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Which Woody Allen?
Colleen Glenn
My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
(Woody Allen, qtd. in Lax 1975)
In Robert Weide’s recent documentary on Woody Allen, film critic F.X. Feeney raises a good question that points to the problem inherent in Weide’s project: “Which Woody Allen?”1 He employs the question to explain that Allen has held several occupations in addition to filmmaking, including author of humorous pieces in The New Yorker, playwright, stand-up comedian, and clarinetist. However, Feeney’s question actually perfectly articulates the complicated figure Woody Allen embodies.
As a star persona, Woody Allen presents a conundrum. By any definition of “star,” Woody Allen should fit the bill. Yet you will probably not find Woody Allen included in a star studies text, and you will not hear his name come up often in conversations about stars. Certainly, his career as a filmmaker generally draws more attention than his star persona; however, this explanation does not seem sufficient considering the magnitude of Allen’s celebrity identity. After all, Allen has been a familiar face on television and film for nearly 50 years and has starred in 34 films. Adding to his powerful star aura, the private or offscreen Allen is virtually indistinguishable from the public/onscreen Allen – so much so that his audience generally perceives the two to be one and the same.
Indeed, Allen has established such a potent screen identity that we regularly refer to the “Woody Allen character” in his films, even when he doesn’t appear in the picture. Depending on the actor playing Allen, the character has sometimes been edgier (Branagh in Celebrity (1998) or more arrogant (Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway (1994) or both (Larry David, Whatever Works (2009)). Allen himself has shifted his performance of Woody Allen over the years as public perception of his identity has changed (he evolved from endearingly hapless to cruel and destructive in Deconstructing Harry (1997)); even his appearance in the documentary on his jazz concert tour, Wild Man Blues (1997), seems calculated to deflect criticism over the scandal by proving he is too boring to warrant attention. Owen Wilson, the latest actor to play the Allen-type in Midnight in Paris (2011), marks a return to the more affable and innocent Allen of earlier years.
As a star persona, therefore, Woody Allen presents a difficult case study because the man we know as Woody Allen comprises so many different real-life and fictional identities that it becomes nearly impossible, despite his iconic public image, to sort out exactly which of the Woody Allens we mean when we say “Woody Allen.” Adding to Feeney’s list, we could add Allan Stewart Konigsberg (the “real” Allen), Woody Allen the screenwriter, Woody Allen the actor, Woody Allen the screen character, Woody Allen the slapstick comedian, Woody Allen the serious artist, Woody Allen the working class Jew from Brooklyn, Woody Allen the upper East Side intellectual snob, Woody Allen the schlemiel, Woody Allen the schmuck, Woody Allen the nihilist, Woody Allen the hopeless romantic, Woody Allen the comic strip character, Woody Allen the jazz musician, and Woody Allen the Knicks fan, aka the regular Joe. By the way, are we talking about Woody Allen pre-scandal or post-scandal? His films, too, reveal numerous and contradictory influences, including the silly, slapstick humor of Bob Hope and Groucho Marx and the meditative styles and existentialist themes of Bergman and Fellini.
Adding to the confusion, although Woody Allen is quite possibly the most consistent film director worldwide in terms of productivity (he has released one film a year for the last 42 years), he has often proven unpredictable in terms of the product he delivers. From year to year, we never know what to expect from Woody Allen. The five films he made just between 1977 and 1982, for example, oscillate wildly between sentimental romantic comedy and serious, existential dramas: Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982).
Like his rapidly swinging tastes in stories, Allen’s career, too, has had its ups and downs, and he has often thwarted expectations by either disappointing audiences greatly or surprising them wonderfully. Most recently, for example, after several lackluster films, Match Point (2005) appeared, effectively reestablishing Allen as an acclaimed director and beginning a new era of his career. While Allen has never fallen off the map, dramatic turns such as this attest to his proclivity to reinvent himself, continually challenging audience expectations.
Although his image is riddled with contradictions such as these, the amorphous nature of Woody Allen the man, the screen character, and the star obscures such fissures and results in a compelling and durable aura that make him a unique figure in cinematic history. In this light, we need to look discretely at the multiple Allens that constitute his star persona.
Woody, a Star?
From the mid-1960s onward, as Woody Allen was establishing himself as filmmaker, he was also establishing himself as a film star. Part of the difficulty in sorting out the multiple personas of Woody Allen includes his slippery classification as a star. Although Allen clearly belongs in the grouping by virtue of his fame and enduring, imitable screen image, he somehow does not seem compatible with the category. Allen possesses few of the traits common to most movie stars. He is not handsome nor sexy nor athletic, and he lacks what is known in Hollywood as the “it” factor: he does not pop from the screen like movie stars do, dominating the mise-en-scène and becoming the focal point of the audience’s attention. (In fact, Allen looks best when playing opposite a dominant actor, providing a kind of comical imbalance to the shot. Positioned against a Diane Keaton or Martin Landau, for example, Allen nearly fades, but the skewed effect is compelling.)
Of course, Allen’s appeal can be attributed to his status as a comedian, as can his ability to compensate for his lack of traditional Hollywood star qualities. Like many comedians, Allen’s physical weaknesses become his advantages as he incorporates them into his act. His forte – playing a neurotic, self-doubting, endearing, witty, sexually charged hypochondriac – developed over years of work in stand-up comedy and then later crystallized as he shifted to a film actor. Though his films evolved from zany comedies to more serious pictures over the years, Allen himself always plays a comedic role, even in his darker pictures, like Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) or Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).
The personality traits for which he became known, in combination with his diminutive size, freckled-face, balding head, and thick-framed glasses, synchronize to form a compelling screen personality that feels genuine. As Sam Girgus has pointed out:
The humor of self-deprecation, the confessional mode of discourse, the revelations of emotional and psychological weakness and impotence, the jokes about masturbation, and the expression of personal venality and misdeeds all insinuate an intensity of authenticity and sincerity that create a veneer of impregnable credibility about his character . . . Personal imperfection makes him more human and real (Girgus 2002: 5).
Girgus’s apt assessment regarding the sense of authenticity that imbues Allen’s image suggests that Woody Allen’s star persona can, at least in part, be defined by his lack of star-like qualities.
In other words, what makes Allen difficult to classify as a star also, ironically, helps explain his star appeal. Our interest in celebrity figures, according to Richard Schickel (1985: 4), is entrenched in what he calls the “illusion of intimacy.” Furthermore, we are encouraged to pursue the “truth” behind the star image (Figure 2.1). Richard Dyer (2004: 2) notes, “It’s the insistent question of ‘really’ that draws us in, keeping us on the go from one aspect to another.” Dyer explains:
How we appear is no less real than how we have manufactured that appearance, or than the “we” that is doing the manufacturing. Appearances are a kind of reality, just as manufacture and individual persons are. However, manufacture and the person . . . are generally thought to be more real than appearance in this culture. Stars are obviously a case of appearance – all we know of them is what we see and hear before us. Yet the whole media construction of stars encourages us to think in terms of “really” . . . which biography, which word-of-mouth story, which moment in which film discloses her as she really was? The star phenomenon gathers these aspects of contemporary human existence together, laced up with the question of “really” (2).
Connecting these two concepts, Erin Meyers (2009: 895) rightly suggests that the “search for the authentic celebrity . . . is closely related to the illusion of intimacy.” Thus, for audiences, Woody Allen provides the desired sensation of familiarity and knowledge of his real personality.2
If Woody Allen conjures a particularly resonant sense of intimacy with the audience by virtue of his seemingly authentic persona, then his frequent use of voiceover and breaking of the fourth wall in his films further intensify the audience’s impression of familiarity. Both devices grant the audience access to his characters’ thoughts, as well as privilege the audience in terms of information (that is, we know more than other characters in the film). These devices in narration coincide with Allen’s “confessional mode of discourse” that Girgus points to as an important component of Allen’s coming off as “real.” When Alvy turns to the camera in Annie Hall (1977), for example, it feels more like documentary than fictional film, adding to Allen’s aura of authenticity.
For his part, Allen does not behave like a star and feels uncomfortable with his celebrity status, further augmenting his ordinary quality. To counteract attention when in public, Allen wears a disguise, pulling a hat down over his ears: “I’ll go out with another actor and he won’t wear a hat or anything. It’s amazing. And I’m walking around with a brown paper bag on my head” (qtd. in Kelley 2006: 23). Notoriously shy, Allen rarely grants interviews and remains extremely modest and self-deprecating about his achievements. “I would consider all the movies that I’ve done failures,” Allen said in 1976. In 2010, by now having earned 21 Academy Award nominations, Allen remarked, “I’m not the great artist that I was certain I would be when I was younger . . . after forty, forty-one films, whatever – you start to realize: it’s just not there” (qtd. in Higginbotham 2010).
Journalists frequently comment on the rather extreme figure of anti-star that Allen cuts. Kathleen Carroll’s interview with Allen in the New York Daily News in 1974 opens with an anecdote: the News receptionist, failing to recognize the man waiting in the lobby wearing a battered Army surplus jacket, phoned an executive, saying, “There’s a bum out here who says he wants to see you.” The bum, of course, was Woody Allen. Carroll (2006: 3) remarks that the first time she met Allen “the News receptionist mistook him for a copy boy and almost sent him out for her lunch.”
The impression of Allen’s authenticity relies not just on his human and fallible attributes in the characters he plays onscreen and the fact that in real life he seems too ordinary to be a celebrity: it also depends on the widespread perception among the public that the “real” Allen is the same man both onscreen and off.
Woody vs. Woody
Separating Woody Allen the director (the “real” Woody) from Woody Allen the film star proves a difficult task. Allen has enjoyed one hundred percent creative control over every film he has made since 1969 and has developed a distinct, auteur style that includes casting actors repeatedly, especially himself. Of course, Woody Allen is not the only director who stars in his own films who has established a distinct screen personality. Several actor-directors, such as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Quentin Tarantino, among others, have forged unique screen identities and have deliberately used that well-known persona in self-reflective ways in their movies. What sets Allen apart is that to many members of his audience, the private Woody Allen, or what we might call the offscreen Woody Allen, is identical to the public or onscreen Woody Allen. The sheer repetition of the appearance of the endearing, self-effacing, neurotic-hypochondriac so frequently played by Allen in his films – virtually interchangeable from movie to movie – only solidified this merging of identities.
For his part, Allen has continually professed that he has little in common with the characters he plays, but the fact that he repeats this protest from interview to interview attests to the public’s perception that he simply plays himself. Allen, cognizant of this confusion, also demonstrates awareness that the slippage between his onscreen and offscreen persona may account for much of his success. In an interview with Eric Lax (2007: 354), Allen speaks frankly of this misunderstanding:
| Eric lax: | [I]t’s so easy for viewers to confuse the person I’m talking with now with the identically dressed person who’s on the screen, who sounds precisely like you. |
| Allen: | Right, they confuse it. That, of course, may be that’s why they come to my movies and I’m lucky they confuse it. I don’t know. But it’s been something I’ve denied my entire life, but they look at me and smile and say, “I know, I know, you’re right, you’re right.” But they don’t really believe it and there’s nothing I can do or say. They think it’s me. |
According to Lax (2007: xii), who has enjoyed an unusually high degree of access to the star for nearly 40 years, “Woody Allen is the antithesis of his screen character, who is usually frantic and in crisis.” Claiming to be far less cerebral or neurotic than the men he plays, Allen describes himself as a “lowbrow” who enjoys “beer and a football game” (qtd. in Itzkoff 2010). “I’m a serious person, a disciplined worker,” Allen states. “I’m not so inept as I depict myself for comic purposes. I know my life is not a series of catastrophic problems that are funny because they are so ludicrous. It’s a much duller existence” (Lax 2007: xii).
Yet the widespread confusion between the public and private Allen is well founded – not only because Allen dresses the same onscreen and off, but also because his fictional narratives contain so many autobiographical elements that it becomes difficult to sort out the real Allen from the fictional one. Take, for example, Lax’s account of interviewing Allen in February of 1973:
Woody and I are being driven to Tarrytown, New York, about an hour north of Manhattan, where he will talk at a film weekend organized by New York Magazine critic Judith Crist. He is wearing corduroy trousers, a cashmere sweater, and an olive green army jacket. He says he is “depressed. I saw [Ingmar Bergman’s] The Seventh Seal yesterday and Cries and Whispers today. I see his films and wonder what I’m doing.” He will soon head to Los Angeles to begin filming Sleeper, and he is not happy about leaving home (Lax 2007: 3).
Despite the distinction Allen would wish to draw between himself and his characters, these lines, out of context, could easily be mistaken as screenplay material from Stardust Memories (1980), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), or any number of movies in which Allen has starred as a neurotic, self-doubting artist.
After all, the facts of his life history – including his birth in Brooklyn, his lifelong adoration of New York City, his working class roots in which his parents held several jobs, his reverence for movies, his interest in the Knicks, his passion for jazz and 1940s music, his occupations as a comedian and writer, his self-developed intellect, his romantic involvement with women who are “out of his league,” his terrible fear of death – are familiar to us because we are familiar with his films, not with his personal history. Significantly, Weide’s documentary on Allen uses footage from Annie Hall (1977) and Radio Days (1987) to illustrate Allen’s childhood, emphasizing the lack of distinction between Allen’s real life and fictional representations. For example, as Allen and his sister describe the many occupations their father held as an unskilled laborer, Weide cuts to a scene in Radio Days where the curious Joe (the young “Allen”), pesters his father to tell him what he does for a living (Figure 2.2).
Well aware that he draws upon his life for inspiration when writing, Allen distinguishes between autobiography and self-expression. According to Allen,
[M]y movies have been very self-expressive; that’s mistaken for autobiography. They’re expressive of observations of mine or feelings of mine, but what you’re seeing on the screen much more often than not are total fabrications, but those fabrications are in the service of my feelings (qtd. in Lax 2007: 311).
More accurately, we might say that Allen himself is in the service of those fabrications. His popular screen alter ego took on a life of its own, placing Allen in the precarious position of having to cater to his creation.
Describing himself as a “silly comic” and “a lower comic,” Allen displays frank awareness of his range as an actor, claiming he can only play in comedies, and, furthermore, that the comedies which feature him tend towards light and frivolous due to the fact that this style is the comic tradition in which he is most confident and comfortable (Lax 2007: 42). Allen has felt restricted as to what kinds of roles he can play:
I’m not like Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro. These guys go out and do miracles on the screen. I’m a perfectly believable actor in my small range. So I can play a college professor, I can play a shrink, I could play an intellectual, even though I’m not an intellectual, or I can play a lowlife. I can play like Broadway Danny Rose or I could play a cheesy little bookmaker or a grifter of some sort because I can handle that. Me, the character for real, is closer to the sleaze ball, but I can act both of them (qtd. in Reagan 2008).
Yet the fact is his limitations as an actor have actually led to an incredible consistency in terms of the characters he plays, crystallizing Allen’s screen persona with each repetition onscreen. So similar are the characters Allen plays in each film that, other than differing plots, the Woody Allen role typically varies little. Even in films as diverse in subject matter and style as Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Shadows and Fog (1991), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Woody Allen plays virtually the same part. No wonder, then, that his audience believes him to be playing himself. The screen character offers the kind of consistency that a real person does; few screen characters (outside of a series) provide the same degree of stability.
Allen has felt pressured to incorporate the Woody Allen character into his screenplays, an encumbrance that comes partly from audience expectations of what it means to see a Woody Allen film. As Allen explains,
It’s hard to write good films and accommodate my character. It’s always been a problem. That’s why I’d just as soon keep out of my movies in the future and then I won’t burden myself and I won’t burden the audience and I’m free to do any movie I want and not have to face the problem of creating a good story and one that also has a funny part for a limited actor – me (qtd. in Lax 2007: 55).
Indeed, when asked if he would appear in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Allen responded,
No, it’s too much of a strain on me in the writing stage. I can only write a certain kind of film when I’m in it. When I sat down to write Match Point, it was refreshing. I never had to think, What’s the part for me? I just wrote scene after scene (qtd. in Lax 2007: 55).
The burnout Allen experienced from feeling obligated to write a part for himself into his screenplays undoubtedly influenced his decision to cast himself less frequently in recent years, but it is also true that it became quite difficult for Woody Allen to continue playing Woody Allen after 1992. Some of this can be attributed to age, especially in the last few years – the 75-year-old Allen is, by now, less castable in certain roles.3 But one reason we saw an alteration in Allen’s screen appearances in the 1990s had to do with the severe disruption of his heretofore-steady star image.
Woody, Post-Scandal
While the slippage between the real Allen and the fictional Allen helped secure success in defining a distinct and powerful screen aura, that same slippage made the scandal concerning his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn all the more disturbing for his audience.4 Actress Mia Farrow had long been linked with Allen, and the two were raising several children together. Farrow’s discovery of her longtime partner’s infidelity was harrowing by any standards: in this case, the “other woman” was her own 21-year-old adopted daughter, 35 years Allen’s junior. Farrow and Allen’s messy split, as well as subsequent allegations of sexual abuse concerning another adopted daughter, Dylan, age seven – sent shockwaves through the media and the public.5
By playing a starring role in this highly broadcasted scandal, Allen essentially broke his own type cast, prompting confusion among film critics and fans who grappled to incorporate this new information with the Woody Allen persona they had known for nearly 30 years. A headline in the New York Times written by Caryn James (1992) captured people’s feelings of betrayal as it proclaimed, “And Here We Thought We Knew Him.”
And yet, wasn’t part of the horrified reaction among fans due to a recognition of familiar themes in his work? How many Woody Allen films feature young, beautiful female ingénues who yearn romantically for a significantly older (and unattractive) male mentor figure? And how many of his films feature infidelity as one of the basic plot points? Nearly every film he has made since the late 1970s – Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Another Woman (1988), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Alice (1990), Husbands and Wives (1992), Deconstructing Harry (1997), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Celebrity (1998), Match Point (2005), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Whatever Works (2009), You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Midnight in Paris (2011) – and these are just the most obvious ones – deal with one or both of these major themes, themes that now define his life history in addition to his film catalog.
Contrary to what we might expect, the ambiguity between the real Allen and the fictional/public Allen did not dissolve due to the scandal but rather seemed to become more muddled. Allen’s release of Husbands and Wives (1992) shortly following the scandal starring Allen and Mia Farrow in a failing marriage further encouraged scrutiny of his offscreen behavior. Despite the tremendous upheaval occurring in his personal life, Allen continued to work and star in films. In an unsettling moment in Weide’s documentary, six people, including Allen himself, comment upon his “ability to compartmentalize” his private problems and produce quality work. Weide draws attention to this odd moment of repetition by overlapping the identical comments; ultimately, this montage highlights the disconnect between Allen’s capacity to see his private life and work as quite separate and the public’s inability to do so. Expressing her feelings of resentment upon the debut of Mighty Aphrodite (1995), New York Times writer Maureen Dowd wrote,
[I]t was the correspondence between Mr. Allen’s work and Mr. Allen’s life that made him so popular. He was the same man in both. He wore the same clothes, ate at the same restaurants, thumbed the same paperbacks, admired the same music, hated the same mother and dated the same women. Artists, certainly, do not all have admirable lives. But what makes Mr. Allen so irretrievably creepy is the way he keeps revising his image in his movies while denying that his movies are about himself (Dowd 1995: 13).
“To Allen’s dismay, according to Dowd, the scandal actually intensified the public’s interest in the relationship between his private life and his films,” Girgus states (2002: 149). Allen’s situation of being understood as one and same man onscreen and off led to the creation of a potent star persona – a recognizable, continuous aura that guaranteed returning fans and box office success. But this same overlap also resulted in rigidity in terms of what other images he could project while maintaining a consistent star charisma.
To be sure, Allen is not entirely unique in this set of circumstances; other celebrities have found themselves in the difficult bind of balancing their public images with their private lives. Much like Allen in many ways, Charlie Chaplin became a repeated target of criticism due to his multiple marriages and divorces, as well as a (false) paternity suit waged by a former mistress (Robinson 1983: 137–140). He, too, became a kind of slave to his own screen persona, the beloved and iconic Little Tramp, with whom he was synonymous and from whom audiences did not like to see him stray. Unlike Chaplin, however, Allen could not distance himself from his alter ego by removing his costume, mustache, bowler hat, or by opening his mouth. Instead of splitting into a public and private Woody Allen after the scandal, Allen’s already blurred onscreen and offscreen personas further imploded into one another, ironically affirming that the public/private division, at least in the public’s eye, did not exist for Allen.
Interruptions to continuity in star personae are always risky. A critical component of movie stardom includes the ability to project an enduring and potent screen image over time. When a star strays too far from his or her image, it is almost as if a contract has been broken between celebrity and audience. And while this phenomenon can occur when a star plays a character far different from his or her usual type, audience backlash tends to be a greater issue when the public and private images of the star clash. Graeme Turner (2004: 4) argues that celebrities’ “private lives will attract greater public interest than their professional lives.” The incessant interest in celebrities’ private lives corresponds to the public’s drive to discover the authentic individual behind the public persona.
With most stars, we could expect that an aberration from their established image would result in a kind of bifurcation, such that we would begin to separate the character onscreen from the real-life actor. Take Tom Cruise, for example. Cruise’s couch-jumping antics on Oprah and subsequent bizarre interviews have resulted in a division whereby we perceive Cruise’s heroic movie characters as existing quite separately from the increasingly eccentric actor. By contrast, something quite different occurred with Woody Allen post-scandal: he did not split into two, but splintered into many Allens.
Playing Woody Allen
Rather than force us to reconsider the character, the scandal forced us to reread the artist. The Woody Allen character persisted, but now reflected its creator in a more pervasive way, always reminding us of the man behind the image. The real-life Allen, and all of his baggage, became part of the metacommentary of his pictures.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Deconstructing Harry (1995), a brilliantly constructed film that brings the issue of the haziness between the real/offscreen Allen and the fictional/onscreen Woody Allen into sharp focus, even as it ultimately confirms the ambiguity between the two. Allen stars as Harry Block, a successful novelist who exhibits little distinction between his real life and the fiction he writes. The narrative follows Block over the course of a couple of days, as he struggles with writer’s block, runs into various ex-wives and lovers, and journeys upstate to his old college, Adair, where he will be honored (even though he was expelled).
From its opening moments, Deconstructing Harry feels different than previous Allen films. The editing is jarring, with abrupt cuts and repeated sequences that move between present time and scenes from Block’s novel with no transitions. The style of nonlinear storytelling and rapid scene changes emphasizes the ambiguity between Block’s fiction and his real life, and indeed, most of what we learn about his personal history comes from the depicted scenes of his novels where he and the other members of his life are barely masked as characters. (Weide’s documentary on Allen, as noted earlier, follows a similar pattern.) Block’s family members, ex-wives, and ex-lovers complain that, in addition to mistreating them, he exploits and humiliates them by incorporating their private lives into his novels with no regard for the consequences this wreaks on their lives.
Harry Block marks a drastic departure from the Woody Allen character. (The frequency of his use of the word “cunt” alone is jarring – a far cry from the “Woody we knew” who may have been amusingly depraved but never misogynistic.) Nevertheless, crucial vestiges of the familiar Woody Allen character persist, including a repertoire of one-liners and comebacks and a hilariously depicted obsession with death. The sum result of this combination is interesting: the figure is the same, the gestures and themes are familiar, but the Woody Allen character has mutated into a kind of extreme (bad) version of himself. In fact, Block complains of this very problem: as he breaks into a panic before the ceremony at the college, Cookie assures him she’s had to talk down many men who were overdosing on various drugs; he quickly corrects her, “That’s not what it is. I’m OD’ing on myself.”
Block’s statement could serve as an accurate assessment of Deconstructing Harry as a whole: Allen the artist looms over the picture, infusing the work with a nearly unbearable exaggeration of self-reflexivity (Figure 2.3). Later, when asked by one of the English professors at Adair what his next protagonist is like, Block responds: “It’s me, thinly disguised. In fact, l don’t think I should disguise it anymore. It’s me.” The film ends as he gets inspiration for a novel about “a guy who can only function in art, not life” (a confession he has repeated about himself throughout the film) and begins typing his next novel. Block is liberated from writer’s block when he fully admits that he is the central character in all of his fiction as well as when he imagines that he receives accolades from his characters, contradictory events that sum up what will be an enduring lack of distinction between Block’s real life and fictional world.
Girgus (2002: 152–153) reads Allen’s playing of a “truly miserable antihero” as a clever approach that allows Allen to incorporate his critics’ and fans’ condemnation into his film rather than attempt to counter it. “In the face of the negatively antiheroic character Harry Block, the focus of the critical discussion about Deconstructing Harry can concentrate on studying the significance and effectiveness of Allen’s creative effort rather than upon [himself].” But, while the screen Woody Allen’s self-castigation, so to speak, might have preempted some of the public outrage directed at the real Allen following the scandal, it also highlights the real Allen’s omnipresent presence in his fictional works.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Allen has demonstrated ambivalence concerning whether the film contains autobiographical material. When talking with Eric Lax about the film in 2006, Allen denied any resemblance between Harry Block and himself:
I know people think the film is about me and I think that is funny because the film’s not remotely about me. I thought when the picture was over that I would say, “Oh, yes, this is definitely about me,” and not go through the usual dance where I’m saying, “It’s not me, it’s not the way I work, I’ve never been blocked, I’ve never kidnapped my kid, I wouldn’t have the nerve to act like that, I don’t sit home and drink and have hookers coming over to the house all night.” If I was being honored by an old school – which I wouldn’t be – I probably wouldn’t show up. Apart from the ability to write anytime, there was nothing in the movie at all that was me, but the path of least resistance was to say yes. I’ve given up trying to say no (qtd. in Lax 2007: 53).
But Allen said something quite different about the film in 1998, shortly after its release:
As a matter of fact, [Harry Block] is a character I feel within myself. I could never portray an astrophysicist or an engineer. I wouldn’t know how to behave. Whereas I feel capable of portraying a writer or an actor, or anyone who expresses himself by the word and by recourse to fiction. The same thing happened with Annie Hall, where I played the part of an actor who was also a writer and who, at the end of the film, started writing a play about his breakup with Annie. Because the dividing line between life, my own life and art is so indistinct, so fine that it’s an obsessional theme with me (qtd. in Ciment and Tobin 2006: 171).
Without a doubt, Deconstructing Harry raises questions concerning the “indistinct” line between Allen’s life and his art. Peter Bailey points out that despite the unorthodox content of Allen’s movie, the tenuous boundary between an artist’s life and his creative works has occupied the subject of several Woody Allen films. “The most unequivocally peevish of Allen’s depictions of artists,” he argues, “Deconstructing Harry represents less a new direction for Allen than a concentrated dramatic reprisal of his previous films’ indictments against them” (Bailey 2001: 4). Now, 14 years post-Harry, we can read it as belonging to a period in the evolution of Allen’s star persona whereby multiple Woody Allens begin to exist simultaneously. Deconstructing Harry, for example, contains multiple Woody Allens, including Harry Block, the fictional Harry Block (the one we see in the scenes from his novels), as well as the star Woody Allen, who complicates the revisionary character with the reminiscence of the Woody Allen “we knew.”
Woody Allen has played “Woody Allen” less and less in the last 20 years, but he has not stopped writing the character into his screenplays: he has started casting other actors. Several actors have played the Woody Allen character, including John Cusack, Kenneth Branagh, Larry David, and Owen Wilson. Instead of offscreen and onscreen Allens, we now have onscreen and onscreen Allens. Like refractions of his screen personality, these other Woody Allens channel his aura and bend to new and diverse directions.
Casting other actors as “Woody Allen” has allowed Allen to reinvent his screen character and explore his boundaries. Though each actor interprets the character differently, they clearly evoke “Woody Allen” in their performances, and by doing so, they draw on our expectations for the character. Even before Deconstructing Harry, Allen placed John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway (1994) in the starring role of David Shayne, a playwright struggling between his idealistic vision and business realities. Shayne not only finds himself compromising his creative impulses in order to make the play a Broadway success, but also discovers that he possesses less aptitude for writing than a mobster who attends rehearsals as the bodyguard of one of the actresses. Although he spins the character slightly differently (Cusack comes across as more confident and temperamental), Cusack’s anxious rants, frequent hand gestures, nightmares, and self-doubting neuroses unmistakably channel “Woody Allen.” When meeting the mobster who has agreed to fund the play, for instance, Shayne nearly has a panic attack; looking for an exit, he makes a wry comment that he needs to go “check into a sanitarium.” Later in the film, a fellow artist assuages Shayne’s guilt over cheating on his fiancée by telling him, “An artist creates his own moral universe,” a line that echoes dialogue in Stardust Memories (1980) and Deconstructing Harry (1997). Ultimately, Shayne must choose between art and life: he gives up his work as a New York City playwright in favor of marriage and the Midwest and declares, “I’m free.”
Celebrity (1998) features Kenneth Branagh in the leading role of Lee Simon, a would-be novelist whose trepidation about putting himself on the line as a serious writer confines him to churning out travel pieces and celebrity profiles. Like other Woody Allens, Simon is neurotic, alternatively frantic and charming, and has great success with women, including a movie star, a supermodel, and a waitress several years his junior. Quick-talking and flirtatious with lots of hand movement, Branagh invokes the personality of Woody Allen by imitating Allen’s gestures and turns of phrase as well as his trademark diction. In many scenes, he is a dead ringer for Allen, and the film encourages the connection. As Simon flatters the supermodel (Charlize Theron), she tells him she is “polymorphously perverse,” duplicating the line Alvy speaks to Annie in Annie Hall (1977). Lee Marshall of the Independent reported, “[Branagh] doesn’t just put on a New York accent, or attempt to method-act his way into the mind of the successful but frustrated journalist. He becomes Woody Allen – down to the smallest inflection, the slightest gesture” (Marshall 1999). Marshall continues, “Pressed, Branagh suggests it was Allen himself who insisted on such a close reading: ‘He directs, sometimes, very specifically. He’ll give you a line reading and he’ll do it and you’ll do him, copy him.’ ”
To be sure, Branagh, an actor and director best known for his Shakespearean film adaptations, impresses his own unique trademark on the Woody Allen persona. His handsomeness alone creates a considerably different Woody Allen, one who is considerably less sympathetic. Whereas Woody Allens played by Allen often got a pass on questionable behavior due to his disarming feebleness (this is true of films prior to Deconstructing Harry, such as Manhattan (1979) in which a 44-year-old Allen dates a high-schooler, or A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), in which Allen cheats on his wife with an ex-flame), Branagh, by contrast, secures little compassion from the audience by virtue of his projection of strength and competence. In fact, Branagh plays Simon on the sleazy side, his arrogance making his infidelity and constant straying from his partners inexcusable, even if he is experiencing a midlife crisis. Simon, however, is “punished” for his decisions, finally landing with a young woman who blatantly refuses to commit to him.
Despite the nuances of Branagh’s interpretation, his astounding imitation of Allen borders on the uncanny. The premise of his performance rests on our familiarity with the Woody Allen character, a personality which, by the time of the release of Celebrity, had been duplicated, revised, and distorted in a number of ways. The mimicry at work in the film creates an unsettled feeling that reflects the conflicted terrain of the Woody Allen persona itself.
Branagh’s memorable performance of the Woody Allen character stands out as the most derivative, but the multiple Woody Allens include Larry David (Whatever Works, 2009) and Owen Wilson (Midnight in Paris, 2011) as well. Both David and Wilson structure the Woody character more closely with their own star personae; however, they also reprise him in interesting ways. Like Woody Allen, Larry David’s onscreen and offscreen identities are so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable. Thus, David’s performance doubles the number of star identities at play, even as it dilutes the force of the Woody aura by virtue of David’s current Curb Your Enthusiasm notoriety, in which he plays “Larry David.” David, as Boris, a misanthrope semi-recluse who is a genius in quantum mechanics, explodes in sporadic Allen-esque moments of panic, fear, and OCD behavior, but David’s distinctive gruff voice and dominant attitude make for an acrimonious (albeit humorous) take on the Woody figure.
Wilson, by contrast, plays his Woody Allen (Gil) with his signature wide-eyed, endearing sense of wonderment. A disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter, Gil wishes to be a novelist, but remains locked in his profession due to writer’s block and discouragement from his selfish fiancée. With the assistance of illustrious writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (whom he meets in magical nightly transports to Paris of the 1920s), Gil manages to achieve his goal. Compared to other Woody Allens, Wilson’s character seems far more balanced and optimistic. Yet, the Woody character persists: talking almost incessantly, Wilson recreates the quickly-smitten loveable loser throughout the picture, particularly in his scenes with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), in which he fawns over her like Alvy over Annie. Allen’s fear of mortality crops up in Gil as well: When Hemingway bluntly asks him if he fears death, Gil replies, “Yeah, I do. I would say it’s my greatest fear.”
These multiple manifestations of Woody Allen can exist because of the degree to which he is enshrined in our collective memory. While the various Woody Allens make him a messy persona to unscramble, they also shore up his legacy, permitting it to continue and evolve in a way that would be impossible for Allen to do by himself.
Seeing Allen as an extreme case of a star persona that reconciles a number of conflicting identities can help us to recognize that stars rarely conform to the homogenized monolithic figures we make them out to be. That so many of Allen’s films deal with what it means to be a celebrity as well as the blurring between the public image and private person only compounds the sense of self-reflexivity that repeats and changes throughout his body of work. The star we know as Woody Allen contains so many images that, finally, it loses coherence. But, what it loses in consistency, it gains in flexibility, allowing “Woody Allen” to mutate infinitely from film to film. Allen may cheat death after all.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Sam Girgus, Alan Nadel, and Ramyar Rossoukh for their helpful feedback and insightful comments on drafts of this chapter.
Notes
1 Robert Weide, Woody Allen: A Documentary, American Masters series; Whayduck Productions (original air date: Nov. 20, 2011, PBS.)
2 I deal with the 1992 Soon-Yi scandal that influenced the perception of Allen later in the chapter.
3 Allen has discussed, for instance, how it no longer works to cast himself opposite a young actress as a romantic pairing: “I can’t be the love interest any more. I can’t play opposite Scarlett Johansson, it’s not appropriate” (qtd. in Cadwallader 2011).
4 For an in-depth discussion of how the scandal affected Woody Allen’s image, see Girgus (2002).
5 The allegations of abuse against Dylan were eventually dropped, but Allen lost custody rights to the children, and his children severed all contact with him. Allen and Soon-Yi married in 1997 and have two adopted children.
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