Since the nineteenth century, the schlemiel has been the principal comic character in Yiddish literature, theater, and humor; and in the twentieth century this comic character made his way to America to extend its legacy on the stage, literature, stand-up comedy, comic books, and film. According to Ruth Wisse, however, its life in America was short lived. At the end of The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, written in 1971, Wisse argued that

whether for reasons of gloom, exotic self-indulgence, opulent self-hatred, or a new dedication to reform, the schlemiel is being rejected as a hero in contemporary American writing. No one, I think, could argue that balanced irony is the perfect response to life’s miseries (Wisse 1980: 123).

What Wisse means by the schlemiel’s “balanced irony” is an irony that maintains a tension between hope and skepticism. The schlemiel lives in the world of hope, aloof from the world; the irony is that while he dreams, the audience, like Sancho Panza of Don Quixote, bears witness to the fact that reality is against the schlemiel. The schlemiel’s obliviousness to reality is funny and troubling. The audience’s skepticism does not aim to correct the schlemiel; rather, it is directed at hope and the reality that denies hope. To be sure, the schlemiel’s hope is not effaced by skepticism; it is wounded by it. His foolish hope lives on. Balanced irony worked in the past because there was a real struggle afoot by the Maskilim (Jewish intellectuals, many of whom wrote Yiddish literature and theater), Jewish socialists (Bundists), and the Jewish tradition to prove reality wrong; Irving Howe called this utopian movement “historical idealism” but traditional Jews in the Pale of Settlement called it messianism. Today, however, “no one would argue that balanced irony is the perfect response to life’s miseries” because Jews no longer have to face a bleak reality with a schlemiel’s foolish hope. Jews apparently live in a world that no longer needs “historical idealism,” where the real and the ideal no longer contradict each other. In other words, the schlemiel can only exist in a world where, because of contradictions that are historical, political, and even theological, both optimism and skepticism are in tension. Today, Wisse tells us, they are not. The post-utopian world insists on either optimism or skepticism, not both.

When read against Woody Allen’s films over the last 12 years, Wisse’s claims take on a different tone. First of all, Allen’s films show us that while the schlemiel was not, according to Wisse, of interest to writers in the early 1970s, this comic character was still of great interest to Woody Allen. He made the schlemiel the main character of nearly all of his films (before the 1970s until today).¹ Second, and more importantly, while the tension between hope and skepticism is – to some extent – retained in Allen’s earlier films, in his later films this tension is resolved. By the end of the film, this tension is insignificant. We witness the schlemiel’s gradual transformation in many of Allen’s films over the last 15 years: in these movies, schlemiels go from being children or psychological misfits to self-conscious adults/artists. This is no accident. Allen’s schlemiels have, through hard work and a little chance, transformed themselves. To be sure, no such schlemiel exists in the tradition of Yiddish or Jewish American literature and film. As Wisse argues, schlemiels have always been naive and are consistently poised between optimism and skepticism. They do not resolve this tension as they do not transform themselves. Woody Allen’s new schlemiel, however, no longer challenges the “political and philosophical status quo” (Wisse 1980: 6) through “balanced irony”; instead, he transforms the outward challenge to the “political and philosophical status quo” into an inner, psychological challenge which the character overcomes.

According to Fredric Jameson, this movement from the outside to the inside constitutes the origin of the middle-class subject and, as a symbolic gesture, reifies the status quo (Jameson 1981: 20–21). Its salvation is personal, not collective or historical. This movement poses internal resolutions to contradictions which are external to the subject and are thoroughly historical. In Woody Allen’s later films, the psychological transformation of the schlemiel not only reifies the status quo by resolving external contradictions internally, but it also makes the schlemiel into the model for the self-actualized modern artist. These transformations of the schlemiel – embodied in the transformation of the schlemiel’s blindness, skepticism, and weakness into insight, optimism, and strength – can be found in Hollywood Ending (2002), Whatever Works (2009), and Midnight in Paris (2011). Allen’s new “psychological” approach to the schlemiel marks a major turn in Woody Allen’s work and bears with it many questions about the legacy and future of this important comic character.

Blindness and Insight

A modernist film, Hollywood Ending begins in medias res (in the middle of things). This middling circumstance is a figure of fragmentation and disharmony. At the outset, we witness to two radically different scenes evoking disharmony: the first scene is of a group of Hollywood executives showing their doubts about whether or not they should hire Val Waxman to direct a film. Val, played by Woody Allen, had once been a great filmmaker. After his divorce, his career and life had gone downhill. He can no longer work or finish any project that he starts because the life he is now living does not correspond to his vision of himself as a great artist. He cannot accept the ‘reality’ that he is now a second-rate filmmaker. We see this indicated throughout the film. This characterization resonates with the schlemiel of the past since the schlemiel has often been characterized as a dreamer (a Luftmensch – literally, a person who lives on air, an airman) and Val is a classic case; he is caught up in his narcissistic dream of greatness, he – literally and figuratively – can’t see what’s in front of his face. And it is this psychological problem which we witness being transformed in the film.

Val’s girlfriend, Lori (Debra Messing), younger than Val, believes in her naive way that Val will someday recapture his Hollywood a success and give her a starring role. This is what Val told Lori so as to win her over. She foolishly believes this will happen, even though Val can’t actually finish anything. This situation clearly demonstrates to the audience that Val’s relationship with Lori is tenuous. Yet, Val chooses not to “see” this. After Val returns home from a job in Canada he was fired from, Lori – wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of a German shepherd that contrasts with Val’s modest (middle class) attire – confronts him. When Val tells her the bad news, she begrudgingly notes how this story is nothing but a repeat performance. As far as psychological ailments go, Val’s repetition compulsion is constituted by his inability to finish any form of work. Only by working through this psychological issue can he be successful. But, at this point, it doesn’t seem possible.

In the midst of Val’s breakdown before Lori, an offer comes by way of a phone call; namely, a script which is connected to his ex-wife, Ellie (Tea Leoni). She is living with Hal, the man with whom she cheated on Val. When his agent Al (Mark Rydell), tells him from whom the offer comes, Val is immediately inflamed and his pathology kicks in yet again. Nonetheless, Al does a fine job of arguing with Val and cajoling him to take the new work.

Al is a catalyst. He helps Val to transform himself. Together, Al and Val are a comic duo. Al – like Val – is a Jew and a New Yorker. This point is by no means arbitrary because Allen creates a similar tension between the New York Jew and California WASP as he did in Annie Hall (1977) – making Los Angeles, where Hal and Ellie reside, into a WASP haven which is only interested in success, wealth, and leisure. New York, in contrast, is represented through two very “ethnic” Jewish characters – Val and Al – who, while interested in success, do it their way.

Psychologically, Al is like a concerned parent, while Val is a traumatized schlemiel (boy-child). Al’s task is to help Val become a success again. This partnership contrasts with one of the first schlemiel novels by Mendel Mocher Sforim, entitled Benjamin III. In that novel, a comic duo, from the beginning to the very end of the novel, travels around the Pale of Settlement, thinking it is going somewhere but goes nowhere. Instead of learning about an outside world, they learn nothing; they see their voyage as a success, but it is really a failure. To be sure, the split-protagonists of Benjamin III echo each other’s blindness. We see this in many schlemiel duos. Their names, Al and Val – like Benjamin and Sender, Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Vladimir and Estragon, or Klein and Gross – resound this comic theme. Often, one of the two is a schlimazl and experiences bad luck while the other character – the schlemiel – blunders.² Hollywood Ending differs from this tradition as it shows how one schlimazl – Al – can help the schlemiel – Val – to succeed.

But Al’s help is not enough for Val to achieve success; the hook in the plot is that Ellie, who works for a film company called Galaxie, convinces Hal that Val can make a comeback. She does this because she truly believes that Val is a great artist. The subplot is that she is really not happy living with Hal in Los Angeles and still has a love for Val that is, at this point, hidden or masked. Her marriage – symbolically associated with Los Angeles – is missing the spice and creativity of New York. She, in a much different sense, has also blinded herself. And, at the other end of the continent, Val is not truly happy with Lorie. Val and Ellie are a match waiting to re-happen; this plot structure makes up what Stanley Cavell has called, in his book of the same title, the “Hollywood comedy of remarriage.” Strangely enough, the filmscript that Val is given is entitled The City that Never Sleeps. It is a period piece based on jazz-era New York. Since Val is a New Yorker and loves that transitional time period, the film would be perfect for him. His success is nearly guaranteed. The studio buys Ellie’s argument and hires Val to do the film.

After getting Val the job, Ellie goes out for dinner with him. The relationship is odd because it is the reunion of the divorced couple and a “professional” meeting. Much has not been discussed, let alone worked out, between them. In the midst of their conversation, Val, in a classic Woody Allen fashion, breaks out and spills the beans about his confused feelings for Ellie and what happened with the divorce. The conversation comes out with such a torrent that one can surmise that it had been bottled up for years. In a schizophrenic schlemiel-like fashion, Val goes back and forth between recounting his confused emotions for Ellie and composing himself – comically, referring to their “professional” relationship. The routine is obviously a parody of professionalism and it sets up a primary love conflict which, by the end of the film, is resolved. Val’s tirade dramatizes what Sanford Pinkser would call Woody Allen’s “loveable schlemiel” (1991: 173–175) or what David Biale would call Woody Allen’s “erotic schlemiel” (1997: 206). The erotic schlemiel, according to Biale, is more masculine and, for this reason, is no longer a schlemiel which, traditionally, is humble and weak (207). This introduces a new element of the schlemiel, one that Wisse did not find present in any Yiddish or Jewish American schlemiels before and after the Holocaust. And it is this erotic aspect which is the catalyst for changing the schlemiel into a man. For both Biale and Pinsker, it is the “loveable” or “erotic” aspect that causes the audience to identify with Woody Allen’s characters.³

In the midst of the scene, we see what created the divorce is the fact that Val wanted to be the “great American artist.” In his single-minded pursuit of this goal, he went “blind.” As Ellie tells him, “You don’t see what you don’t want to see.” This blindness and lack of “harmony” (Ellie’s definition of a good marriage) makes Val into another kind of schlemiel – one who dreams of being the best American artist and ends up destroying everything around him (albeit in a comic, and not in a tragic, sense). To be sure, Val’s blindness, the central motif in this film, is what causes him to become a greater schlemiel than he originally was. For Allen, the blindness/insight distinction underlies the schlemiel as a character; but in classical schlemiel literature and theater, the schlemiel remains blind and foolish. Val doesn’t. The audience who would watch/read the schlemiel would have insight; here, the schlemiel, Val, will eventually have the insight which will transform him.

At this point in the film, however, insight is lacking and blindness is comically emphasized and exaggerated. After their dinner, what follows is a wonderful parody of Val’s schlemiel-artistic sensibility which is, at the same time, indistinguishable from his blindness. To be sure, Val embraces an aesthetic of randomness and calls himself, at one point, an “accidental Fellini.” He has “total freedom” and can do what he wants. Accordingly, Val ends up hiring a cameraman who cannot speak a word of English. Val chooses him to film the movie because the cameraman filmed the “Red Army” and “understands color” (namely, red). He also hires several artistic directors who think in ways that are grandiose and ridiculous. One of the directors, who speaks, dresses, and acts like a Queer artist, wants to rebuild Manhattan in Central Park and paint everything green. The other artistic director doesn’t object to painting everything green so much as the color he chose: she would prefer white and red. In response, the cameraman says he cannot shoot anything in white. All of this comic chaos ends up getting back to the studio. Fortunately, Val is protected by Ellie, who tells Hal that Val is an artistic genius; he has reasons for doing what he is doing. There is method in his comic madness.

After these scenes, Val is questioned by an Esquire journalist. Through her, we see that Val is something of a narcissistic artist (hence his blindness to others). When she butters him up, calling him a “unique American artist,” he allows her to stay on the set. Ellie pulls him to the side and injects some realism by telling him that the Esquire interviewer says such things at first to win directors over but in the end she stabs them in the back. Once she has said this, Val reacts and throws comments at Ellie regarding her relationship with Hal; she retorts and asks Val how long he has been living with his “wind-up doll” girlfriend. All of this amounts to a plot structure that posits the smart as opposed to the stupid partner; the schlemiel chooses the stupid over the intelligent and fails rather than succeeds because of his blindness. This is his character flaw. To foreground this blindness as a central theme and bring out what must be done if Val is to transform himself, Allen has Val literally go blind.

The next major scene is Al’s Passover Seder. Val makes a call to Al during the Seder and interrupts it, demanding that Al come to him. In response, Al says he can’t just interrupt the first Seder; to be sure, it is one of the most important rituals of the Jewish tradition. Val then says the magic words which draw Al away from his family Seder: “It’s a matter of life and death.” When Al arrives, with a kippah on his head, he notices that Val really is blind. At that moment, he throws off his kippah to address the situation. This gesture is telling, because it communicates what Allen considers to be of greater value than Judaism: friendship and artistic success. To be sure, if it weren’t for Al’s care for his friend (not simply his client), Val would not be able to make a film that, he believed, would change his life. Indeed, love, friendship, and artistic passion, as we shall see, are the ingredients for transforming the schlemiel – in this film – from a narcissistic failure into a new man.

Val’s blindness is a part of his condition. We learn that it is psychosomatic, which implies that this schlemiel, out of his intense fears about reality, has brought about his own blindness. This is an odd move because the classical schlemiel, from Mendel Mocher Sforim’s Benjamin III to I.B. Singer’s Gimpel the Fool and Charlie Chaplin’s immigrant, is not “blind” by virtue of his own will or psyche. His blindness, so to speak, is not intentional. The schlemiel’s blindness points: it is an accusation, not a description. Indeed, while the schlemiel’s blindness may be funny, the mistreatment of the schlemiel by different characters is not. It accuses the world and not the schlemiel of being wrong. As we mentioned above, this accusation is what Wisse would call a challenge to the “political and philosophical status quo.” The world and not the schlemiel must change. Here, on the contrary, the schlemiel has a psychological problem and is made aware of this flaw. Unlike the traditional schlemiel, it is the character and not the world that must change. This is an internalization of a challenge that was once posed – by the schlemiel – to the world.

What makes this psychosomatic condition so interesting is that it isn’t truly addressed until the end of the movie. Before we get there, the movie within a movie that follows Val’s blindness is a powerful parody of the trust people invest in the artist and his or her creations. And, although the main theme of the film deals with this internal challenge, these scenes hearken back to the traditional schlemiel.

In this part of the film, Al helps out Val by confiding in someone who can be by Val during the entire filming process. He does this because it is an unwritten rule that an agent should not be on a film set; for this reason, Al can’t be there to help Val. So he chooses the cinematographer’s translator. The problem is that the translator is a Math major at NYU and knows nothing about filmmaking. For this reason, Val’s eyes for the film don’t match with reality and create yet another schlemiel effect dividing action and intention (which parallels the difference between the real and the ideal that is found in all classical schlemiel stories and humor).

As the movie commences, we see Val act as if he is fine. No one notices, thinking that what Val does is what an eccentric filmmaker – an “accidental Fellini” – does. George Plimpton, who plays a Galaxie studio executive, is a case in point. Throughout the filming, all he can say about Val’s happenstance way of filming is that “it’s brilliant”; meanwhile, the cinematographer can only curse in Chinese that none of the film makes sense. In addition, the interviewer for Esquire magazine exacerbates this mistaken belief that Val is brilliant through her voiceover, in which she discloses her contention that Val is a filmic genius.

The film gets more and more chaotic as it develops. The cinematographer insists on firing the translator because he thinks that everything he is saying to Val is being mistranslated. He tells Val that either he or the translator will have to leave. Who will be by Val’s side if the translator is fired? He will be discovered!

Ellie, who is visiting the set while this is happening, is thrown into the mix by Al. He decides that he has no choice but to tell her since he can trust her; she is close to Val and would be the perfect match to allay a possible disaster. This throws Val and Ellie close together and functions in two ways: one, it brings Ellie closer to Val emotionally and, two, shows us a combination that will facilitate the movement from the schlemiel to the new man. This combination between a WASP and Allen is much different from the one we see in Annie Hall because this combination will transform the schlemiel and prove beneficial; rather than leaving the schlemiel to be the odd one out (as Alvy Singer is at the end of the movie), this combination will make him shine.

Ellie now takes part in a major bluff, but it is exposed when Val accidentally tells the interviewer, whom he thinks is Ellie (because of the perfume they both wear), that he is blind. After this moment, everything starts falling to pieces. But before this happens, Val’s psychiatrist discovers something that will cure him: he realizes that Val has a son that he has not communicated with in years. In the scenes that follow, Val goes to his son (who calls himself “scumbag”) and asks forgiveness for not being the best father.

Val’s son is his diametrical opposite. He sports a green Mohawk, lives in near squalor, and has never tasted success like his father has. He is, without a doubt, a modern outsider. We learn that, while on drugs, he pushed Val down the stairs. Val never forgave him; but, at this moment, Val’s son apologizes and Val accepts him. The last words of the scene ring with a delicious irony and mark a major transformation of the schlemiel from someone who is blind to his son and his life to someone who accepts them: “I love you, Scumbag.”

Immediately after reconciling with his son, Val and Ellie are together in the park. Against this scene, the Esquire writer tells the story of how, all of a sudden, Val regained his eyesight. At this point, Val has something of a revelatory experience and raves about how much he loves everything (“I can see . . . I can see . . . the city looks so beautiful”). It’s as if Val is seeing everything for the first time.This is not a miracle that comes out of nowhere; it is the miracle of personal salvation.

After turning to the city, the romantic theme music starts up again and he turns to Ellie and says, “You look so beautiful!” Ellie is of course beside herself with happiness as Val is literally and psychologically restored to vision and insight into who he is and what he must do. At this point, he acknowledges Ellie as his true love and leaves Lorie and his previous self behind.

This moment of reconciliation and transformation is interrupted by the next frame which shows Val and Ellie in the screening room with frightened looks on their faces. Val’s first words are “Someone call Dr. Kevorkian . . . This is the worst . . . This looks like the work of a blind man!” The irony is obvious. But the verdict is not final.

The movie is edited and screened to viewers, all of whom find it to be an artistic disaster. In going over the responses, Ellie sticks up for Val and says “that’s the audience, not the critics.” The film hits rock bottom when Hal goes over the critics’ responses and discusses the Esquire article that he receives – before publication – from the journalist. He confronts Ellie with the fact that she lied to him about Val’s capability to direct the movie. He also has insight.

At this point, Hal lays down the law: “You care more about [Val] than Galaxie.” Ellie is not loyal to the corporation or Hollywood; her loyalty and trust is in a schlemiel who is not blind (and really not a schlemiel) but, supposedly, a great visionary artist.⁴ Hal goes on to say that he heard Ellie was seen kissing Val around the set – each of these kisses, she explains, were done to distract others; they were not passionate. Hal says it doesn’t matter now, asking her if she still loves Val. At this moment, the camera focuses in on Ellie. And she says that “I never stopped loving him.” She now has insight. The circle is almost complete.

As the movie approaches its end, Val and his son sit in Val’s study, talking about the film. Scumbag offers his father solace when he tells Val not to listen to the critics; he never did. Scumbag stayed true to himself. These words manage to console Val to some extent. And Scumbag’s last insight in this film reveals the artistic intent of the schlemiel’s transformation: “Wow, blindness as metaphor!” This realization marks a threshold; for, immediately after saying this, the doorbell rings and Al enters, bearing good tidings: “Guess what? The French have seen your movie and they think it is the greatest American movie they have seen in years!” Amazed, Val looks at the French newspaper and says, “You must be kidding!” To this Al says grandly, “You are being hailed as a true artist! A great genius!” Al goes on to say – in a hat tip to progressive Jewishness (one that forgives) – that France atones for the rest of Europe. He can return to Europe with Val. The French want him to do a movie there and Al has led the way.

At this point the theme music starts again and Val states the line that delineates the new dichotomy: “Over here I’m a bum, over there I’m a genius!” Al: “A genius!” Val: “Thank God the French exist!” These words, spoken by a Jew (Val), are transformative; they revise history and posit that Jews no longer need to despise the French (and Europe) for their complicity in the Holocaust and anti-Semitism prior to it. If the classical schlemiel’s task is to compel the world to change and become more human, what need is there for a schlemiel if the world (here, France) has become humane rather than anti-Semitic and barbaric? This is Woody Allen’s rhetorical question. For, at this moment, he is insisting that the battle is over.

In the last scene of the film, we see a tree full of flower blossoms – symbolizing, in the most obvious fashion, a new transformation and hope, as the camera pans down to Ellie, who races with Val to a taxi taking them to the airport.

“This is my life’s dream!” he tells her. “To live in Paris!” At this point, she asks him “Are you sure?” – so as to confirm that Val is a man and not a schlemiel. In response, he says, “You look so beautiful!” and kisses her. Now he can “see” what is in front of him; he is no longer a blind and foolish schlemiel. This is a Hollywood ending which is novel and metaphorical in its own right; it eschews America and its corporate filmmaking for Paris as the true artistic haven for the modern artist. At this point, it seems as if the schlemiel is dead and gone. Val is a new man, a success. However, the last words of the film taint that ending (a little): “Did you remember to pack my Dramamine?”

Clearly, Woody Allen designed this film to show us a character who goes from being a schlemiel to being a success. But even if Val’s film was not praised by the French – who, we learn from one scene in the film, appreciate experimental film – Val would still be a new man. He would no longer be a schlemiel because of his reconciliation with his son and his new found love for Ellie. To be sure, the success at the end of the film completes his transformation. The condition is that of being a schlemiel. It, like psychosomatic blindness, can be overcome. It is, according to Allen, a psychological or cognitive problem, not a cultural or historical crisis that the schlemiel is situated in.

Mitigated Skepticism

Whatever Works (2009) returns us, once again, to the process of transforming the schlemiel into a man. But the schlemiel in this film, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), differs considerably from Val. And his transformation marks yet another way to redefine the schlemiel: this time, with a wink toward a new practice that defines the life of the new post-schlemiel man – namely, faith in whatever works rather than ubiquitous skepticism.

The movie begins with Boris arguing over religion with three of his friends in the Village: “it’s not the idea behind Christianity I’m faulting or Judaism or whatever religion that I’m slighting, it’s the professionals.” He distinguishes between intentions and realities; in other words, the real and the ideal. He privileges the former over the latter and argues that the fundamental flaw of these religions is their “fallacious notion that people are decent.” He goes on in his pessimism to claim that we “are a failed species.”

What is most interesting about this schlemiel, in contrast to the schlemiels we see in Yiddish literature, Jewish American literature, or in Allen’s earlier films, is that Boris is a pessimist. Usually, schlemiels are not intelligent and their dreams do not match reality. Here, we find the opposite. Boris is intelligent and measures ideals against reality; not the other way around. Nonetheless, Boris is a schlemiel because his pessimism makes him blind to goodness. His belief in pessimism, because it is so excessive, is comic. For this reason, his transformation into an optimist is the main trajectory of this film.

After stating his pessimistic view on life, Boris is asked to tell his real story. In response, Boris says “my story is whatever works, so long as you don’t hurt anybody.” All of those listening cajole him to tell the “real” story, not this story which they know is too optimistic for Boris. Rather than tell his friends, he turns to the camera and the audience to confess the truth: foregrounding the film within the film – a tactic found in many Woody Allen films. As he limps before the camera, Boris tells the audience how difficult a person he is. To illustrate, he tells the audience how stupid we are; looking only for happiness, the audience, he informs us, is deluded. He refuses happiness and, it seems, is not interested in whatever works; to the contrary, that would make him a dupe much like the audience which refuses to face the fact that reality is a nightmare.

In the midst of his harangue, he comically discloses his tragic secret: that his father committed suicide because of all the terrible things he witnessed in the world. Boris’s psychological issue is now foregrounded; because he “knows too much,” he cannot find any reason to be optimistic and is doomed to repeat his father’s legacy. Boris admits that he, like his father, tried to commit suicide. His limp is a physical trace of that failed attempt and, perhaps with a wink to the Jewish tradition, the limp can be read, midrashically, in terms of the struggle Jacob had with the angel – a struggle in which he earned his name, Israel, yet with a price; namely, a wound, a limp. This motif has some resonance in this film because Boris will emerge from his struggle a new man – he will go from a man with a limp (a schlemiel) to a healthy man with a new name and life.

Like the classic schlemiel, Boris is a failure. But unlike the classic schlemiel (and much like Val), he had at one time been successful but his outlook on life – the vision of “the genius” – made him fail miserably. In an important scene, we learn that his suicide attempt is linked to his visionary problem. In the scene, Boris has a “panic attack” in the middle of the night which his first wife, a psychologist, wakes to. She tells him that he shouldn’t take his pessimism seriously. In response, he says that “I’m the only person who sees the whole picture for what it is.” And that picture is one of death, devastation, and chaos. To be sure, in this film, the vision of the “genius” is what makes him into a schlemiel. He is – apparently – too intelligent not to see the limits of his vision. What follows is his failed suicide attempt and his new life.

Instead of teaching at Columbia University, he now teaches chess to children. And whenever he has free time, he bickers about the most hopeful things. For instance, even though Barack Obama was elected president and represents a major shift in history, he pessimistically retorts to his group of friends that racism lives on. In the midst of this discussion, Boris is accosted by an angry mother, who accuses him of throwing a chessboard at her son for being incompetent. He confirms the allegation and insists that it was justified. In addition, he heaps insults on the mother and, so to speak, illuminates several things about her life that disclose how ugly it really is. Here we have a picture of a person whose realism is so bitter and cynical as to render everything he sees contemptible.

On the way home, Boris, limping at high speed, runs into the character who will transform him from a schlemiel into a man: another schlemiel, Melody (Evan Rachel Wood). She is another kind of schlemiel: a traditional schlemiel who is naive and trusting. But instead of being confined to an Eastern European shtetl or a New York slum like most traditional schlemiels, she is confined to a Southern shtetl. Her parents keep her sheltered in a right-wing world of the South. Coming from the South is like coming from the shtetl to the city (one thinks of Sholom Aleichem’s Menachem Mendle, who leaves the shtetl to travel through Europe and then to America). Throughout the film, Allen continually reminds us that Melody is moving from the conservative to the liberal world. This world change has been the subject of countless American and European pastoral novels that record the progressive movement from tradition to modernity. But, more importantly, this movement is from naivety to experience. Here, the schlemiel is being grafted on to this narrative configuration (something that was never done before). In the Eastern European version, the schlemiel may have been a country bumpkin, but this didn’t make him the subject of a transformation – as it does in Whatever Works. In traditional literature on the schlemiel, experience (here, change and travel) doesn’t transform the schlemiel; he/she always retains his or her naivety. But if you are a new schlemiel, experiences will change you. And, in this film, as we shall see, Melody’s transformation is from a naive Southerner to a mature, modern New Yorker while Boris’s transformation is from being a pessimist to an optimist.

Hence, the setup: the ultimate theme of this film is the transformation of two schlemiels into normal, happy, optimistic, modern New Yorkers. For this to happen, something needs to be softened – namely Boris’s pessimism – and something needs to be hardened – namely Melody’s sense of self. She is on the way to autonomy and maturity while Boris is on the way to acceptance and compassion.

When we first meet Melody, what we notice is what is most schlemiel-like about her: in her innocence, she can’t understand one iota of Boris’s pessimism since she is a literalist and can’t understand any of Boris’s ironies. She lacks the intellectual sophistication to know the difference between the real and the ideal – which is the bread and butter of irony. Because of this lack of intellect, Boris heaps insults on her, calling her an “imbecile child,” “an idiot,” “brainless inchworm,” and “stupid beyond all comprehension.”

What is most striking about the dichotomy between Boris and Melody is that it embodies and yet contrasts with the distinction between the Haskalah, who made the schlemiel a popular character in Yiddish literature, and the people they wished to reform – the traditional and religious Jews of the Pale of Settlement. At the outset, the Haskalah, much like Boris to Melody, looked down on these religious Jews, yet they knew that this perspective would do nothing to gain adherents. Condescension may have worked in Germany, as Sander Gilman argues, but it didn’t work in Eastern Europe. For this reason, the schlemiel came to be the embodiment of the better traits of shtetl Jews which, as mentioned above, fit well within the project of historical idealism. Here, however, Melody is presented as a naive Southerner whose beliefs – having much to do with God – are shown, via Boris, to be naive. For Allen, there seems to be nothing worth emulating in these beliefs – nonetheless, her optimism and hope are still employed by Allen as catalysts for Boris’s transformation.

Together, Melody and Boris embody a version of the tension between optimism and skepticism – as this tension is closer to optimism and pessimism.⁵ The tension is brought out in a visit to the Statue of Liberty. There, Melody recites Ezra Lazarus’s famous lines that appear on Ellis Island. For a beauty pageant, Melody memorized the lines about how America welcomes the “weak and the weary” to its shores. Boris retorts by saying although the message is beautiful, the fact of the matter is that immigrants were not welcomed and had to fight for nearly everything they needed to live. Boris’ retort marks the difference between hope and skepticism.

But this tension, which is at the core of the schlemiel’s character, is gradually displaced in this film by the new schlemiel. To be sure, we see this in the same scene when Boris notes how blacks were enslaved and brought to this “great country”; Melody, in response, notes that her father says that people feel sorry for blacks and “bend over backwards for them.” Boris proceeds to call Melody’s father a “racist bigot” and Melody concedes, saying that Boris probably knows because he is “the genius.” After saying this, Boris smiles and acknowledges that he may have taught her something. This teaching moment marks the beginning of Melody’s separation from her religious and Southern roots which, in this film, get in the way of her becoming a New Yorker and keep her a schlemiel.

As the film progresses, we see that her education is paying off. She notes many of the things Boris taught her, such as his claim that the American education system is inadequate or that many things people say are clichés. While this is happening, we notice that Boris is gradually learning compassion and love. We see this, for instance, through his being affected by romantic music. As he listens, he smiles. Nonetheless, he is not ready to accept Melody’s greatest gift: love.

After dating a man she meets on the street walking his dog, Melody realizes that she, like Boris, finds many people too optimistic and shallow; meanwhile, Boris acknowledges to his friends that, in his estimation, Melody has gone from a “6” to an “8.” This culminates in Boris having an epiphany regarding chance and randomness in the universe. In the next scene, we see that randomness need not be regarded as something negative, for in this scene Boris marries Melody. In so many words, he shows us that he is going through changes when he admits – like David Hume did centuries earlier – that it’s better to mitigate his skepticism – created by a pessimistic yet realistic view of life – than to wallow in bitterness. Boris tells us that after being married for a year, he has developed a “delicate balance.” At this point, it seems as if Boris has gone from being a schlemiel to a new man because, in Allen’s view, the schlemiel is a schlemiel by virtue of this or that pathology. But the differences between Boris and Melody at the middle of the film show that this balance is tenuous.

Boris and Melody’s transition from the schlemiel to the new man/woman is foreshadowed by Melody’s mother and father’s transformation from Bible-thumping Southerners to New Yorkers. When she first meets him, Melody’s mother calls Boris a “secular humanist” and confirms what Boris imagined he would find when he eventually met Melody’s parents. What follows this initial meeting is the beginning of a long critique of religion that goes on to the very end of the film. In the end, the mother, like her daughter, leaves the shtetl and her old-time religion behind for New York liberalism. Everything starts changing when one of Boris’s friends, a philosophy professor, inspires the mother to pursue art. He finds her photos – which were not intended to be art – to be “haunting” and “primitive.” Boris narrates her transition from a Southern housewife to an artist who sleeps with two men and throws religion “where it belongs, in the toilet.”

Melody’s final transition occurs when, upon meeting up with a handsome young English actor her mother set her up with, she realizes that she is “more a nurse than a wife” to Boris. Through him, she also realizes that she mistakes his pessimism for wisdom. Once she has this insight, she stops being a schlemiel and becomes a “mature woman” with a mature (“proper”) relationship. This realization leads to her breaking up with Boris so that he can also reform himself and live a normal life. She would rather do that than live with a schlemiel who, even after marriage, can’t transform himself. We see how “abnormal” Boris is when Melody’s new flame, Randy, who is wise and normal, says he doesn’t fall for Boris’s pessimism. Randy is a willful and self-reliant individual who believes in what he can achieve. His optimism is connected to his willpower.⁶

Randy and Melody live well in the world; they are beautiful, independent people who enjoy life. According to this contrast, which draws heavily on vitalism, the schlemiel is not in the world; s/he is ugly, weak, and for these reasons not truly happy. What their healthy relationship teaches us is that the schlemiel, as Allen understands this character, has an internal and psychological sickness that must be transformed or negated. Boris does not portray the schlemiel of the tradition so much as a caricature of the real man, Randy. Therefore, if Boris is a schlemiel, he is not the traditional schlemiel, but a schlemiel who has been reduced to a being with a debilitating psychopathology.

However, the end of the film completes Boris’s transformation into a healthy, well-functioning individual. The next time we see Boris – after Melody leaves him – he is in the hospital. Boris visits the woman who had broken his fall from his second suicide attempt. This time, the audience is spared the details and the panic attacks, the omission of which gives the audience a more “healthy” view of Boris. We see his health in the fact that, instead of negatively reacting to the fact that his preserver is a psychic, he smiles and shows interest. As one can expect, a healthy Boris ends up falling in love with her. The framing of the film, in terms of the smiles and glances they exchange, and the dialogue between them indicate that she seems to be the proper match for him.

At the very end of the film, on New Year’s Eve, we get yet another Hollywood ending, this time in New York City. Boris narrates how everyone is happy: Melody, her mother, her father, and even himself. The metaphor is obvious: on New Year’s Eve, everyone is new, transformed. At the end of the film, it seems as if there are no remains of the schlemiel. But after the ball drops, Boris expresses a moment of schlemiel-like pessimism. Nonetheless, this moment is interrupted by the group when they ask Boris who he is talking to. But unlike the beginning of the film, where he expressed schlemiel-like pessimism, here, he smiles and expresses optimism. His last words to the camera, said with a smile, are that he is the only one to see the whole picture, “that’s why they call me a genius.” But now the whole picture is perfect, harmonious. After saying this, he returns to the group of celebrants rather than turning away from them and the world. His vision is now in line with everyone – with the world – rather than opposing it. His completion of the artistic whole is, in short, the abandonment of the schlemiel. As in Hollywood Ending, the death or transformation of the schlemiel marks a new beginning. Allen seems to be telling his audience that, for it to be effective, the psychological transformation of the schlemiel into the reality-adjusted ego (what we called above personal salvation) must be rehearsed in each film so as to emphasize a new habit that is, so to speak, “healthy.” This is confirmed by Woody Allen’s last film Midnight in Paris, which, yet again, rehearses the transformation of the schlemiel.

The “Parisian Dream”

At the close of Hollywood Ending, Val Waxman enthusiastically affirms “This is my life’s dream! To live in Paris!” Gil Pender will fulfill the same dream at the end of Midnight in Paris. In Midnight in Paris (2011), Owen Wilson plays an attractive, successful Hollywood screenwriter but unsuccessful writer from Pasadena, California. The “problem” with Gil is that he can’t seem to get his life together and make the right decisions. There are two things that Gil is unsure of: his impending marriage and the book he has been trying, for a very long time, to finish. Like Val in Hollywood Ending, Gil needs to make decisions which will bridge his love life and his life as an artist. And, as in Hollywood Ending and Whatever Works, this film takes us through the decisions that will make for the transformation of the schlemiel into a man.

The plot brings us from California to Paris where Gil and his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams), are tagging along with her parents, and her friends, Paul and Carol, on vacation. Gil has obvious problems with the entire entourage but, because he is a weak and indecisive schlemiel, he doesn’t challenge them. However, like all of Allen’s later schlemiels, this lion learns courage. As the film progresses, we go along with Gil to experience what gives him the strength to step up to Inez’s parents – who see Gil as falling short of all their expectations – and Paul – whose pedantic descriptions of Parisian history, art, and culture irritate Gil greatly yet entice his fiancée no end. The process of Gil’s education, which Allen wants us to witness (as in each of the two above mentioned films), is, once again, the process of the schlemiel’s psychological transformation.

The fact that this film takes place in Paris, the home of modernism, is very telling as it lays bare Allen’s project to turn the schlemiel into the modern artist. For Allen, as for Hemingway and Baudelaire, the modern artist is a hero; he cannot be a schlemiel. He is a man in love. We have seen this in Hollywood Ending. And in Whatever Works, we learn that only a real man, an optimist, can be an artist.

Allen manages Gil’s education through a magical realist conceit: time travel. After leaving the entourage on the second night of the trip, Gil goes for a walk along the streets of Paris. Around midnight, in some nondescript area of Paris, Gil stumbles upon a gap in time and space which brings him into Paris of the 1920s. Celebrants riding by in a Peugeot of the era insist upon taking him to a party. Astonished and not knowing whether or not he is dreaming, Gil goes along. At the party he meets famous writers and musicians such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. From there he goes to another party and meets other artists including Ernest Hemingway.

Every evening Gil goes out to meet more of his literary and artistic heroes. But it is Hemingway who tells him and shows him what he should be: a real man and an artist. For Gil, the first test of his manhood is twofold: one, he must passionately involve himself with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who had been in an affair with Pablo Picasso and two, he must work with Gertrude Stein to produce a good novel.

It is appropriate that Hemingway should initiate this challenge to Gil because, as Ruth Wisse points out, Hemingway posed the greatest challenges to the post-World War II schlemiel. He believed in the power of the will to correct one’s follies and because the schlemiel fails to do this, he is deemed despicable (Wisse 1980: 76–78).

In The Sun Also Rises, Cohn is the token Jew. According to Wisse, he is a “schlemiel-manque, because the book realizes neither the humor of his condition nor any irony in his failure as compared with the ‘success’ of the in-group” (1980: 76). In contrast to Cohn, “Romero the Bullfighter is still the traditional Western hero in his work, a man of dignity, truth-to-self, physical courage, romantic polish, masculine beauty, the old-fashioned virtues” (77). The schlemiel is characterized in this way because Hemingway “writes about the schlemiel from the standpoint of the gentile Westerner, and concludes that his qualities are wholly defeatist and distasteful” (77). Because Gil is deeply affected in this film by Hemingway, so deep that he even competes with him in one scene for Adriana, there can be no doubt that Allen has been taken in by such a perspective. However, Allen challenges it only because he gives Gil (in the place of Cohn) the power to transform himself.

Although Allen parodies Hemingway’s excessive masculinity in the film, he truly emulates it by making the central conceit of this film the transformation of Gil from a schlemiel manqué – like Cohn – into an independent artist, like Hemingway. Like Hemingway, Allen sees a direct correlation between masculinity and art. To be sure, Gil goes from writing a novel on nostalgia that fails to one that (in Gertrude Stein’s preliminary estimate) succeeds. He is only able to do so because he is bold when it comes to his love for Adriana. And this is exactly what Hemingway advised him: to be a bold lover and man is to be a good artist.

Not only does his courage do its work in the virtual realm of the 1920s time warp; it also does its work in the realm of reality. At the end of the film, Gil speaks what he feels; he ends up leaving his fiancée and her Tea Party parents, and walks off – in the rain – with a French woman he met earlier in the film who shares an interest in the music of Cole Porter. She just happens to show up after Gil makes his ultimate decision to live in the present and leave Adriana and the artistic 1920s behind. Like Baudelaire’s modern artist, Gil lives in the present, not in the past. He can now start a new life as an artist – that is, as a man, not as a schlemiel.

Conclusion

It is clear that Gil’s final transformation is not unexpected. Like Hemingway, Allen rejects the schlemiel. But instead of showing a character who is “better” than Cohn, Allen has Cohn, so to speak, transform himself. Allen and Gil’s response to Hemingway shows us an old/new paradigm of the schlemiel in which the Jew believes that he/she can get rid of negative traits and become a success. This paradigm is based on the dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy; as we saw above, it presupposes that autonomy is the goal of the modern man while heteronomy marks man’s childhood and immaturity. The hope that one can transform from a heteronomous to an autonomous individual can be found in the schlemiel of nineteenth-century Germany. This hope is placed with the audience; here, in these films by Allen, it is given instead to the character to transform himself.

While it would be easy to simply accept Allen’s new reading of the schlemiel, I would like to argue, in closing, that its internalization of the schlemiel’s challenge to the “philosophical and political status quo” is problematic. To be sure, the dichotomy and characterization of the schlemiel characterized by the German schlemiel and Allen’s schlemiel cannot be found in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Eastern European schlemiel. There is a distinct reason for this difference. Allen’s schlemiel, like its German predecessor, has given up on the belief that the world and not the schlemiel should change.

As we saw above, what we find in the Eastern European schlemiel is a “balanced irony.” With “balanced irony,” optimism is not negated by skepticism. Both are suspended but one doesn’t eliminate the other. Rather, skepticism wounds optimism. In the above-mentioned films, there is no such wound; an “ironic balance” cannot be found in any of these films. The reason for this has to do with Allen’s belief that the real and the ideal, although they are initially in conflict, can be and are in fact reconciled in and through the schlemiel’s transformation. He can, literally, save himself.

Allen’s belief that personal salvation is the goal of the schlemiel does away with and internalizes the utopian aspect of this character which insists that the gap between the real and the ideal cannot be realized in the artwork, the audience, or in the labors of the schlemiel. The gap discloses a historical contradiction; instead of resolving this contradiction through a psychological transformation, the schlemiel can perhaps bring us closer to understanding a contradiction that is not simply an intellectual or psychological issue but rather a historical one.

What I would like to suggest in closing is that in bringing us closer to this contradiction between what is and what should (or could) be, the schlemiel brings us close to utopia, which is not present and accessible to us but is always to come. It is precisely as unfulfilled and untransformed that this comic character can make its appeal to something beyond our psychological power. And it is through this character that our complacent acceptance of this world can be challenged. Instead of focusing us on something internal, the schlemiel should focus us on what Emmanuel Levinas calls exteriority or what Ernst Bloch would call utopia. For Bloch (1988) and Levinas (2000), the contradiction which cannot be resolved or “internalized” deals with time (not an internal psychological time, a past that can be transformed, but a different kind of time, one we can’t control).

Time, the future in particular, challenges the comic belief found in all of Allen’s latest films: that the present moment is transformational. In the present, the schlemiel can stand up and be transformed into a man and an artist. This is a hope shared by Allen with Harold Bloom who, using Nietzsche, Freud, and the Gnostics, argues that the “I willed it” of artistic creation negates the “it was”⁷ of contingency and history. But this is an impossibility.

If the schlemiel were to just will his transformation, then the future would lose its weight and the present would engulf everything. The schlemiel’s hope has always served to challenge our satisfaction with the present moment. The hope of the schlemiel is thus not psychological; it is historical and utopian. It is the hope that one day there will be justice and happiness. Our current happiness, according to this view (the happiness of the liberal and modern life we see in all of the above-mentioned films) is incomplete. For this reason, one will notice that many Yiddish jokes about the schlemiel are bittersweet. All happiness – in the present moment – is wounded, incomplete or, as Wisse might say, “balanced.” For many past authors of the schlemiel, no amount of psychological transformation will resolve the greatest contradictions which are shared by humanity; they are not internal psychological contradictions, they are historical, ethical, and political. For this reason, the schlemiel has always been and perhaps always will be a character that doesn’t go through a psychological transformation as that which would contradict its relation to utopia.

The fact that we live in a liberal state and can make our own choices, which is, lest we not forget, the backdrop of all the above-mentioned films, doesn’t mean that we are at the end of history, that utopia is realized, and that we can now turn inward. For Levinas and Bloch, at least, there doesn’t seem to be an end to history; it is not realized in the liberal state, as Fukuyama, Kojeve, and, I would add, Allen believe.⁸ And it is not realized in the psychological control we have over our lives. For Levinas, the other reminds us of a future that is beyond our mastery.⁹

I would like to close with the claim that it is the schlemiel that can still remind us of the fact that history is not over and that utopia is, in Bloch’s words, “not yet.” Allen’s schlemiels hold before us a temptation to believe that utopia is within our grasp, that is, within the power of psychological transformation. Autonomy is the goal. This internalizes utopia and displaces our wounded hope which is time and time again evoked by the schlemiel’s foolish exploits that inevitably clash with reality. This hope, historical hope, bound as it is to the future is foolish; for Levinas and Bloch it is built into our very existential relation to the future and others. It is necessary but it is uncertain. It is like the hope of I.B. Singer’s Gimpel the fool, who is constantly being betrayed by people he unconditionally trusts – simply because they are human. The happiness in knowing that one can trust the other, that humanity is good, is “not yet.” Right now, this hope is wounded or “balanced.” Nonetheless, we need a fool like Gimpel to remind us of this temporal gap. But there is, of course, a problem. As Walter Benjamin once said in a letter to Gershom Scholem, only a fool can provide “real help”: “The only uncertain thing is whether it can do humanity any good” (Scholem 1992: 225).

1 Nearly every film made by Woody Allen over the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s cast schlemiels as main characters.

2 One can see this in the classic joke about the schlemiel and the schlimazl. The former is asked to bring in a bowl of soup for the latter. The schlemiel does so with the utmost scrupulousness, but when he is about to put it down on the table, he falls. The schlimazl gets the hot soup spilled on his lap. The point being that schlemiel always blunders and to bring out the blunder there is always a hapless schlimazl who suffers.

3 It should be noted that for Wisse weakness was an asset to challenge the “political and philosophical status quo.” Daniel Boyarin (1997), in a different context, also sees Jewish weakness and femininity as a challenge to the status quo. In this film, and in many of Allen’s later films, humility and femininity are ultimately given a negative valence which is transformed into a masculinist power of individuation – the very things that Boyarin, for instance, is looking to challenge in his book.

4 I say “supposedly” here because it the evidence of Val’s being a great artist is never shown – save for a mention of awards he had received in the past for his films. In the film it is merely talked about and played with.

5 The distinction between pessimism and skepticism is a matter of degree. Ruth Wisse makes a similar distinction between sarcasm and irony (1980: 46–48). The latter is more skeptical than the former, which is more pessimistic. As Wisse explains in reference to the Yiddish joke, the second part of the joke challenges the first part. If it is a challenge to the first part, then we have irony and skepticism; but if it negates the first part, we have sarcasm and pessimism. For instance, Wisse uses the classic Yiddish joke regarding the chosenness of the Jewish people: “You chose us from amongst all of the nations; why did you have to choose the Jews.” The first part of the joke comes from the Bible and is in Hebrew; the second part is in Yiddish. The second part does not reject the first part so much as express dismay and skepticism over its truth or meaning. A more pessimistic rejoinder to this first part of this joke would sarcastically negate it. This is what Wisse calls “black humor,” which also had a place in Yiddish humor but no place in schlemiel literature.

6 It should be noted that a reading of the metaphysics of will could certainly be made here. I am making reference to Martin Heidegger’s critique of the Nietzschean will-to-power which is found in many of his works; especially his volumes on Nietzsche. This critique of voluntarism has had a profound effect on deconstruction and poststructuralism. It has application here because Allen’s entire model is based on a metaphysical privileging of the will. The reading of the schlemiel I would like to propose, in contrast to Allen’s, doesn’t privilege the metaphysics of the will.

8 See Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1996) and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (2006) which share this thesis of the end of history in the liberal state, a thesis originally put forth by Hegel.

9 With respect to Levinas see Time and the Other (1987) and God, Death, and Time (2000), in which he discusses the relationship of ethics to time, most notably the future. Levinas also discusses Bloch’s notion of utopia, death, and the future in the latter book.

The Schlemiel and Autonomy: From Moses Mendelssohn to Woody Allen

Blindness and Insight

Mitigated Skepticism

The “Parisian Dream”

Conclusion