The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (14 page)

Of course, Sinatra was portraying a lover singing to his beloved, but in the film’s cinematic appropriation of the song, the singer’s references seem to. be to the lavishly plush, impossibly glamorous cathedral of American movies Joe has entered. Here “an old radio song” converges with Little Joe’s encounter with “heaven” to create
Radio Days
most ecstatic moment, Di Palma’s cinematography providing compelling visual corroboration of the song’s lyrical romanticism. This scene is probably as close as Allen has ever come to showing why he became a filmmaker. If the splendor of Radio City Music Hall, so utterly different from Little Joe’s inglorious home circumstances, is a dream, it’s one he doesn’t want to wake up from. The song’s phrase,”content to be in love with loving you,” is as concise a summary of Allen’s conflicted attitude toward the consolations of film’s illusions as he’s ever presented, distilling the close of his previous film,
The Purple Rose of Cairo
, in which Cecilia, who has personally experienced the fraudulence and duplicity that underlies the Hollywood romance fantasy, reembraces it nonetheless, “content to be in love with loving” it in spite of what she’s seen. The Radio City Music Hall scene with its “If You Are But a Dream” soundtrack dramatizes a notion increasingly prevalent in Allen’s most recent films—the affirmation of illusions embraced despite the knowledge that they are illusions. Our reward for embracing the illusion which is Allen’s characters’ pilgrimage through Radio City is another illusion: the Radio City scene culminates in what Sandy Bates calls “a big, big finish,” the generic romantic consummation all moviegoers recognize in Katherine Hepburn’s kissing James Stewart on the Music Hall screen.
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The so aptly named Radio City Music Hall partakes of the same illusion-imbued mystique attributed to radio by the film, radio’s increasing tendency to become a repository less of imaginary wish-fulfillments than of dark truths reflective of Little Joe’s maturation seeming—as it does so often in Allen’s films—to generate, compensatorily, a greater need for the aural illusions of radio, the visual illusions of movies.

To see
Radio Days
as Allen’s homage to the imaginative capacity engendered in him by the radio is to perceive as simple affirmation what is really a cinematic debate—a debate which had become a preoccupation of his films with
Purple Rose of Cairo
. To Little Joe and his family, the illusions of radio are relatively uncomplicated, pleasures of self-recognition which require more or less suspension of disbelief depending on their age and levels of sophistication. Little Joe’s Aunt Ceil (Rene Lippin) enjoys a ventriloquist on the radio despite the insistence of her husband Abe (Josh Mostel) that the performance is invalidated if you can’t see that the ventriloquist’s lips don’t move. Little Joe’s experience of Radio City Music Hall is perfectly summarized for him in Frank Sinatra’s “If You Are But a Dream,” and Aunt Bea’s intense longings for love find complete expression in the performance of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” by a radio songstress (Diane Keaton) on New Year’s Eve.
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In general, the family members take on face value the reality the radio projects, believing, for instance, that Irene and Roger are “rich and famous” and that they move through a glamorous realm qualitatively different from the family’s life in Rockaway. “There were two different worlds,” adult Joe explains. “While my mother stood over the dirty plates in Rockaway, Irene and Roger ate their breakfast over the air from their chic Manhattan townhouse while they chatted charmingly about people and places we only dreamt of.” But Allen’s film also dramatizes what neither Little Joe nor his family could have known about: the actual lives of the radio performers, these scenes completely negating the performers’ sophisticated and culturally elevated self-projections on the radio. Roger (David Warrilow) is erotically fixated upon proletarian Sally the cigarette girl at the King Cole Room, while his wife, Irene (Julie Kurnitz), is hotly pursuing “society’s most interesting and exotic Latin playboy.” Sally subsequently rises to have her own radio show, “Sally White’s Great White Way,” not by American hard work and initiative but through intervention of a mob hit man and the secrets she learns by sleeping with countless Broadway power brokers in her desperate social climbing. Allen’s most honest films seldom settle for the conclusion, “I hope I never wake up”; they insist on dramatizing as well the waking reality, which is the inescapable knowledge that “you”—the reality projected on radio and embraced ecstatically by members of Little Joe’s family—“are but a dream.”

It is both entirely consistent with this equivocal construction of dreams and characteristic of Allen’s films in general that the ending of
Radio Days
offers a markedly hedged conclusion regarding on which side of the receiver things are better.
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Little Joe’s family celebrates the New Year together, united by familial affection but envying the people on the radio greeting the New Year at the King Cole Room. “There are those who drink champagne at nightclubs,” is Tess’s social Darwinist summation, “and those who listen to them drink champagne on the radio.” When her husband asks her, “What—you think they’re happier than us?” Tess’s sarcastic reply is “How long do I have to answer that question?” Through its protracted dramatizations of the sorrows and insufficiencies of the radio performers, however,
Radio Days
expresses Allen’s far greater uncertainty that the answer to Martin’s question is self-evident.

“[T]hose who drink champagne” on the roof of St. Regis Hotel which houses the King Cole Room prove incapable of replicating Little Joe’s family’s warm celebration. Instead of enjoying the moment (“It’s okay—we’re all together, you know?” Martin affectionately assures Aunt Bea, dateless on New Year’s Eve), the radio celebrities are agonizing over the mutability of their on-air fame. The Masked Avenger serves as their spokesman, boozily reflecting, “I wonder if future generations will ever even hear about us. It’s not likely. After enough time, everything passes. I don’t care how big we are, or how important in their lives.” Deprived of any belief in the superiority of their condition because of their awareness of the radio illusion which is its source, the champagne drinkers must confront the same terrifying existential questions that the characters in
Manhattan
seek to evade through entangling themselves in the “unnecessary neurotic problems” created by their emotional/erotic engagements with other people. To be on the performers’ side of the radio receiver is to understand the baselessness and insubstantiality of the reassurances their programs continually pump out to the audience; it is to know the fraudulence of radio’s hourly consolation from the inside. No one could understand better than the diminutive actor who plays the Masked Avenger (Wallace Shawn), for instance, what a farce his “Beware all evildoers” threat is in a 1944 world so pervaded by palpable international evils; as this actor’s last rendering of the canned admonition fades once the radio folk have left the roof, adult Joe’s final lines in voice-over seem to confirm the Avenger’s darkest fears of oblivion: “I never forgot that New Year’s Eve when Aunt Bea awakened me to watch 1944 come in. And I’ve never forgotten any of those people, or any of the voices we used to hear on the radio. Although the truth is, with the passing of each New Year’s Eve, those voices seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.”

Perfection is not to be had on either side of radio’s broadcast illusion for, as a press agent describes a similarly vexed antinomy in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
, “The real ones want their lives fiction, and the fiction ones want their lives real.”
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Nonetheless,
Radio Days
ultimately
does
celebrate the affect which radio’s demand of imaginative involvement had on one listener—Little Joe/Allan Konigsberg/Woody Allen, filmmaker—who has expressed his sincere gratitude by making a tenderly nostalgic movie insuring that those radio voices not dim out completely. The signature Woody Allen qualifier to this ostensibly Modernist affirmation of art’s redemptive capacities is that
Radio Days
prevents from dimming out completely not the voices of Mr. Abercrombie or Pegreen and Ed Fitzgerald or the
Quiz Kids,
all of which have been stilled forever, but only the cinematic incarnations of them fabricated in Allen’s film. For all their devious and ingenious blurring of life and art, Allen’s films ultimately affirm one insuperable difference between the two, the disparity heralding bad news for the oblivious aesthete Harry Block: if you’ve been saved by art, Allen declares with cinematic indirection, it proves that you’re nothing but a fictional character. “Woody Allen” may live on in the hearts of film viewers everywhere, but Woody Allen won’t live on anywhere, and that discrepancy encapsulates Allen’s primary gripe with art.

6

Life Stand Still Here

Interiors
Dialogue

Though his taste was described by many as lowbrow, it was his own.

—Leonard Zelig, described by the narrator of
Zelig

The art form celebrated in
Radio Days
is clearly a popular medium, and it is one of the significant characteristics of Allen’s films that, as a component of their focus upon the life/art conflict, they consistently affirm popular culture over serious art. A major dramatic tension in
Stardust Memories
exists between Sandy Bates’s desire to make socially significant movies and the groundswell of voices (a Martian named Og among them) encouraging him, “You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes” (p. 367). In the same film, the one scene not permeated by Sandy Bates’s anxieties and self-recriminations is the intensely lyrical “Stardust memory” in which the screen image of the beautiful Dorrie is imbued with Louis Armstrongs rendition of “Stardust,.” the conflation of human beauty with pop standard seeming to Bates to epitomize perfection. The list of “things to live for” Isaac Davis enumerates which inspires him to attempt a reconciliation with Tracy in
Manhattan
is dominated by popular culture icons—Louis Armstrong, Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, and Marlon Brando—although such high-culture representa-tives as Flaubert, Cezanne, Swedish films, and the
Jupiter
Symphony (
Manhattan,
pp. 267-68) are also included in a roster Allen acknowledges as replicating his own personal list of favorites.
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While institutionalized religions fail to provide the reasons to continue living that Mickey Sachs seeks in
Hannah and Her Sisters,
he locates such
raisons d’être
instead in a Marx Brothers movie:

And I started to feel how can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn’t it so stupid? I mean, I—look at all the people up on the screen. You know, they’re real funny, and what if the worst is true?… What if there’s no God and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? And I’m thinking to myself, geez, I should stop ruining my life… searching for answers I’m never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts…. And then… I sat back and actually began to enjoy myself (p. 172).
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Of course, we will need to return to Mickey Sachs’s pop culture epiphany, one which has become something of a rosetta stone in Woody Allen film criticism; for the moment it’s sufficient to say that no matter how many serious films he produces, Allen’s tendency to identify himself primarily in terms of entertainment has been fairly consistent throughout his career. “All I want is not to be taken seriously,” he told Lee Guthrie shortly before shooting
Interiors:
“I have no great insight into poverty or integration or their relation to history, death, or God. I just want to tell jokes. “
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It is probably not surprising that a filmmaker whose professional career was inaugurated through writing one-liners and doing stand-up comedy would celebrate popular forms in his art; it
is
remarkable, however, that a filmmaker whose work is so pervaded by issues relating to the sources of art and the psychology of the artist should find in the properties and potentials of aesthetic creation so little material for the dramatic resolution of his plots. Modernist literature proliferates with narratives which achieve the resolutions they do through the intercession of the artist’s capacity to shape the ruins of contemporary reality into significant form. In Virginia Woolfs
To the Lighthouse,
for instance, art’s saving function is characterized through the description of “Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent.… In the midst of chaos there was shape, this eternal passing and flowing… was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said,”
⁴
or the song sung by “the single artificer of the world” in Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” who knows that “there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang, and, singing, made.”
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“After one has abandoned a belief in God,” Stevens wrote in a definitional articulation of the Modernist credo, “poetry is the essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”
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If, in high Modernism’s formulation, art’s preeminent benefit is lending coherence to lives otherwise contingent and random, one would expect at least a few of Allen’s
post-Sleeper
films to achieve closure through the device of their artist/protagonists’ completed artworks resolving the film’s significant tensions in corroboration of Stevens’s invocation of the saving powers of art.