurring Allen themes. In Bullets Over Broadway (1995), the cultivated protagonist David Shayne must watch in despair as Cheech, a brusque bodyguard with an innate feel for dramatic dialogue, improves and champions his play. (Like Mozart's wretched colleague Salieri in the play/film Amadeus, who interprets as mockery the irony of God bestowing the gift of genius on one so 'unworthy'.) Mighty Aphrodite (1996) exhibits the theme of fate overtly with an actual Greek chorus on hand to provide commentary and warn on the danger of interfering with destiny.
Stardust Memories again evoked the nostalgia of old romances, but was also a more serious commentary on filmmaking. As Annie Hall could be analogous to Sartre, Stardust Memories is a fantasy, a recognition of mortality in line with the philosophy of Heidegger. Film director Sandy Bates (played by Allen) contends with the hostility of critics who feel betrayed by his shift from comedy to drama. Coming shortly after Interiors, Allen's first overtly dramatic film, the parallels were evident. The film drew more accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence, as would Deconstructing Harry (which also centers on an artist at a still point in his career) but Stardust Memories is lighter and ultimately more positive (7). While the films sometimes catalogue the despair of the romantic protagonist they are, comparatively at least, hopeful. (The exception here is Interiors, which with its grey seaside location, claustrophobic indoor setting and suicide was indeed bleak and derided as an overly ponderous Bergman rip-off.) The schlemiel is a hapless figure and Allen has always been self-deprecatory – “It figures you've got to hate yourself if you've got any integrity at all” (8) – but the dissatisfaction seemed more like an aspect of the persona than the personality. Allen's films in the '90s however have shown the development of a darker streak, a bitterness without the sweet. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman perceives this tendency in his review of 1998's Celebrity:
Judah (Martin Landau) is a married, wealthy doctor who organises the murder of his mistress (Anjelica Huston) when she threatens to disrupt his life. At first he is haunted by guilt but finds that in time he forgets, is able to live normally again, unburdened by the memory of his horrific crime. Perhaps to emphasise the senselessness of this situation Allen pairs this story with a subplot involving a romantic triangle where ultimately, the character who prospers is the one who seems the least worthy, the one we have been invited to mock and disdain. The death of the character Louis Levy in the film is suggestive of Allen's move towards the philosophical stance of misanthropy. Levy, a professor of philosophy, is the subject of a documentary that Cliff (played by Allen) is making. Scenes of his addresses to Cliff's camera present some of the moral issues the film proffers, for example:
What is remarkable about the film is how joyless it generally is, how negatively events and people are portrayed. There is a paucity of Allen's customary comic relief, however rueful, to lighten the tone and instead the characters seem futile and hopeless. Allen and Farrow play Gabe and Judy Roth, a Manhattan couple who find their own marriage in crisis when their friends Jack and Sally (Sidney Pollack and Judy Davis) announce their separation. Farrow and Allen act and look joyless, weary and old. Farrow's Judy is angry, fretful and frustrated with her husband – “I don't know why you ask for my opinion, you don't care about it.” Gabe looks equally care-worn, and it is not surprising when the bleak-faced couple fret and bicker so much before sex that they decide to call it off. In this film, unlike earlier films (such as Play It Again, Sam) nostalgia can't revive romance. Gabe recalls to Judy a sentimental ride through Central Park in a carriage, in the rain. For him this symbol of past romance is strong enough to sustain the present but Judy refuses, saying that memories are not enough. Apart from a feeling of hopelessness many of the characters have a nasty, cruel spirit. The narcissistic Sally has no problem, when leaving new lover Michael to return to Jack, in getting Judy to do the dirty work. Jack, once his self-delusion about his new partner Sam ends, treats her obnoxiously. His attitude has always been that she is intellectually inferior but one night, embarrassed by her earnest defense of astrology at a party, he tells her to shut up and tries to drag her into the car, then leaves her there while he invades Sally's house and begs her to take him back. Whilst still married, Jack had been enthusiastically sleeping with prostitutes and encouraging Gabe to do the same, suggesting that one girl in particular had “a mouth like velvet”. Gabe's relationship with the younger Rain (Juliette Lewis) has none of the innocence of Ike and Tracy's in Manhattan. In that film Allen's Ike saw himself as the teacher (as did Alvy in Annie Hall); in Husbands and Wives, although he is her university professor, he cannot assume the role of mentor privately because she exhibits too much self-awareness. When Rain critiques his work as being “so retrograde, so shallow” and admonishes him for idealising a past flame as “powerfully sexual, when in fact she's pitifully sick”, Gabe turns on her nastily, calling her “a twenty year-old twit”. Their intimacy doesn't progress past a kiss, as Gabe can't summon up the desire or energy to justify anything further, or even fool himself into thinking there is any point. He tells Rain that because it would end badly they should forget it. The situation is a wearier recapitulation of the Sartrean view of the impossibility of romantic relationships.
The sexual sensibility in Deconstructing Harry is crass and vulgar; a marked shift from Allen's usual artlessly bawdy attitude. In one of Block's stories, a couple who are cheating with each other at a family barbecue are attempting some kind of intimacy. The woman murmurs wistfully about having the freedom to be together, and the man replies "Mmm, sounds great. Now open wide”. Allen uses the taboo term 'cunt' twice in the film, both times when Harry is referring to a woman in his life. The infrequency with which the word is deployed in the mainstream cinema makes its connotations of anger and venom more distinct. Allen's doleful Block has dismissed religion as a faction of exclusive clubs that “tell you who to hate”. He comes to the conclusion that “the truth about our lives consists of how we choose to distort it”. This position of relativism, of recognition of the plurality of meaning renders the formulation of an ethical stance futile (11). If we can continue to read the films as those of an auteur it seems as if Woody Allen's earlier 'romantic-philosophic' nature has developed into cynicism, if not misanthropy. Perhaps things that were sublimated at a safe distance in his art, such as profligate desire (“The best thing is twelve-year old blond girls, two of them whenever possible”) and how to abide by it (“The artist creates his own moral universe” (12)) have perforated screen into life. Instead of seeking change his characters are content to stay put or cannot see far enough to effect the right sort of changes. His characters no longer find redeeming pleasure in the small details of life, such as the Sunday breeze and Dorrie's face in Stardust Memories, or the films of Ingmar Bergman and the face of Tracy in Manhattan. The fact that we continue to make the same mistakes and fail to learn has ceased to be so harmlessly amusing to Allen. In Schickel's documentary, Allen repeatedly and in a rather surreal fashion utterly rejects the idea that his satires have a target and his persona a referent. In his film work as well he seems to have backed away from serious inquiry into human nature and is content to take (still comical) potshots at our foibles – the nouveau-riche (Small Time Crooks, 2000), the film industry (Hollywood Ending, 2002) and of course, the inevitable doom of romantic love. © Victoria Loy, June 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography As director: What's
Up, Tiger Lily?
(1966) 
Bibliography Harry M. Abrams,
Woody Allen At Work: the Photographs of Brian Hamill., Inc., Publishers,
New York, 1995.
Articles in Senses of Cinema Carlo Di Palma: An Appreciation and a Remembrance by Peter Tonguette
Web Resources Mighty
Aphrodite
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