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W Oody a Llen and the Literary Canon

W Oody a Llen and the Literary Canon

17 Woody A llen and the Literary Canon

William Hutchings

I ’ m a serious person, a disciplined worker, interested in writing, interested in litera- ture, interested in theater and fi lm. (, qtd. in Lax 2001 : 155)

Comedy, like water, always fi nds its own level – as Shakespeare knew best. For the groundlings, there were physical buff oonery, “vulgar” double entendres, com- pounded insults and beratements, as well as the antics of rustics and clowns; for those with more refi ned tastes and better educations, there were often now- recondite literary allusions and witty, subtle, and cerebral wordplay. Both kinds of entertainment (and more) were provided, often in abundance and in the same play. This is the promise that was exemplifi ed in the title As You Like It : each viewer could be assured that, for the price of a ticket, he or she would fi nd whatever type of was most likely to make him or her laugh. It is, however, a claim that can be made on behalf of remarkably few modern , whether on stage or screen – and a standard to which few playwrights and screenwriters even aspire. Neil Simon provides a reliably “good out” for those who are Broadway- bound in search of unchallenging fare; Noel Coward reliably amuses those with a taste for witty exchanges among the “Mahtini, dahling?” subset of the haute bourgeoisie. Even the great comedians of the silent era knew and reliably played to the particular tastes of a popular audience: hence the sentimentalities of Chap- lin’ s Little Tramp, the sad-sack stoicism of Buster Keaton, the physical imperil- ments of Harold Lloyd, the knockabout shtick of Hal Roach’ s Keystone Kops. The audiences for Porky’ s (and its sequels and its legion of imitators) or Dumb and Dumber or Animal House know – and fi nd – exactly and reliably the entertain- ments that they seek. Woody Allen ’ s fi lms, however, are quite a diff erent matter. Certainly, his early comedies have no shortage of slapstick humor and sexual

A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 360 William Hutchings innuendos; yet often, especially in his subsequent fi lms, there can be found also a rich allusiveness and a wide-ranging erudition that are unrivaled among fi lmmak- ers of his time. His non-comic fi lms confi rm and deepen this unique intellectual intertextuality, often evoking literary works of the existentialist and absurdist traditions. Nevertheless, an exact assessment of Woody Allen ’ s relationship to the literary canon is more problematic than it might initially appear – not least because of inconsistencies within his own self-presentation in interviews and his own writ- ings. At times, he frankly discusses literary authors with remarkable sophistica- tion and aplomb, articulating a post-Sartre, post-Kaf ka, post-Beckett worldview and aesthetic, as in many of the interviews cited herein. Particularly in the later years of his career, however, he has preferred to present himself as a street-smart “regular guy” from a Brooklyn blue-collar family – one who was thrown out of college during his fi rst year, fi nds reading a chore rather than a pleasure (and does it mainly “to keep up with my dates”), ardently follows his favorite basketball team on television, plays jazz, and drinks beer (see, for example, Shickel 2003 : 153). When asked in 2011 about his “top fi ve books . . . that have made most impact on him as a fi lm-maker and comic writer,” he included only one widely known literary work – J.D. Salinger’ s The Catcher in the Rye which “always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – 18 or so” (Gerber 2011 ). The others were Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe (1946), a memoir by a jazz clarinetist of that era; The World of S.J. Perelman (2000), an anthology of writings by “the funniest human being in my lifetime, in any medium,” to which Allen himself contributed the introduction; Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis (1880), about which Allen remarked that “Because it’ s a thin book, I read it[; i]f it had been a thick book, I would have discarded it”; and : A Biography by Richard Schickel (2005) (Gerber 2011 ). Yet, just three weeks later, following the release of Allen ’ s , his most overtly literary and allusive fi lm since Love and (1975), saw fi t to publish an article “decoding” the fi lm’ s “historical truths,” its many references to “the enormously talented cast of and bohemi- ans that peopled Jazz Age Paris” including “[Ernest] . . . [Gertrude] Stein[,] . . . Picasso ’ s mistress[,] . . . Salvador , T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Jose- phine Baker, Luis Buñuel, Man , and others,” all of whom fi gure in its plot (Berger 2011 : C7). One month later, noting that Berger ’ s “crib sheet to the ‘Mid- night in Paris’ pantheon . . . still ranks highest among the most e-mailed items in the movie section,” A.O. Scott wrote a lengthy analysis of such cinematic inter- textuality as a (supposedly) recent trend. Allen ’ s fi lm, he claimed, “wears its cul- tural baggage lightly and the great writers who fl it across the screen less as touchstones than as imaginary friends for its hero” – adding that “his enthusi- asm for high art has always fi ltered snobbery through an essentially democratic temperament, and there is nothing obscure or recondite in the name dropping” in his latest fi lm (Scott 2011 : AR 12). Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 361

Often, Allen’ s less-than-literary self-characterization refl ects the stand-up come- dian’ s honed sense of playing to the specifi c audience/readership of the venue in which his comments will appear; it is also the conjurer ’ s age-old trick of “misdirec- tion,” his fi nal topic in Schickel ’ s interview (Schickel 2003 : 169, 173). Certainly, his satirical animus against pompous pseudo-intellectuals has long been apparent (most famously in , when Allen ’ s character brings in the real Marshall McLuhan to correct a pretentious moviegoer standing in line trying to impress his date by discussing the scholar’ s theories); furthermore, Allen’ s own public persona as a comic has long been relentlessly self-deprecating, a by-now-intuitive tendency that is perhaps exacerbated in literary matters by his status as an autodidact – a trait shared by working class English authors , , and , among others. As the census prepared by Andrew Gothard (Chapter 18 in this volume) clearly reveals, the extensiveness of Allen ’ s allusions throughout his fi lms, fi ction, and interviews from over fi ve decades far surpasses what has been widely assumed. A confi dent, knowing allusiveness, whether more or less subtly apparent, can be found in both the content and the structure of many of his works and in numerous interviews over fi ve decades; yet alongside this, there persists a counter-tendency – equally strong – towards denying that he is an intellectual in any sense of the term. Such self-deprecation often carries over into his com- ments assessing his fi lms as well – eventually provoking an interviewer ’ s profane outburst that seems no less appropriate to Allen’ s disparagement of his literary knowledge:

[ S CHICKEL:] I think you’ re full of shit about this. [A LLEN:] Well, I . . . I . . . as long as long as people know how I feel about them (Shickel 2003 : 163).

These rival tendencies within Allen ’ s self-representation have long been not only an essential trait of his comic persona but also a recurrent characteristic of his creative genius and an underassessed facet of his personality. From the outset, Allen ’ s affi nity for allusions to and quotations from the literary canon was manifest, made all the funnier in their often incongruous contexts. Amid the standard comic alarums, slamming doors, and madcap chase scenes of What’ s New Pussycat? (, 1965), Allen ’ s fi rst feature fi lm as both script- writer and actor, a character pauses in mid-farce to declaim a line from Hamlet. Even more surprisingly, there is an off hand if arcane allusion to German philoso- pher and playwright Friedrich Schiller. Similarly, near the end of Sleeper (1973), an excerpt of dialogue from Tennessee Williams ’ s A Streetcar Named Desire gets interpolated, with Allen reprising famous lines of Blanche Dubois (including, inevitably, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”) and responding with those of Stanley Kowalski, mumbled in the style for which Marlon Brando was by then renowned. Asked to identify assorted photo- graphs from the twentieth century by his twenty-second-century captors, Allen’ s 362 William Hutchings character describes F. Scott Fitzgerald as “a romantic writer loved by English majors [and] nymphomaniacs”; he also deems Rod McKuen a serious infl uence on American poetry – a line that would have drawn laughter even then. Sleeper (1973, cowritten with ) is the fi rst Allen fi lm to have its premise based on a single identifi able work of literature: H.G. Wells’ s The Sleeper Awakens, which is also known by its original title, When the Sleeper Wakes. Like Allen ’ s character Miles Monroe, Wells ’ s protagonist Graham awakens from a 200-year slumber to discover a civilization whose technologies, values, customs, and mores have been utterly transformed from those of the world he knew – though not for the better. The fi lm soon diverges from Wells ’ s plot, however, in that Graham discovers that he owns more or less the entire earth, though the exact means by which this occurred remains unclear (it somehow involves multinational corporations, legacies, and tax laws as well as astute and unregulated corporate management). Miles, however, remains only a (former) health food store-owner/ English major/clarinet player who never awoke from minor surgery – an ordinary schlemiel who is anxiety-laden, beleaguered, and baffl ed by a world that he can neither escape, understand, nor control. Like Graham, he fi nds himself caught up in a plot by an antigovernment resistance movement and aligned with a female collaborator (Diane Keaton as Luna Schlosser) – although she is not a romantic interest in Wells’ s novel, as she is in Allen’ s version. Other tropes that the screen- play shares with Wells ’ s novel include its telescreen newscasts, instantly tailored clothing designed by computers, sliding doorways, gliding cars, and austere inte- rior design. Wells’ s remote “Pleasure Cities” have been replaced with the in-home “orgasmatron” and metallic orbs that are fondled for pleasure. Eventually, Graham fi ghts the earth ’ s governing council of oligarchs who rule, oppressively and cor- porately, in his name – and seems to die in airborne combat when the novel ends; Miles gets to kiss Luna instead, whether the insurgency succeeds or fails. Accord- ingly, Sleeper establishes the precedent for Woody Allen’ s unique assimilation of literary texts throughout his career as a fi lmmaker: clearly he respects his sources, but he is equally willing to diverge from them whenever his own creativity demands it. As in a jazz rendition of a long-familiar melody, the baseline of the original remains there, but the improvisational variations make it inimitably, creatively his own.

Crossing the Literary Divide

Some of us are real, some are not. ( )

Although described on its title page as simply “A Romantic Comedy,” Play It Again, Sam (stage, 1969 ; fi lm, Herbert Ross, 1972) not only reinforced Woody Allen’ s Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 363 typical comic persona but also introduced a comic premise that would become increasingly important – and increasingly complex – in his later fi lms: the inter- relationship between literature and/or fi lm and actual life. Its protagonist, Allan Felix, is described in the opening stage directions in terms that eff ectively defi ne its creator’ s stage and screen persona:

a slight, bespectacled young man . . . [whose] mind is a hyperactive mass of prepos- terously neurotic contradictions that make the world a little too much for him. He is nervous, shy, insecure, and has been in and out of psychotherapy for years (Allen 1969 : 5–6).

Recently divorced by his wife, he proves romantically inept as he tries to reenter the dating scene at the age of 28. He is, in fact, an intellectual who “daydreams of someday doing something important in literature or fi lm. [He] daydreams a lot . . . ” (Allen 1969 : 6). Those reveries, like those of any true cinephile, are shaped by the images and narratives of the cinematic canon – to such an extent that Humphrey Bogart enters his life (the fi rst of many such crossovers that will occur in Allen ’ s oeuvre) and off ers Allan counsel about his relationships with women. Importantly, it is the trenchcoated Bogart-as-character who provides such advice to the lovelorn modern man, as opposed to Bogart-the - actor or Bogart-the-man with a private life of his own; his appearances are explicitly related to his roles in Casablanca (the fi nal sequence of which begins the fi lm adaptation) and The Maltese Falcon (in version). “Bogart ’ s a perfect image,” Allan remarks; as a cin- ematic and/or literary character, he transcends time, preserved and immortalized on screen, never aging and forever heroic. In the screenplay ’ s opening lines, Allan notes that “I ’ m not like that. I never was. I never will be. It ’ s strictly .” Like the opening views of him gazing raptly at the images on the screen – which are refl ected in the lenses of his eyeglasses – this statement concisely and brilliantly defi nes the relationship between fi lm (or literature) and life. Such disparity between the heroic past and the devalued present has been a consistent preoccupation throughout much twentieth-century fi ction and poetry, though rarely explored on stage or fi lm. As Lily ’ s daughter famously remarks in ’ s “,” “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (Joyce 2006 : 154); they are men of words rather than heroically self-sacrifi cing deeds, Allan Felix rather than Humphrey Bogart. In words that would equally well fi t Joyce ’ s Gabriel Conroy, Felix is characterized as a “writer of articles and reviews . . . for a little intellectual [daily]” who “earns a decent living” but is “shy [and] insecure” (Allen 1969 : 6); Joyce ’ s protagonist stands in similarly stark contrast to Michael Furey, his wife ’ s long-dead teenaged lover who sacrifi ced his life out of selfl ess devotion to her but remains forever young and ardent in her memory, in contrast to her self-consciously inferior, aging, intel- lectual husband who “had never felt that way himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (Joyce 2006 : 194). In much the same way, 364 William Hutchings

T.S. Eliot’ s J. Alfred Prufrock contrasts himself with fi gures of the heroic past, concluding that he is neither a nor a John the Baptist, “nor was meant to be”; indecisive, self-conscious about his body, shy, forlorn, and sexually frustrated, he has neither friends nor a heroic cinematic counselor to intervene on his behalf. The diff erences between these forlorn antecedents and Allan Felix are obvious: the latter is fundamentally comic in ways that the former are not. Like the onscreen personae of such great silent-screen comics as Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, Allen’ s Allan is besieged by even simple objects: a handheld hairdryer, a plate of salad, a phonograph record, and a chair provide the basis for uproarious physical shtick. Yet, beyond the jokes about psychoanalysis, sedatives, neurosis, and sexuality, the sense of devaluation remains; pathos gets adroitly redacted through farce. A similar “intervention” from the world of literature into the world of modern life provides the premise of (1995), wherein a chorus from Greek tragedy comments on and off ers warnings about the life of New York sportswriter Lenny Weinrib, linking his and his wife’ s adoption of a son to the story of Oedipus. Cassandra, Laius, Jocasta, and blinded Oedipus appear with the chorus in a Greek amphitheater (which Lenny can wander into), but the rag-clad Greek fi gures also appear in scenes set in contemporary New York. Tiresias, however, appears as a blind beggar in the New York streets, dressed in modern attire. In the latter half of the fi lm, the chorus becomes a Broadway-style chorus, though still in its ancient attire; it performs a rendition of ’ s romantic “You Do Something to Me” and ends with a jitterbug-style performance of Fishe, Goodwin, and Shay ’ s “When You’ re Smiling.” The plot itself is quasi-Oedipal, as Lenny seeks the truth about the parentage of his adopted son, Max, whose mother (Linda Ash, played by Mira Sorvino) turns out to be a prostitute and porn actress. Eventually, he has sex with the mother of his son – and fathers a child whose parentage he never discovers. Unlike Oedipus and Jocasta, neither Lenny nor Linda ultimately fi nds out the truth of his or her parenthood: he is never told that he is the father of her child, and she never learns that she is in fact the mother of his adopted son, whose photo he shows her. Oedipal confl icts are thus avoided for all concerned – as are the dire consequences of the ancient disclosures. The resolution features a modern-day deus ex machina when Linda’ s future husband arrives via helicopter. The premise of Play It Again, Sam is eff ectively reversed in Allen ’ s short story “The Kugelmass Episode”: instead of a character entering “actual” life, a “real” person enters the world of a classic novel (Allen 1980 : 41–55). Sidney Kugelmass, a professor of humanities at City College of New York, fi nds himself transposed via magic into the world of Gustave Flaubert’ s Madame Bovary – and has an aff air with Emma Bovary herself. At the same time, he appears as a character in stu- dents’ copies of the novel. Later, when she accompanies him on a shopping trip to modern-day , she temporarily disappears from the novel entirely. At the end of the story, Professor Kugelmass disappears permanently into an obsolete Spanish textbook, endlessly pursued by an irregular verb. Signifi cantly, Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 365 this academic is the only one of Allen’ s characters who does not eventually return to the literary or nonliterary world from whence he or she came. His everlasting torment is Dantesque in its grotesque and bizarre appropriateness: academic obscurity to the nth degree, disappearance into a long-abandoned textbook, with relentless pursuit not by a pitchfork-wielding devil but by a wholly linguistic tor- mentor all his own. The culmination of Woody Allen ’ s works based on this interplay of fi ctional characters and “real” people is undoubtedly The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Sharing its central plot device with ’ s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), in which characters from an abandoned work by an unidentifi ed play- wright physically intrude themselves into a theater where the rehearsal of a Pirandello play is underway, The Purple Rose of Cairo ingeniously transposes this premise out of its theatrical setting and into a cinematic one; accordingly, it allows a fi lm character to “cross over” into the world of a moviegoer – who later accom- panies him back into the black-and-white world of the fi lm. Like the mirror in Lewis Carroll’ s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) and its counterpart in ’ s fi lm Orpheus (1949), the movie screen itself proves to be a selectively permeable membrane separating the worlds of art and life, those alternative universes of the creative imagination and worldly experi- ence. Set during the depth of the economic Depression of the 1930s, when grim social realities of unemployment and its attendant desperations were in stark contrast to the carefree affl uence and elegance of, for example, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat (1934, 1935, Mark Sandrich), The Purple Rose of Cairo juxtaposes these alternate realities in particularly vivid and poignant ways. Cecilia (Mia Farrow), the central character, fi nds refuge from her strained marriage and her thankless job as a waitress in her frequent moviegoing. To her astonishment, during one of several repeat viewings of The Purple Rose of Cairo (the fi lm-within-the-fi lm, an escapist fantasy whose bizarre plot involves an explorer and the capricious and carefree Manhattan-penthouse social elite among whom he unexpectedly fi nds himself ), its protagonist notices her in the audience, addresses her directly, and steps through the screen to join her in person. A clan- destine romance ensues, replete with metaphysical complications worthy of Pirandello himself: actor Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels), who plays explorer Tom Baxter, is a naïf in the real world, oblivious to the custom of paying for meals in restaurants with other than stage-money, for example; his fellow actors, unable to follow him through the screen, are unable to continue the plot of their fi lm but dread the moment when the projector might be turned off , consigning them to an existential oblivion and a darkness all their own. Moviegoers are as baffl ed – and as outraged – as the fi rst audiences for Six Characters in Search of an Author; predict- ably, some demand their money back, perplexed and befuddled by a moviegoing experience unlike any they have encountered before. Producers, distributors, and the local theater manager fear the worst: similar disruptions could happen at other cinemas across the country, a possible crime spree could be staged by characters 366 William Hutchings running amok, and even (of course) some kind of nefarious conspiracy could be behind it all. When Cecilia steps through the screen with Tom/Gil, the metaphysical impli- cations of the now-doubled crossover are compounded far beyond anything in Pirandello’ s play. The plot of the fi lm can be resumed; the characters leave their time-passing card games, gossiping, and bickering and go to dinner at an elegant nightclub. Yet, like Madame Bovary after the intrusion of Kugelmass, the fi lm’ s story is inherently altered by the presence of Cecilia; even the number of chairs at their table in the restaurant must be changed, and Cecilia soon proves to be as out of place in the characters’ world as Tom/Gil was in hers. Their romance thus proves impractical, and they must part. Each “belongs” in his or her own world: Tom back on the screen, Gil back in , and Cecilia – in the fi lm’ s fi nal scene – back in the movie theater, raptly gazing up at the fl ickering screen. Rarely if ever has the moviegoing experience been so imaginatively and lovingly depicted in a work of metacinema: moviegoers, actors, characters, producers, distributors, and theater managers are all cleverly satirized. In much the same way that Allen’ s (1994) celebrates/skewers the life of the theater and evokes the prohibition era of the early 1920s, The Purple Rose of Cairo commemorates all that makes moviegoing worthwhile. Nevertheless, Allen has adamantly insisted that such interpretation of the fi lm seriously misreads his intentions:

I would not think of Purple Rose of Cairo as an homage to that kind of fi lm [escapist fare of the 1930s]. I would think of that as a dark fi lm about a woman who was forced to choose between fantasy and reality and naturally had to choose reality, because if you choose fantasy, that way lies madness, and so she chose reality, and as it does in real life it crushes her at the end. . . . To exist in the fantasy world is psychosis. And by choosing the real world, which we all must do, she is inevitably crushed by it, as we all inevitably are. . . . For me the, the tragic end of that movie was the only reason I did the picture (Schickel 2003 : 77, 79, 80).

Yet later in the same interview, he blatantly contradicts that claim:

there ’ s a modicum of hope someplace. Even at the end of Purple Rose , when Mia goes back into the movie theater and starts watching the Fred Astaire movie, at least you get the feeling that at the very minimum she’ s not going to kill herself. She’ s going to lose herself in escapist fi lms. I ’ m not Pollyannish, but I don ’ t think I ’ m cynical or gloomy or pessimistic (Schickel 2003 : 139–140).

Neither “crushed” nor psychotic nor tragic, she ultimately displays a (fundamen- tally comic) resilience that opposes all of those. Fortunately, as always, moviegoers are free to decide such issues for themselves, regardless of authorial intent. Piran- dello – and Cecilia too, no doubt – would certainly approve. Whereas the aforementioned characters fi nd themselves transposed into realms of fi ction or fi lm or encounter literary or cinematic characters in their own lives, Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 367

Gil Pender (), the protagonist of Midnight in Paris, fi nds himself among their creators – physically transported into the literary milieu of American expatriates in Paris during the 1920s, the Golden Age of high that was immortalized in such memoirs as ’ s and Janet Flanner’ s Paris was Yesterday: 1925–1939. There, Flanner remarks,

Back in the opening 1920s . . . for the fi rst time Paris began being included in the memories of a small contingent of youngish American expatriates, richer than most in creative ambition and rather modest in purse . . . [who had] settled in the small hotels on the Paris Left Bank. . . . Though unacquainted with each other, as compatriots we soon discovered our chance similarity. We were a literary lot. Each of us aspired to become a famous writer as soon as possible (Flanner 1972 : vii).

For them then, as for Gil now, the ambience of Paris provides an alternate set of markedly cosmopolitan values – a stark contrast to the philistinism, parochialism, shallow pietism, and (not least in the 1920s) prohibition that defi ned American culture of the time. eloquently summarized its appeal in an interview with Stephen Longstreet, whose We All Went to Paris: Americans in the City of Light, 1776–1971 provides an invaluable companion volume for Midnight in Paris. Why, Longstreet wondered,

did Paris still draw us to its fascination, why did it draw those who felt themselves creative – talent or no talent? Why had it been, since Franklin, that all of us felt that we were freer there than elsewhere? Why did art, literature, and sex, and the feeding and drinking seem more genuine there? Generations of Americans had run a whole gamut of desires, hopes in Paris – all so opposite to those they had found at home, on the farm, in the city . . . (Longstreet 1972 : 447).

Faulkner ’ s reply is no less applicable to Gil Pender in 2010 than it was in the 1920s for Scott and , Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, , T.S. Eliot, Cole Porter, and Faulkner himself:

Maybe, Steve, we all went . . . because the American strain for the writer fellow, the painter, the poet had become thin here, petered out. The sounds, the colors, the taste of Paris to us felt better than the country cooking we grew up on. Paris for us young fry was . . . an eager look at things you maybe felt had meanings you didn’ t get from the folks back at the store. . . . Paris is the grab bag for us because it skirts the irrational, yet seems to fi nd now and then the potential for genius in embryonic shape. . . . You can escape there getting entangled, sure, entangled in moral alterna- tives. We’ re such black Calvinistic bastards at home. . . . But you always want to go back [to Paris]. It leaves you spooked with a world of invisible presences. We go there hunting some damn evocative quality, maybe we come back and feel that only the unrealized parts of our lives seem perfect . . . That ’ s what keeps Paris green for us. It ’ s something we are sure is there only we ourselves never fully realized it (Longstreet 1972 : 447–448). 368 William Hutchings

Certainly, for Gil “the American strain” has “become thin” if not entirely “petered out”: a would-be novelist, he feels that he has “sold out” to Hollywood, becoming a successful screenwriter of popular if shallow fi lms which have brought him considerable fi nancial success. “Getting and spending have laid waste [his more serious creative] powers,” as Wordsworth said, and Gil feels himself becoming “entangled in moral alternatives” – nowhere better exemplifi ed than in an argu- ment with his fi ancée over whether they should live in Paris or in after they are married. No less than Allan Felix in Play It Again, Sam , Gil is self-consciously a modern- day devalued counterpart of the now-iconic larger-than-life fi gures from a decades- earlier Golden Age (Hemingway, Stein, and others) whom he meets and whose counsel – literary rather than romantic, this time – he solicits and heeds. Stein ’ s approbation of Gil ’ s novel plus Hemingway ’ s perspectives on life and love and writing fortify his resolve much as Bogart ’ s counsel did in Allen ’ s earlier work. Yet, importantly, icons and legends that they have become, the “actual” Stein and Hemingway are in a sense characters who are no longer any more separable from their personae than Bogart-the-actor is from Bogart-the-character in his Casablanca trenchcoat. Thus, as David Denby observed in his review of Midnight in Paris , “the artists and writers are presented not as they actually were but as Gil wants them to be” (Denby 2011 : 88). Perhaps more accurately, they are as Gil expects them to be based on his own knowledge of their works and lives. Hem- ingway implies as much in the genre-blurring fi nal paragraph of his preface to A Moveable Feast : “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fi ction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fi ction may throw some light on what has been written as fact” (1964 : ix). Accordingly, “Hem” in the narrative simultaneously is and is not the “him” of the 1920s or, for that matter, the “him” at the time of his writing in the late when, like Tennyson ’ s Ulysses, he had “become a name.” The choice – and the problem of diff erentiation – is thus left to the reader and, by extension, to the viewer of Allen ’ s fi lm. Longstreet even contends that

The problem about gathering research [about Americans in Paris in the 1920s] has been that in some cases there is almost no source material, [and] in others there is too much, most of it so mixed with myth and legend . . . that almost all published memoirs must be suspect. There is so much in literary heroism that destroys modesty and fact (Longstreet 1972 : 18).

Although Paris in the 1920s certainly looks to be in a Golden Age throughout Midnight in Paris, it is recognizable as such only via nostalgia-induced retrospec- tion. For Picasso ’ s mistress Adriana (with whom Gil too falls in love) the Golden Age was the 1890s – and he accompanies her there through the same magical transposition, entering the café society of Toulouse-Lautrec and . Always, therefore, the mythic, legendary, and ultimately fi ctional Golden Age Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 369 must be defi ned against the then -current, in infi nite regress, whether or not it is beyond recall except through literature. Like Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo and like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Gil ultimately cannot remain in the realm of Otherness to which he has been transported – although the detective who pursues him there ultimately fi nds himself trapped in pre-revolutionary France, a doom akin to that of Professor Kugelmass, a perpetual malediction. Yet Gil’ s experiences in Paris enable him to “escape getting entangled . . . in moral alternatives,” exactly as Faulkner discerned: left “spooked with [its] world of invisible presences,” Gil chooses distinctly “Paris- ian” values, embraces his new found twenty-fi rst-century Parisian girlfriend, and fi nds the courage to reject his fi ancée, her values, and his Republican would-have-been in-laws. In so doing, he affi rms the truth of Hemingway’ s self- quotation that became the epigraph of A Moveable Feast itself: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast” (1964 : v).

Russian Infl uences

Maybe it’ s because I’ m depressed so often that I’ m drawn to writers like Kaf ka and Dostoyevski and to a fi lmmaker like Bergman. I think I have all the symptoms and problems that their characters are occupied with: an obsession with death, an obses- sion with or the lack of God, the question of why we are here. (Woody Allen, qtd. in Lax 1991 : 179)

I had, of course, always loved the Russian classics, and I was trying to do a fi lm with philosophical content, if you can believe it. (Woody Allen, qtd. in Schickel 2003 : 104)

Nowhere is the infl uence of the literary canon on Woody Allen ’ s comedic genius more apparent than in (1975) – which is surely the most allusive and intertextual fi lm ever made for a popular audience. Though its script contains countless allusions to and parodies of nineteenth-century Russian novels, its physi- cal shtick, sexual double entendres, absurd plot, and the presence of Woody Allen himself with his familiar comic persona and trademark style all keep the fi lm quite enjoyable for those who recognize none of its literary allusions. Set during the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, Love and Death obviously parodies Tolstoy ’ s . The gravitas of its compound title – fi t company for Crime and Punish- ment and Being and Nothingness as well – makes it (mock-)epic and epochal, por- tentous and pretentious in equal degrees. Although it depicts a cross-section of Russian society (including the village idiot, shown attending a convention of his kind) from the serfs through the aristocracy and even Bonaparte (or at 370 William Hutchings least one of his doubles), the plot focuses on Boris and his long-unrequited love, Sonja, whom he does eventually marry. Like Tolstoy’ s Pierre Bezuhov and his beautiful but immoral wife, Ellen Kuragin, as well as the assorted Bolkonskys and Rostovs who fi ll War and Peace , Boris and Sonja are caught up, albeit bunglingly, in the sweep of history. Dire though their plights may be (the fi lm’ s opening voi- ceover reveals that Boris is to be executed by fi ring squad at dawn), they neverthe- less always manage to fi nd time to philosophize at length in the distinctive nineteenth-century-Russian-fi ctional-character way, though the conversation soon veers into Sartrean distinctions between the pour-soi and en-soi and other distinctly modern epistemological in-jokes. (1989), like A Midsummer Night ’ s Sex Comedy (1982), presents a complex series of interrelationships and amatory entanglements, though this time their complications lead to an arranged murder. The fi lm’ s primary literary forebear is Dostoevsky ’ s , though its char- acters are affl uent and highly educated members of America’ s professional classes – an ophthalmologist, television producers, writers, and a fi lmmaker – rather than Dostoevsky ’ s down-and-almost-out student Raskolnikov and his circle of acquaintances. More important than the details of the plot, however, is the extraordinary exposition of profound and complex philosophical issues: such themes as guilt and moral responsibility, the existence or nonexistence of God, whether there is any moral centering of the universe, and how we are to live in the midst of such uncertainties have rarely been so thoughtfully and explicitly presented in twentieth-century popular culture. Multiple perspectives on these issues are presented with remarkable thoughtfulness, though none is privileged; indeed, all of them are complicated or undercut by further details of plot and characterization. These conversations take place both in the narrative present and in a poignant evocation of the ophthalmologist’ s past when (in a rather “stagey” fl ashback) he remembers – and briefl y reenters – a dinner-table argu- ment that occurred during his adolescence; while gathered for a Seder meal in the early , his family argues passionately over the value of religion and tradition amid the manifest evil rampant in the world. Other voices further com- plicate the fi lm ’ s present day narrative: a rabbi who is going blind off ers moral guidance to the ophthalmologist, who cannot see a way out of a dilemma in which his mistress threatens to expose him as an adulterer and embezzler; in a series of fi lmed interviews a life-affi rming academic philosopher holds forth on the sources of joy – even though he would end his career in suicide. The murder itself goes unsolved and unpunished (in contrast to Raskolnikov ’ s), except and unless by the doctor ’ s own guilt, exacerbated by his (ostensible) belief in the all- seeing eyes of God – which had been emphasized by his patient, the near-blind rabbi. Allusions to and images of sight, eyes, blindness, and guilt recur through- out the script, which also explicitly mentions Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (in an argu- ment among fi lm producers over whether the ancient play can be considered comic, given the passage of time). The fi lm’ s most important similarity to Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 371

Oedipus , however, is the ability to provoke virtually endless arguments over remarkably similar – and remarkably profound – ideas. As in Crimes and Misdemeanors , the Dostoyevskian infl uence in (2005) is unmistakable. Indeed, within the fi rst four minutes of the fi lm, its central character, Chris Winton, is shown reading Crime and Punishment and The Cambridge Companion to Dostoyevskii, the covers of which are shown in separate shots at nearly full screen. Once again, complications about marital infi delity, fi nancial malfeasance, and blackmail lead to murder, including not only the intended victim but also an innocent neighbor. Match Point’ s central existential issue, again, is whether in a world in which “science is confi rming more and more a purposeless existence,” anything becomes permissible since there is no transcendent purpose and no permanent basis for morality – the issue that Ivan Karamazov eloquently raises with his brother Alyosha in . During the fi lm’ s opening scene of a tennis ball crossing a net during a match, the voiceover deals with the importance of sheer luck and circumstance, quite apart from skill or strategy. Something literally as arbitrary and uncontrollable as which way the ball bounces if it strikes the top of the net can determine whether one wins or loses – and indeed will determine whether or not the murder that Winton committed gets discovered by the police at the fi lm ’ s end. Accordingly, such issues as freedom versus imprisonment, success versus failure, truth versus duplicity, fate versus chance, and justice versus injustice are all shown to depend on literally the bounce of one hurled object during the fi nal quarter of the fi lm. When literally so much can and does depend on random happenstance, the nature and meaning of life can easily get called into question in a markedly Dostoyevskian way. Nevertheless, as in Crimes and Misdemeanors , the equation with Dostoevsky goes only so far. The psychological focus on murder in both fi lms may evoke the des- peration of Raskolnikov, but there is no emphasis on the perpetrator’ s psychologi- cal torments after committing the crime and no implication whatsoever that there is any redemptive power in suff ering, whether or not it is infl icted through judicial punishment. Accordingly, notwithstanding its existential implications and overt Dostoyevskian allusions, Match Point has equally signifi cant precedents in a very diff erent part of the literary canon, far from nineteenth-century Russian fi ction. In many ways, Chris Wilton is a close counterpart to Tom Ripley, the protagonist of fi ve novels by Patricia Highsmith, of which the fi rst, The Talented Mr. Ripley, is the most pertinent here; both are young, personable, and ambitious outsiders who fi nd themselves in worlds of wealth and privilege where they never entirely belong, aff able but conscienceless charmers for whom expediency and self-survival lead to multiple murders and audaciously cunning cover-ups that remain undetected. Yet the erotic intensity of Match Point – the irresistibility that leads via inevitability to homicide – is characteristic not so much of Highsmith ’ s coolly calculating Ripley as it is of the characters of James M. Cain’ s novels such as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity . Scarlett Johansson ’ s Nola Rice is no less a blonde than Lana Turner’ s Cora Smith in the 1946 fi lm of Postman 372 William Hutchings

– passionate, amoral, frustrated, and doomed. There are also notable structural parallels with Theodore Dreiser ’ s An American Tragedy : Chris Wilton, like Clyde Griffi ths, is an ambitious social climber whose social ascendancy takes him into a world of corporate respectability; he too carefully plans the murder of his mistress (who has refused an abortion) in order not to lose his opportunities brought by a much wealthier woman he loves (and, in Wilton ’ s case, has married); each con- cocts a devious ruse to make the death seem accidental (an interrupted drug robbery in Match Point, a drowning in An American Tragedy); in both cases, docu- ments prove incriminating (Nola ’ s diary, Roberta ’ s letters). Of the two, however, only Clyde Griffi ths is arrested, tried, convicted, and electrocuted for his crime; Chris Wilton, though obviously no less guilty, evades arrest because at a crucial moment an object happened to bounce one way rather than the other, exactly as the fi lm’ s opening voiceover portends:

The man who said “I ’ d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’ s scary to think so much is out of one ’ s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn ’ t, and you lose.

Clyde Griffi ths loses; Chris Wilton wins. A universe in which such apparent inequity and injustice occur – when so much depends on the all-important but uncontrollable bounce of a certain small object, controlled only by chance, the logistics of randomness, and the law of gravity – is the epitome of the absurd. Whether Wilton goes on to any Raskolnikovian remorse of conscience is left for each viewer to imagine; there is very little if any indication that he will. No such indeterminacy about the aftereff ects of a carefully planned murder can be claimed about Cassandra’ s Dream (2007). Among all of Woody Allen ’ s “Crime and Punishment” fi lms, this is the only one in which a perpetrator is psy- chologically tormented by remorse over what he has done – and, equally notably, the “punishment” is not a consequence of apprehension by the police, since the murder remains unsolved. Cassandra ’ s Dream is anomalous as well because its characters have a working class background, far from the elegance of the haute bourgeoisie of so many of Allen’ s fi lms. Brothers Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell) are aggressively “on the make” despite often being under fi nancial duress as a result of expensive personal tastes (they buy and refurbish a used sail- boat), unstable sources of income (Terry is a compulsive gambler), and pampered girlfriends to support. Having grown up with an ethos that family always comes fi rst, they are off ered fi nancial support from their uncle, a self-made millionaire whose fi nancial shortcuts and misrepresentations are being threatened by a whistleblower within his organization. As in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point , the person threatening to disclose incriminating information is to be mur- Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 373 dered in a way that will appear to have been a random, hence untraceable, act of violence. The brothers agree, under duresses of their own, and carry out the crime successfully. Whereas Ian is quite ready to “move on” after the crime, Terry is wracked by guilt that is exacerbated by reliance on pills and liquor; he plans to turn himself in to the police and has talked about the crime to his girlfriend, who believes it to have been a dream or a delusion. Ian and the uncle agree that Terry must now be killed, and Ian plans to poison his brother at sea but cannot go through with it. In a scuffl e that ensues, Ian dies when Terry knocks him against the hull; Terry then deliberately drowns himself. Unlike much of the tradition in which malefactors do themselves in (from Chaucer’ s “The Pardoner’ s Tale” to ’ s fi lm of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Allen’ s fi lm off ers no such easily moralistic resolution: the mastermind of the entire scheme, the uncle, sur- vives and will apparently escape indictment. As in Match Point, he “wins” as a matter of luck.

I certainly love Chekhov. No question about that. He ’ s one of my favorites, of course. I ’ m crazy about Chekhov. I never knew anybody that wasn ’ t! People may not like Tolstoy. There are some people I know that don’ t like Dostoyevsky. . . . But I’ ve never met anybody that didn’ t adore Chekhov. (Woody Allen, qtd. in Björkman 1993 : 156)

Long rightly attributed to the infl uence of his admiration for the directorial skills, emotional complexity, and stark cinematography of , Allen ’ s controversial turn away from his trademark comedies led him towards serious, bleak, somber, existential domestic such as and September . Even comparatively lighter fi lms such as and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger are no less emphatically a testament to a fascination with – and phenomenal mastery of – a fundamentally Chekhovian dramaturgy. Remarkably specifi c affi nities with The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, and Three Sisters abound throughout these fi lms:

• a patrician family matriarch who, like Madame Ranevskya in The Cherry Orchard and Irina Nikolaevna Arkadina in The Seagull , is typically impractical, extrava- gant, aesthetic, emotionally manipulative and/or neurasthenic • daughters (often three) whose lives, like those of the Olga, Masha, and Irina in The Three Sisters and Anya and Varya in The Cherry Orchard, have been and continue to be defi ned by their confl icted family obligations and unfulfi lling romantic or marital entanglements • a lower class, vulgar, and/or philistine outsider who, like Yermolay Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard , disrupts the family ’ s often tenuous emotional equilib- rium. Typically less educated and certainly less emotionally constricted than the family, this outsider has never mastered – and fails even to comprehend – 374 William Hutchings

the patrician ethos and etiquette by which the family lives; they in turn are no less baffl ed and/or aff ronted by the crass forthrightness and/or tastelessness of the intruder • juxtaposition of such characters’ mutually exclusive worldviews as the source of the central confl ict in the plot. Often, this stark socioeconomic contrast originates in class norms related to issues of money (or the lack of it) in the present; in September , this involves the impending sale of a farm that is part of an estate, as in The Cherry Orchard. The female outsider may often be perceived by the family as a gold-digger whose upward mobility is the result of multiple marriages (Interiors ) or a prostitute (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Mighty Aphrodite ); nevertheless, she embodies an earthiness, practicality, vitality, and/ or unrepressed physicality that her alleged social “superiors” conspicuously lack • dialogue that is defi ned by and subtext. However much this may have been derived from the stark minimalist dialogue of such Bergman master- pieces as , The Silence , and Cries and Whispers , the inventor of this dramatic technique remains . Notwithstanding its Berg- manesque cinematography and existential austerity, Interiors in particular could serve as a masterclass in Chekhovian acting technique; no silences in the history of cinema have been more eloquent, more nuanced, more heartbreak- ing, more Chekhovian, or more profound.

The presence and prevalence of such Chekhovian dramaturgy need not – and indeed should not – imply that these fi lms are “derivative,” as has been too often been condescendingly remarked, particularly by those who wish that the director/ screenwriter would continue to create only the kind of comedies for which he became renowned. Without exception, these fi lms bear the unmistakable imprint of Woody Allen ’ s particular sensibility, as instantly recognizable as that of any other auteur. Unmistakably American in their idiom as well as their zeitgeist, they are remarkable for the complexity of their characterizations as well as the sophis- tication of their style. In many ways, September (1987) is the most purely Chekhovian of Woody Allen’ s fi lms, having many distinct affi nities with The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, and Three Sisters. Set within a single American house in the countryside, it could as easily be produced on stage as on fi lm. Like The Cherry Orchard, its structure begins with the arrival of the family matriarch – here, as in The Seagull , a famous actress whose career is now past its prime – who has a legendary, rather lurid, passion-driven life: she abandoned her husband to live with a lover, a who was later shot by her then 14-year-old daughter. Like The Cherry Orchard too, it ends with her departure, with considerable emotional distress having ensued in the interim. As in The Seagull , the plot features a series of unrequited loves, with each in love with someone who is in love with someone else: Howard, an elderly friend of the family (like Dorn in The Seagull ), loves Lane (the daughter who, it is Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 375 claimed, killed her gangster stepfather); she in turn loves Peter, a frustrated writer (like Treplev in The Seagull ), who secretly loves Stephanie (Lane ’ s sister), who refuses to betray her marriage or give in to her feelings for him. Lane, like Varya in The Cherry Orchard , has long resided at the family homeplace but, like the sisters in Three Sisters , she yearns to live in the city – where she would begin a career as a photographer. Unlike its counterpart in The Cherry Orchard, the sale of the prop- erty does not go through, so Lane is left in the countryside, nearly suicidal in her multiple frustrations. Stephanie ’ s poignant fi nal speech to her is remarkably similar to Irina’ s closing words in Three Sisters, on the importance of work, perseverance, and “petty things to keep you going, and distractions to keep you from focusing on the truth” – although that truth itself may remain unknown. Beyond such structural similarities and shared leitmotifs, however, September contains one of the most remarkable, distinctly Chekhovian sequences ever fi lmed: almost 20 minutes of extraordinarily revealing soliloquies and duologues occur during a power failure brought on by a thunderstorm. Lit by candlelight as Stephanie softly plays hauntingly melancholy popular songs from decades past on the piano, the sequence is an exact counterpart of the second act of The Cherry Orchard, in which the Ranevsky family and their retinue sit in the garden in seemingly idle conversation during which nothing much “happens” but many painful truths are revealed. Rife with subtext, nostalgia, repressed desires, unre- quited love, and eloquent silences, the scene encompasses both personal heart- aches and philosophical musings; Peter the novelist and Lloyd, a physicist, look at the stars, fi nding there beauty and wonder (Peter) or an aimless universe in which “deep truth . . . is always slipping away” and a world that is “haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent” (Lloyd). Diane, at a Ouija board, speaks to her dead second husband, reminiscing about now long-ago good times and ruing that their daughter Lane has never gotten over the shooting and hates her mother; when she asks the deceased to rap in support or acknowledgment, however, there is of course no reply. Howard confesses his long-held love for Lane, yearning for her touch, beseeching her not to leave as she intends to, having put the house up for sale; Lane admits her love for Peter, who tells her that he cannot commit following his failed marriage, though he subsequently tells Stephanie that he loves her; she in turn refuses to leave her husband and children for him. Even the titles of the songs played in the background provide subtle reinforcement of the sentiments expressed in the dialogue: “What ’ ll I Do?” (Irving Berlin), “Who” (Jerome Kern, Otto Harlach, and Oscar Hammerstein II), “I ’ m Confessin ’ ” (Al J. Neiburg, Doc Daugherty, and Ellis Reynolds), “Moon- glow” (Will Hudson, Eddie DeLange, and Irving Mills), and “When Day Is Done” (Robert Katcher and B.G. DeSylvia). In Chekhov’ s distinctively dialogic form (as Mikhail Bakhtin has defi ned the term), each character gives a prose “aria,” though none is privileged over the others. Equally nuanced in its script and its direction (with an extraordinarily capable all-star cast), September irrefutably demonstrates the remarkable depth of Woody Allen’ s understanding of Chekhovian content 376 William Hutchings as well as his dramaturgy. It is surely among the most Chekhovian dramas not to have been written in Russian.

Kafka and Other Absurdists

Beckett is superintelligent . . . but I don ’ t like his plays. Though he is able to com- municate a sense of absurdity and despair that resonate within me. Kaf ka, on the other hand, just gets to me totally. He ’ s the best reading. (Woody Allen, qtd. in Kelley 2006 : 26)

Among the many screen roles that Woody Allen has created for himself, the char- acter of Kleinman in (1992) is in many ways the best match between his own comic persona and major literary forebears – specifi cally, the protagonists of the best-known novels of Franz Kaf ka. Like Joseph K. in The Castle and K. in , Kleinman fi nds himself caught up in a process that he can neither understand nor control even though his life itself is at stake. In an unnamed city that is clearly based on Kaf ka ’ s native Prague (recognizable through its distinc- tive streetlights, angular streetscape, and bridgeways), a serial strangler prowls near-deserted streets at night in search of prey. Kleinman (whose name means “little man” in German) is roused from sleep late one night to take part in a vigi- lante plan to capture the killer even though he knows – and can fi nd out – little or nothing of the plan or his role in it (an early version of this opening sequence is the one-act play titled Death, published in Without Feathers (Allen 1972 : 39–100); its central character is also named Kleinman). He may or may not be bait in a trap for the killer, and those who rouse him into participation may or may not be providing him surveillance and protection. His attempts to understand the plot and his role in it are constantly thwarted amid circumstances that remain utterly beyond his control; his irremediable uncertainties, his unrelenting anxieties, his continuing frustrations, and his desperate but futile struggles to make sense of his situation are not only central motifs of Kaf ka’ s fi ction but also the quintessence of the absurd. The existential implications of Kleinman’ s plight are unmistakable: he is a common man trapped in a major life-or-death situation that he cannot comprehend or meaningfully aff ect; ill equipped and unprepared though he is, he nevertheless defi nes himself (and his future, including his life or death) through every action, decision, and inaction. Yet, uniquely among the various screen adap- tations of Kaf ka ’ s works – including adaptations of The Trial by both Orson Welles (1962, from Welles ’ s own screenplay) and David Hugh Jones (1993, from a screen- play by Harold Pinter) as well as Stephen Soderbergh’ s Kafka (1991) – Woody Allen’ s fi lm captures not only Kaf ka ’ s characteristic nightmarishness and menace but also, no less importantly, Kaf ka ’ s quite distinctive comedy, an equally impor- tant characteristic of the absurd. Arguably, Allen’ s Kleinman could join such comic Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 377 icons as Chaplin ’ s “Little Tramp,” Buster Keaton ’ s stoic sad-sacks, , and Jackie Gleason ’ s “Poor Soul” among the twentieth century ’ s foremost images of the endlessly beleaguered yet comically resilient common man. The circus-based subplot of Shadows and Fog is an homage to the German silent fi lm classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Kaf ka’ s contemporary Robert Weine (1920), which also features a traveling circus or carnival, a sinister doctor, and a murderous somnambulist who turns out to be under his control. Kaf ka ’ s aesthetic, like Weine ’ s, readily accommodates the eccentrics and grotesques who populate such a world, heightening the contrast with the “ordinary” citizens of the beleaguered community. Visually, too, the world of Weine’ s fi lm seems Kaf kaesque: the set contains no right angles (and the streetlights are distinctively Prague ’ s), the logic of the action seems always somehow askew or nightmarish (for reasons that become clear at the end), and the characters are often (semi-) comic grotesques. Kaf ka too used the circus or carnival as a setting, particularly in his short story “The Hunger Artist,” in which the central character turns self- starvation into performance art in a traveling show. The opening scene in which Kleinman is abruptly awakened by the posse authorities echoes the famous opening of The Trial, when K. is roused from sleep to be arrested without explana- tion. The process through which Kleinman tries but fails to discover what’ s actu- ally going on is as futile as Joseph K.’ s eff orts to get answers in The Castle – though neither he nor any Kaf ka protagonist ever asks “Why me?” as Kleinman does. The ending of Shadows and Fog seems brilliantly Kaf kaesque as well, since his novels were unfi nished at his untimely death; Kleinman simply and literally disappears as part of a vanishing act performed by a down-and-out drunken circus magician. Together, they escape the still-on-the-loose strangler themselves – leaving many of the plot’ s issues unresolved. Allen has unreservedly admired the early generations of absurdist playwrights, novelists, and philosophers, although they seem to have had little apparent direct infl uence on the form or content of his own writings:

Kaf ka, a lot I like. And Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard . . . I ’ m also a great fan of Ionesco – I found his plays very amusing and imaginative. And I thought Genet’ s The Balcony was a brilliant play . . . (qtd. in Kelley 1976: 26).

In the same conversation, he praised ’ s “superintelligen[ce]” and the “resona[nce]” of his “sense of absurdity and despair” (26), but his admiration notably and explicitly does not extend to the plays; neither the Irish author’ s mini- malist aesthetic nor his down-but-never-quite-out characters have any signifi cant presence in Allen’ s writings. Edward Albee has been acknowledged among “serious authors [who] were performed on Broadway” in another of Allen’ s interviews (Ciment and Tobin 2006: 136) – and may have been, surprisingly, the most directly infl uential of the aforementioned playwrights. Specifi cally, Allen’ s little-known and rarely produced one-act play, Riverside Drive (Allen 2003 ), shares its dramatic 378 William Hutchings premise with Albee’ s early one-act play Zoo Story (1958, prod. 1959). Both plays begin with seemingly happenstance encounters and perfunctory conversation between male strangers in a public park; gradually, the stranger who began the conversation becomes increasingly menacing until an unexpected act of extreme violence occurs at each play’ s climax. The dialogue in Riverside Drive is unusually spare for a Woody Allen play or fi lmscript, with many lines consisting of only a few words; unlike the conversationalist in Zoo Story (Jerry), his counterpart in Allen’ s play (Fred) knows far more than he has any reason to know about his interlocutor (Jim Swain, a writer), whom he has clandestinely spied on and/or stalked for an unknown period of time. Fred ’ s increasingly disconcerting disclo- sure of details about Jim ’ s personal life, including an extramarital aff air that he seeks to end this day in the park, gives him an air of menace that is more often associated with the works of Harold Pinter – whose name is surprisingly absent in the numerous interviews in which Allen has discussed his assessment of con- temporary authors. Like Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party or Ben and Gus in , Fred seems all too ready to turn violent – as he proves when he murders Jim’ s soon-to-be-ex lover and disposes of her body as if merely doing his friend a favor. Though reminiscent of the plot device in Crimes and Mis- demeanors , the murder in Riverside Drive is fundamentally diff erent from the stab- bing in Zoo Story, the victim of which is the perpetrator’ s interlocutor who has been sharing the park bench throughout the play. Whereas the aesthetic and character types found in Samuel Beckett’ s plays are wholly absent from Woody Allen’ s oeuvre, his “sense of absurdity and despair . . . resonate within” many of his interviews, fi ction, and fi lms. At times, Allen is dis- missive of Beckett and other avant-garde authors:

With a play, when the curtain goes up and people are in garbage cans [i.e., in Beck- ett’ s Endgame ], I know I may admire the idea cerebrally, but it won ’ t mean as much to me. I’ ve seen Beckett, along with many lesser avant gardists, and many contem- porary plays, and I can say yes, that ’ s clever and deep but I don ’ t really care (qtd. in Kakutani 1995 : 207).

However, as revealed in an interview with Robert E. Lauder, Allen’ s views on the nature of human existence might serve as a concise and eloquent introduction to Samuel Beckett ’ s thought – if not, indeed, a “channeling” of Samuel Beckett himself. When asked why he continues to make fi lms in a universe that he regards as meaningless – and what he means by the term “salvation” through creative activity, Allen replied that

you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me . . . it ’ s a brutal, meaningless experi- ence – an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experi- ence, and so it ’ s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 379

the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the fi lms because the problem obsesses me all the time and it ’ s consistently on my mind and I ’ m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making fi lms as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. . . . I think what I ’ m saying is that I ’ m really impotent against the overwhelm- ing bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort (Lauder 2010 ) .

With such similarly singleminded obsessiveness towards their creative work, with such similar mastery of a remarkable variety of media, styles, and forms, with such idiosyncratic humor in the face of the direness of existential existence, with such consistent disregard for the opinions of reviewers and critics over their half- century-long careers, Woody Allen and Samuel Beckett have remarkably much in common, notwithstanding any diff erences about the advantages or disadvan- tages of a minimalist aesthetic and the social class of the characters about whom they respectively choose to write. Insofar as can be concisely defi ned as existentialism played for laughs, Woody Allen has undoubtedly been the foremost American popularizer of such a worldview in the latter half of the twentieth century and over a decade into the twenty-fi rst. Like the silent fi lm comedians whose work he admires – who were themselves avatars of the absurd long before it became a philosophical ideology – he has not only established an iconic comic persona which he has sustained for fi ve decades – far longer than , Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Fatty Arbuckle, or Harold Lloyd – but also directed over 40 feature-length fi lms, authored the screenplays of the vast majority of them, and published dozens of short stories. Among the foremost characteristics of his remarkable oeuvre is its deft literary allusiveness; yet beyond the often subtle literary references that can be found in many of his fi lms and stories, his deeply felt admiration for canoni- cal authors clearly shaped both his dramaturgy as well as his directorial skills. While he may not have a scholarly understanding or an academic’ s theoretical perspective, few creative artists do – nor do they particularly need one. In an era when the alleged coarsening of American culture has been almost ceaselessly deplored, Woody Allen’ s fi lms and short stories have constituted a body of work remarkable not only for its diversity of genres but also its often subtle erudition, the quality and sophistication of which have remained underappreciated for far too long.

Works Cited

Allen , Woody (1969 ) Play It Again, Sam. New York: Samuel French. Allen , Woody (1972 ) Without Feathers. New York: Random House. 380 William Hutchings

Allen , Woody (1980 ) Side Eff ects. New York: Random House. Allen , Woody (2003 ) Riverside Drive. In Woody Allen , Three One-Act Plays: Riverside Drive, Old Saybrook, Central Park West. New York: Random House. Berger , Joseph (2011 ) “Decoding Woody Allen’ s ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” The New York Times (May 27), C1, C7. Björkman , Stig (1993 ) Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Björkman. New York: . Ciment , Michel and Franck Garbarz (2006 ) “Woody Allen: ‘All my fi lms have a connection with magic.’ ” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS : University Press of Mississippi , 169 – 178 . (Original work published 1998.) Denby , David (2011 ) “The better life.” Review of Midnight in Paris. (May 23), 88 – 89 . Flanner , Janet (1972 ) Paris Was Yesterday: 1925–1939. Ed. Irving Drutman . New York: Viking . Gerber , Eve (2011 ) “Woody Allen’ s top fi ve books.” Guardian (May 6). www.guardian.co.uk/ books/2011/may/06/woody-allen-top-fi ve-books (accessed Oct. 3, 2012). Excerpted from Eve Gerber, “Woody Allen on inspiration.” The Browser. http://thebrowser.com/ interviews/woody-allen-on-memory?page= 3 (accessed Oct 26, 2012). Hemingway , Ernest (1964 ) A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’ s Sons. Joyce , James (2006 ) “The Dead.” Dubliners . Ed. Margot Norris . New York: Norton , 151 – 194 . Kakutani , Michiko (1995 ) “Woody Allen: The art of humor I.” Paris Review 135 , 201 – 222 . Kelley , Ken (2006 ) “An interview with the real Woody Allen.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews . Jackson, MS : University Press of Mis- sissippi, 7 – 28 . Lauder , Robert E. (2010 ) “: Woody Allen’ s world.” Comonweal Magazine. www.commonwealmagazine.org/woody (accessed Oct. 3, 2012). Lax , Eric (1991 ) Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf . Lax , Eric (2001 ) “Conversations with Woody.” In Kimball King (ed.), Woody Allen: A Case- book. : Routledge , 153 – 155 . Longstreet , Stephen (1972 ) We All Went to Paris: Americans in the City of Light, 1776–1971. New York: Macmillan . Schickel , Richard (2003 ) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. : Ivan R. Dee. Scott , A.O. (2011 ) “Catch that reference? There’ ll be a quiz.” The New York Times (June 26), AR 1, 12 .

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