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Home , Crimes and Misdemeanors, Interiors, Shadows and Fog, We Need the Eggs

“, Filmmaker”.

By Brian McIlroy

[Delivered as part of the “Signs of the Times: Creativity in the 1990s” Free noon-hour series, UBC Centre for Continuing Education, at the Robson Square Conference Centre, Vancouver, March 24th, 1993]

I notice that I am giving the last of these talks in the series “Signs of the Times:

Creativity in the 90s.” Program Director Marcie Powell’s blurb that these lectures are in celebration of artists who have been fortunate to straddle both the serious and the popular is a provocative statement when we consider the subject of Woody

Allen’s films of the last fifteen years or so. Woody Allen is unquestionably popular, but is he serious or worth talking about seriously?

In preparing this talk (I think “lecture” is too formal a word for Woody Allen), I have been haunted by the imposter syndrome. I await Woody Allen to appear at the back of the auditorium and remark with vigour that I know nothing about his work, and how I managed to become a university professor teaching film courses is a scandal. You might recall that this is the fate of one professor in a movie line- up in , when Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer drags out the real Marshall Mcluhan to back up his opinions and reveal the obtuseness of the smart- assed professor.

I might well be saved from this humiliation, as I’m sure Woody Allen is too busy making another film than to be bothered to argue with critics from and in another country. But I cannot be saved from your good selves because it is genuinely hard to find someone who has not an opinion on Woody Allen’s work, whether as fans or as detractors or artistic enemies. Woody Allen has been involved, mostly as director or star, in up to thirty feature films. You undoubtedly have seen many of them, and have formed a view concerning his artistic position and/or importance.

When I ask people to describe their first reactions to the name “Woody Allen,” the following words and phrases usually arise: Neurotic….comic….Obsessed with sex, and . The “neurotic Jewish comic” is not generally what attracts us to the work of Woody Allen: rather, it is the continual obsession with sex and human relationships, death, and the existence or otherwise of God. These topics ensure

Allen’s work a universal quality, outside the New York Jewish intellectual humour which is his trademark and strength. Of course, the proverbial of life is

Allen’s constant quest, and this pursuit attracts us all.

Nevertheless, for many people the jury is still out on Woody Allen. One would not think so, given the vast amount of critical work on his films. Here are some of their titles: Woody Allen On Location; Woody Allen, New Yorker; Woody Allen: An

Illustrated Biography; Woody Allen: His Films and Career; Woody Allen: The

Clown Prince of American Humour; Loser Take All; The Woody Allen

Encyclopedia; The Woody Allen Companion; Fun With Woody: The Complete

Woody Allen Quiz Book; of Woody: A Short Neurotic Quiz Book; Non-

Being and Somethingness ( a collection of comic strips based on Woody Allen’s jokes); But We need the Eggs: The Magic of Woody Allen; and, finally, (drums must roll here): I Dream of Woody (a compilation of people’s dreams about Woody

Allen).

Woody Allen is a cultural phenomenon there is no doubt. That his one-liners are funny, and that his short scenes often marvelously crafted for humour, there is also no doubt. But is he the serious artist that it seems he so strives to be? Is Woody

Allen living under a terrible shadow of other filmmakers, particularly Ingmar

Bergman, one his great loves? I think the answer must be YES. The purity of

Bergman’s visual and thematic artistry is best exemplified in The Seventh Seal

(1957), Persona (1966), Winter Light (1963), Wild Strawberries (1957), and

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). These films of the 1950s and 1960s seem to have been influential on Woody Allen. Others might wish to point to Cries and

Whispers (1972) and Autumn Sonata (1978) from the 1970s as pivotal in pushing

Allen to try to make serious films. The films I would include in this serious category are (1978), September (1987), Another Woman (1988) and, although with some reluctance, (1989).

But before looking at these films, I’d like to focus on what Woody Allen seems to do best, and that is to make a humorous film. Perhaps his most successful (four : Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress) is

Annie Hall (1977), a film worth some examination to get at the core of the Allen formula. Speaking of formulas, that of the romantic comedy is well known: (a) man meets woman; (b) man and woman dislike/conflict with each other ; (c) over time, they both learn to respect each other; (d) they fall in love at the end.

Woody Allen works another way: (a) man meets woman; (b) they like and respect each other and fall in love; (c) they break up; (d) they psychoanalyze their breakup.

So Allen takes up the genre, reworks it, “makes it new” in a modernist sense, and challenges us in so doing. Annie Hall is a reflexive film; it draws attention to the film medium as part of this psychoanalysis. The split screen is used to show the painful disparity between Annie’s family and Alvy’s family, and the disparity between themselves—most famously when both attend psychoanalysis: one thinks sex three times a week a lot; the other not enough. We are constantly aware of the documentary narrative of Alvy, while watching his attempts to show his story in a nondocumentary fashion. Similarly, we see that another representational world is brought to our attention by the cartoon sequence, placing Alvy and is friend Max into a fairy tale.

Other splits are apparent: he uses film to show up the inanity of television comedy

(and yet Alvy is a TV personality) ; Alvy is a stand-up comedian, the personification of words spoken and standing still, and yet Allen’s medium of choice is focused on movement and visuals, including a complex mise-en-scene to convey how the past and present meet. Finally, near the end of the film, a montage memory sequence distills from the relationship “The Eggs”, as Alvy calls them, the reasons why he suffers his splitting headache. It is in the thematic and technical splits that Annie Hall achieves its uniqueness. Whereby the techniques do not so much reflect the thematic splits, but mediate them. Form here is content.

Another film where Allen seems to succeed in bringing formal and thematic elements together is one not well received in terms of popularity: (1983).

The film is a pretend documentary which immediately suggests to us that the notion of split or division within a genre is again operative in Allen’s mind. Just as instead of a romantic comedy we have an unromantic comedy in Annie Hall, here instead of a bona fide documentary, we have a pseudo-documentary.

All of the traditional features of a documentary are present: a controlling voice-of-

God narrator, who seems to have been imported from the newsreel narrator in

Welles’ Citizen Kane, and compilation archival footage of the 1920s and 1930s, including an amazing matching of the Woody Allen character on the left side of

Hitler who is busily giving a speech to the assembled masses. We are also presented contemporary interviews with real-life authorities, among whom are

Susan Sontag, Dr. Eudora Welty, Bruno Bettelheim, Saul Bellow and Irving Howe.

They all present analyses of one Leonard Zelig, the human chameleon. Zelig has the unfortunate tendency of turning into whomever he talks to, whether a rabbi or a black person. He is a man without substance, wanting to please, to be filled by more sturdy identities. If nothing else, this conceit allows Allen to rip apart the seriousness of psychoanalysis, and in finding love with Dr. Fletcher, Zelig is able to overcome his condition. But does the film Zelig not take the easy way out? Is there a sustained critique of documentary practice? I think the answer must be NO.

The one-liners and visual gags come hard and fast, so that you are not invited to think for long how documentary is a constructed reality or, indeed, how the social construction of documentary lies within our viewer response.

In to the serious films—Interiors, September, Another Woman-- however, we note first of all that Allen does not appear in these films, although this absence alone does not distinguish them as serious, for with

Allen has a number of serious moments, and Alice and seem whimsical even without Allen centre stage. What does Allen attempt to do in these three films? To my mind, they are a reworking of specific Bergman productions.

Cries and Whispers informs Interiors, Smiles of a Summer Night informs

September, and Wild Strawberries informs Another Woman.

Take the earliest film Interiors. It is a film that concentrates on the effects of a marital breakdown on the two elderly partners, but mostly focuses on the results it has on the three grown up sisters Renate, Joey and Flyn. The mother Eve has just returned from a stint in the sanatorium, fresh from electro-shock therapy. Despite the fact of the presence of others, the film seems to revolve around the mother and her three daughters. In Bergman’s , we also have four women struggling to determine their relationships with the spectre of death hovering around the gloomy interiors of where they live. The opening of Interiors tries to capture the intensity of Cries and Whispers with its absence of a music track.

Later, Joey’s condemnatory speech directed towards her mother is quintessential

Bergman in focusing on guilt, dreams, memories, and inadequacies in human relationships. This speech pushes mother Eve to suicide, and releases Joey to be able to write. Bringing to the fore these pent-up hatreds acts as a creative release valve.

Arguably, September, released in 1987, is another attempt at making Interiors. Six people spend some time in a Vermont Beach . They re-evaluate their past lives and loves, while new relationships develop or threaten to develop. It is all shot on one set, with the blinds of the beach house drawn down. In the re- evaluation process, it resembles the charades of Smiles of a Summer Night where couples intermingle, but who find their way back to their rightful partners in the end. In the midst of the love trysts, philosophy and often arise. The writer Peter quizzes Lloyd about the universe above; Lloyd pessimistically replies:

“I understand it for what it truly is. Haphazard. Morally neutral. And unimaginatively violent.” Allen appears to be parading his own gloomy diagnosis of the world.

In Another Woman, distinguished Philosophy professor Marion Post shuts herself away in a rented office to write her next book. She is the kind of person who feels happiest detached from the world and from her true feelings. Immediately, we sense that this is Woody Allen’s version of Professor Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild

Strawberries, who avoids if he can communication with others, to the point of even playing chess by himself. Marion post overhears a doctor and his patient Hope, who is pregnant and considering suicide. It is Hope who eventually characterizes

Marion as a very sad woman. As she says, “she can’t allow herself to feel. The result is she’s led this cold, cerebral life, and it’s alienated everyone around her.”

Marion dismisses her brother Paul’s writing, much in the same way Isak Borg dismisses at first the real problems in his son’s and daughter-in-law’s marriage.

Marion becomes aware that her husband is having an affair, but lie Isak Borg when he discovers his wide’s infidelity, she intellectualizes it too easily out of existence.

Whereas Bergman’s film ends with a modicum of hope, Allen’s film strikes me as less assured in the recuperative power of people in their 50s and beyond to rearrange their lives and feelings.

This existential emphasis is linked, of course, t the existence or otherwise of God.

It’s a running sore in Allen’s work. In , for example, the doctor who is eventually murdered by the manic killer, scoffs at the idea of a God or an after-life. And the same concerns worry the student who visits the brothel as a way of proving or giving meaning to his existence. These concerns seem well developed in Crimes and Misdemeanors, wherein two storylines are followed: one extremely dark and brooding, the other more typical of Woody Allen’s humorous work. In the first storyline, Judah Rosenthal, an eye doctor, desires to extricate himself from an affair with a woman called Dolores. When she threatens to spill the beans to Judah’s wife, the ophthalmologist asks his brother Jack to have her

“taken care of”—a euphemism for murder. Although racked by guilt, Judah is able eventually to cast the deed from his mind and return to “normality.” Meanwhile, one of his patients Ben, the rabbi, who embodies all the faith in God that is possible, goes blind. Allen seems to suggest, as in the film September, that the universe is a haphazard and violent place.

The second storyline involves a great deal of humour, where we see Cliff (played by Woody Allen) accepting an assignment to make a film on a successful TV producer Lester. Cliff only accepts this work since he needs the money to finish his documentary film on a Professor Louis Levy, who appears as a leading philosopher on matters of life, love, God, and relationships in general. Cliff sees him as brilliant, but before the film can be completed, news arrives that the great professor has committed suicide. Does Allen here not say that too much knowledge and reflection is a terrible burden? Cliff cannot even be fortunate in his relationships, as after pursuing Halley (played by ) he loses her to

Lester, his nemesis. Judah reflects at one moment in the film that his father used to tell him that the “eyes of God” were always over him, and this explains in part his later interest in ophthalmology! But the eyes of God seem blind or indifferent to human actions, and this relativism is at the core of the film: The good guy does not always prevail.

If we are to see Woody Allen’s work as gradually fusing serous philosophical and ethical issues with a desire to entertain and make people laugh, then Crimes and

Misdemeanors is the most interesting film of all. But even here, we could argue that there are really two films in play, and the conjoining actually weakens both rather than strengthening them. This is clearly open to debate. To conclude briefly,

I would argue that Allen’s talent lies in the creation of short visual and verbal gags, of exploiting the “split” in all conscious activity; that the influence of Ingmar

Bergman has become a block to his ability to make serious films (despite hiring

Bergman’s cinematographer and actor Max Von Sydow).

Nevertheless, there is still something comforting for the adult audience when we sit down for a new Woody Allen film, and that jazz music begins over basic white credits and a simple black screen.