Critical Theory, also known as the Frankfurt School of Sociology, was transported to the United States by Jewish intellectual émigrés from Nazi Germany. Interweaving Marxist sociology, economics, and political theory with Freudian psychoanalysis, the theorists struggled to understand the impact of social forces associated with the emergence of modernity on the human psyche and their political consequences (Jay 1973). Under Max Horkheimer’s guidance at the Institute of Social Research, social theorists such as Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm brought an interdisciplinary approach to theorizing the contradictions located in the processes of modernization.¹ While these writers point to capitalism as the primary determinant for the organization of social life, they shift the Marxist focus on production to exchange (distribution, marketing, consumption) and concentrate their analyses on the legitimizing function of cultural production (Kellner 1989).

In the United States, they directed their lens on what Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) refer to as the “culture industry.” Whereas the production of culture in Nazi Germany was controlled by the totalitarian state, in the United States, media corporations were producing a new cultural form, mass culture – an increasingly rationalized form that is administered and produced like any other commodity. The juggernaut of mass culture destroys aesthetic sensibilities and intellectual reflexivity, transforming cultural production into a mindless ethos of consumerism. While Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the film and music industry, Marcuse (1964) argues that advertising produced a new form of totalitarianism, restructuring human needs to fit the needs of the marketplace. Corporations not only produce commodities but also stimulate the need structure necessary to sell those commodities. Fromm (1955) notes that the individual experienced the self through a marketing orientation “as a thing to be successfully employed on the market.” Modern alienation permeates not only work but also consumption. Later writers such as Stuart Ewen (1977) extend Fromm’s argument by using the term “commodity self” to describe a person who defines him/herself as well as others by the commodity signs he/she consumes. He argued that advertising creates a social world in which individuals feel constant anxiety and they then locate solutions to this anxiety in the act of consumption. More recently, Fredric Jameson (1991) refocuses the lens on new hyperanomic social formations theorized under the rubrics of postmodernity, hypermodernity, or liquid modernity. Here, the ever-increasing velocity at which cultural texts and/or fragments of texts circulate appears to undermine even the idea of authenticity. Within the postmodern paradigm, the best we can do is piece together an identity out of cultural fragments. The ongoing task of Critical Theory is to unravel the threads of modernity and postmodernity to reveal the dynamics of these historical social formations.

I argue that Allen’s concerns are located within the parameters of Critical Theory’s analysis of modernity and now postmodernity. Both Critical Theory and Allen share the same concerns: the destruction of an anchored intellectuality; the pursuit of status and the resulting inauthenticity of self-presentation; the reduction of the psychoanalytic to the therapeutic; a desire to understand the organization of the erotic; and the expansion of social formations – particularly media – which produce a narcissistic obsession for recognition. Allen explores the intersection of meaning, pleasure, and identity in relation to the social and cultural contradictions of modernity. We encounter the most pronounced articulation of this in Zelig. As I will illustrate, the diegesis of Zelig is a direct extension of Fromm’s (1941) analysis of the underlying psychological conditions produced by modernity reflected in the rise of Nazism.

Allen’s work following Annie Hall is particularly sensitive to the workings of the culture industry, its penetration into everyday life, and its role in organizing the fantasy life of its audiences. He traces the social psychological consequences of this industry as we move from modern to postmodern social formations. Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Radio Days focus on the explosion of modern forces in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s mediated by newsreel, film, and radio. Interiors and Stardust Memories explore the role of the artist and her/his relation to the formation of identity. The multinarrative structure of Celebrity, a later work, presents a fully developed postmodern world in which, at the end of the film, protagonist Lee Simon can only look up at the sky as a skywriter writes HELP.

Although I contend that Allen explores the problem of authenticity and selfhood within Critical Theory’s construction of modernity, to claim that Allen is philosophically bound to any one of these theorists or is in any way committed to Critical Theory’s agenda would be erroneous. For Allen, the culture industry produces a conflicted terrain which not only produces dreams and reignites memories, but also reduces culture to triviality and empty formulae. Moreover, Allen resists any attempt to theorize and mistrusts any social agenda deducted from abstract theoretical positions. Nevertheless, Allen’s approach to cinema, whether comic or serious, exposes the contradictions located at the level of everyday life in cultural landscapes. His characters are negotiators. Some negotiate the contradictions more successfully than others. This chapter illuminates Allen’s treatment of this world and the way in which it resonates of and departs from the concerns and analyses of Critical Theory.

Zelig: Reflections on the Cultural Landscape

Against a montage of images of nightclub jitterbuggers, airplane stuntmen playing music on the wings of a plane, flagpole-sitters weaving back and forth high above the New York skyline, the documentary-intoned voiceover of Zelig states,

The year is 1928. America, enjoying a decade of unequal prosperity, has gone wild. The Jazz Age it is called. The rhythms are syncopated, the morals are looser, the liquor is cheaper when you can get it. It is a time of diverse heroes and madcap stunts, of speakeasies and flamboyant parties (Allen 1990).

With the Charleston playing in the background, Allen invites us to the coming-of-age party of modernity. Here tradition recedes into distant nostalgia, replaced by the excitement of the speeded up flow of novelty captured so well when silent films shot at 20 frames per second are now projected at 24 frames per second. “Events in the Jazz Age move too rapidly, like Red Grange,” attests the narrator. Lindbergh’s iconic transatlantic flight stamped the decade in which everything is possible in a world with seemingly no limits.

The 1920s is a pivotal decade for American society. The United States is rapidly transforming itself into a mature urban society. For decades, immigrants have been pouring into the country from Europe, settling in ethnic enclaves, and now their sons and daughters are assimilating into the American melting pot. Industrial capitalism is “successful”; mass production is outrunning consumption. A cultural explosion is brought about by new technologies: the mix of print and photography, sound and film, news and cinema, and the maturing of radio. Cinema and advertising provide the models for success. The stars, exotic locations, and narratives of Hollywood are the materials out of which the dream factory manufactures fantasies. Marchand (1985) observes that, speaking the language of urbanity, advertising supported the dictum, “what was new was desirable.” But he also notes that the themes of advertising responded to the anonymity and impersonality of the city, the lack of self-sufficiency and control, and the need to learn how to manipulate others. This constant “state of flux” is both intoxicating and disorienting (Berman 1981).

While the 1920s are remembered as the Golden Age of modernity, Marx and Engels, over 70 years earlier, theorized the social and economic forces underlying its emergence. In 1848, Marx and Engels (2002) rang the death knell of the traditional world with the words, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Recognizing that Capital mowed down everything in its path, Marx clearly understood that the cultural architecture of traditional Europe and the social relationships it supported were collapsing around him. Marx, however, did not decry this collapse nor nostalgically pine for the lost world’s return. The traditional world was filled with superstition, backward thinking, and exploitation legitimized by religious belief and caste systems. Capitalism is the economic juggernaut churning through the social landscape, tearing it apart, rebuilding it and then tearing it apart again, a process Schumpeter (1950) termed “creative destruction.” As ascribed social roles become unglued from their traditional moorings, a Hobbesian world emerges. Stripped naked before the social forces that make life unpredictable and uncertain, it is every man for himself. For Marx, however, this was a world of possibility – one so destructive and ruthless, and so riddled with contradiction, that revolutionary change was inevitable. This is the world of Critical Theory. This is also the world that gave birth to Leonard Zelig.

Starting with Marx’s vision of the social landscape but now also armed with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Critical Theory asked: “In this maelstrom of social and cultural change, how does the individual produce a sense of self that not only can cope with these macro social forces but also live a reflective, productive life?” In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm describes what he sees to be the modern dilemma:

Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness (1941: 140).

For Fromm, this moment, simultaneously disorienting and liberating, can be transformed into “positive freedom,” a spontaneous active engagement with work, play, and relationships. Or, one can use “mechanisms of escape” to protect oneself from the anxiety attached to the state of anomie in which humanity finds itself. Fromm provides Allen with the modern dilemma, and it is within this world that Zelig negotiates. Will Zelig succumb to the forces of modernity and escape from the new freedoms associated with it, or will he transcend these forces and become a reflexive, autonomous individual?

Fromm posits three mechanisms of escape: conformity, destructiveness, and authoritarianism. Zelig explores all three. We first meet Zelig as the uber-conformer, taking on the characteristics of whomever he is with, no matter how divergent they are. At a Sutton family party, he transforms himself first into Republican aristocrats then to Democratic working staff. As his condition worsens, he physically changes into a range of ethnicities. Finally, he is hospitalized. Fascinated with his condition, Dr. Eudora Fletcher becomes his psychiatrist and begins to explore its causes. All she is able to extract from analyzing him is Zelig’s simple answer “I want to be liked.”

Ironically, despite America’s celebration of individualism, it is the theme of overconformity that fascinated post-World War II writers like Fromm and his disciple, David Riesman, who popularized this discussion in The Lonely Crowd (1950). He argues a new form of conformity, other-directedness, emerges in the 1920s, taking hold in the post-World War II period with the rise of what C. Wright Mills (1951) calls the new middle class, a bureaucratic class which no longer owns the means of production. For Reisman, it is a world filled with anxiety, the fear of failure plaguing the individual before she/he even enters a situation. One’s radar always has to be on. To be successful means to fit in, to be able to do the necessary facework. Other writers followed Reisman’s lead. William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) decries the loss of individuality and the loss of entrepreneurship in the corporate world. Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) constructs a social world of role players quickly shifting identities as fast as a waiter goes through a restaurant’s kitchen doors.

In this new consumer society, one does not just consume goods, but commodity signs – images associated with commodities – become the constituents from which a person constructs an identity. In Captains of Consciousness, Ewen (1977) argues that in the 1920s even ethnic presses were running ads that denied and degraded ethnicity; advertising was creating a world in which individuals felt that they were constantly being judged. The new model of success was located in Protestant bourgeois culture. It is against this model that the immigrant experiences marginalization. The new cultural imperative is to transform oneself, to slough off one’s ethnicity and to assimilate into the American melting pot. Throughout the film, we watch Zelig become Chinese, Greek, African American. What is noteworthy is that it is only at the film’s end when he marries Eudora Fletcher and comfortably settles into a WASP identity that Zelig feels fully at home. Johnston (2007) argues that Zelig has learned civility and vertically assimilates into the middle class, that he is more a conformer now than when he suffered from his neurosis. Ironically, after escaping from Germany and flying upside down across the Atlantic Ocean, Zelig states that, “I have never flown before in my life and it shows exactly what you can do if you’re a total psychotic.” Saul Bellow’s comment follows: “His sickness is the root of his salvation . . . it was his very disorder that made a hero of him” (Allen 1990). Perhaps Allen leaves a loophole at the end of the film: well‑adjustment is not salvation.

Destructiveness, Fromm’s second mechanism of escape, aims at eliminating the threatening object, the cause of anxiety: “I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside of myself by destroying it” (Fromm 1941). Paradoxically, the threatening object is the disruptive force of modernity itself, an undefinable enemy. And so substitutions are made – domestic violence, racism, and the genocides it supports, as well as the moral panics that project these fears onto the other. Throughout the first part of the film we are comically taken through the early life of Zelig as destructiveness infects all the personal relations surrounding him. “My brother beat me,” Zelig, under hypnosis, tells Dr. Fletcher. “My sister beat my brother. My father beat my sister and my brother and me. My mother beat my father and my sister and me and my brother. The neighbors beat our family. The people down the block beat the neighbors and our family” (Allen 1990). Later, Allen makes reference to destructiveness in the backlash of hatred and rage directed at Zelig when he falls from grace. On the left he is vilified by labor, and on the right by the Ku Klux Klan. The fear of Zelig, who is now the threatening object, is given voice by an older woman sitting before a microphone in a radio studio: “Leonard Zelig sets a bad moral influence. America is a moral country. It’s a God-fearing country. We don’t condone scandals – scandals of fraud and polygamy. In keeping with a pure society, I say lynch the little heathen.” Here Allen takes a comic swipe at talk radio and its ability to project hostility onto weaker objects.

Allen states that Zelig is “not a pleasant fantasy of metamorphosis but about the kind of personality that leads to fascism” (Perlmutter 1990: 42). Fromm’s third mechanism is authoritarianism. Here, the terror of loneliness and the deep feelings of insignificance produced by the breakdown of community and tradition and the dissolution of moral certitude are replaced by fusing oneself to someone or something more powerful. Fromm suggests,

The annihilation of the individual self and the attempt to overcome thereby the unbearable feeling of powerlessness are only one side of the masochistic strivings. The other side is the attempt to become a part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself, to submerge and participate in it. This power can be a person, an institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion (1941: 155).

In each case, the anxiety-ridden, hollowed-out self is replaced by an all-powerful phantasm. The freedom and exhilaration of the American Jazz Age took on the opposite form in Nazi Germany. The dislocated individual is now reconstituted in the crowd, easily directed by a charismatic leader. The Fascist movements of the 1930s absorbed those persons displaced by the forces of modernity.

In Zelig, authoritarianism also exists in what appears to be a more benign form: in celebrity culture – a theme that is also taken up in Allen’s later work. In an allusion to Citizen Kane, we encounter Zelig and Eudora Fletcher in a Pathé newsreel at a San Simeon party. They are mingling with a pantheon of stars from a variety of professions: Marie Dressler, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Jimmy Walker, Tom Mix, Adolph Menjou, Claire Winsor, Dolores Del Rio, James Cagney, and Bobby Jones. Zelig and Fletcher are “on top of the world.” Not only does celebrity culture permeate the film, but so does the culture industry, which produces it. Mass media can instantly transform anyone into a celebrity – not just Fletcher and Zelig, but anyone connected to them: Martin Geist, Zelig’s sister, Zelig’s former wives, even the man on the street with an opinion, no matter how uninformed or irrational it might be. And while celebrity culture is clearly less destructive than fascism, both forms are underwritten by the same sociopsychological dynamic – the need for identification thrives on isolation, loneliness, insignificance, anxiety, and powerlessness. Rather than filling the void within, fusing oneself to a phantasmagoric other for both Fromm and Allen connotes a loss of identity.

Fromm (1941) separates freedom into two categories: objective freedom or the freedoms guaranteed by democratic formations – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, etc.; and subjective freedom, a psychological category, the ability to think critically and act independently and creatively. It is the latter that concerns both Fromm and Allen. The dilemma for Allen is the same dilemma for Critical Theory: how can Zelig transcend the disruptions of modernity itself and become an authentic, autonomous self? How does one theoretically explain how the social determines the psychological while simultaneously freeing the individual’s psyche from that determination? If alienation produces the need to escape, can’t it also produce autonomy and resistance? What are the mechanisms of transcendence?

Allen explores these questions through Zelig’s relationship with Dr. Eudora Fletcher, a psychiatrist. Fletcher is fascinated with Zelig, who claims to be a psychiatrist as well. They have numerous unsuccessful, frustrating sessions in which Zelig spews out gibberish – these scenes perhaps commenting on psychiatry in general. Asking him for advice, Fletcher reverses roles and claims to be a patient. When Zelig becomes disorganized, she hypnotizes him and begins to unravel his defenses. Finally, she produces a “subject” who not only has an opinion but also will excessively defend it. After Zelig gets into a fight with another doctor, Fletcher does some “fine tuning,” and Zelig becomes a socially functioning being. He appears normal. Is the attainment of normalcy the solution to the social disruptions of modernity? A psychiatry producing well-adjusted people who can function in the chaotic uncertainty of modernity or what has now developed into a full-fledged therapeutic society?

Allen constructs Zelig as an object, a non-self. Throughout the film, he is acted upon by the medical community, the media, Fletcher, Geist, and his sister. Allen’s use of the mockumentary structure reinforces this position. Voiceover, when spoken by a character, subjectivizes the character. The externalizing of the inner voice as the all-knowing narrator produces a deep self who is both reflexive and autonomous. However, Allen’s use of third person voiceover reduces Zelig to an effect, determined by both the structure of the film and the social world which the narrator describes. It is only when Zelig speaks that his subjectivity is apparent. This takes place in two forms: in his psychological double-talk and his abbreviated aphoristic-laden speeches – “Be yourself. You have to be your own man” – neither of which suggests any sense of reflexivity or agency.

Has Allen boxed himself in? If all that psychiatry can do is produce a better object, what’s left? Allen chooses romanticism. Love is given the status of an autonomous, transcendent formation, existing outside the social. Not only is Zelig lost in the currents of modernity, but we find Eudora Fletcher there as well. She is also a nonperson living out a script. The only difference is that she appears to be successful and normal. When she reverses roles with Zelig and becomes the patient, she is not performing. The daughter of successful, though dysfunctional, Protestant parents, Fletcher is not just a psychiatrist, but also a damaged person. It is the love relationship that develops between Fletcher and Zelig that cushions them from this anomic social world. The voiceover quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald, “In the end it was after all not the approbation of many but the love of one woman that changed his life.”

In his discussion of Zelig, Allan Bloom (1987) criticizes both Allen and Fromm for their retreat from Nietzche’s nihilism:

If Allen’s art is ultimately shallow and disappointing, it is because it tries to assure us that the agonies of nihilism are just neuroses that can be cured by a little therapy and a little stiffening of our backs. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) is Dale Carnegie with a bit of middle-European cultural whipped cream on top. Get rid of capitalist alienation and Puritan repression, and all will be well as each man chooses for himself (85).

Bloom is correct here. Both Allen and Fromm retreat into idealism without any material grounding. They desire an autonomous authentic individual without being able to recognize any social formations which might support it. It is not surprising that a later work of Fromm’s is entitled The Revolution of Hope (1968). Fromm had moved away from the Marxist base of Critical Theory to an idealistic humanistic perspective.

Critical Theory is ambitious: its goal is to theorize the contradictions of modernity against the proposition that social formations ought to be designed to ameliorate human suffering and reduce exploitation. If there is going to be a new man, it must emerge under new structural formations. Critical Theory calls for strategic structural changes. Fromm drifts away from this macrotheoretical position; Allen, however, has always ridiculed the hubris of it.

From Interiors to Radio Days: An Exploration into Art and Culture

Critical Theory elevates what it referred to as “authentic art” to a privileged position; it articulates the negative side of the dialectic essential for social progress. Adorno (1997) and Marcuse (1979) argue that the role of the artist is to express alienation and estrangement produced by the inequities in the social relations of production. By expressing the negative, it simultaneously gives voice to liberating possibilities. It expresses that which is not yet, but could be. It positions itself against the reproduction of the status quo. The problem occurs if artistic production loses its autonomy and functions primarily as legitimizing discourse supporting unequal distributions of power and wealth.

Two seminal essays on the changing nature of art and culture in modernity have shaped the debate on film as a cultural object. In “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin (1968) describes the fundamental change in the art object. Benjamin argues that the traditional art has an “aura,” a result of its functional place in ritual. The meaning of art is locked in location and context. As the ritualistic use of art declines, so does its aura. Consequently, art in the age of mechanical reproduction is no longer dependent upon ritual but exhibition. Photography and film liberate the art form from the “parasitical dependence on ritual” (224).

Benjamin entertains two positions. On the one hand, he argues that film, because of the nature of its production as a commodity, reduces culture as a legitimate voice for depicting the existence of modern man.

In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations (Benjamin 1968: 232).

On the other hand, Benjamin contends that film breaks down perceptual barriers of socioeconomic location. Consequently, film has a liberating potential that no previous art form has.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling (236).

Influenced by the work of Brecht, Dziga-Vertov, and Eisenstein, Benjamin gives voice to questions that still haunt filmmakers and film theorists: is film by nature of its production/distribution nexus destined to be nothing more than a commodity determined by the logic of capital and spectacle? Where does film’s liberating potential lie? Are specific aesthetic strategies more appropriate to the medium? While Benjamin gives voice to both sides of the debate, he is almost always identified with the latter position, that film has liberating potential.

In contrast, Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay, “The Culture Industry” (in Horkheimer and Adorno 1972), aptly subtitled “enlightenment as mass deception,” argues that the production of mass culture driven by market forces does little to produce transcendent possibilities.²

The phrase “culture industry” denotes not only a top-down model of culture production but also an assembly line process driven by market efficiencies not unlike the production of automobiles. Because Hollywood realism is the dominant aesthetic, film is particularly problematic, simply duplicating what already exists. Designed to be consumed as a market commodity, film employs the use of stereotypical characters, simplistic plots, unsublimated sexuality, and repetition. This not only promotes infantilism in its audiences but also conformity and submissiveness to existing political economic powers. The culture industry, supported by mass communication technologies, reduces artistic production to mindless entertainment. Supporting the expansion of a consumer society, it functions to contain the contradictions produced by capitalism.³

Adorno’s critique is not a critique of popular culture, but of the loss of autonomy of the artist producing under capitalism. Waldman argues that

the heart of Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, then, is based upon the changed function of the “non-autonomous” art work: it affirms, rather than negates, falsely reconciling the general and the particular, and consequently reconciling the mass audience to the status quo (1977: 43).

Unlike folk culture, which is organically tied to traditional communities, or high culture, which expresses the interest of the bourgeoisie, mass culture is determined by the logic of capital. In this form, art is reduced to a commodity, an exchange value. Moreover, mass culture absorbs both folk and high culture – not only by destroying aesthetic sensibility but also by reducing alternative critical ground. This process reproduces an ideological position synonymous with what Marx termed false consciousness or Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony. Unlike traditional Marxist critique, however, which focuses on the politically correct content of a work, Critical Theory concentrates its critique on the use of standardized repetitive mechanical forms. Rejecting Marxist realism, Adorno and Horkheimer argue for a radicalization of the formal qualities of the cultural text – i.e., Dadaism or Surrealism. They offer a theory of form rather than content.

In a later essay, “Transparencies of Film,” Adorno (1981–1982) does not critique film per se, but criticizes instead the process that tethers its aesthetic vision to the demands of marketability. Praising “works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality” (199), he argues for amateur independent cinema. Noting that “the ideology provided by the industry, its officially intended models, may by no means automatically correspond to those that affect the spectators” (201), Adorno resisted collapsing text and reception. Most importantly, Adorno recognized the sociological nature of film aesthetics: “There can be no aesthetics of the cinema, not even a purely technological one, which would not include the sociology of the cinema” (202). Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique centers on the concentration of production in Hollywood and what they saw as the commodification of cultural forms. The mass production of culture deeply violated the bourgeois conception of the artist as one who could express the deepest contradictions experienced by man as he encountered the human condition. Sarris’s (1968) auteur theory is an extension of this position, a belief in the power of the autonomous authentic artist, the élan of the auteur – not just a technical expert nor a stylist but an artist with vision.

Allen is concerned with the same questions. When do cultural formations produce infantilism, conformity, and fascism? When is film liberating to the viewer? When is it deadening? What is the responsibility to the filmmaker to himself, to his audience? What is the relationship of aesthetics to the social? Most importantly, what is the relationship of art to the struggle for meaning? How does one articulate suffering, meaning, love, the relationship of living to the moment of dying? Allen’s exploration of these questions takes place in carefully constructed social landscapes echoing Adorno’s proposition that there is no aesthetic of cinema without a sociology of cinema. Allen’s formal aesthetic choices are determined by the social dynamics infused in each film’s diegesis.

While Allen’s romance with popular culture positions him on the opposite side of the culture debate with Adorno and Horkheimer (Grimsted 1991), Allen’s work itself as well as his exploration of the role of the artist/intellectual parallels Adorno and Horkheimer. For many, in Annie Hall Allen establishes what is often seen as an anti-intellectual bias in his work. The famous Marshall McLuhan scene in which he pulls McLuhan out of thin air to correct a movie-line know-it-all, and the New York party scene in which he escapes intellectual gibberish to the bedroom to watch a Knicks game establish a style in which he regularly jibes at intellectuals. However, Allen’s attack on the intellectual as well as the artist takes place under three conditions: intellectuality is divorced from the reality of everyday life, the speaker is shallow and ungrounded, and/or the speaker is using his/her relationship to knowledge or art as a status enhancer. Allen is not critical of intellectual discourses, but of how they are used in social situations.

Allen makes a significant leap from his jibes at the “intellectual” in Annie Hall to his study of the centrality of aesthetics to bourgeois identity in Interiors. Each character reflects a different side of what Bourdieu (1984) refers to as the aesthetic disposition. For Eve, the matriarch and an interior designer, aesthetics is formal, a function of the relation of one object to one another; for her, the relationship of the aesthetic to actual life is secondary. The consequence of this position is a lifeless aesthetic, an ice palace. Renata, the successful but burnt-out poet, produces work composed of aphorisms divorced from lived experience. Her poem is entitled “Wondering,” but wondering about what? It celebrates a subject without an object. What’s missing is an experiential referent. Nevertheless, her sister and husband envy her success. Joey, the middle daughter, is a would-be artist, who jumps from medium to medium. She lacks the artistic talent necessary to succeed and therefore lacks the cache to attain full bourgeois identity. Frederick, Renata’s husband, is the clever writer in whose work style outruns content. As a critic, he is willing to tear down other writers, but he hastens into a narcissistic retreat when he is criticized. Michael, Joey’s husband, a Marxist filmmaker married into a bourgeois family, is uneasy about the hypocrisy of his life in relation to his work. Flynn, the youngest daughter, has gone to Hollywood to make movies. Lacking the intellectual finesse of other family members, she fails to enjoy the higher status associated with serious art. Her sexuality, however, gives her a power that the other daughters lack. Rose, the outsider engaged to wed the sisters’ father, has no pretentions: she simply enjoys life. Her son sells kitsch at a Las Vegas casino. Joey refers to her as a vulgarian. While Allen steers away from class politics, Interiors is a sophisticated analysis of the intersection of class, status, and aesthetics. It is not that class doesn’t matter for Allen; for him, more dangerous than the effects of class on relationality is a political agenda to eliminate social class.

Paying homage to both Bergman and Fellini, Stardust Memories is an exploration of both the internal and external life of filmmaker Sandy Bates. The film interweaves dreamlike memories of childhood, family, friends, and lovers and clips from Sandy’s autobiographical films juxtaposed with a nonstop staccato barrage of the filmmaker’s demanding fans. Sandy must negotiate these constant intrusions as he explores the meaning of filmmaking in relation to audience, industry, art, and life itself.

In the film’s loosely constructed narrative, Sandy, a successful director, heads to a film culture weekend, a publicity event at which fans, writers, critics, and academics can mingle with the director. Everybody wants something from Sandy. He is offered speaking engagements, scripts to read, even sex. Autograph seekers and picture-taking fans interrupt his most intimate moments. The cult of the celebrity promoted by events such as this one has turned back on the celebrity. Every moment is destroyed by fan adulation. Feeling exploited by turning out comic films, Sandy ventures out and produces a serious piece. His agent and producer, however, question his judgment.

Sandy:	I don’t want to make funny movies anymore. They can’t force me to. I don’t feel funny. I look around the world and all I see is human suffering.
Agent:	Human suffering doesn’t sell tickets in Kansas City.
Producer:	They want to laugh in Kansas City, they’ve been working in the wheat fields all day (Allen 1983: 286).

Sandy rejects being just another cog in the culture industry. With a wall-sized image of a Vietnamese man being executed in the background, Sandy expresses the dilemma to his girlfriend, Dorrie.

All those people and how unhappy most of them are. The terrible things they do to each other. Everything’s over so quickly and you don’t have any idea if it’s worth it or not” (Allen 1983: 287).

Later in the movie, when he meets a group of space aliens, he asks them why there is so much suffering and what he can do about it. He is told to make funnier movies.

Critical Theory and Allen share this same concern. What is the role of the intellectual/artist faced with human suffering? Critical Theory starts with a sociological proposition that in a given society specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human suffering and Reason can guide us to the specific ways for realizing those possibilities. For Critical Theory, it is the role of the artist/intellectual to recognize those social forces that contain the contradictions that produce positive social change. Critical Theory is driven by a Marxist agenda. To the extent that mass media is a force of containment, simply reproducing the status quo, it is to be criticized.

Allen also expresses a deep concern for human suffering but starts from a philosophical position that suffering is a function of the human condition. How does one position oneself as an artist in relation to this dilemma? Unlike Critical Theory, which directs criticism at the control and distribution of resources and power, Allen focuses on the interpersonal. It is at this level that pain and suffering are produced. Allen is leery of political agendas: for him, they are as limiting to the artist as is the organization of the culture industry itself.

Allen does not deny inequality nor the strictures of social class. They are simply taken for granted. In interviews, Allen frequently refers to luck as the key ingredient of success. In Stardust Memories, Jerry Aber, a childhood friend with whom he played stickball, stops to talk to Sandy.

Sandy:	So what are you doing ? What are you up to?
Jerry:	You know what I do now. I drive a cab.
Sandy:	You look good. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Jerry:	Yeah, but look at me compared to you. Beautiful broads.
Sandy:	What do you want me to say? I was the kid in the neighborhood that told the jokes. Right. So we live in a society that puts a big value on jokes. Think of it this way. If I had been an Apache Indian – those guys didn’t need comedians at all. Right? So I’d be out of work.
Jerry:	Come on – that doesn’t help me feel better.
Sandy:	I don’t know what to say – I’ve got such a headache. Luck. It’s all luck. I’m the first to admit it. I was a lucky bum. If I was not born in Brooklyn, if I were born in Poland or Berlin, I’d be a lampshade today. Right? It could happen just like that. Be thankful that you’re not Nat Bernstein. Yeah, wasted away. Incurable disease. It was absolutely terrible (Allen 1983: 342).

Allen recognizes the existence of class relations but nullifies them by privileging luck as the main ingredient in his position. Although Allen has an acute understanding of the dynamics of social class, his focus is on the interpersonal, not the macrosocioeconomic.

Allen believes in the integrity of the artist who must resist the demands of the culture industry to produce films that are moneymaking commodities. When the studio decides to reshoot the ending of Sandy’s film, landing the travelers on the train at jazz heaven instead of the garbage dump, Sandy protests.

Sandy:	And, you know the whole point of the movie is that no one is saved.
Walsh:	Sandy, this is an Easter film. We don’t need a movie by an atheist.
Sandy:	Jazz heaven – that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t control life; it doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only–only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I’m an absolute expert (Allen 1983: 335).

Similarly, when the studio wanted to change the ending of The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen stood firm in the face of the difference in box office receipts a happy ending would have generated (Schickel 2003).

Allen’s answers to the questions that surround art and life are personal and romantic. Meaning is reduced to the nonrepeatable idyllic magic moment.

Sandy narrates:

It was one of those great Spring days. A Sunday. And you knew summer would be coming soon. I remember that morning Dorrie and I had gone for a walk in the park and back to the apartment and we were just sort of sitting there and I put on a record of Louis Armstrong which is music I grew up loving. It was very, very pretty. And I happened to glance over and I saw Dorrie sitting there . . . and I remember thinking to myself how terrific she was and how much I loved her. . . . I guess it was the combination of everything . . . the sound of that music, and the breeze and how beautiful Dorrie looked to me and for one brief moment everything just seemed to come together perfectly, and I felt happy, almost indestructible in a way. That simple little moment of contact moved me in a very, very profound way (Allen 1983: 372).

All of Sandy’s artistic struggles are meaningless next to this memory. A beautiful day, a beautiful woman imaged up with Louis Armstrong playing in the background. Ironically, Sandy’s memory of this moment with Dorrie places him in jazz heaven.

In Stardust Memories, Allen takes on the relationship of the filmmaker to the culture industry and here the industry includes all the mechanisms that produce an audience – publicity events, fan clubs, academic journals, university courses, award ceremonies, etc. In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen looks at the relationship of Hollywood to everyday life. He sets the film in the Depression in a factory town in New Jersey. The factory has closed down; men are out of work, hanging around the street; the houses have deteriorated. Even the amusement park is barren and emptied of life. The washed-out, drab colors of the film, the dull overcoats everyone seems to wear, project a sense of struggle to just to get through each day.

In the midst of this, we are introduced to Cecilia, who works as a waitress in a diner with her sister. As they talk about the lives of Hollywood stars, a costumer yells “Where’s my toast?” and the boss prods them, “Let’s go, girls. Cecilia, your sister is slow. Ladies, there is a depression on. A lot of people would like this job if you can’t handle it.” The fantasies produced by Hollywood only last a moment before the grind of everyday life intrudes. In the next scene, we are introduced to Monk, Cecilia’s husband, an out of work, brutish man who is pitching pennies with buddies. When Cecilia appears, he asks her for some “dough.” As the film progresses we learn that she is a victim of domestic violence; Allen, however, never shows us the violence.

Stuart and Elizabet Ewen (1982) argue that cinema and fashion were two domains in which young women, particularly immigrant women of the 1920s and 1930s, could escape the oppressive patriarchal formations found in ethnic immigrant enclaves. Cinema provided new roles that expressed the desire for autonomy and empowerment. Ewen and Ewen argue that these moments are only ironic, because cultural hegemony is at work. The dynamics of capitalism redirect their dreams into fantasies and consumption rather than into real political change. Hollywood is simply another discourse (like advertising and fashion) that distracts individuals from a reflexive relationship to their everyday lives, disguising contradictions by functioning as a legitimation discourse for the inequities produced by capitalism.

Allen interrogates Hollywood cinema from a sociological position. By choosing to locate the film in the Depression, he widens the gap between fantasy and everyday reality. Art opens up an imaginary world of possibility, but it is just that imaginary in which kisses are perfect. Against the backdrop of the Depression, movies can only provide a momentary illusion. Harsh reality waits outside the movie theater.

But Allen does not simply create a binary world of illusion and reality. Even in the Hollywood illusion of the interior Purple Rose of Cairo, inequality seeps in. Allen includes Delilah, the black maid, into the illusion. Delilah is making the bed while the countess is lying on a couch, painting her nails. While Delilah notes her romantic infatuation with Tom Baxter, the countess replies, “Come on, Delilah, draw my bath.” And Delilah responds “Yes, M’am. Now would you be wantin’ the big bubbles or the ass’s milk?” The inequalities of class and race are injected into the Hollywood version of reality, contradictions waiting for a later historical moment to draw them out.

Most readings of the film focus on the ending and applaud Allen’s conflicted and complex construction of the relationship of cinema to everyday life. Bailey notes that Purple Rose of Cairo dramatizes “Cecilia’s gradual, ultimately ecstatic reabsorption into a ‘heaven’ whose utter fraudulence it has been her dismal necessity to confront throughout the film” (2001: 152). Brode applauds Allen’s ability to hold contradictory positions expressed in the character of Cecilia: “She is a person of romantic sensibility tempered by a realist’s awareness: She is Woody Allen. . . . Thus, he experiences the worst of both possible worlds: a romantic’s innocence and idealism, a realist’s cynicism and pessimism” (1991: 241). Dunne also praises the film’s ending: “Unlike Stardust Memories, this film does not serially propose and reject such conclusions. Instead, it suspends the positive and negative, the real and the imaginary, in a purely cinematic form of ambiguity” (1987: 27). For both Critical Theory and Allen, the processes of projection-identification produced by Hollywood cinema and the realist illusion have their dangers. But for Allen they also provide some magical moments as long as the illusion is recognized as such.

Although Stardust Memories expresses Allen’s desire to maintain his distance from the entertainment industry, The Purple Rose of Cairo accepts the realm of entertainment as producing joyful moments, which can be mimicked in everyday life – for instance, the ukulele scene in a music store. This theme is carried into his next film, Radio Days, a series of vignettes loosely based on Allen’s childhood memories. Each story is tied to a radio-induced memory, often narrated by Allen: Joe getting caught stealing from a collection fund to establish the state of Israel in order to purchase the Masked Avenger ring, Tess listening to the Breakfast with Irene and Roger Show while she cleans her family’s dirty dishes, Aunt Bea’s date leaving her in the countryside when hearing Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, the failed rescue of Dolly Phelps, a young girl who fell into a well, the broadcast ultimately saving Joe from a spanking. Despite the rabbi’s warning – “Radio. It’s all right once in awhile. Otherwise, it tends to induce bad values, false dreams, lazy habits. Listening to the radio, these stories of foolishness and violence” – Allen’s stories weave the events and personalities of radio innocently and romantically into the fabric of everyday life.

Schickel writes that Radio Days contains some of the recurring themes in Allen’s work –

his somewhat unreasoned (but heartfelt) love of his city, his sense of the endless mutability of fashion, his awareness of how magical phenomena, like radio, can profoundly affect us and then, in the wink of history’s eye, become totally irrelevant (2003: 37).

Moreover, radio, because it lacks the visual, opens up an imaginative space. The characters on radio were larger than life. It is the disconnect between body and voice, description and reality, that produces space for individual fantasies to take form. The Masked Avenger is portrayed by small, bald Wally Shawn; family members pointlessly debate the talents of a radio ventriloquist; Biff Baxter sends the neighborhood boys looking for German submarines off the coast of Rockaway – these are the magical moments of childhood enhanced by radio. Unrecognized when they are experienced, these moments are nostalgically gathered together to produce warm familial memories. These moments intertwine with popular culture: the premise of Radio Days, the last scene on the train in Sandy’s movie in Stardust Memories, even the bittersweet ending of The Purple Rose of Cairo – for Allen, popular culture anchors identity.

Celebrity, Negotiating Identity

In the age of postmodernity, Critical Theory faced two fundamental challenges: Lyotard (1984) lays out the first premise of postmodernity, arguing that the grand narratives of modernity – science, humanism, Marxism – have lost legitimacy and have collapsed. The belief in scientific, technological, and societal progress under the auspices of the Western tradition were delegitimized by historical events, such as the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalinism, as well as the Vietnamese War. Moreover, the rise of postcolonial and other voices from the margins called into question the use of Enlightenment narratives associating technological progress and civilization as discourses that served the interests of colonial powers. Critical Theory’s agenda to produce a totalizing theory, to elide Marxism with psychoanalysis and to extend the Enlightenment project, were shaken.

The second challenge faced by Critical Theory and a central problem with which Allen engages is the problem of interiority. Postmodern theory called into question the notion of the deep self, a belief that fueled the bourgeois conception of identity. For Critical Theory, the deep self emerges out of a moment of alienation, an awareness of what possibly could be, a sense of the self in relation to the social with the ability to reflect on the contradictions between existence and possibility. For Critical Theory alienation presumes the possibility of coherency, a reconciliation of the self with the social. It is the role of the artist/intellectual to speak to this moment of alienation. The problem of interiority also haunts Allen’s films. His work is often self-reflexive to the point at which he accuses himself of being of self-indulgent. Interiors, a study of the aesthetic dimension and the construction of self, finds in human relations nothing but rivalry, jealousy, and narcissism, and yet the form this film takes demands at least an understanding of the artist’s dilemma. Stardust Memories follows an artist struggling to produce a meaningful work, one who struggles to make sense out his life. Similarly, Zelig assesses the impact of modernity on the formation of identity. Allen also expresses the problem of alienation as neurosis, a privileged position he uses comically to explore the contradictions between self-formation and the social materialized as interpersonal relations.

Fredric Jameson (1991), who carries the banner of Critical Theory into the current era, locates postmodernity as a function of advanced industrial capitalism in which commodification takes over all aspects of everyday life. Jameson articulates the problem of identity formation in the age of postmodernity using the metaphor of schizophrenia to describe the relation between cultural fragmentation and self-fragmentation. He argues that postmodern cultural formations are composed of disconnected, decontexualized commodity signs. Driven by the logic of capital supported by electronic technologies, the velocity by which these signs travel through our lives has highly accelerated. If identity is a function of culture, what happens to the self when a culture is composed of fragmented, decontextualized, fast-moving commodity signs? Jameson theorizes that the postmodern self is composed of signifiers that fail to link to a coherent sequence, like words without a sentence. When all that matters is surface, the logic of the spectacle, which aggrandizes all surfaces, prevails. This is the world of Celebrity.

The protagonist of Celebrity is Lee Simon, played by Kenneth Branagh. An Allenesque character, Lee speaks in a hyper, panic-driven language. Working as a magazine writer, not quite a gossip columnist but one who has entry backstage to the private lives of the stars, he “rubs elbows” with actors and actresses, supermodels, critics, novelists. Although he is driven by the desire to break into that group, he skirts the edges and remains on the margins, waiting for his big break.

Lee is unable to commit to anything – his work, his novel, his relationships. He is not anchored to anything or anyone. His self-deprecating manner of speaking uses a language structure composed of fragments and nonsequiturs. His diminished sense of self leaves him lacking in the bravado necessary to ascend to heavenly world of celebrity.

Lee has divorced Robin, his schoolteacher wife of 16 years. Lacking self-confidence and completely embittered by the experience of rejection, she flounders after the divorce. Guided by a friend, she tries therapy, a religious retreat, and finally winds up at a plastic surgeon’s office. Instead of undergoing plastic surgery, she meets Tony, a grounded TV producer who is doing a show on the practice. Tony not only offers Robin a job but also marriage. At the end of the film, Robin has her own TV show interviewing celebrities at a famous restaurant. She has ascended to celebrity status. Ironically, Robin is doing what Lee is doing: producing celebrity; the only difference is that she does it in front of the camera.

For Allen, celebrity culture has penetrated all cultural formations. At a Catholic retreat complete with a “Kumbaya”-singing nun and celebrity priest, practitioners debate whether the pope is more popular than Elvis, Jesus, or the Beatles. At an opening, the artist Bruce Bishop narcissistically comments, “Don’t buy my paintings to be in, buy them only if you have to have a Bruce Bishop,” reducing art to a signature on a painting. Dr. Lupus, a plastic surgeon featured in Newsweek, cannot keep up with demand. Robin even interviews a celebrity real estate agent.

In this short dialogue scene in the kitchen, Allen captures the central contradiction of celebrity culture.

Production assistant:	This is your 15 minutes of fame.
Tony:	Hey look. I never believed what Andy Warhol said about everybody being famous for 15 minutes. It sounds great, but it’s not true. Almost nobody will be famous for even one minute, so enjoy it.
Robin:	OK. How did I manage to swing this? Last year I was teaching English, performing a serious function and suddenly through a whirlwind series of events I’ve become a woman I always hated, but I’m happier.

While Allen criticizes the spectacle of celebrity culture, he refuses to theoretically locate it in the logic of capital. He paints a narcissistic culture in which fame and recognition replace money, a Hobbesian world in which everyone battles everyone else for attention. There never seems to be enough. This new world is not a world of bourgeoisie and proletariat, but of smug self-confident celebrities and anxiety-ridden wannabes. Filled with narcissistic pretenders who are unaware that they are pretending, surface dominates the postmodern world. Self-knowledge is at a premium; everyone is an actor – the successful ones become celebrities. The rest press their noses to the glass, desiring to be on the other side. In Celebrity, the opening song, “You Ought to Be in Pictures,” appears to be taken literally by everyone, an ode to narcissism rather than nostalgia.

In this new cultural formation, where is the self located? Is it, as Jameson argues, simply sliding from one signifier to the next? – none of which is attached to a signified? Authenticity and meaning have been overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of the spectacle. Allen is generally a romantic – Zelig finds love, Sandy nostalgically remembers a moment, Annie and Alvy become friends and share memories of their good times together, even Cecilia returns to the movies to experience the magical moments of Astaire and Rogers dancing, and Radio Days is full of warmth from beginning to end. In Celebrity, there is no redemption via ecstatic moments. The film ends where it began. The camera pans the audience at the screening of The Liquidator, finally resting on Lee’s face. He looks up at the screen to see “HELP!” written across the sky. Here Allen comes very close to Adorno and Horkheimer’s position that the growing pervasiveness of mass culture leaves the individual without the necessary cultural material to develop an anchored sense of self and incapable of acting from a reflexive moral position.

1 In the introduction to Eclipse of Reason Horkheimer (1974) pessimistically describes the central contradiction of modernity. “The present potentialities of social achievement surpass the expectations of all of the philosophers and statesmen who have ever outlined in utopian programs the idea of a truly human society. Yet there is a universal feeling of fear and disillusionment. The hopes of mankind seem to be farther from fulfillment today than they were even in the groping epochs when they were first formulated by humanists. It seems that even as technical knowledge expands the horizon of man’s thought and activity, his autonomy as an individual, his ability to resist the growing apparatus of mass manipulation, his power of imagination, his independent judgment appear to be reduced. Advance in technical facilities for enlightenment is accompanied by a process of dehumanization. Thus progress threatens to nullify the very goal it is supposed to realize – the idea of man.”

2 “The Culture Industry” is a chapter in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972). Adorno, however, is given first authorship to this chapter.

3 Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument is heavily criticized for its elitism. Adorno’s critique of jazz further positioned him as a European who didn’t understand American cultural formations. Even Brecht, whose work Adorno admires, referred to him as a cultural mandarin.

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Zelig: Reflections on the Cultural Landscape

From Interiors to Radio Days: An Exploration into Art and Culture

Celebrity, Negotiating Identity

Conclusion