The Barcelona captured by Woody Allen’s lens in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) is a white-centered landscape, shot with young white women at the core of its composition. In response to an invitation from Vicky’s white aunt Judy (Patricia Clarkson), Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) travel to Barcelona for a vacation/study adventure. And so it begins, another year, another Allen film.

For those of us who have awaited, viewed, and critiqued many or all of Allen’s films, the advent of a new one is exciting, both from an entertainment perspective and a scholarly perspective. We’ve grown used to the strengths and weaknesses of his films, and we’ve also grown to expect the ebb and flow of his artistic sensibility, but what one might expect or anticipate from an Allen film varies among different viewers. Allen has long been known as a comedic director with deeply cerebral interests. Film scholars David Desser and Lester Friedman (2004) note,

Allen has evolved into one of the few “public intellectuals” . . . in America, a person working in the popular arenas of film, television, journalism, and literature who transcends the merely popular and transitory, but who never loses touch with his mass audience (34).

Although it is debatable how “in touch” Allen remains with his mass audience since the Allen/Soon-Yi/Mia Farrow scandal, audiences do have expectations that philosophical explorations and intellectual playgrounds be depicted in Allen films. In 1986, the French critic Robert Benayoun described Allen as “the first to found a reputation on an instantaneous reaction to the great problems of our times” (Benayoun 1986: 71), and, yes, many of us did feel throughout the 1970s and 1980s that Allen had a deeply witty and uniquely sharp insight into the changing contemporary relationships between men and women. Film scholar Sam B. Girgus points out it is no coincidence that Ike and Mary in Manhattan (1979) meet “at a party in support of the Equal Rights Amendment at the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden,” which demonstrates for Girgus – correctly, I think – that Allen wanted Manhattan situated “during a time of social and sexual transition when definitions of gender and patterns of relationships” were in flux (Girgus 1993: 61). Indeed, there were worrisome tensions even then, such as the vast age difference between Isaac Davis (Allen) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan, but the overarching ability of Allen to play both seriously and humorously with the feminism of the times was mostly well received.

In the last few decades of Allen’s career, the great problems of our times have changed, and for some, our expectations of Allen’s abilities to react to, participate in, and guide us through these problems, with wit and intellectual insight, have also changed. In addition, our understanding of film, media audience, and audience response has also flourished. Film scholar Inez Hedges writes,

As we look at a film, perception occurs on many levels. On the one hand the medium itself has a certain relation to reality. Except in animated and abstract films, the movie image is a photographic rendering of objects that have existed in the real world. . . . Even narrative, or story-telling is a way of structuring information that occurs in real life as well as in art. On the other hand, a film spectator relies on his or her knowledge of other films when encountering a new work. . . . Most spectators will walk into a movie theater already expecting a certain type of film (1991: xiv).

Some spectators of Allen films expect, and may have always expected, that his films adhere, at least somewhat, both to the changing material world as well as to the changing social aspects of the world. He enticed viewers to want this from him by virtue of his previous ability to react to the issues of the times, but viewers themselves have grown along with the times and bring their cultural and social expectations with them to the movies.

Long before Hedges suggested in her 1991 book, Breaking the Frame: Film Language and the Experience of Limits, that film viewers do not simply accept the limits of the framed composition offered to us by film, sociologist Robert K. Merton made claims in 1946 for a “uses and gratifications” approach to understanding audiences; this approach found that “different audiences use the same media to meet different needs according to their own wants”; such audiences are “ ‘active’ and/or discriminating in their engagement with the media,” and “they may read or use the media in different, surprising or even ‘aberrant’ ways” (Merton 2003: 9). The types of information and expectations that viewers might bring to a movie include information received from previously viewed films, lived experiences, scholarship, discussion with friends and colleagues, and more. In terms of viewing a new film that depicts a place, geography scholar Christina Kennedy tells us that

The degree to which place portrayal in film affects our mental image depends upon a variety of factors: whether we have had personal experience with that place, the skill with which it is portrayed, the context of the media representation, the purpose of the director, as well as the filters that director and audience bring to the filmic event (1994: 163).

Thus, although film directors may wish to control the place and characters inside the frame of their film portrayal, many viewers are going to map onto the film their own desire for a modicum of adherence to reality, their personal experience with the people or the place, as well as sundry other filters that may cause them to stay within the frame or to break the frame of the film.

Of course, filmmakers and certain viewers may contend that any director has the right to frame the place, characters, and setting of his/her choice without concern for an adherence to reality; these would argue that such is the purview of auteurism, imagination, and creativity. Although viewers do want to see visionary, imaginative, and creative films, the field of audience studies suggests that viewers have a difficult time curtailing the information pressing on them from outside the frame of the film. In particular, some audiences of films about difference seek a balance of aesthetic aspects and political aspects in their films. Film scholar Sheldon Schiffer tells us that, “The balance between the political and the aesthetic is a defining hinge in the argument toward a process of filming difference. . . . What makes ‘good cinema’ is a film that strives to develop a reality-seeking experience for the audience” (2009: 235). Schiffer is not prescribing one type of “good cinema”; rather, he is suggesting that filming difference invites less viewer resistance when it admits to the facts of a preexisting reality.

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen is filming difference, but it is unclear whether he understands himself to be involved in this type of work. He presents the character of Vicky (Rebecca Hall) as a young white graduate student whose thesis is on Catalan identity. We might assume from her research that she should have some passion for her topic, some fluency with Spanish and/or Catalan, and that this visit to Barcelona should permit her to verify some of her research findings. Once in Barcelona, however, the only evidence she demonstrates of interest in the surrounding culture is her enjoyment of Spanish guitar. Her friend, Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), has no knowledge of the culture or the place. Thus, viewers originally perceive Allen’s Barcelona through the eyes of two unknowledgeable white women, as well as from the perspective of the offscreen white voice of the narrator. The limitations of these perspectives cause us to question the Barcelona of the film framed by Allen, especially in regard to his ability to film difference and to resist his urge toward racial insularity. These questions also pertain to his previous and subsequent films of the large, global, multicultural cities of Manhattan and London. Explorations of these cities and their peoples in Allen’s Manhattan and Match Point (2005) allow us to examine this filmmaker’s sensibilities and largely unconscious assumptions regarding white privilege.

As told to us by the unseen, but ever-present, narrator of the film, Vicky quickly views Barcelona as fraught with overly sexualized Latinity; Cristina experiences a landscape and a people whose only value is to facilitate her personal and sexual experimentation. Vicky Cristina Barcelona has been praised for the return of Allen’s storytelling strengths, and it’s true, the characters are strong – they have incredible chemistry with each other – and the architectural backdrop of Barcelona is mesmerizing. However, upon reflection we realize that the Barcelona framed by Allen does not satisfy fully because it doesn’t reflect the differences many viewers know to comprise the city and its people, and it also doesn’t address any of the real problems of the times. Certainly, he can make the film he wants to make, but viewers can also want things from the artist that the film inside the frame doesn’t provide. Audiences don’t want these things because of mere resistance or arbitrariness, but because Allen is a capable, intellectual artist who once seduced us with his films into believing that he had his lens aimed at the pulse of change. We want this brilliant man to grow with the times; in particular, if he is going to take us to Barcelona, we want him to grapple with global ideas about race and place. We have trusted his intellect, his wit, and his knowledge before, and we are willing to travel to this new country with him to see what he has to say. But what Allen provides in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a fulfillment of his own decades-old fantasy of being a European filmmaker:

I always wanted to make the kinds of films that I saw in the 1950s. The Truffaut films and the Godard films and the Bergmans and Fellinis, and those are the films that always influenced my work. And I’ve always copied them and been influenced by them. Vicky Cristina Barcelona looks to me, when I see it, like one of those films (qtd. in Baylen 2008: 2).

Yes, perhaps to him and others it does look like one of his fantasy 1950s films, but the Barcelona he projects is also a contemporary one, and the characters flaunt contemporary values, which puts Allen in the position of risking that his viewers begin to yearn for the environment of Barcelona outside his frame. Allen ignores the complex multiculturalism of modern-day Barcelona and thus risks defining himself as locked into white privileged behaviors. Philosopher Shannon Sullivan claims that

one of the predominant unconscious habits of white privilege is that of ontological expansiveness. As ontologically expansive, white people tend to act and think as if all spaces – whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise – are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish (2006: 10).

Unfortunately, it seems that Allen participates in just such a white privileged idea by utilizing the landscape of contemporary Barcelona as a mere space onto which he can paint his own white American characters and tell their story. It’s difficult to know whether Allen would intentionally whitewash Barcelona for his own purposes, whether he would simply be unaware of how his actions could be perceived as white privilege, or whether he would be indifferent to issues of white privilege when it came to making the film he wanted to make. But, all in all, it does appear that for Allen, “the world presents no barriers . . . to engagement” (Sullivan 2006: 103); the complex realities of contemporary Barcelona do not give him pause as he frames his film. And so, Allen delivers to his audience a Barcelona bereft of its people from Ecuador, Peru, Morocco, Columbia, Argentina, Pakistan, Africa, and China, whose population has grown throughout the city over the past 25 years. He frames Barcelona through the lens of white privilege and lodges whiteness as the centrality and authority of Barcelona.

According to the work on whiteness of film scholar Richard Dyer, white power “reproduces itself regardless of intention, power differences and goodwill, and overwhelmingly because it is not seen as whiteness, but as normal” (1997: 10). Allen seems unable or indifferent to self-reflecting about white privilege. It might seem difficult to imagine why a long-time liberal, public intellectual such as Allen would be averse to, indifferent to, or unaware of issues related to white privilege, but perhaps, even unconsciously, his perceived detachment from these concerns is related to the fact that questions have been raised throughout history as to the whiteness of Jewish people. “The rise of European racism frequently focused specifically on Jews: in the European context the Jews were the defining opposite of what is now called ‘white’ ” (Biale 1998: 27). In their book, Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel claim that Jewish peoples in America have benefited from the “historical process of enlarging the definition of ‘whiteness’ to include groups like the Jews who were initially considered ‘non-white’ ” (1998: 2). David R. Roediger, a scholar of critical whiteness studies, writes, “Not only were many Jews identified and victimized partly on the basis of their dark skins in Europe, but also . . . [t]he category ‘Jew’ was itself singled out for racial hatred” (2005: 116). Even as a renowned Jewish American filmmaker, who has built a large part of his film oeuvre around characters and topics relevant to the Jewish situation in America, Allen doesn’t seem to want to entertain the idea that when depicting other characters who represent peoples who have had discordant relationships with whiteness, these characters, regardless of authorial intent, still represent complex filmic sites of long-standing racial difficulty. Allen may simply not want his representations to be that complex or, as Biale and colleagues (1998: 4) claim, sometimes once some Jewish Americans are able to participate in all realms of American society as white people, they became more willing to forget that they are now “part of a majority whose very self-definition as a majority was based on the exclusion of those termed ‘nonwhite.’ ” It may also be the case that Allen has likewise “forgotten,” or never has fully felt the burden, to represent peoples of color in terms of their particular historical exclusions. For viewers who have invested many decades in viewing and/or studying Allen’s films, and perhaps even for those who are new to his films but who have heard about Allen’s remarkable fearlessness as regards lifelong psychoanalysis and addressing the pulse of the times, it is difficult to resolve the seemingly contradictory idea that Allen would not be able or willing to reflect upon his own white privilege.

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen does offer us the Spanish characters of Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz) and Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem); these two characters play secondary roles in relationship to the two white women. Allen also portrays a few people of color as minor cast members and extras: a black woman is cast as a prostitute, a black man lingers in a bar, two Indian men pass by Juan Antonio and Maria Elena in an alley, and an Asian man shops at a market. But Allen’s camera minimizes and makes extraneous the multicultural facts of Barcelona; he controls the filmic frame so that whiteness centers and prevails over the story taking place in this city, which could, in fact, be any city erased of its authentic population.

In retrospect, the critique of Allen’s inability to capture the true social landscapes and real peoples of the cities he films has been available. In Allen and Stig Björkman’s 1995 book, Woody Allen on Woody Allen, Björkman interviews Allen regarding the use of people of color, particularly black peoples in his films, even as extras in the background. Allen responds:

Well, usually there are two different situations when it comes to extras. One is that we just call up the extra people and say, “Send over a hundred extras or twenty extras or something.” And they usually send over a mixture of people. I mean, if it’s a street in New York, they usually send over a mixture of Hispanics, black and white people. But that’s just something we call up and order for background. I mean, we don’t buy them by the pound. Then for principal roles, I don’t know the black experience well enough to really write about it with any authenticity (46).

Allen tries to divert the question of attaining appropriately diverse extras for films located in multicultural cities by shifting the problem to a choice made by a business office over which he has no control: “we just call up the extra people.” It is difficult to believe that this infamously independent director has no ability to make specific requests about the “extra people” when designing the background populace of his global cities, but in terms of his suggestion that he doesn’t know the black experience well enough to film it, it is easy to believe that he might feel uncomfortable writing stories and filming stories about people with whom he doesn’t identify. However, many filmmakers feel this way, and many make the decision to overcome such limitations. For instance, film director Alejandro González Iñárritu conducts significant amounts of research on the location he decides to use for his films. When asked about the research on Barcelona for his film, Biutiful, in an interview for New York Magazine.com, Iñárritu answered,

I interviewed hundreds of Chinese immigrants, I went to the real places. . . . Some of the places that I shot the film are places where these things really happened. Ninety percent of the Chinese guys that are in Biutiful are people who have actually been in those conditions. The Africans live in those houses. So all that research I did. Then to cast all these people and use all these non-actors, I wanted to use all these hyper-realistic elements (qtd. in Bennett 2010: 2).

Like Allen, Iñárritu did not feel comfortable writing these unknown peoples into his film, but he faced his limitations head on and decided that a better film would come from engaging with the real peoples of Barcelona. Iñárritu and Allen make different types of films: Iñárritu favors the hyperreal and Allen favors the nostalgic film style of the 1950s; however, both filmmakers moved their filmmaking endeavors to Barcelona, chose to make their films in and of contemporary Barcelona, and only Allen believed that just as in American productions of the 1930s and 1940s, cities could be depicted “as neutral backdrops for the antics of the stars” (Ford 1994: 119). It is an unconscious habit of white privilege to think that one is not compelled to account for the people who live in the environment one wants to film. As Shannon Sullivan reminds us,

Both within the United States and without, the racialization of space and habits of lived spatiality often enforces racism and white privilege. Yet the connection between race and space often is not seen because space is thought of as racially neutral (2006: 154).

Allen’s unconscious participation in white privilege becomes starkly apparent through his sense that the only authenticity he has to address is that of his own experience: he admits that he has received a great deal of criticism regarding his depictions of black peoples in his films, but he asserts, “I’m just trying to depict the reality as I experience it, my own authenticity” (Allen and Björkman 2005: 47). When Allen’s own reality delivered material relevant to the realities of his audience members, the relationship between this filmmaker and his audience was more aligned, such as when he critiqued and explored feminism in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. But Allen is not merely delivering a commodity to a group of consumers; his audiences are actively bringing to bear on the film their additional experiences and information. Communication scholar John Fiske tells us that audiences do not always treat popular culture as commodities; instead, they treat such cultural products not as “a completed object to be accepted passively, but as a cultural resource to be used” (2003: 112). Fiske continues this argument by saying that the “commodity-consumer approach puts the power with the producers of the commodity” (112). The cultural resource-user approach concerns itself with “constructing meanings of self, social identity and social relations” (112). These approaches relate to Allen’s films in the sense that while his own experience is certainly of interest to some audiences, some other audiences are constructing meanings about his films with information from outside of his frame in which only white women are permitted to tell a story in and of Barcelona.

In 2009, actor Angela Bassett lambasted Allen for his lack of black people in Vicky Cristina Barcelona: “I mean, to have one black cast member for the whole film seems rather strange, and, oh yes, she’s a prostitute, of course” (Eden 2009). Although Bassett fails to address the fact that both Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz have major roles in the film portraying the brown-skinned peoples of Spain, her point remains an astute one regarding Allen’s insularity. Accepting Allen’s racial and cultural insularity is very difficult for audiences who have deemed him to be a public intellectual; we want him to have grown in his knowledge of white privilege; we want him to have globally inclusive sensibilities when he makes films about racial and ethnic differences; and, we feel disappointed when he demonstrates a lack of awareness about the topics and concerns of our times. Yes, he says he wants to make films about his reality, but it is sad to believe that Allen’s reality really includes walking through the streets of Barcelona without meeting any people of color. When realities such as the one Allen depicts in Vicky Cristina Barcelona are put forward to viewers, viewers may react as if something is “amiss” or “strange.” “When things appear strange to the viewer,” Bobo argues, “she/he may then bring other viewpoints to bear on the watching of the film and may see things other than what the filmmakers intended. The viewer, that is, will read ‘against the grain’ of the films” (2003: 310).

Just such viewing against the grain occurred when Penélope Cruz won an Oscar for best supporting actress in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Some critics pointed out that her role was one that “lampooned her foreignness” (Parkinson 2009). They warned Cruz to beware of having her American film career become like Carmen Miranda’s, one in which she is asked to portray attributes of Latin peoples that are amplified for the purpose of being ridiculed and laughed at by white American and European viewers. “In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, by having Javier Bardem consistently remind her to speak English so that Scarlett Johansson can understand her, Allen lampooned Cruz’s transatlantic dichotomy” (Parkinson 2009). Although Allen provided Penélope Cruz with a role that won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, it is the case that, in order to create Maria Elena, both Bardem and Cruz had to agree repeatedly to their characters’ silencing of Maria Elena’s Spanish, her authentic language, in her own country so that the white, English-speaking, Cristina could feel comfortable. Not to sound too zealous about the overarching argument, it is important to note that the film is a comedy, and that Juan Antonio’s silencing of Maria Elena whenever she speaks Spanish is very funny for a variety of reasons. Maria Elena is an extremely verbal and sexually powerful woman, prone to hysterical, passionate, and violent outbursts; when Juan Antonio insists on silencing her Spanish, we laugh because we know that putting any kind of lid on Maria Elena, although it may work in the short term, is bound ultimately to entice her to explode. As viewers, safe in our seats, we laugh because we are vicariously thrilled by Juan Antonio’s courageous provocation, and we secretly want to witness Maria Elena fly into a rage – it makes for great cinema. We also laugh because Allen has used this silencing trope to great effect in his previous films. In Bullets Over Broadway, for instance, when David Shayne (John Cusack) professes his love for Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), she puts her hand over his mouth and tells him, “Don’t speak, don’t speak, oh no, no, don’t speak.” Silencing another person strikes us as humorous because the act directly tackles issues of power and decorum among human beings. As it’s used in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the silencing of Maria Elena invites laughter because it is a provocative action and because it is a well-known comedic trope, but the laughter can occur simultaneous to recognizing that a reductive racial insult is also at play.

In fact, it seems that every part of Barcelona must reduce itself to what Cristina is capable of understanding. Cristina’s whiteness provides a vast erasure to all that has come before her in Barcelona, and sadly, both Juan Antonio and Maria Elena capitulate to her unspoken power as the representation of whiteness. Dyer reminds us that

In Western tradition, white is beautiful because it is the colour of virtue. This remarkable equation relates to a particular definition of goodness. All lists of the moral connotations of white as symbol in Western culture are the same: purity, spirituality, transcendence, cleanliness, virtue, simplicity, chastity (1997: 72).

Viewers know that Cristina is not necessarily pure, virtuous, simple, or chaste, but as a white symbol, she is quite powerful. Throughout the initial scenes that include both Maria Elena and Cristina, Maria Elena is even dressed in white, a symbolic erasure of her Latinity. When director Allen moves into a city, he brings white privilege with him; he lampoons and minimizes that which isn’t white, and in the case of casting Vicky Cristina Barcelona, he persuades Spanish actors Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, two powerful and admirable talents acclaimed across the globe, to succumb to his script and his vision of their own homeland, and their language.

The questions raised by the notable absence of people of color in Allen’s films run straight to the core of what responsibilities a director has to the material he or she presents on screen. Scholar Henry Louis Gates writes, “Common sense says that you don’t bracket out 90% of the world’s cultural heritage if you really want to learn about the world” (qtd. in Greene 1993: 13). Similarly, Hermes and Adolfsson claim that filmmakers undertake a significant “burden of representation,” whenever they depict an unrepresented group (2007: 256), or, I would argue, a location that has a complex multicultural history. Allen may not agree to this burden of representation, but nonetheless, the privileged white aesthetic upon which he insists for his films does serve to represent the world in a way that minimizes the presence of racial others. Although he may not want to be held accountable for such a burden, the images and representations he frames with his camera “serve particular social interests” (Dyer 1997: 82), such as an investment in maintaining white power and white privilege. His art participates and contributes to the continuance of white privilege, regardless of whether he is conscious of this fact or indifferent to it. The work itself represents a particular way of thinking about whiteness.

The Allen template for centering whiteness on a city landscape has been problematic throughout his career. In the films that have used Manhattan as backdrop, critics have long pointed out that Allen’s New York was decidedly and excessively white, upper class, and insular. And Allen has never seen this critique as part of his “burden of responsibility” as an artist. As recently as 2009, he defended his portrayal of New York:

My memories of New York are unrealistic. The New York that I grew up loving was, ironically enough, the New York of Hollywood parties, where people lived in penthouses with white telephones and came home at five in the morning . . . people popping champagne corks and making witty banter and elevators that open into your apartment directly. I never knew New York as it really existed. For that, you have to speak to Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese (Nguyen 2010).

Allen constantly acknowledges a willingness to reflect an idealized New York derived from Hollywood movies he saw in his youth, which clearly demonstrates how little interest he has in depicting the actual landscape and people of the city. He thinks that responsibility for depictions of a multicultural New York belongs to directors essentially defined, in his mind, by their racial and ethnic backgrounds, directors such as African American Spike Lee or Italian American Martin Scorsese. He may see Lee and Scorsese as realists, while he defines his work differently; however, Sheldon Schiffer claims that whenever difference exists to be filmed, “the balance between the political and the aesthetic is a defining hinge” (2009: 234). Schiffer argues that audiences want filmmakers to attempt such a balance while developing a “reality-seeking experience for the audience” (235). The end result of filming difference in this balanced way increases the possibility “that viewers will engage intellectually, will have assumptions challenged, and will experience complex contradictions inside characters and themselves” (235).

In Allen’s 1979 film, Manhattan, the opening street scenes do portray a few African American extras as menial workers in the background. At Elaine’s restaurant, while the white and Jewish people eat and converse, a black waiter makes an appearance. The white and Jewish characters mingle only among white peoples on every city street. They venture into a bookstore, which also presents only white people as potential customers. The white and Jewish people attend fundraisers and roam around New York’s safe and romanticized streets at night. True to form, Allen’s white and Jewish characters live out his privileged white vision of Manhattan; Allen claims, “To me, people who lived in Manhattan would go from the Copa to the Latin Quarter; they’d hear jazz downtown, they’d go up to Harlem, they’d sit at Lindy’s until four in the morning” (Lax 1992: 21). Even the department stores of the film contain all white customers except for one black female shopper. On another occasion, African shoppers dressed in pseudo-African costumes leave a specialty shop. When the main character, Alvy Singer (Allen), has to move to a new apartment, two black men with a white supervisor come to move him. When the characters go to see a foreign film, as the camera captures all the audience members exiting the theater, not one single person of color is included.

It is difficult to imagine that the intellectual circles of Manhattan in the late 1970s would not have included significant numbers of peoples of color frequenting galleries, fundraisers, and foreign films. Allen has whitewashed Manhattan and significantly diminished the population of its peoples of color. Allen makes it clear that the framed world of the film is the activities of intellectual New Yorkers, but his depictions reveal an unconscious sense that New York intellectuals did not include any peoples of color.

Likewise in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), which also takes place in Manhattan, the only people of color portrayed in the entire film are entertainers and servants. Hannah’s black maid wears a complete maid’s uniform including a cap over the course of three separate Thanksgiving celebrations at Hannah’s home. The black pianist, Bobby Short, and his black bass player accompanist make an appearance in the film. And, as Hannah (Mia Farrow) discusses her plans to play Desdemona in a public television production of Othello, her mother says she will be great, “You and some big black stud.” The centrality of Allen’s vision of whiteness diminishes people of color to their most offensive stereotypes: mere entertainers, servants, and oversexed male studs.

When Allen moves from filming Manhattan to portraying London in Match Point, not much changes in terms of the centrality of his white vision and his failure or indifference to bearing responsibility for accurate depictions of the locations he chooses. He takes Scarlett Johansson with him to portray the sexy, American character, Nola. Film critic A.O. Scott writes that Match Point’s setting is “modified Henry James (wealthy London, with a few social and cultural outsiders buzzing around the hives of privilege” (2005: 1). And a critic for Slate writes, “Like Henry James before him, Allen has gone to England to make a comedy of someone else’s manners” (Metcalf 2006: 2). Just like the cities of New York and Barcelona, and in accordance with Allen’s usual framing, the backdrops of the London landscape are filled with white extras, except for one black man dining at an upper class restaurant. Interestingly, in 2002, director Stephen Frears filmed Dirty Pretty Things in London and pointed out that London’s streets are filled with Nigerian, Turkish, Somalian immigrants, and more. The characters in Frears’s film understand themselves to be “the people you do not see.” Regarding Dirty Pretty Things, scholar Ted Hovet (2006: 4) writes, “Far from remaining tucked away in their neighborhoods, the inhabitants of this new London are fully integrated into the economic life of the city.” Although Allen might argue, as he does when discussing Manhattan, that his “memories” and “experience” of London are unrealistic and informed by a set of film portrayals, his memories and experiences are white and privileged experiences as he has portrayed them on the screen.

In Match Point, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), a struggling actress who comes from Boulder, Colorado, becomes engaged to Tom Hewitt (Matthew Goode), a wealthy upper class Britisher. Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) described in the film as the “poor boy from Ireland come to London,” is a working class Irishman who attained a bit of professional acclaim as a tennis player. Metcalf writes, Chris Wilton is a “bootstrapper – tennis was his way out of the lace-curtain poverty of his Irish childhood” (2006: 1). Chris and Nola serve as the off-whites of the film; neither of them has the status nor the heritage of the Hewitt family into which both of them hope to marry. In fact, when Chris first meets Nola, she is wearing a white dress to emphasize her cleanliness, value, and hopeful acceptability as a bride. Dyer writes, “As a day-to-day ideal, the image of the glowingly white woman no longer has the currency it once had. . . . Yet the language of this image remains powerful, and particularly at those radiant moments of adoration: the man’s first sight of his first or great love” (1997: 131). Both Nola’s legitimate claim to the privileged white Hewitt family and her fitness for radiant adoration are emphasized and symbolized by her white dress. But, in London, Chris and Nola’s whiteness is skin-deep only, in that the power that extends from their whiteness is not central and can easily become marginalized, as evidenced by Nola’s situation once Tom breaks off the engagement. As Dyer points out,

Colour distinctions within whiteness have been understood in relation to labour. To work outside the home . . . [i]s to be exposed to the elements, especially the sun and the wind, which darken white skin. In most hierarchical social systems, however much the toiler may be lauded in some traditions, the very dreariness and pain of their labour accords them lowly status: thus to be darker, though racially white, is to be inferior (1997: 57).

When Nola’s living conditions change dramatically, so does the status of her whiteness. She moves into a flat in an area of London known for its drug-related crime, near other flats that have been burglarized and are infested with mice. Black men come in and out of her building, and she actually befriends one black man, Ian (Colin Salmon), who lives in her building. She is described by the Hewitts as having taken on a “hard” look.

Chris Wilton, on the other hand, fares a bit better regarding his movement from “ethnic white” into the more well-developed world of London white privilege. He marries Tom’s sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), although he does still desire Nola. As Chloe’s husband, his status changes drastically, too. He and Chloe move into a glorious apartment with floor to ceiling glass windows that display a panoramic view of London. They marry in a country church, and Chris goes to work for Chloe’s father, the Hewitt patriarch. Chris, however, still has an unresolved desire for Nola, so when he happens to see her at a gallery, he approaches her, and the two begin a sexual affair. Consequently, Chris is able to revel in the elevation of his white status while he participates in the ethnic white affair that reminds him of his roots. But once Nola becomes pregnant and threatens to tell Chloe of the affair, Chris determines to end not only the affair but also Nola’s life. By ending her life, any connection he had to his former white ethnic past would be severed once and for all. He ends Nola’s life with a hunting rifle from the Hewitt family gun collection, thus symbolically blowing her away with the power of his new found white status.

After the shooting, Chris goes to see a play, The Woman in White, a darkly reminiscent moment that permits viewers to reflect on Nola in her white dress when we first met her in this film. After the murder is discovered, we view a black police investigator as well as Nola’s black neighbor in discussion outside of Nola’s building. So the greatest number of black people apparent in this Allen film are viewed once a crime has been committed, thus stereotyping the roles that black people can play in a film. Allen seems aware of the role of whiteness in Match Point, but he treats it stereotypically, and he plays with whiteness as a mere motif of innocence lost rather than as the recreation of white authority, power, and social status.

At the end of the film, Nola’s ghost and the ghost of Mrs. Eastby, the neighbor that Chris also murdered, visit Chris. In response to their questions about why he murdered them, Chris replies, “The innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme.” Chris Wilton’s grander scheme is to remain snugly ensconced in the English white upper class, to revel in all the white privilege that his newfound class affords him – especially the privilege of annihilating all of the dingier, ethnic whiteness that threatened to hold him back.

When Allen then takes his camera, his script, and his Scarlett Johansson to Barcelona to film, he once again brings his own “grand scheme” with him and thrusts it upon the landscape of Barcelona. The landscape and representative face of Barcelona had just been emerging from a form of ethnic homogenization as dictated by Franco from 1939 to 1975. Since the late 1980s, numerous immigrant populations have moved to Spain, making Spain both an international and multiethnic society. “The new democracy turned its back on the previous monolithic notion of Spanishness and sought to replace it with renewed versions that could acknowledge internal differences” (Santaolalla 2003: 44). For Spanish film directors such as Pedro Almodovar, the burden of representation of the real Spain looms large.

Almodovar works to deliver a Barcelona to the screen that is truthtelling in its “geographical, genealogical, and cultural intricacy” (Amago 2007: 16). Contemporary Spanish filmmakers such as Almodovar and Cedric Klapisch investigate in their films “how Barcelona’s African communities are represented cinematically.” They’re emphasizing the “multicultural fabric of contemporary Barcelona by drawing explicit attention to African Spaniards and African culture” (11). Film director Alejandro González Iñárritu, when asked in an interview how he was able to capture a more ethnically diverse Barcelona than others have recently been portraying, responds,

I literally just moved the camera to the right and it was all just there. It’s an immense community which is diverse and powerful. . . . There’s a very big and important part of the city that’s integrated by those people who are in a very limited existence by being ignored, by being invisible, by nobody wanting to see them (Bennett 2010: 2).

Klapisch’s film, L’auberge espagnole, is shot in at least “four main languages: French, English, Spanish, and Catalan, with snippets of other languages thrown into the mix (Danish, Italian, and German)” (Amago 2007: 19). Barcelona is a landscape bursting with its own stories to tell, and they are intricately multiethnic.

And yet, even with this movement afoot in Spanish cinema, Allen feels compelled to bring the white Allen tale to whatever location will have him. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen captures the white women’s sexual experimentation as it plays off of the myth of overly sexualized Latinity. In many ways, this is not surprising. Girgus (1993: 116) has reminded us throughout Allen’s career that “The testing of taboos and prohibitions and the craving for impossible love have been pervasive.” In Match Point, Chris wants Nola, then murders her to remain married to Chloe, who is whiter. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Vicky and Cristina both come to desire Juan Antonio. Cristina explores lesbian love and a ménage à trois with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, a situation which scholars Yancy and Ryser refer to as white women wanting to “play in the dark” (2008: 739), a clause that suggests Cristina is perhaps more curious about the sexual lore associated with Latin lovers than she is with the actual people with whom she is toying.

Cristina comes to realize that she loves neither Juan Antonio nor Maria Elena, but she is satisfied with the fact that she was courageous enough to further her sexual experimentation with them. Cultural Studies researcher Aimee Carillo Rowe writes that when white people move into different locations, they will behave in ways that permit them to add to their own internal sense of personal growth; in other words, indulging their sense of entitlement and dominance permits them to use the people they meet as opportunities for their own growth. Peoples of color provide white characters with opportunities “to struggle in their complexities and to grow, to become wholly human” (Rowe 2007: 126). Clearly, Cristina uses Juan Antonio and Maria Elena to work out her sexual needs, her relationship journey, and her sexual identity. She views the nonwhite bodies of Juan Antonio and Maria Elena as part of an exotic story to share with Vicky and her husband, but the story is hers alone; it is not told from the viewpoint of Juan Antonio or Maria Elena. Yancy and Ryser discuss characters such as Cristina as participants in a

chaotic and exotic natural landscape in need of being ordered, properly identified and categorized, and subdued by those (whites) who thought of themselves as the very expression of a teleological order that privileged whiteness as the quintessence of beauty, intelligence, and cultural and historical progress (2008: 732).

True to form, Cristina’s presence in the love triangle does subdue Maria Elena’s melodrama and excess. But the moment Cristina announces that she’ll be leaving the relationship, Maria Elena becomes outraged and screams at both Cristina and Juan Antonio that Cristina never loved them. Once Cristina actually leaves the relationship, the two Latin lovers cannot save themselves from the chaos and madness of their tumultuous love for one another. Maria Elena claims that Cristina provided the balance that she and Juan Antonio had always needed and that without her, their relationship was too unstable. Maria Elena symbolically sheds the white clothing she wore when with Cristina, and she returns to wearing her original black clothing. Dyer writes that while multiculturalism may provide opportunities for people of color to claim agency and express their voices, it may also provide “a side-show for white people who look on with delight at all the differences that surround them” (1997: 158).

In the films of Allen, the overall worldview is white. Allen sees white people (who are sometimes also Jewish people) as the central characters worthy of story on his landscape. He views all landscapes as bearing primarily white people, with an occasional supporting actor of color; and all of his background peoples are white save the rarest person of color walking by. Moving from one location to another – Manhattan to London to Barcelona – changes none of this in his films. All landscapes, once envisioned by the Allen eye, become white regardless of the location’s actual history, populace, or social intricacy. Allen’s eye dominates, and Allen’s eye envisions whiteness. For this filmmaker, the grand schematic landscape of these cities is a white landscape that dominates, threatens, and ultimately obliterates any existence he deems not pertinent to his white worldview.