I mean to raise the question of comic faith in Woody Allen, show how it bears on the way he sees death, and focus on the relationship of comedy, tragic action, absurdity, faith, art, and morbidity in six of his best twenty-first-century films. Here’s the nub of my argument: Thesis: comic faith. Antithesis: tragic history, tragic facts (murder, suicide, frivolous warfare, aging and dying, despair, and the cruel amorality of collective human existence) and a catharsis of justified misanthropy, bitterness, and nostalgia. Synthesis: late Woody.
Everyone knows that Allen found his identity in comic vision and made himself an artist through his sense of humor. With his brilliant comic mind, he shows in his movies what it can mean to be funny and how you can use a memorable comic persona to make art and define life. Ultimately, though, the question that haunts him throughout his career and becomes even more pronounced as he moves closer to his own non-Hollywood ending is whether comedy and a vocation for it really do matter at all. Do suffering and death finally obliterate the value of any creative comic faith?
Comic faith is what some witty, creative people can have – or try to have – instead of God and/or eternal bliss. I define the term as the particular insight and sense of the world that allows you to find or create mirth, to justify life, and to imagine the means and desirability of its continual regeneration.1 Sometimes that’s what you see in Allen’s films. For him, God never worked and orthodox religion is a sham and a scam when it comes to any rebate on the death tax. His identity as a filmmaker increasingly is dedicated to showing the absurd historical truth about the moral horrors and the meaninglessness of existence. He’s a man whose imagination keeps coming back to the decisive fact of life: our species is subject to, conscious of, and defined by its last thing, death. For him, the gift-wrapping of existence with jokes and joys is always stamped with a skull-and-crossbones, and his moviemaking reflects his will to bring to the subject of death the power of comic imagination. From Allen’s twentieth-century films, here (chosen from scores) are two examples: (1) the vision of antihero Boris (Woody) at the end of Love and Death (1975), after his firing-squad execution, prancing along through trees in a lovely riverside setting to great Prokofiev music, led by a white-robed, cavorting figure of Death (the dance of death thus turned into a dance of life); (2) suicidal Mickey (Woody Allen) in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) finding his raison to continue d’être while watching the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup mock the idiocy of war. In the changing twenty-first-century scene, his comic vision oscillates, fades, and revives in protean forms. Comic faith endures, but not without showing how age, history and devaluation of life can savage it. Like many Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others, Allen can practice a faith without always believing in it.
In Manhattan (1979), Ike (Woody Allen) famously sets out a basis for comic faith:
Well, all right, why is life worth living? That’s a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? Okay. Um, for me, oh, I would say . . . what, Groucho Marx to name one thing . . . uh, and Willie Mays, and, ummm, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and ummm . . . um, Swedish movies, naturally . . . Sentimental Education by Flaubert . . . uh, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra . . . umm, those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne . . . And Tracy’s face of course (Allen 1982).2
So here, it seems, a brilliant comedian, physical grace, music, movies, books, performing talent, great painting, and the loveliness of a woman can justify existence. But, as time goes by, he’s more doubtful, and as the long post-World War II optimism of the American twentieth century has faded into the new century, he has to keep readjusting his point of view to test and keep faith.
Allen’s output by now is so vast – more than 40 pictures – that only a few can take all it in, much less remember it all. I want to concentrate here on what he’s tried to do for you lately in his great signature films Melinda and Melinda (2004), Match Point (2005), Cassandra’s Dream (2007) Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Whatever Works (2009), and – my coda – Midnight in Paris (2011). I’m arguing that, contrary to much “conventional” opinion, Woody Allen, deep into his seventies, has made, in the first decade of this century, a remarkable string of excellent, intellectually challenging, original films that include some of his finest work. And (as of 2011) he shows no signs of stopping. These movies render both the fragility and high significance of any viable comic vision for a new age and open up tensions and absurd, terrible links between comic and tragic visions that have shaped life and literature. He’s often been scorned in the last 20 years for being out-of-date and repetitive.3 But, in the unbrave new world of perpetual wars of choice, occupation of distant lands, out-of-control narcissism, ignorance of the past, subprimal greed-is-good (with its global “derivative” of the colossal inequality of wealth and hope), the de facto collapse of both Marxist and “free” market ideologies, the scary zeal of fundamentalist religions, neotribalism, the reverence for the military, rampant anti-intellectualism, the news media’s devotion to trivia and ranting incivility, the heartbreak of political incompetence, and the need both to confront and escape from such a world, Allen now looks to have tottered right back into fashion – not behind but ahead of the times.
In his twenty-first-century work, Allen looks hard at what it means – and whether it helps – to imagine life through the categorizing terms of comedy and tragedy. That “binary” subject inspired him because it gave him a way to dramatize primal contradictions in the new century: he’s out to show the schizophrenic nature of postmodern life. Melinda and Melinda (2004) is full of wit, sad wisdom, and sophisticated satire, but nothing matters more about it than the way Allen uses it to illuminate that “binary.” He bases his movie on the premise that people, whether they know it or not, adapt and use preexisting narrative and cultural forms (for example, comic, tragic, romantic, slave narrative, etc.) to chart their paths through life. The structure of Melinda allowed Allen to begin getting deep into the conflicting, yet resonating, modes of the tragic absurd.
Melinda and Melinda is one of Allen’s most theoretical films: it interweaves comic and tragic visions of the same protagonist – Melinda (Radha Mitchell) in two different stories. It opens with a prologue-dialogue between two dramatists – one writes comedies, the other tragedies:
“The essence of life isn’t comic. It’s tragic. There’s nothing intrinsically funny about the terrible facts of human existence.”
“I disagree. Philosophers call it absurd because, in the end, all you can do is laugh. Human aspirations are so ludicrous and irrational. I mean, if the underlying reality of our being was tragic, my plays would make more than yours because my stories would resonate more profoundly with the human soul.”
“[And] I mean, it’s exactly because tragedy hits on the truly painful essence of life that people run to my comedies for escape. . . . Tragedy confronts, comedy escapes.”
This talk sounds likes an inner dialogue going on in Woody Allen. Reality – and not just in a work of art – may depend on aesthetic perspective, i.e., on what artists (Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world”) through time have infused into the cultural imagination.
Each writer then imagines a different Melinda story, and the film moves back and forth between them. A desperate, bedraggled Melinda crashes her college friend’s dinner party and shows up as a failed wife, failed mother, failed adulterer, failed friend, failed recovering alcoholic, failed suicide (though she keeps on trying), and a failed psychiatric patient who had to wear a straitjacket. But she is a successful murderer who got off shooting her cad lover. At the end of her story, jilted by a good man who likes somebody better, she tries to leap out the window, but, the last we see of her, she’s been subdued and looks out from behind a prison-bar grid – an image that, at best, promises more straitjacket time.
A fey, “normal” Melinda provides a comic “escape” from downer Melinda. Single, winning, and loved by an unhappily married, funny, much put-upon, nice-guy (Will Ferrell), she at last makes him and herself happy in Allen’s little divorces-are-made-in heaven counterplot.
Melinda and Melinda shows the conflict in the filmmaker between life as full of comic possibilities and life as so painfully skewed it seeks the death of self or others. He doesn’t try to harmonize these visions, but instead makes vivid the idea that any single person, depending on luck, might play such different roles. It’s confusing, though, to follow the two Melindas, and that’s the point. It’s no longer easy to keep tragic and comic perspectives and identities apart, but it’s also hard to unify them. The film ends with dialogue between the two writers:
“We hear a little story, a few hearsay details. You mold them into a tragic tale. . . . And that’s how you see life.”
“Whereas . . . you put them into an amusing romance. . . . It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
But for Allen, a beholder has two eyes, and art must “see” both comic and tragic visions. They depend on one another – like “hot” and “cold.”
Allen found the “tragic” Melinda more interesting, and that’s how she comes across.4 Through her he can get into much deeper water, where he wants to go. In Radha Mitchell’s extraordinary delivery of one line (which – I can’t help saying – all serious movie lovers deserve to see), ravaged Melinda, in the midst of a banal conversation with a shallow guy hitting on her, steals the show and inaugurates a new wave of Allen’s cinematic power: “I want [heavy pause] . . . to want [heavy pause] . . . to live.” In a trice, Mitchell’s Melinda defines and personifies the pull and tragic power of the death wish, the sad, fragile need for faith in life, and the depth and passion of Allen’s own creative anhedonia – his desperate, shifty longing for some comic antidote to the plague of life and dying.
He not only told Eric Lax that the Melinda comic plot was a mistake, but so was the whole Woody-side of Crimes and Misdemeanors.5 He was wrong in both cases, but the emergence of the “low, dishonest decade” that began the new century and an ebb tide of his own comic faith were pushing him to do something radical. That was – and is – Match Point.
Match Point (2005) comes across as very tough – focused on the beauty and moral worthlessness of a glossy culture gone rotten. In its historical context, its crime comes to stand analogically for a new age’s wickedness; Allen fuses the personal and the political in a way new for him.6 The film’s vision and text radically question what sustains Woody Allen’s own comic faith – when he can sustain it. Here all his great good things – erotic joy, art, aesthetic capital, family values, luck, vocation, good sex, and the pleasure that money can buy – show up and then turn into “bad” things. Match Point focuses on characters and a modern world set off against the cultural heritage of tragic art – most obviously, here, tragic opera.
Taking his title from the decisive moment in tennis, Allen makes its explosive points out of the collision in this match of love and death. In it, unlike the earlier Crimes and Misdemeanors (to which it’s often compared), he narrows his focus in order to make the vision of unjustified violence, unpunished homicide, and unmitigated evil even clearer and more disturbing. When Judah in Crimes and Misdemeanors confronts the corpse of his mistress, the scene switches abruptly to an old film that Cliff (Woody Allen) and his niece are watching: suddenly the daft Betty Hutton, siren of vulgarity, is blasting out a comic song, “Murder, He Said. Murder, He Said.” In Match Point Allen rids his work of any such distancing irony or diffusion of its appalling implications.
The mesh of a film with its music always matters to Allen, but never – even in Everyone Says I Love You and Sweet and Lowdown – more than in Match Point. The music here is nineteenth-century opera. Right away, over the opening credits, you hear a plangent aria, “Una furtiva lagrima,” sung by Caruso, from Donizetti’s L‘Elisir d’Amore. Allen repeats and then repeats again its key lines as the closing credits roll:
A single secret tear. . . . She loves me . . . Heavens! Yes, I could die! I could ask for nothing more, nothing more. Oh, heavens! Yes, I could, I could die! . . . Yes, I could die of love.7
So there’s the gist of what’s to come – Allen staples, love and death. But at first viewing, you have no idea why this musty old opera highlight prefaces a new movie. After several viewings and some drudgery, you can later find out how all the selections of the opera music do fit and serve as accurate, if esoteric, captions for what’s being played out.
Why this pedantic use of allusion? One reason is that opera for Allen becomes a dramatic symbol of cultural capital and the way it can work for those who have it and know how and where to invest it. Who – what sort of person – might pick up on the operatic references in Match Point? One answer is its protagonist Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who speculates in cultural capital. Allen is making a subtle, but important point. He imagines that the heritage of aesthetic capital – art – can, ironically, both touch and trap, both soften and harden, its entrepreneurial devotees as it infuses and shapes their perceptions. And there is something more going on: a serious and shocking in-joke by this fan of the Marx Brothers, whose most famous comedy was A Night at the Opera. Match Point is Allen’s ironic, ultimately terrifying twenty-first-century Night at the Opera. In the film’s last scene, the killer, who you’ve seen shoot his mistress and their unborn fetus, brings home, with his wife and family, their firstborn baby, and all celebrate the new son. On the soundtrack, you hear Macduff’s “O figli, o figli miei!” from Verdi’s Macbeth. The lyric in translation is “Oh my children! / You have all been killed by that tyrant, / Together with your poor mother!”8 That music, in its terrible irony, conveys both the complexity and moral horror of this film.
“I love opera,” says tennis teaching-pro Chris to rich Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), and their mutual love of music gets Chris an invitation into the Hewett family’s Royal Opera House box and, from there, right smack into the upper class. Later, to impress Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), Chris gives her a rare collection of Caruso. It expresses, he says soulfully, “all that’s tragic in life.” But passionate love of art and good music, as Hitler proved, can accompany the martial dirge of killer nihilism.
The film per se opens with a voiceover as you look at a close-up of a net with a tennis ball passing over it, back and forth. You see only the net and the ball, as the speaker makes his point:
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 our 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.
The scene is an overture and, not so incidentally, an example of the psychological force of “motion” pictures. It prepares you for the sequence much later when Chris throws jewelry into the Thames, and, as he hurries off, finds another a ring in his pocket, makes a hasty throw, and keeps on going. Suddenly comes a switch to slow motion and a shot of the telltale ring floating slowly, slowly through the sky, then hitting the top of the river wall and bouncing back. Set up by the film’s “luck” preamble, this shot becomes one of the most memorable in all of Allen. And, when it comes, you may think, a bit smugly, that you’ve just seen how random luck will decide a murderer’s fate. And you’re right – except the actual effects of any piece of luck are unpredictable and, as this scene and the whole movie suggest, hundreds of unknown instances in the flow of luck touch you every day. The deepest subject here is the growth of evil in a modern psyche, and how it blooms can be a matter of blind luck.
The “voiceover” of course belongs to Chris Wilton. Before you see him hustling after erotic fire and materialism’s gory glory, you hear him as this thoughtful commentator. Allen by no means wants early or total alienation between his audience and his main character. Like Chris, most twenty-first-century people somehow inevitably get stuck related to or dealing with that symbolic Hewett Company “Global Infrastructure and Finance.” It’s the diseased corporate heart of the movie.
Chris stands out as one of Allen’s most fascinating characters – chilling as Antarctica. The fusion of a bright, polite, labile man from the working class, a capitalizing culture vulture, an up-and-coming business scion, a terrorist devotee to “the bitch-goddess success,” and a sire of a blessed baby all in one figure is serious business. Allen takes pains to establish his protagonist’s split personality, and that schizoid fissure rocks our century.
The richness and beauty of the world here help make its moral and philosophical meanings both deep and sinister. It’s one of the most beautiful movies Allen ever made – relentlessly beautiful – and the viewer sees what Chris sees: life at, on, and from the top. You get vistas of London from on high, picturesque views of country greenery, shots of lovely interiors and intriguing artwork (amazing paintings of all kinds), passionate lovemaking – in short, the gorgeous cinematography of Remi Adefarasin which features the steamy, intimate images of Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) and Chris.
Sex early gives the movie energy, and the scene when Nola and Wilton first meet teems with emotional foreplay.9 But it’s also drenched with ironic foreshadowing. Chris, on his first visit to the Hewett mansion, walks alone through the house and into a rec room where the click-clack of ping-pong sounds. He sees a striking young blonde, in a white dress full of conspicuously nice bulges and curves, hit a hard shot past a man who turns away, beaten.
Adefarasin’s camera now alternates images of these two beautiful people showing how they see – like the audience – and feel their mutual erotic force. I focus on this scene because the sheer throbbing life in it can make clear, later, the horror and nihilism of the murder to come:
| Nola [brash, impertinent]: | So. Who’s my next victim? [Sizes him up; he’ll do] You? . . . Would you like to play for a thousand pounds a game? |
| Chris: | What did I walk into? . . . [She serves, and he slams the ball right past her] |
| Nola: | What did I walk into? [He moves around the table right up to her] |
| Chris: | It’s like this – May I? |
| Nola: | Please. |
| Chris: | [He moves behind her body, puts one arm and hand tightly around her waist and grabs her paddle hand with his – bold to show right away how much he wants to touch her] You have to lean in and hit right through it. |
| Nola: | I was doing just fine until you showed up [the intimacy of “just kidding”, but also, in retrospect, frightful irony]. |
| Chris: | That’s the story of my life. [Self-deprecating charm, followed quickly by a flirtatious assault on English social reserve] So tell me, what’s a beautiful young American ping-pong player doing mingling among the British upper class? |
| Nola: | Did anyone ever tell you, you play a very aggressive game? [Double entendre spreads through the scene now. Less than a minute after they meet, their lips are nearly touching and they’re in a virtual embrace] |
| Chris: | Did anyone ever tell you have very sensual lips? [an extraordinary thing to say to a woman you don’t know at all in the family home of your upper-class girl friend – an absolute come-on] |
| Nola: | Extremely aggressive [not showing any resentment, not turning away]. |
| Chris: | I’m naturally competitive. Is it off-putting? [daring candor again, and Allen aims it not just at Nola, but at his audience] |
| Nola: | I’ll have to think about that for a while. |
| Tom: | Ah, there you are. I want to introduce you to Chris Wilton. Chris Wilton, Nola Rice, my fiancée. |
| Nola: | Hm. So you’re the tennis pro. [Tom, in a proprietary way, kisses her] |
| Nola: | He was trying to have his way with me over the table [spoken in a “many a true word spoken in jest” manner]. |
| Tom: | Oh really, well you better watch out for this one. He’s made his living out of hustling. [Light-hearted, but condescending – and Chris goes quiet with resentment and jealousy] |
| Nola: | I’ll be ready for you next time. [Double entendre] |
What Allen gets across here is the force of sexual desire, the appeal of la dolce vita, the aphrodisiac of humor, the unpredictable and funny games people play, physical grace, and the appeal of a woman’s face – all those signs of his comic faith. But not now: here it’s all prologue to moral disaster. The tempting vulnerability of women, the inevitability of conflicting desires, class impulses, and a kind of assertive male craziness also stand out, and they become the tricky first act to a very unfunny Murder, He Said.
Chloe Hewett falls in love with Chris, and she and her father (Brian Cox) mean to “groom” him. She meets him at a chichi restaurant. At first it looks casual, but it’s a fatal temptation scene. She comes in, solicitously loving, and orders champagne. An agent of her father has just called Chris about “the possibilities of a job” that she says she spoke to “Papa” about. She’s pushing him. It’s “a stepping stone for you . . . to a bigger job, more responsibilities, and greater earnings potential.” That’s her genuflection to the dominant twenty-first-century religion: money-faith. “Papa” runs “Global Infrastructure and Finance” and that’s literally what counts.
When Tom Hewett comes in with Nola, still his fiancée, he’s formidable in his ease. He takes charge. It’s his world – an infrastructure of class, consumption, credit, and finance. The talk turns to Aston Martins, caviar, blinis, vintage wine, and the country estate – luxury’s trappings. Chris looks woeful and shut out, but he opines again, “I think everybody’s afraid to admit what a big part luck plays. It seems that scientists are confirming more and more that all existence is here by blind chance. No purpose. No design.” He’s desperately wanting to establish authority, but he’s also stating a philosophical problem that bothers Woody Allen: how do you reconcile faith (in his case, comic faith) with a world and life that has no higher purpose? Tom, in a mocking voice, intones, “What was it the vicar used to say? ‘Despair is the path of least resistance.’ ” Chris answers, “I think of faith as the path of least resistance.” That’s a deep, rebellious sentiment Allen sometimes shares, and he imagines it to be just the sort of thing his Hewetts would scorn:
| Chloe: | Can we change the subject please? |
| Tom: | Two bottles of Puligny Montrachet. |
This restaurant scene has extraordinary economical power, in the full sense of that word – conveying both the cash nexus and the quick transaction of key cinematic business. Immediately the film cuts away from the Montrachet to Global Finance, where, in the briefest of scenes, Chris signs on – and then soon after marries Chloe.
Why would a character like Chris choose to murder Nola? It’s a shocking move that makes good drama, but the question gets at the crux of the film’s meaning and menace. In the scenes between them in the first half of the movie, you see how much he loves Nola, obsesses over her, wants her, and melds sexually with her in pretty rites of flesh and spirit. But, as time goes by and she keeps nagging him to leave Chloe, he comes to realize that a union with Nola would wreck his career. He tells his tennis mate: “It’s crazy . . . I have a very comfortable life with my wife . . . I don’t fool myself that I haven’t got used to a certain kind of living.”
When Nola gets pregnant, the film moves into a neo-Hitchcockian world of suspense and murderous pathology. She refuses to get an abortion and gives Chris an ultimatum. “I expect you to do the right thing . . . Tell Chloe.” “Okay, okay. I’ll do the right thing.”
That night, Chris sleeps by Chloe, but then you see him wake up, brood, and make a quick decision about what that “right thing” is: if Chloe and the Hewetts knew the truth – months of sleazy deceit with Tom’s cast-off sexpot, Chloe still trying without success to get pregnant, Nola now ready to flaunt her condition – he’s sure they would destroy him.
Next you see him arming himself. He plots the elimination of Nola like a one-man blitzkrieg. Whatever he was before, he’s now a sociopath desperate to keep what he’s gained. He’s both logical and maniacal (like people planning a “war of choice”). He calmly gets his father-in-law’s shotgun, makes plans, sees Nola, tells lies, and fixes the assault hour.
In the movie’s jaw-dropping murder scene, when Chris, amid tears of agony, shoots down Nola’s neighbor and then her, Allen makes his most sustained use of opera (10 minutes’ worth). He juxtaposes the entire episode against the conversation-duet between Othello and Iago from Verdi’s Otello Act II when Iago manipulates the Moor into killing his beloved wife. Allen thus juxtaposes the murder of Nola with Othello’s tragic slaughter of Desdemona and those cultural twin peaks of drama and opera in Shakespeare and Verdi. The filmmaker is trying hard to create important art (he succeeds), but he is not comparing Chris to Othello, not presenting a tragic vision. He’s matching him with Iago, the classic sociopath in drama whose advice for all seasons is put money in thy purse. As Chris’s elaborate scheme unfolds, it gives you not a tragic Othello drama, but life in a modern Iago world – a strategic killing with the motive of putting money in your portfolio.
In the film’s late, great, dream sequence, Chris’s murder victims return to confront him. It’s not a long scene but it’s one crammed with mind-food. Beginning with a quick shot of Chris asleep in bed, it jumps to an image of him dozing, head on his desk next to his laptop. Just in front of him sits a mostly empty glass of beautiful rose-red wine. He wakes, hears a noise, then clumsily knocks over the glass and spills the wine (dream-scene symbolism picking up on “Sangre! Sangre!” [Blood! Blood!] from the murder-scene soundtrack of Otello). He gets up to mop up the wine and Nola appears behind him.
“Nola?” Quiet, pensive, he talks to the dead, “It wasn’t easy. But when the time came I could pull the trigger. You never know who your neighbors are until there’s a crisis. You can learn to push the guilt under the rug and go on. You have to. Otherwise it overwhelms you.” That could be mad rationalization, chaotic dream talk, glib wisdom, the disintegration of the self, political allegory – or all of them and more. Pulling “the trigger” and managing “the guilt” might make a terrible kind of sense, but the trite sentiment “you never know who your neighbors are until there’s a crisis,” applied to the slain neighbor is so perversely twisted in its idea of how a neighbor might help you out, so bizarrely ironical, that you know you’re now in a special poisonous realm of moral revulsion and evil.
Allen does, in this crucial scene, use particular murder victims to represent impersonal, collective killing, and in so doing he expands its allegorical meaning and force. The dead older woman (Margaret Tyzack), whom Chris sacrificed in his “crisis,” inquires, “What about me? . . . I had no involvement in this awful affair. Isn’t there a problem about me having to die? An innocent bystander?”
Chris’s cool, formal answer moves him and the movie beyond dream and limited story to the center of the real world’s nightmare where each year thousands of people purposely kill thousands of other people and populations acquiesce to massacres of civilians: “The innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme. You were collateral damage.” Those words surely have broad political relevance, and the movie hits home. “A grander scheme”: you have here the deadly claim of special privilege – the driving spirit of terrorism, imperialism, oligarchy, organized crime, and the exclusionary “true faith” of religions, parties, classes, and races. Like “innocent bystander,” that obscene expression “collateral damage” can’t help but stand out and explicitly relate Match Point to the bloody era that spawned it. “Collateral damage”: to designate the shotgun killing of an old woman (and pregnant Nola), Chris adopts the bureaucratic military term for the killing of the unlucky.10 Allen sometimes says he avoids the immediate political and historical context of his time, but nothing could be more relevant to the lying twenty-first-century “weapons-of-mass destruction” American history of “collateral damage” than this passage, this scene, this film.11
“So was your own child,” is the good neighbor’s devastating reply.
Chris tries to change the subject by expanding the discursive field: “Sophocles said, ‘to never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.’ ” This response, like every remark he makes in the dream, might, on its own, make sense and even appear eloquent and thoughtful, but in context each sounds spooky and insane. It’s as if he were assuming a grandiose tragic identity and the voice of a great tragedian to distance himself from causing others to die – moving to a godlike perspective on human life and death. But his response to the chilling line “so was your own child” is just horrific in its weirdness. The astonishing cynicism of killing your own engendered flesh and blood and then saying, in this double entendre context, “the greatest boon is never to have been born” (little baby-to-be, I just did you a big favor), surely matches the evil of Iago, the gold standard of villains.
“Prepare to pay the price, Chris. Your actions were clumsy, full of holes, almost like someone begging to be found out.” The gist and cadence of Nola’s speech doesn’t sound like her, but it’s what Chris would fear: stereotypical police mentality honing in on him like Detective Banner (James Nesbitt), who does suspect him. The dream is widening.
Again, Allen has Chris disdain mere defense, and instead keep using cultural capital to raise himself to some level of moral authority: “It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.” Far from remorseful honesty, it’s a self-deceiver’s way of escaping from a vicious self into the softer abstractions of ethics and literature. The film has taken you into the realm of the tragic absurd, a dream world where you may live without having to see what you’ve really done or take any responsibility for the larger life outside of your own skin and neural network.
Suddenly – no transition – the screen gives you Detective Banner sitting up in his bed, awake from a dream, startling his wife, and blurting out, “Chris Wilton did it. I see how.” So now the dream can be his as well as Chris’s, one in which Banner sees the truth. It’s the dream of a Cassandra, however, who knows the truth but can’t get herself believed. Allen has moved the range of the dream into the area of Alice’s dream at the end of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: “Let’s consider who dreamed it all. This is a serious question. . . . Which do you think it was?” Carroll adds, “Life, what is it but a dream?” The crime has become a dream of reality and a creator’s work of art that subverts the basis for either comic or tragic faith. It leads directly to Cassandra’s Dream.12
Not for nothing did Allen call his icy 2007 movie Cassandra’s Dream. The title comes right out of the end of Match Point with its hectic, prophetic dream content. Starting with the name, Allen lades his text with teasing references to Greece, theater, tragedy, and myths and so keeps signaling that forms of Cassandra’s nightmare go on shaping the world. Here, Cassandra’s Dream is the gas-burning sailboat that two brothers, Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell), trying to scrabble out of the working class, manage to buy. It floats in their lives like the phantom of golden luxury that traps them, and it becomes the site of their end.
Moreover, you have key late Woody projection in the title: he’s made this haunting figure a chief muse in his recent work. In Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, Whatever Works, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger he identifies with this never-heeded, screwy prophet of doom whose combination of brilliant insight and powerlessness is said to define the tragic condition of humankind. It’s as if he took to heart the banter of the mock Greek chorus in his comedy Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and literally assumed the role:
“I see big trouble.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes, you’re such a Cassandra.”
“I’m not such a Cassandra. I am Cassandra.”
Now he’s dead serious about his film’s allegorical meaning and heritage. The rhetorical function of the title is to make you keep thinking about how and why what’s in front of you relates to crucial patterns in ancient lore and modern history. It calls for the analogical imperative that is so important in late Allen – compare, compare, compare!
What Cassandra, manic truthteller, does – most notably in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – is to imagine and predict murderous ruling-class violence and its consequences. She conveys the political and social horror that bleeds out into the wide world from homicidal behavior of men and women in leading families and turns the ensuing lives of more and more people into masses of gore. In Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, so does Allen, this aging, unique seer from Brooklyn and the comic tradition. He sees the awful truth of his times, but, since few take him seriously, he can’t change a thing. He could hardly get Cassandra’s Dream – a profound work – screened for two weeks straight in his own land.
But the movie works. The best thing in it, the sign of this filmmaker’s tremendous energy and ambition, is that he takes you straight to Cassandra, the mythic figure whose very being defines and proclaims the tragic absurd by fusing comedy’s distancing ironic perspective with inescapable personal tragedy. The meaning of her being – always to be right, always to be ignored, always crazy, always telling you that the truth is right there before you, but that you can’t or don’t want to see it – shows how the character of ancient texts becomes an immortal archetype. Says she, in Trojan Women, “Whoso is wise should fly from making war.”13
Cassandra is an ambitious, austere film – an attempt at modern tragedy, an intellectual crime drama, a tragic anatomy of murder and murderers, and a vision of Mammon’s violence out of control and spreading. Tragedy has to deal with death – the hardest fact of life – and with the dispensing of death to others. More specifically, the traditional basis of the tragic genre has been the drama of willed deaths: who causes it, who dies, what happens to the killers, and why. Nowadays, it’s mostly underprivileged people who actually do the killing and who get killed. Like Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Allen wants to explore the possibilities of modern tragedy and see whether an authentic tragic vision linked to the heritage of ancient tragedians can be found – needed to be found – in “ordinary” life. The tragic plot of Cassandra’s Dream is simple. Ian and Terry desperately need money, and their rich uncle will give it to them if they do away with a man whose testimony would destroy his business and life. Uncle Harold (Tom Wilkinson) squeezes them hard, and they do kill for him and his money. One brother can live with the guilt, one can’t, and this fatal split brings about their deaths.
The film dramatizes Allen’s version of the famous Miller line in Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid” – paid here, that is, to the mercenary system involving weedy people enforcing the power of capital, the literal and figurative shock troops of “wealth management.” Colin Farrell as Terry and Ewan McGregor as Ian portray with skill, and even sympathy, feckless brothers co-opted into murder. As Match Point made a jump from the vicarious murder contracted by Judah in Crimes and Misdemeanors to Chris’s actual, trigger-pulling homicide, so Cassandra’s Dream takes violence one step further and makes its killer-brothers reluctant mercenary assassins for their anything-goes free enterprising Uncle. “The whole of human life is about violence,” Ian says to Terry. And, according to Woody-Cassandra’s vision, modern life involves the will of those who can afford to pay for the use or threat of violence to get and keep what they want.
The life of the brothers early on in the movie features their scramble for money, sleek cars, glamor, gambling, and business opportunities. Uncle Harold, a crucial figure, internationalizes and historicizes the brothers’ slice of life. A “self-made” man and a plastic surgeon, he moved to Hollywood and America, turning his practice into a global franchise of “organized medicine” with clinics even in China: “You’d–You’d be amazed what’s happening in–in–in China today,” he tells the brothers, “They’re–They’re–They’re way more capitalistic than we are.” Ian tells Terry that they have to do what Uncle wants, and he rationalizes, “If we were in the army, we’d be expected to kill strangers everyday to profit men who are up to here in corruption.”
Allen puts you in a grim, symbolic narrative that reeks with analogies to the bloodshed and violence of twenty-first-century imperialism. The cards are stacked against the brothers. Neither Terry, a mechanic with a massive gambling debt, nor Ian, a would-be investor trying to shed his class background and win his dream girl (Hayley Atwell), have a chance without Uncle’s cash. They finally manage to kill, but they have little in common with Chris Wilton. They bumble, agonize, quarrel, and end up dead. But Uncle Harold’s plan succeeds; he’s in the clear, back in America, having maintained his strong financial position in the global infrastructure.
Allen tried to create tragedy in the life and death of Terry and Ian, and, at least with Terry – flawed, well-meaning, compulsive gambler seduced into killing against his will – he nearly succeeds. The film makes him inarticulate, limited, sometimes foolish and easy to look down on, but then Allen unexpectedly – movingly – shows that this surprising figure comes to know and feel the real truth about why death matters, what he has done, what he must do, and how and where he must live out his days. That domicile collectively is his heart, his psyche, and his culture, and it’s the same place Cassandra identifies and describes in her famous outburst in Agamemnon before she enters the royal palace of death: “This house stinks of blood-dripping slaughter.”14 How well, as this film indicates, that describes the White House of the early twenty-first century.
Cassandra the eponymous seer of dead-on-target abattoir prophecies and Cassandra the movie’s symbolic take on the widespread business of death surely might drive you to see what could be salvaged for comic vision. Allen next made Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) – a movie that sets out to show you great physical beauty. It’s a classic film that invites critical scrutiny on any number of topics, but here I simply want to point out how it responds to the assault on comic faith in Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream. One short-but-sweet antidote to the morbidly contagious moral poison rendered in those works is seize the day – or, more precisely, see and then screen the day. The word Barcelona in the title connotes something good and real in life: namely the vacation – here, an intense, much-needed emotional vacation from Cassandrastan.
The film is a romance and, in part, an idyll of late Allen comic faith. It doesn’t sentimentalize life with the closure of a happy love story, but it does celebrate the body beautiful, the human face divine, “worth-it-all” moments, the marvel of the arts, intelligent language, the uniqueness of personality, great movie stars, and the controversial “gaze” of movies – both a male and female gaze, both the director’s and the spectators’ gaze, both characters’ and actors’ gaze, both the camera’s and the editor’s gaze.15 Life, Allen shows, can be extraordinarily good-looking: like Gaudí’s great Barcelona church La Sagrada Familia; like Penélope Cruz as Maria Elena and Scarlett Johansson as Cristina; like Rebecca Hall’s rational Vicky falling irrationally in love and turning gorgeous; like Javier Bardem’s handsome and charming Juan Antonio.
In Allen’s long career, you can watch a seemingly endless stream of talented, lovely women at the peak of their careers, working for comparatively little money, giving glorious performances. That fact should not be taken for granted; it shows a major theme in this film and by extension in Allen’s whole comic vision – one so obvious it’s easy to ignore or dismiss. Cumulatively and visually, female beauty and talent become one lasting basis for comic faith. Glamour attracts; sex really does appeal; movies can show you scenes of amazing beauty; people really do find actors beautiful and winning, and it’s fun to see good-looking, accomplished ones showing off in movies and sinking into your mind’s eye, so you somehow live vicariously and closely with them for a time (à la Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo).
Allen milked a long-running comic shtick featuring a dweebish, funny fast talker seeing, wanting, and even for a while getting the most attractive babes in cinema’s toyland. But after Soon-Yi and Deconstructing Harry, that jokey wish fulfillment no longer played well. He just looks too old and creepy. What makes Vicky Cristina Barcelona work and come off as something new and different is that Allen, free of his own body, speech mannerisms, and image here, can present and explore convincingly absurd, significant, and complex desires in male fantasy life (as he would do again in Midnight in Paris). He can sublimate and project them onto his Spanish protagonist, the artist Juan Antonio and, as Bardem plays him, the most charismatic male lead in all his films.
In “respectable” American media, you rarely see a winning, straightforward pitch for hedonism put forth rationally by a nice person. Here you do: “Life is short. Life is dull. Life is full of pain and this is a chance for something special,” says Juan Antonio to the attractive, smart, but tightly wound skeptic Vicky and the golden honeypot Cristina. “We’ll eat well, drink good wine, and make love.” The onscreen appeal of doing this with beautiful people comes across so powerfully that you can see why society needs to muster against it all the ammo of civic control, repression, and religion’s supernatural sticks and carrots. Bardem’s Juan Antonio is what Allen imagines most men (and maybe most women?) would like to be: a creative, interesting, cultured, honest, kind person, open and caring in sensual life, wonderfully articulate, and able to sleep with, love and like – and be loved and liked by – the most beautiful, talented, interesting women on earth. In a delicately erotic scene, he and Vicky, temperamental antagonists, surprise each other by suddenly falling in love and then making love. Later, Juan Antonio manages to live harmoniously for a time in a stellar ménage à trois – surely as aesthetically pleasing as any in imaginative history – with Cristina and his estranged wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz). Cruz with incomparable force and skill acts out her director’s idea – like it or not – of Maria Elena as woman at her hottest, most gorgeous, most gifted, and craziest. Somehow the magnetism of Bardem’s acting suspends disbelief, and Woody Allen, the projector of the film’s projection of desire, fulfills visually, for a time, the fantasies of free love, timeless beauty, and delight in women that animates desire in his movies. His vision seems meant to convey, to himself as well as his audience, that as you change and grow old and your world falls apart, beautiful people – other beautiful people – will appear and dance the dance of love and death with passion and an irresistible talent to amuse.
But is most of this just barefaced piggy-sexist escapism that just turns women into stylish items for the men’s store? “Well,” says Allen in effect, “take a good look at Vicky Cristina Barcelona and see how you feel about what you see.” A movie in which that glamorous pair Cristina and Marie Elena play sexually liberated women living in the same place with their lover, whom each wants and needs to bed – and does – is a movie (bet on it) that flagrantly features “the male gaze.” But much more is going on here. Allen is very much in the process of using, transforming, and plotting the gaze to see in another direction. What happens is that the camera becomes a center of female subjectivity and the means by which Cristina can succeed for a time as an artist. Mentored by Maria Elena (whose own original “gaze” has formed Juan Antonio’s art) she becomes a fine photographer (Figure 6.1). One of the most moving features of the film is the whole relationship between Cristina and Maria Elena, and one of its best scenes takes place between them in their red-lit darkroom. Allen shows you two women working together, and as they do, they come to see and respect the aesthetic sensibility of the other – the barrier between art and love, work and physical intimacy, sex and creation, friendship and ambition (that wall that so often characterizes and subverts relationships with and between men) dissolves into fused sensual and intellectual affection.
Figure 6.1 Artistic inspiration: Maria Elena poses for Cristina’s camera in Vicky Christina Barcelona.
(Producers: Charles H. Joffe, Javier Méndez, Jack Rollins, Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, Gareth Wiley, Helen Robin)
Art gives people something to do, enjoy, and believe in. It’s tangible and visible, and you don’t need metaphysics or miracles to adore it. In Allen’s Barcelona, art is the local religion and it pulls institutionalized religion into its service (Gaudí’s great church was for half a century an icon of art before it was officially consecrated). Juan Antonio makes ritual pilgrimages to see a religious statue in Oviedo that keeps on inspiring him. After he shows Vicky this work of Christian art which he adores, she asks him, “Are you very religious?” and he surprises her: “No, no, I’m not. The trick is to enjoy life, accepting that it has no meaning whatsoever.”
When Cristina tells Vicky and Vicky’s husband-to-be about her lovemaking with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, she shocks buttoned-up Doug. But Allen has Vicky – newly swimming in the swirling emotions of love life and the contradictions of being a very intelligent, sensual, and mixed-up human being – articulate, under her breath, her creator’s desperate, absurd faith, “Whatever works.”
Whatever Works: that’s the meaty title Allen gave his audacious, controversial 2009 comedy. “My story” says Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), sour veteran of despair and the film’s anti-Juan Antonio, anti-Bardem protagonist, “is whatever works. You know as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Any way you can filch a little joy in this cruel, dog-eat-dog, pointless black chaos. That’s my story, yeah.”16 It’s a rough story, but it can be a funny one too.
A postmodern avatar of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1666), this film has all the relevance for twenty-first-century America that Molière’s play had for the leading seventeenth-century power, France.17 Allen’s big point here, like Molière’s, is that if comedy is to matter as art, it must contain (in both senses of the word) misanthropy.18 The film starts with bilious Boris speaking for seven minutes straight. In all those words, Allen grants the truth of the near-nihilism and the death-wishing compulsions of Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, with their grim analogies to modern global history (e.g., both heartless hedge funder and Abu Ghraib kinds of “collateral damage”) and the shame, anger, and repressed guilt it has brought to so many. The film then moves to show how it still might be possible to imagine value in a flexible comic perspective. It somehow does filch (perfect Allen diction) joy – but just barely.
Whatever Works is to Allen what The Misanthrope is to Molière – art that blends a daring gospel of intellectual pessimism and hard truths with the privilege of professing it in a world that still offers a variety of pleasures and humor. In the classic French play, the contradictions between the moral force of misanthrope Alceste’s denunciation of a corrupt culture (the proof of which would later issue in such strange fruit as Marie Antoinette’s severed head) and his involuntary love for the flirtatious, fun-loving Celimene make for a volatile comic vision. Whatever Works, with Boris’s opening screed of misanthropy followed by his zany hook-up with his total opposite – the young, peppy, ignorant, and sweet Melody Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) – loosely follows Molière’s pattern in which Alceste, with his contempt for the world, gets compromised (and saved) by social Celimene and “irrational” love. Here – as the names make obvious – “Celestine” takes over Celimene’s role.
But death is closer to Allen’s heart than Molière’s. The first thing you hear, as the titles roll by, is Groucho Marx singing “Hello, I must be going” from Animal Crackers. It’s an audio epitome of late Woody: a gifted comic trying to subsume the certainty of death (“I must be going”) in order to make it into a laughing matter. Which Allen does here – the movie is like an anhedonist’s black-humor mass that celebrates, with real, if absurd jollity, misanthropic intelligence.19
Allen’s comic imagination tries to animate death and turn its finality into the process of how people see and revitalize it – how, using whatever works, they can, in the fullest sense of the phrase, live with death. That’s exactly what he would do in Midnight in Paris (2011), but in a different form in which he imagines how “dead and gone” artists can live within the self and inspire it. Here, early on, Boris moans “I’m dying! I’m dying!” but when his first wife wants to call an ambulance, he yells, “Not now! Not tonight! Eventually!” Beneath the hysteria, Allen is showing that knowledge and fear of death – even seeking to die and the experience of dying – are facts of life, not death.
Returning to the “out-the-window” theme he used seriously with Professor Levy in Crimes and Misdemeanors and tragicomically in Melinda, he makes jokes out of Boris’s two suicide leaps and their failure – the “fortunate falls” of this movie’s faith. When Melody dumps Boris near the end, he washes his hands, then suddenly runs to jump out the window, and – Hollywood ending – lands on another woman, whom he subsequently marries. What you see is Allen answering Groucho’s “I must be going” song with a visual pun, the image of Boris flying through a large window but not “going.” As George Eliot says, “These things are a parable.”
In his movies, Allen is first of all a writer, and often his misanthrope Boris, off-putting as he can be, has a dazzling way with words. Here, for example, is Boris on sex, a subject hard to say much new about (but not for him):
Think of it . . . The absurd choreography, like a sewing machine, up and down, up and down, up and down . . . Reproducing the species over and over. Toward what goal? Carrying out what moronic design?
In the claustrophobia of convention, wild nay-saying can let in fresh air.
I want to focus on Boris’s scorching “failed species” oration that begins the film, sets its tone and makes it so provocative and risky. It presents a language of comic purgation – pushing a comic catharsis not of pity and terror (Aristotle’s tragic catharsis), but of hostility and sentimentality. This “speech-act,” virtually unprecedented in film history, gives the movie its distinction and makes Boris one of Allen’s most important characters. One premise driving the talk is that you can’t know what works if you don’t know the problems in life and can’t honestly acknowledge what doesn’t work. It was bound to turn off both his fan base nostalgic for those “early, funny” movies and the condescending hate-and/or-patronize-Woody crowd as an “unacceptable” message from a discredited source. Allen, however, wants to use its bitter content as an aesthetic and moral inoculation to make his whatever works faith credible. It comes as the comic shock therapy of an ironic secular Calvinism.
Allen gets very personal in this Liebestod of cynicism: “I have a vision. I’m discussing you.” Mostly a soliloquy spoken directly to the audience – you and me – it might be the most quixotic overture in screen comedy. In fact, it’s not a prologue, but the heart of the movie, and what follows it is, in essence, an hour-plus, comic epilogue dramatizing, mocking, disputing, affirming, glamorizing, and humanizing Boris’s raillery.
Talk with friends turns fast into monologue:
Big money in the God racket. Big money. Hey, the basic teachings of Jesus are quite wonderful. So by the way is the original intention of Karl Marx. What could be bad? Everyone should share equally, Do unto others, democracy, government by the people. All great ideas . . . But they also suffer from fatal flaw . . . the fallacious notion that people are fundamentally decent . . . But . . . I’m sorry to say, we’re a failed species.
Boris is defying – crucifying – popular American ideology. Not only does he stress religion’s greed and duplicity, he then brands humanity as an evolutionary mistake. He isn’t joking here, but he is talking for pleasure. For Allen (like all good satirists) there’s a comic uplift in appropriating the authority – like a god – to judge and condemn human nature and thus to get high on truths others aren’t strong or honest enough to face. Deep in Allen, deep in comedy, deep in misanthropy, deep in your mind, conflicting passions churn for both the joy of fulfilling desires and the truth of contemptus mundi (which tells you that a rat race is not worth running and so it’s not so bad to lose). If you keep in mind late Allen’s Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, and what they show (“collateral damage” and the “triumph of the will” to defy “thou shalt not kill”), it’s easy as cherry pie to think of mankind as a “failed species.”
Boris’s overture next turns to the personal, and his comment takes you right into a pregnant analogy for Allen’s death-obsessed, shaky comic vision.
That’s why this woman you like, Joe, so what if she’s an embalmer’s assistant, so she stinks from formaldehyde . . . For Christ sake, you gotta take what little pleasure you can find in this chamber of horrors.
In late Woody, everybody can’t help but reek of the universal mortuary business. Yellnikoff is just getting started:
There’s an audience full of people looking at us . . . They paid good money for tickets, so some moron in Hollywood can buy a bigger swimming pool. . . . Some are eating popcorn, some are just staring straight ahead breathing through their mouths, like Neanderthals.
Baiting an audience is tricky. Allen wants to get subversive things said, so he has them proclaimed by a weirdo – this odd, bitter little man with whom you don’t have to identify. Because he’s such a nerd you don’t have to be defensive: you can give his words, ideas, and humor the attention they deserve. That’s the film’s rhetorical comic ploy. People, though, tend to resent preachy, ironic talk that belittles them, as some reviews and anti-Woody blog fury about the movie makes clear. And yet, for some, wheezing in a smoggy social atmosphere of banal pieties, clichéd mind-fuzz, public anti-intellectualism, stifling repression, and the soul-killing carpentry of building and keeping up a good front under an implacable death sentence, the speech and Allen’s prose as a whole can be an example of “whatever works.”
Why would you want to hear my story? Do we know each other? Do we like each other? Let me tell you right off, okay? I’m not a likeable guy. Charm has never been a priority with me. Just so you know this is not the feel-good movie of the year. So if you’re one of those idiots who need to feel good, go get yourself a foot massage.
Such talk in a film is so off-the-wall that it might engage you right away in the complex processes of art – how personal it can be: Am I someone this schlemiel is calling an idiot? Do I need a phony story to feel good? Allen’s script puts it to you directly: these words are about you and you need to see how and why. If he convinces you, he wins. If not, not.20
Next, Boris the monologist appropriates Shakespeare the monologist:
What the hell does it all mean anyhow? Nothing. Zero, zilch. Nothing comes to anything [“Nothing can come of nothing,” King Lear I, i, 92]. And yet there’s no shortage of idiots to battle [“It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,” Macbeth V, v, 26–28].
Yellnikoff is anything but a tragic hero, but in the balancing act between misanthropy and comic equanimity in Allen’s evolving twenty-first-century work, the heritage of tragedy’s language and vision is key.
I have a vision. I’m discussing you. Your co-workers. Your newspapers, the TV. Everybody’s happy to talk. Full of misinformation, morality, science, religion, politics, sports, love, your portfolio, your children, health . . . And with it all the day still comes when they put you in a box, and it’s on to the next generation of idiots who’ll also tell you all about life and define for you what’s appropriate.
Death is always pending, but since there’s obviously immortal folly in the ever-present bossy know-it-all who keep dictating to every generation what’s “appropriate,” maybe there is a kind of ridiculous eternal life for the species – but one, thankfully, that’s not, for the individual, the hell of no exit.
My father committed suicide, because the morning newspapers depressed him. And could you blame him? With the horror and corruption and ignorance and poverty and genocide and AIDS and global warming and terrorism and the family value morons and the gun morons. “The horror,” Kurtz said at the end of Heart of Darkness – “the horror.”
There’s just Boris’s talking head, but his linguistic energy is so relentless that it can make you long to see something to mitigate it. The Conrad quote implies the need for some kind of art – some aesthetic mode – to help inure you to life’s horrors.
But what can you do? You read about some massacre in Darfur or some school bus gets blown up, and you go “Oh my God! the horror,” and then you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free-range chicken. Because what can you do? . . . I tried to commit suicide myself. Obviously it didn’t work out.
Unless you just tune it out, the range of the speech is astounding – disturbing, fascinating, funny, but terrible too. Boris has the will to kill himself but not the skill.
But why do you even want to hear about all this? Christ, you got your own problems. I’m sure you’re all obsessed with any number of sad little hopes and dreams. Your predictably unsatisfying love life; your failed business ventures; “Oh, if only I’d bought that stock”; “if only I’d purchased that house years ago”; “if only I’d made a move on that woman?” If this, if that – you know what – give me a break with your could haves and should haves.
From atrocities and suicide to a missed chance to hit on some fetching woman or make more money, the diatribe moves from a review of horror and death to the staging ground of deflationary humor and unpredictable feats of imagination. And that’s the overall pattern of this whole movie and, indeed, of late Allen’s work through Midnight in Paris.
Philosophical pessimism and satirical humor, though they offer indispensable knowledge that thoughtful people need to deal with reality, just can’t overcome or negate the appeal and interest of personal narratives – of “my story,” as Boris puts it. A particular story might have in it the appealing vitality – the life force – of a Melody Celestine and her mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), but to see and appreciate all that might depend on a purging of both sentimental illusions and bitterness through inspired and inspiring misanthropy.
“Whatever works” can mean a liberation in golden fantasy. An autobiographical imperative drives Midnight in Paris, if you can believe Allen. Before he made his own movies, he went to Paris as a young scriptwriter for What’s New, Pussycat? (1965). He told Eric Lax,
I had, or fancied myself having, an artistic temperament, and I was plunged into Hollywood at its most venal . . . The redeeming thing about the film was that I got to spend eight months in Paris and I developed a love for the city . . . I have a regret, or a semi-regret, that I didn’t stay there. Two of the girls who did the costumes liked Paris so much they stayed there and lived there and worked there. I didn’t have their independence or spirit or originality. It took a more adventurous soul than me to do it, and it’s a shame (Lax 2007: 294).21
The film proves that you can’t live in the past, but that the past can live in you and then, if your art is good, in others.
Midnight in Paris (2011) is a late-Woody masterpiece of comic faith, but it wouldn’t exist without Allen’s misanthropic discontents and the Cassandra-like probings of his preceding twenty-first-century films. It combines the “inspired silliness” of his earlier movies with the “rueful fatalism of his later work.”22 It’s built on nostalgia for the aesthetic glory of the past, but paradoxically this phenomenal nostalgia is strictly a product of present-day wish-fulfillment psychology and imagination. There’s no nostalgic Golden Age without a strong contemporary need for art to recreate the present by recreating the past.
Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), would-be novelist, wants to escape his sell-out present and “give literature a real shot.” He’s a “successful” young “Hollywood hack” (his own words), disgusted to be doing scripts and rewrites for bad big box-office films. On a vacation with his gorgeous, venal fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her rich parents dedicated to twenty-first-century Mammonism, he dreams of staying on in Paris, where so many Americans and other expatriates have gone to do their work. At midnight, he’s out alone walking and lost, when revelers drive by and invite him to get in their old luxury Peugeot. He soon finds himself transported to his Golden Age, 1920s Paris. There, in a recurring fantasy of enormous gaiety and charm, he hangs out with the era’s crowd of famous artists. He meets and talks with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (Allison Pill and Tom Hiddleston), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brophy), and many others – but most important of all, with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), imaginary lover of Modigliani, Braque, and Picasso, with whom he falls in tender love and who falls in love with him. All of them help him and believe in his book.23 Allen does a wonderful thing in this film: out of the past, he appropriates art into comedy, and he brings off the difficult feat of making artists and even forms of art funny without denigrating their radiance.
Five haunting phrases characterize this movie:
The words “magical” and “camp” describe the effect, the destination and fascinating poise of the film and suggest why it’s had such an unexpectedly strong appeal for viewers: “Magical” is one thing, “camp” is another, but combine them successfully in their full, literal meanings – appealingly, mysteriously transcendent and outrageously, provocatively absurd – and you have a radiant fission of toggling energies that only a few artists – Austen, Dickens, Joyce, Nabokov, Beckett, Waugh, and Allen, say – ever achieve.24 Late Woody brings the “magic” and “camp” the out of a Golden Age past and fuses them in high comedy.
Figure 6.2 “We’ll always have Paris”: Gil and Gabrielle walk off into a rain-imbued future at the close of Midnight in Paris.
(Producers: Letty Aronson, Raphaël Benoliel, Javier Méndez, Helen Robin, Jack Rollins, Jaume Roures, Stephen Tenenbaum)
I want to end by going back to Allen’s existential question in Manhattan (1979), his answers to which, I said, established a basis for a comic faith then. Posing the question again three decades later, I’m setting down the answers I see in Midnight in Paris:
Well, all right, why is life worth living? That’s a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? Well, maybe the fact that you can travel back and forth through time by means of art and artists of the past and present (who run the ultimate nostalgic shop) and you really can be thrilled, now and then, to be a part of a brilliant, joyous, ridiculous, delusionary, dangerous, futile, and creative species. Okay. Um, what else? I would say, Paris, “city of light” in the dark – urban heat, roiling and boiling with art, history, and romance in a freezing solar system. What else? Well, um, how about falling head-over-heels in love with someone so beautiful and adorable that for a time you care about nothing else and can hardly believe your good luck at being alive . . . And, hmmm, Monet’s Water Lilies that turn walls into heaven, no matter what pedants say . . . and, um, a fabulous comic sense that mocks all the thought police and, um, also makes fun of artists while exalting them. What else? . . . belle epoque golden merry-go-rounds, and Gabielle (Lea Seydoux), happy to walk with you in the rain of the present . . . And cinematographer Khondji who can shoot the cliché Paris sites, then show them fresh and golden, and make you see and feel why the tourists have to come . . . and um, music and lyrics by Cole Porter giving you every rhyme and reason to just do it . . . and the jazz of Bechet, Django, and Grappelli . . . and dotty, pretentious, Hemingway with his clean prose and macho pose, still alive, magnetic, ridiculous . . . and, of course Cotillard’s face – loveliness that, in a flash, explodes the idea of humanity as a failed species.
Coda: Directly and indirectly, literally and allegorically, Allen’s recent movies confront and imagine for viewers the dilemma of living with and even being faith-starved, death-haunted, money-mad, truth-fearing, erotically confused, intellectually provincial, handwashing witnesses and rationalizers of violence, vicarious murder, trivializing ambition, envy, avarice, and cynicism who have made and are making twenty-first-century history. Comic faith comes hard, and that’s why Midnight in Paris could seem so touching and powerful in showing that an original comic genius lives on and can do great new work.