The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (3 page)

In
Shadows and Fog,
a roustabout who works in the circus for which a magician is the featured act effusively extols the prestidigitory abilities of “The Great Irmstedt”. “Oh yes,” he exults, “
everyone
loves his illusions!” The career-spanning debate Allen conducts with himself in his films over the effects, upon audience and artist alike, of the aesthetic illusions he has created and projected upon movie screens leaves real questions as to whether he loves the illusions he has created, or whether he thinks his audience should feel gratitude toward him for conjuring them. By and large, however, Allen’s continuing film-by-film interrogation of the value of the cinematic illusions he projects and upon which his professional reputation rests constitutes the basis of his status as a major American filmmaker—and artist.

That debate Allen is conducting with himself does not take place solely on the plot level of his films. As he has become increasingly skilled in the art of filmmaking, Allen has become progressively aware of his movies as synthetic visions, as fictions of affirmation or negation, as cinematic projections which embrace and/or celebrate a cheerful unreality
(A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Alice, Everyone Says I Love You)
or which present grimly naturalistic depictions of actuality
(Interiors, Another Woman, September
), or—most commonly—as filmic narratives that constitute an offbeat commingling of the two. Sandy Bates insists in
Stardust Memories
that he doesn’t “want to make funny movies anymore … you know, I don’t feel funny. I-I look around the world and all I see is human suffering” (p. 286). Although several of Allen’s own films are reflective of such a determination, he has never settled there for long; the relentlessly somber
Interiors
was followed up by the mixed modalities of
Manhattan,
while the prevailing bleak introspectiveness of
Stardust Memories
seemed to spawn the fluffy pastoral romp of
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
as a cinematic rejoinder. It can be argued that the most effective of Allen’s movies are those that explore a middle ground between unrelenting dramatic gravity and comedy: films which enact a dramatic cinematic compromise between fantasy and reality, between—to cite the central tension of
Shadows and Fog
—the magic of the circus and the existential necessities of the town, between comic affirmation and pessimistic negation. Danny Roses philosophy of life is essentially indistinguishable from Allen’s post-
Bananas
philosophy of filmmaking: “It’s important to have some laughs, no question about it, but you got to suffer a little, too. Because otherwise, you miss the whole point of life.”
¹⁴

A corollary antinomy pervading Allen’s filmmaking career involves the identification of his movies as comic inconsequentialities vs. the recognition of Allen as a creator of serious cinematic art. The substantial amount of criticism published on Allen’s work has, of course, established the deliberately self-conscious and complexly self-reflective quality of his literary texts and films. Examples abound:
Play It Again, Sam
(in which a movie character named Allan Felix emulates the style of another movie character, Rick Blaine of
Casablanca
); “The Kugelmass Episode” (in which the protagonist has an affair with Emma Bovary in the pages of Flaubert’s novel);
The Purple Rose of Cairo
(in which a movie matinee idol emerges from the silver screen to court a moviegoer in Depression America);
Mighty Aphrodite
(in which a chorus leader from Greek tragedy becomes a convert to the belief that “life is unbelievable, miraculous, sad, wonderful”
¹⁵
). Allen’s most and least serious work has reveled in transgressing the boundaries between literature and life, in problematizing the distinction between fiction and fact, in complicating definitions of image and self. Allen critics such as Diane Jacobs, Nancy Pogel, Graham McCann, Sam B. Girgus, and others have clearly established how appropriate it is to consider Allen’s work in the context of self-reflexive artists such as dramatists Chekhov, Pirandello, or Tennessee Williams, or filmmakers Godard, Fellini, Bunuel, or Bergman. Thanks to the work of these critics, it is no longer necessary for later Allen critics to justify his films as being completely deserving of serious, detailed critical examination. What their studies have succeeded more equivocally in accomplishing is delineating the points in his movies when serious artistic purpose is clearly distinguishable from Woody Allen
shtick
. Consequendy, Sandy Bates isn’t the only person whose attempt to distinguish between art and life results inevitably in self-consciousness and a self-mocking confession of self-abuse: it seems an inescapable experience of Woody Allen critics that our attempts to illuminate his films leave us occasionally making so much of a one-liner that the joke seems to be on us.
¹⁶

The prevalence in Allen’s movies of one-liners like Bates’s convergence of art with masturbation invokes another tradition into which Allen’s work fits even more comfortably than it does among canonical works of drama and film: the American comedic tradition, exemplified for him principally by the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Bob Hope. That Allen’s work is animated by a tension between high-culture sophistication and low-culture comedy explains, for one thing, why so many of his jokes—Bates’s included—are predicated upon the prototypical Jewish American humor ploy of deflating profundity through puncturing it with the incongruously trivial. (A classic example is “‘God is silent,’ [Needleman] was fond of saying, ‘now if we can only get Man to shut up’”
¹⁷
; another is Mickey Sachs’s refusal in
Hannah
to embrace the Nietzschean notion of the eternal return because it would commit him to attending the Ice Capades again.) This crucial conflict accounts as well for the oddly hybrid, or in-between, quality of so many of his later films spanning seriousness and humor. Given the characteristic generic intermediacy of so many of his films, it’s only appropriate that middle grounds turn out to be a place in which Allen’s protagonists often find themselves.

The narrator of the comic essay, “My Apology,” imagines himself as Socrates but finally has to “I’m not a coward, and I’m not a hero. I’m somewhere in the middle.”
¹⁸
Alfred Miller, the blacklisted writer for w om Howard Prince (Allen) is fronting in
The Front,
tells Prince, “You’re always looking for a middle you can dance around in.”
¹⁹
Isaac Davis tells Tracy in
Manhattan
that she’s of the drugs-and-television generation, while he’s World War II; when she objects that he was eight during the war, he acknowledges that “I wasn’t in the trenches, I was caught in the middle. It was a very tough position.”
²⁰
In
Shadows and Fog,
Kleinman is asked by one of those who have devised a plan to trap the killer terrorizing the town, “Are you with us or against us?” Kleinman, who characterizes himself as the only person in town without a plan, replies, “I don’t know—because I don’t have enough information.” “You have to choose,” is his townsman’s Kafkaesque admonition.

In characterizing Jewish humor, Stephen J. Whitfield found it to have at its heart a similar quality of in-betweenness:

Heinrich Heine, along with Ludwig Boerne, is credited with the invention of the German feuilleton, the casual humorous monologue in which Jews have excelled, from the Viennese café wits to S.J. Perelman and Woody Allen. Heine helped to transmit to Jews who came after him the pertinence of irony, the prism of double and multiple meanings simultaneously held and accepted. It is the natural response of a people poised between two worlds: one, the matrix of ghetto and
shtetl
—to which they can no longer return; the other, the civil society of the West—in which they could not be fully at ease.
²¹

That Allen’s films repeatedly depict someone “not fully at ease” is clear enough; whether his life or films evoke someone “not fully at ease” in the “civil society of the West” depends on the perceiver’s assumptions about cultural assimilation, its advantages and deficits, or on the extent to which we find in Jewish comedic
kvetching
veiled objections to and critiques of the culture into which the
kvetcher
is assimilating. (One way to summarize the complex issue of Allen’s assimilation to mainstream American culture is to suggest that Jewish American cultures most significant influence on him has come through George Gershwin and Groucho Marx.
²²
) For his part, Allen described his sense of his own in-betweenness in terms not completely different from Whitfield’s: in invoking the significance of his evolution from stand-up comedy to comedic filmmaking and beyond, Allen described the public’s—and his own—contradictory perception of him:

There’s a problem of self-perception and public perception of me. I’m an art film maker, but not really. I had years of doing commercial comedies, although they were never really commercial. Pictures like
Take the Money and Run
and
Bananas
were forerunners of movies like
Airplane
—although they didn’t make a fiftieth of what
Airplane
made. First there was a perception of me as a comedian doing those comic films, and then it changed to someone making upgraded commercial films like
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan
. And as I’ve tried to branch off and make more offbeat films, I’ve put myself in the area of kind of doing art films—but they’re not perceived as art films because I’m a local person…. What I should be doing is either just funny commercial films, comedies and political satires that everybody looks forward to and loves and laughs at, or art films. But I’m sort of in the middle.
Purple Rose of Cairo
and
Zelig
and
Radio Days
are examples of films that are not popular yet they’re not so esoteric that they’re art films exactly. They just fall into an odd category. If they’re art films, they should be made for very little money and shown in 12 cities. But mine are shown in a hundred, or however many.
²³

It’s been more than twenty years since he last produced what might be termed a “funny commercial film,” and yet Allen continues to be associated primarily with comedy, partly because even “serious” films such as
Shadows and Fog
and
Husbands and Wives
contain moments of broad comedy which seem recognizably Woody Allen
shtick
.
²⁴
Because of its lack of a sustained dramatic plot,
Radio Days
is sometimes perceived as the film in which Allen began deliberately to indulge a penchant for mixing mood and genre textures in his films; the resulting movie with its dramatization of old-time radio as a source of both the audience’s giddiest fantasies and of news of human tragedies at the front and at home left a number of reviewers with conflicted responses. But
Manhattan
is an often uneasy blend of drama and humor,
Zelig
and
The Purple Rose of Cairo
are as difficult to categorize generically as Allen suggests, and the two murders in
Bullets Over Broadway
clearly complicate the viewer’s reaction to what otherwise seems a light and highly likable comedy. “This is what I’ve been fooling with for a while now,” Allen told Bjorkman in the early 1990s, “the attempt to try and make comedies that have a serious or tragic dimension to them.”
²⁵
Allen’s ability to effectively intermingle the serious with the comic in film is one of the ways in which his craft as a screenwriter and director has grown considerably, but it’s won him no points with those who insist that comedy is comedy and drama is drama—viewers for whom the interstices between the two, where Allen’s movies tend to position themselves, are sites of emotional indeterminacy and artistic incoherence. Making a case for the affective and artistic effectiveness of Allen comedic/dramatic hybrids such as
Broadway Danny Rose, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Shadows and Fog, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry,
and
Sweet and Lowdown
is another central critical task of
The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen
.

Arguably, the trick in successfully discussing Allen’s collection of films involves sustaining the consciousness of its self-reflexive artistic context while simultaneously recognizing the comedic cultural context that is so central to Allen’s background and influences. The critic who loses sight of the importance of the comedic context runs the risk of emulating the insufferably pompous intellectual posturings of the Columbia professor at the New Yorker theater in
Annie Hall
or, perhaps worse, of sounding like Alvy Singer (“The medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself”) when he’s trying to snow Annie with an expertise about photography he doesn’t possess. (The critic too enamored of the comedic context of Allen’s films, on the other hand, risks coming on like a stand-up comedian regurgitating Allen’s zingiest one-liners, a critical strategy not lacking among the books published on Allen’s films.) One of Danny Rose’s aunts, counseling against adultery, admonishes him that “You can’t ride two horses with one behind”
²⁶
; it is a central objective of this study of Allen’s movies to demonstrate that one of the major achievements of his filmmaking career has been to effectively straddle the two horses of comedy and art with one behind, becoming in the process neither a comedian nor an artist but something in between: a comic auteur.