Although Woody Allen’s films differ dramatically in content and tone, there are recurring themes that permeate his work. These themes reappear again and again, yet each time they are handled somewhat differently. It’s as though Allen has engaged in a decades-long debate with himself, an ongoing dialectic in which he presents all sides of the arguments concerning the most profound philosophical issues. This book is a systematic analysis of these themes as they appear in a representative selection of Allen’s films including those that I consider to be his most influential.
The reader might wonder why I don’t analyze all of Allen’s films rather than a mere eighteen. The answer is that I already have. In 1997, in the hardback book Woody Allen’s Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on his Serious Films, I presented detailed analyses of all thirty of Allen’s films to that date, from What’s New Pussycat? (1965) to Mighty Aphrodite (1995). Running to more than four hundred pages, that book examined Allen’s films in exhaustive detail, often engaging in scene by scene analyses of Allen’s most important films.
This book explores those same themes in a shorter format both in terms of the number of films examined and the degree of detail presented. It has two intended audiences: students in undergraduate courses and lay readers interested in Allen’s films who do not desire to immerse themselves in the comprehensive approach of the hardback. As a textbook, this edition might be used in a variety of contexts, including film courses that take a more theoretical approach and philosophy courses that use film to illustrate their content. Although the philosophers discussed in this volume range from Plato and Aristotle to Buber and Sartre, the emphasis here, as in Allen’s films, is on those philosophers usually associated with the movement known as existentialism.
Philosophers argue about everything, including labels like “existentialism.” Existentialism is a name given to a philosophical movement that became popular in the decades following World War II. The philosopher most associated with this movement was the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre. While Sartre may not have coined the term, he was well known for his willingness to describe himself as an “existentialist.”
In fact, in France and much of Europe, Sartre became as recognizable as a movie star or a sports hero. In the United States, the image of the gloomy existentialist, dressed all in black with a beard or goatee, drinking wine in a smoke-filled jazz club, became a cliché on TV and in films. This image also became associated in people’s minds with the Beatniks of the 1950s.
For a classic example of this popular stereotype, take a look at the 1957 film Funny Face, in which a sophisticated Fred Astaire transforms Audrey Hepburn from an unhappy beat existentialist into a glamorous fashion model. This story was a variation on a theme found in an earlier film, the wonderful 1939 Ninotchka, in which a sophisticated Melvyn Douglas transforms Greta Garbo from a dour Communist functionary into a glamorous woman of the world. Indeed, for many, the popular images of the existentialist and the revolutionary Marxist blur together, partially because Sartre himself attempted to combine the two.
But Sartre’s atheistic approach is not the only philosophy that has been labeled as “existential.” In the wake of its postwar popularity, a number of commentators, such as Walter Kaufmann and William Barrett, made the argument that existentialism comprised a set of themes or concerns; and that, perhaps, a number of philosophers who wrote before Sartre, and had never even heard the word “existentialism,” could accurately be described as important influences on its development. Two of the philosophers often named in this connection are the nineteenth century theorists Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.
In addition, in their books on existentialism, these same commentators also included twentieth-century philosophers who may have heard of existentialism but either did not actively associate themselves with the movement or actually denied that their philosophy should be identified with it at all. For example, both Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus were very well aware of Sartre’s philosophy and publicly disassociated themselves from it. Yet, in Kaufmann and Barrett’s books on existentialism, and in many of those which followed, both Heidegger and Camus are discussed extensively in the context of existentialism, even though Kaufmann, for one, is careful to acknowledge that neither philosopher considered himself to actually be an “existentialist.”
Further, there are those philosophers of the twentieth century who were willing, or even eager, to accept the label of “existentialist” despite the fact that their philosophies would appear, on the face of them, to differ significantly from Sartre on important issues such as religious faith. In this group could be placed such contemporary religious philosophers as Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Tillich, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
So, given all this, what does it mean to say that someone is an existentialist? According to Walter Kaufmann, “The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life—that is the heart of existentialism” (Kaufmann, 1975, p. 12). He also says, “The existentialist has taken up the passionate concern with questions that arise from life, the moral pathos, and the firm belief that, to be serious, a philosophy has to be lived” (Kaufmann, 1975, p. 51).
From this, existentialism sounds like no more than an attitude, a rebellious and passionate commitment to living, but one with no particular beliefs. Yet it must be more than just that or all rebellious and passionate people would be existentialists, a group which could arguably include both Socrates and Adolf Hitler! No one who knows anything about the movement would seriously consider either of those two to be members, however, so we need to know more about what makes someone an existentialist.
In his 1996 book Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction, L. Nathan Oaklander points out that:
Books on existentialism often stress certain themes that are shared by a variety of philosophers who are called “existentialists.” One common theme is the emphasis on human freedom and the related Sartrean slogan that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that we have no prepackaged essence or nature, but that what we are is what we choose to be. Another theme stressed by existentialists is the contingency of the world, the fact that the universe has no meaning and is absurd. A third is that there are no objective values [Oaklander, 1996, p. 7].
This helps, but it still doesn’t make entirely clear what most existentialists agree on and what they are most likely to disagree about among themselves. I believe that one of the best sources for clarifying these two issues lies in an analysis of the themes found in the films of Woody Allen.
But before beginning this analysis, I must stop to answer an obvious question: why should we take Woody Allen seriously? This is precisely the issue with which I begin the next chapter, the Introduction.
One of the hardest parts of preparing this abridged and revised paperback edition of my book was deciding which films would be covered and which would not. In limiting the number of films covered, I’m sure I’ve left out films that some consider Allen’s best (e.g., Stardust Memories or Zelig) while including films which others may never have heard of (e.g., Another Woman or “Oedipus Wrecks”) or which some consider to be of little interest (e.g., Husbands and Wives or Deconstructing Harry). While I did consult with many people in making my choices, ultimately I decided which Allen films to include or exclude based on my estimation of each film’s contribution to the philosophical dialectic which I claim exists throughout Allen’s work.
For example, even though Another Woman did not receive much attention when it was released in 1988, I consider it to be one of Allen’s finest serious films, better than Interiors or September yet representative of the tone found in both. As in this case, I have often chosen to pick one film to stand in for a number of similar films while making references to elements from those other films in the course of my discussion. So, in the chapter on Deconstructing Harry, I make frequent references to Stardust Memories, a film I argue it resembles in many ways, almost to the point of being a remake.
Of the films which have appeared since the publication of the hardback, I have chosen to include only Deconstructing Harry as the rest seem to me to be so derivative (e.g., Everybody Says I Love You, Celebrity) or light (e.g., Small Time Crooks), that the issues they raise are already discussed sufficiently in the discussions of the earlier films. One possible exception is Sweet and Lowdown, which I did strongly consider including; however, I ultimately decided its similarities to other films such as Bullets Over Broadway and Deconstructing Harry were strong enough to make its inclusion redundant. Why exclude any films one might ask? Why not simply expand the earlier hardback to include all the films that have appeared since Mighty Aphrodite? The answer to this question is primarily practical: A number of colleagues, including Maurice Yacowar (author of the wonderful Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen), have asked me for a lower-cost paperback edition of the book that would be appropriate for use as a textbook in their courses. Once I started the process, however, I decided that this revision was very beneficial. I believe that the book has benefited from this tightening of the chapters by paring them to their most essential elements.
On the other hand, if you should become interested in exploring the longer versions of the chapters or if you wish to see the chapters that cover films not included in this edition, you could of course refer to the earlier hardback.