Certain themes of Woody Allen’s films (and writing) are prevalent and well documented: his blurring of the distinction between fiction or fantasy and reality, his skepticism regarding religion, his skewering of intellectuals, his characters’ need to escape or distract themselves from “the terrible truths of existence,” as Sandy Bates’ analyst puts it in Stardust Memories (1980).¹ While Allen at times mentions or alludes to well-known philosophers in his films,² and at times includes or hints at philosophical ideas, mostly those derived from existentialist thinkers, what I’m interested in here are the philosophical commitments presupposed by the themes delineated in my title. That is, what are the philosophical assumptions that motivate the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality, that compel one toward religious skepticism, or that lead a character like Mickey Sachs in Hannah and Her Sisters to say, rather astonishingly: “Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds, and in the end none of them knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do”? Does Allen honestly believe that Plato or Aristotle, Kant or Hume, know nothing more about the big questions than the producer of a late night comedy TV show? How could that possibly be?

To summarize, here’s the philosophical argument I believe to be implicit in Allen’s films: everything changes and nothing stays the same, and this means there is no God. We ourselves are constantly changing and finite. Death for us means nonexistence, individual and eventually collective extinction. Because of our own finitude and imperfection, and because of the changing nature of the universe, the only serious things we can know about the universe and human existence are these depressing facts – that everything changes and we’re doomed to annihilation. Further, the only real meaning our lives could possibly have would entail some sort of permanence, specifically our own immortality (even if our works live on after us – and they’re not even permanent – that doesn’t mean anything, since we’ll be dead). Consequently, life is utterly meaningless. Last, the best that we can hope to do in life (should we decide not to commit suicide) is to deceive ourselves about reality through religion or distract ourselves from these terrible truths, particularly through art and sex.

I will argue that at least some of these claims that pervade Allen’s films are based on the false dichotomy of science and religion. That is, as so often happens in contemporary discourse, people assume that when it comes to important existential or ethical questions (for example, the existence of God or the morality of abortion), the answer to the questions (if any are forthcoming) must come from either science or religion, forgetting that these are properly philosophical questions and require a philosophical approach and methodology in order to be handled in any kind of competent fashion. That is, Mickey Sachs is wrong. The great minds know much more about the big issues than he does.³

Allen’s Flux Metaphysics

The notion of a flux metaphysics is captured neatly in an aphorism by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who famously said, “You cannot step twice into the same river,” meaning that everything is constantly changing and nothing ever stays the same. Since, as the aphorism concludes, “other waters and yet others go ever flowing on” (Wheelwright 1985: 71), it’s never the same river the second time. Further, as part of the flux, you yourself are continually changing, so it’s not the same you the second time, either!

Allen’s commitment to such a metaphysics is expressed in a number of films, most hilariously by the young Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977), when he tells the doctor to whom his mother has taken him because of his depression: “The universe is expanding. One day it will break apart, and that will be the end of everything.” Given his understanding of this terrible truth, young Alvy has stopped doing his homework. In Stardust Memories, Sandy Bates (Woody Allen), asks his handlers:

Hey, did . . . did anybody read on the front page of the Times that matter is decaying? Am I the only one that saw that? The universe is gradually breaking down. There’s not going to be anything left. I’m not talking about my stupid little films here – eventually, there’s not going to be any . . . any Beethoven or Shakespeare . . .

And in Whatever Works (2009), Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), who has come to echo the thinking of the pessimistic Boris (Larry David), uses nearly the same line: “Well, you know, nothing lasts forever, you know, not even Shakespeare or Michelangelo or Greek people. I mean, even as we’re standing here talking right now, we’re flying apart at an unimaginable speed.”

Now, our everyday experience tells us that things change: we watch the hours pass and the seasons drift into one another; we see ourselves growing older; we lose friends and loved ones to death; and we change our minds all the time. However (at least in Allen’s thinking) it’s theoretical physics that tell us that everything is changing all the time, that we’re “flying apart at an unimaginable speed,” and that eventually there will be nothing left – that everything will decay and be destroyed. Consequently, Allen occasionally has characters appeal to physics to express these ideas. For example, in September (1987), Peter (Sam Waterston) and Lloyd (Jack Warden), a physicist, have the following exchange:

Peter:	What branch of physics are you involved with?
Lloyd:	Something much more terrifying than blowing up the planet.
Peter:	Really? Is there anything more terrifying than the destruction of the world?
Lloyd:	Yeah – the knowledge that it doesn’t matter one way or the other, that it’s all random, radiating aimlessly out of nothing, and eventually vanishing forever. I’m not talking about the world. I’m talking about the universe. All space, all time, just a temporary convulsion. And I get paid to prove it.
Peter:	You feel so sure of that when you look out on a clear night like tonight and see all those millions of stars? That none of it matters?
Lloyd:	I think it’s just as beautiful as you do, and vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away, but then my professional perspective overcomes me, a less wishful, more penetrating view of it, and I understand it for what it truly is: haphazard, morally neutral and unimaginably violent.

So the authority of physics tells us that the universe is haphazard and a “temporary convulsion.” Similarly, the above-mentioned Boris Yellnikoff in Whatever Works is also a scientist who worked in quantum physics. Mirroring Lloyd’s thinking, Boris describes himself and Melody as “two runaways in the vast, black, unspeakably violent, and indifferent universe”; and at their breakup, he says, “The universe is winding down. Why shouldn’t we?” Also, in Deconstructing Harry (1997), Harry’s sister, Doris (Caroline Aaron), says of him: “He has no spiritual center. He’s betting everything on physics and pussy.” And in a fantasy sequence, Harry Block (Allen) tells the devil: “I never believed in God or heaven or any of that stuff. I’m . . . I’m strictly, you know, quarks and particles and black holes, and, you know, all that other stuff is junk to me.” And, echoing Lloyd and Boris, Harry tells a prostitute: “You know that . . . that the universe is coming apart?”

The two most important corollaries to (or perhaps conclusions from) the acceptance of this flux metaphysics are the nonexistence of God and our own extinction with death. I’ll discuss below the phenomenon of religion, but suffice it to say for now that Allen’s skepticism about (or, more substantially, his rejection of the notion of) God is clear and has been much discussed in the literature. Indeed, a number of his main characters (most of whom he plays himself) are atheists: Miles Monroe in Sleeper, Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories, Danny Rose in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Harry Block, Boris Yellnikoff, and Alan Alda’s character in Everyone Says I Love You.⁴ This only makes sense. If the universe is flying apart and will one day be completely destroyed. There’s certainly no room in such a cosmos for a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being.⁵

The obsession of Allen and his characters with death is also clear and pervasive in the films. Just a few familiar examples: Alvy in Annie Hall is preoccupied with death, Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters is obsessed with mortality, Renata in Interiors (1978) is overwhelmed by the thought of death, and the allegorical Shadows and Fog (1991) is all about being hunted by the specter of death (the film being based on Allen’s “Death (A Play)”). Connecting the flux metaphysics specifically with mortality, Gabe in Husbands and Wives (1992) claims that “change is death.” In his Woody Allen on Woody Allen, Stig Björkman asks Allen about this view. Allen responds:

Yes, change is death. That’s an opinion of mine. I’m against change. Because change equals ageing, change equals the progression of time, the destruction of the old order. Now, you can say that somebody in a certain station in life wants nothing more than change, because they want the destruction of the old order. But ultimately, to me, change is not your friend. It’s like nature (Björkman 1993: 230).

Elsewhere in the same book, Allen goes on to say:

I’ve made this joke before, that I’m not interested in living on in the hearts of my countrymen, I’d rather live on in my apartment! And that’s really what I feel about it. In Interiors that theme occurs a few times. Really what we’re all talking about is the tragedy of perishing. Ageing and perishing (105).

Last, I’ll mention that in the absence of God and permanence, the universe becomes, as Lloyd puts it above (echoing Boris), “morally neutral and unimaginably violent.” Thus Allen and his characters understand nature not as some harmonious idyllic place, but as predatory. As the Boris of Love and Death (1975) describes it, nature is like an “enormous restaurant,” with creatures feeding on one another. Commenting on this scene, Allen tells Björkman:

But, in this context, I meant “nature” overall, city and country. I mean, when you look at natural beauty you look at a beautiful pastoral scene. If you look closely, what you will see is pretty horrible. If you really look closely, you would see violence and chaos and murder and cannibalism (Björkman 1993: 71).

And, speaking of Interiors and Renata, Allen says: “Here comes also my view upon nature, that when you look close at nature, you find that nature’s not your friend. It’s marked by murderous and cannibalistic competition” (Björkman 1993: 105).⁶

Allen’s Epistemological Claims

Given that the universe is continually changing and nothing is permanent, it might naturally follow that there’s little of significance we can grasp and understand about the world and ourselves (except, seemingly, the fact that everything changes and we’re doomed to extinction). That is, any fact you can get hold of will undoubtedly change if you wait long enough, and there’s nothing absolute and fixed to be grasped at all. That even seeming truths grasped by sense experience might be suspect is suggested in a scene in Shadows and Fog. Affirming the flux metaphysics, Kleinman (Allen) says, “Everything’s always moving all the time . . . No wonder I’m nauseous.” And when Kleinman and Irmy (Mia Farrow) pause to appreciate the stars that have peeked through the fog, they have the following exchange:

Irmy:	You see that very bright star, up in that direction?
Kleinman:	Um-hmm.
Irmy:	For all we know that star could’ve disappeared a million years ago, and it’s taken the light from it a million years to reach us.
Kleinman:	I don’t understand. What are you saying – that that star is not there?
Irmy:	That it might not be there.
Kleinman:	Even though I can see it with my own eyes?
Irmy:	That’s right.
Kleinman:	That’s a very disquieting thought, you know, because when I see something with my own eyes I like to know that it’s actually there. ’Cause otherwise, you know, a person could sit down on a chair and break his neck. You know, you have to be able to rely on things. That’s very . . . very important.

Given the changing nature of things, Allen here suggests, we can’t always trust what our senses tell us. Interestingly, the opposite view is proclaimed by hardnosed empiricist philosopher Leopold (José Ferrer) in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982): “Ghosts, little spirits, or pixies – I don’t believe in them,” says the professor in the film’s opening. “Nothing is real but experience, that which can be touched, tasted, felt or in some scientific fashion proved.” Allen would seem to approve of Leopold’s distaste for metaphysical speculation: “Metaphysical philosophers are simply men who are too weak to accept the world as it is,” says the professor. “Apart from this world, there are no realities.” However, as the exchange from Shadows and Fog above indicates, Allen rejects Leopold’s empiricism. This is particularly evident, given that Leopold’s claims are disproved when – in a classic Allen skewering – the professor himself is turned into a spirit!

However, most of Allen’s skepticism seems to be directed not towards everyday sense experience, but rather towards knowledge of what he labels “the big questions” of life. For example, at the end of his fruitless search for God and meaning in Hannah, Mickey Sachs says: “I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I’m never going to get, and just enjoy it while it lasts.” This realization for Mickey leads to his claim that none of the great minds “knows anything more about the big questions of life” than he does. That is, Mickey comes to the conclusion that questions about God and meaning, the big questions, are inaccessible to and unanswerable by the human mind. Consequently, no one, not even great philosophers, could possibly know anything more about these issues than he does; we’re all equally in the dark. Allen seems to embrace this position in an interview:

I would be better off abandoning asking the audience to try to come to grips with certain issues because those issues finally always lead you to a dead end. They’re never going to be understandable, they’re never going to be solvable. We all have a terrible, fierce burden to carry, and the person who really does something nice is the guy who writes a pretty song or plays a pretty piece of music or makes a film that diverts (DeCurtis 1993: 50).

Thus we seem to be able to conclude with Halley in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989): “No matter how elaborate a philosophical system you work out, it’s got to be incomplete.”

However, there’s a real tension, if not outright contradiction, between what I’ve argued above are Allen’s metaphysical commitments and what I’ve been discussing here as his epistemological claims. That is, previously I said that Allen has definitively answered the question about God; but here, through his characters and his own statements, Allen seems to be saying that such a question is unanswerable. I believe this tension can be resolved. I think the above analysis of his views of God and the flux is correct: for Allen, the universe is in flux and there is no God. I think the apparent tension or contradiction arises because of the epistemological claims as I’ve been discussing them. Though it certainly seems so, it’s not the issues about God and meaning that are, strictly speaking, unanswerable and unsolvable for Allen. It’s really the question about death and individual extinction (which is closely tied to the issues of God and meaning). What Allen and his characters are searching for is a solution to the problem of their mortality. This is the “terrible, fierce burden” Allen makes reference to, and this is why Halley thinks any philosophical system must be incomplete. Indeed, when Björkman asks him about the fear of death, Allen responds:

There is no other fear of significant consequence. All other fears, all other problems one can deal with. Loneliness, lack of love, lack of talent, lack of money, everything can be dealt with. In some way, there are ways to cope. You have friends that can help you, you have doctors that can help you. But perishing is what it’s all about (Björkman 1993: 105–106).

For Allen, no other concern or fear is of any real import; that is, the only significant existential question is the one about death, and given the nonexistence of God, of course there’s no answer to this question; of course none of the great philosophers has any better solution to the problem of mortality. Consequently, when Mickey Sachs decides not to worry about these questions any longer, since they’re unanswerable, and just enjoy life, he’s deluding himself. The consequent happy ending of Hannah, in which Mickey marries Holly and she somewhat miraculously becomes pregnant (miraculous because earlier in the film Mickey finds out he’s infertile), is, as Allen admits, something of a copout. Regarding the question of whether life is meaningless, he says:

It was not a point of departure for Hannah, but it’s certainly what my story was about, what my thread was about. I think, if I’d had a little more nerve on that film, it would have been confirmed it somewhat more. But I copped out a little on the film, I backed out a little at the end (Björkman 1993: 156).

Again, the question about God (and, consequently, the question about meaning) has already been answered. It’s for the sake of a happy Hollywood ending that Allen has Mickey adopt agnosticism and throw himself joyfully back into life.

The Meaning and Value of Life

Roughly, the difference between the meaning and the value of life is that the former refers to the sense or purpose of, or reason for, life, and the latter refers to whether or not life is worthwhile. As I’ve already indicated above, for Allen, because there is no God and we’re mortal, life is utterly meaningless. Thus, for one of his section titles in Hannah, he quotes Tolstoy: “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.” This, as he says, is what the film was about, though he copped out in the end and gave the movie a happy ending. That meaning is tied to both God and mortality is confirmed in various scenes from Allen’s films. For example, in the midst of his search for God and meaning, Mickey Sachs explains to a priest why he’s considering converting to Catholicism: “Well, because, you know, I’ve got to have something to believe in. Otherwise, life is just meaningless.” He goes on: “I need to have some evidence. I’ve got to have some proof. You know, if . . . if I can’t believe in God, then I don’t think life is worth living.” Similarly, in Love and Death, Sonja claims: “But if there is no God, then life has no meaning.” In The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Cecilia (Mia Farrow) and the fictional Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) stumble into a church. Knowledge of religion wasn’t built into Tom’s character so he’s puzzled about the purpose of the place:

Tom:	It’s beautiful. I’m not sure exactly what it is.
Cecilia:	This is a church. You do believe in God, don’t you?
Tom:	Meaning?
Cecilia:	That there’s a reason for everything, for our world, for the universe.
Tom:	Oh, I think I know what you mean: the two men who wrote The Purple Rose of Cairo, Irving Sachs and R. H. Levine, they’re writers who collaborate on films.
Cecilia:	No, no, I’m talking about something much bigger than that. No, think for a minute. A reason for everything. Otherwise, it would be like a movie with no point, and no happy ending.

While Purple Rose certainly isn’t pointless, we should note that Allen didn’t cop out here and give it a happy ending, thus confirming his position on the issue: God doesn’t exist and there’s no reason for, or meaning to, anything.⁷ Further, in Interiors, Renata claims it’s hard to dispute that “in the face of death life loses real meaning.” Last, in Whatever Works, given his commitment to the picture of a transient universe physics presents to us, Boris says of life: “What does it all mean anyway? Nothing, zero, zilch. Nothing comes to anything.”

Given the lack of meaning in life, many of Allen’s characters decide life isn’t worthwhile (it’s valueless) and contemplate committing or commit suicide. In Hannah, Mickey considers suicide and almost pulls it off, when he fails to get an answer about God. In Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Professor Levy (Martin Bergmann), recognizing that the universe is a “pretty cold place,” jumps out the window. In Another Woman, Marion’s (Gena Rowlands) first husband, Sam (Philip Bosco), who always lectured her on the pointlessness of existence, kills himself, and Hope (Mia Farrow) contemplates suicide. In Interiors, Eve (Geraldine Page) successfully kills herself after a first botched attempt and, in September, Lane (Mia Farrow) has once attempted suicide and contemplates it again. Boris, in Whatever Works, gave himself a game leg prior to the opening of the story by jumping out of a window, and towards the end of the film makes another (rather humorous) suicide attempt.

Responses

In Allen’s godless universe, should one decide not to commit suicide, there seem to be several types of response to meaninglessness and the horror of mortality. The first I want to mention isn’t usually explicitly articulated, though we fairly often see Allen’s (and his characters’) reaction to it. This response is broadly a kind of denial of our own lack of understanding about the universe. The most explicit example of this position, as I noted above, is expressed by Leopold in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. He’s convinced that, after a rejection of God and other metaphysical meanderings, he still understands the universe: “I’m sorry, I did not create the cosmos,” he tells one of his students, “I merely explain it.” As noted above, Leopold’s cosmology is undermined when he dies in the heat of passion and is transformed into some sort of disembodied spirit, set loose to wander the upstate countryside. That Allen utilizes the supernatural to skewer Leopold’s pretentions to knowledge doesn’t mean, of course, that he’s somehow affirming the real existence of the supernatural; the film is meant to be a Shakespearean fantasy. Part of the point of the plot’s unfolding is to deflate Leopold’s pretentious claims to knowledge.

Indeed, one of Allen’s favorite pastimes is skewering intellectuals, and this is what I meant when I said we are often presented with Allen’s reaction to pretenses to knowledge and understanding. That is, beyond the fact that the universe is chaotic and random, God doesn’t exist, and death is inescapable for us, we can’t really know anything, at least intellectually. As Isaac Davis (Allen) says in Manhattan: “Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.” Consequently, anyone who says he’s got it all figured out needs to be exposed as the pretentious blowhard that he is. So Isaac’s new love interest, the brainy Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton) and her odd assortment of friends, including her “devastating” and “brilliant” ex-husband, Jeremiah (Wallace Shawn), are exposed as neurotics and homunculi, who generally have no clue as to what’s going on. Further, in Annie Hall, Alvy’s intellectual first wife and her friends are revealed to be pompous bores, as is the media professor standing in line behind Alvy and Annie at the movies in the delightful Marshall McLuhan scene. In Another Woman, because of its seriousness, Marion – a philosophy professor – isn’t exactly skewered or deflated, but she’s shown to be out of touch, sterile, and disconnected from real people. Her abstract philosophical musings have only alienated her from reality.⁸ Further, one of Allen’s most brilliant deflatings of intellectual pretention occurs in Love and Death, in this exchange between Boris and Sonja as they discuss the existence of God and the meaning of life:

Sonja:	Boris, let me show you how absurd your position is. All right, let’s say that there is no God and each man is free to do exactly as he chooses. Well, what prevents you from murdering somebody?
Boris:	Murder is immoral.
Sonja:	Immorality is subjective.
Boris:	Yes, but subjectivity is objective.
Sonja:	Not in an irrational scheme of perception.
Boris:	Perception is irrational. It implies immanence.
Sonja:	But judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomena exists in any rational or metaphysical or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract and empirical concept such as being or to be or to occur in the thing itself or of the thing itself.
Boris:	Yeah, I’ve said that many times.

If you don’t understand what’s being said here, you’re ahead of the game. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s a bunch of highfalutin language, philosophical buzz words, strung together in an incoherent fashion. The point hilariously made in this exchange is that when intellectuals start conversing in their abstractions, the conversation quickly devolves into gibberish. Allen makes a similar move in the Annie Hall movie line scene. McLuhan tells the pretentious academic: “You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.” Again, that last sentence makes no sense at all. How could a fallacy be wrong? Likewise, in Stardust Memories one of Sandy Bates’s critics is asked about the meaning of the Rolls Royce in the movie he’s just screened, and he responds: “I think it represents his car.” As Alvy tells his first wife: “That’s the thing about intellectuals – they’ve proved that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.”

A second response to the human predicament is to deny everything: flux, meaninglessness, mortality, and godlessness. This is the way of religion. As Harry Block says to his sister in a discussion about her faith in Deconstructing Harry, “Tradition is the illusion of permanence.” That is, religion allows us to deceive ourselves about the ever-changing universe and our unlucky place in it. Allen’s fullest and most extended treatment of religious faith occurs in Crimes and Misdemeanors. There, in a flashback to Judah’s (Martin Landau) boyhood, the choice is laid out between atheistic nihilism and its denial of objective morality, articulated by Judah’s Aunt May (Anna Berger); and a pious but illogical devotion to God and a clinging to religious ethics, embodied in Judah’s father, Sol (David S. Howard).⁹ Judah’s friend and ophthalmological patient, Rabbi Ben (Sam Waterston), echoes Judah’s father and claims: “Without the Law, it’s all darkness.” He expands on this thought to Judah, after Judah confesses an infidelity to him:

It’s a fundamental difference in the way we view the world. You see it as harsh, and empty of values, and pitiless. And I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t feel with all my heart a moral structure with real meaning and forgiveness, and some kind of higher power. Otherwise there’s no basis to know how to live.

In a somewhat heavy-handed dose of symbolism, Rabbi Ben loses his sight, indicating that he’s blind to reality. Allen confirms this reading of the character:

Yes, my own feeling about Ben is that, on the one hand, he’s blind even before he goes blind. He’s blind because he doesn’t see the real world. But he’s blessed and lucky because he has the single most important lucky attribute anyone could have, the best gift anyone could have. He has genuine religious faith . . . The worst kind of adversity can be surmounted with faith. But as the author, I think that Ben is blind even before he’s blind, because he doesn’t see what’s real in the world. But he’s lucky, because he has naïvety (Björkman 1993: 223).¹⁰

Religious faith is naive, a refusal to accept reality,¹¹ but it’s good fortune to possess it, because it enables one to endure life and all its difficulties.

At times, artists are tempted by a similar self-deception. That is, according to Allen, they can delude themselves into believing that they can cheat death and the flux and achieve a certain immortality through their work. Discussing Renata’s questioning of this idea in Interiors, Allen says:

I sometimes feel that art is the intellectual’s religion. Some artists think that art will save them, that they will be immortalized through their art, they will live on through their art. But the truth of the matter is, art doesn’t save you . . . it doesn’t save the artist. I mean, it doesn’t profit Shakespeare one iota that his plays have lived on after him. He would have been better off if he was alive and his plays were forgotten (Björkman 1993: 103).

The fallacy of immortality through art is likewise exposed in Stardust Memories. In a fantasy sequence, Sandy Bates imagines being posthumously honored for his films after having been murdered by a zealous fan. He’s dismissive of the accolades; they don’t mean anything to him because he’s dead: “I would trade that Oscar for one more second of life,” he says. His analyst designates this bit of wisdom, “Ozymandias Melancholia,” referring to the Shelley poem in which a traveler discovers in the desert the ruins of a once-great civilization. He spies on a pedestal the king’s exclamation: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (Shelley 1986: 691). The point is, of course, that even great kingdoms disintegrate; nothing really lasts. The melancholia refers to the depression that sets in once one realizes there’s no immortality to be had through great works. Allen says of “Ozymandias Melancholia”:

That’s a symptom I’ve invented that describes that phenomenon specifically, the realization that your works of art will not save you and will mean nothing down the line. Eventually, there won’t be any universe, so even all the works of Shakespeare and all the works of Beethoven will be gone (Björkman 1993: 103).

The third response to the terrible truths of existence, which is most prevalent in Allen’s films and which drives many or most of his characters and plots, is the attempt to distract oneself from the horror of meaninglessness and the human condition. “I feel the only way you can get through life is distraction,” Allen told an interviewer (Cadwalladr 2011), and one common means of distraction for Allen’s characters is sex or romantic relationships. For example, in September, when Lloyd the physicist describes the universe to Peter as “haphazard, morally neutral and unimaginably violent,” Peter somewhat remarkably responds, “Look, we shouldn’t have this conversation. I have to sleep alone tonight.” That is, Peter has no one to share his bed with and thus no one to distract him from these depressing truths about reality. Similarly, in “God, (A Play),” a character named Doris says: “But without God, the universe is meaningless. Life is meaningless. We’re meaningless. (Deadly pause) I have a sudden and overpowering urge to get laid” (Allen 1975: 150). And, in Whatever Works, Boris explains why he married Melody. It has to do, he says, with “The search in life for something to give the illusion of meaning, to quell the panic.” Of course, characters throughout Allen’s films pursue relationships – this is an important element of the drama of life. What these passages indicate is that an important function of romantic relationships (one might argue, pessimistically, that for Allen the only function of relationships ultimately) is to help us forget about the horror of existence.

The other very common source of distracting illusion for Allen’s characters is art, both through the creation of art for the artist and the experiencing of art for the spectator. A great many of Allen’s characters are artists of some kind; they are writers, painters, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers. In the Felliniesque Stardust Memories, for example, in which there’s a deep blurring of fantasy and reality, Sandy Bates used magic tricks as a boy and film as an adult to attempt to escape reality. But in the emergency room where Sandy has been taken after being shot, a nurse reminds him, “All those silly magic tricks you do couldn’t help your friend Nat Bernstein,” Sandy’s friend who died horribly of Lou Gehrig’s disease. That is, the illusions ultimately are no match against death. I’ve already discussed the danger of what Allen terms the “artist’s Catholicism,” the fallacious belief that he or she will achieve some sort of immortality by producing great works of art. As Peter J. Bailey argues in The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, the artist’s attempts at creating meaning in Allen’s films are ultimately fruitless in that,

Allen is content . . . to dramatize a single Irmstedt trick – the one that fails to stop the killer/Death in his tracks – because that failure so effectively epitomizes Allen’s ambivalent conception of art’s value to humanity: we need its illusions in order to live, but we’re only deluding ourselves if we believe they can redeem us from death (Bailey 2001: 162).

To reiterate, for Allen the one serious existential issue for human beings is our own mortality. Philosophers and scientists can’t solve this problem: we’re under a sentence of death (to put it as an existentialist might), and the best we can hope for is to delude ourselves about, or distract ourselves temporarily from, this horrifying reality.¹²

The False Dichotomy

Woody Allen is not a philosopher; he’s a filmmaker and a writer. Consequently, there may admittedly be something unfair (or untoward) about calling him on fallacious reasoning. Why worry so much over philosophical details? Why not just enjoy the movies?! The answer is that he includes philosophical themes and ideas in his films and has (if I’m correct above) drawn certain philosophical conclusions in his work, and these invite analysis and critique. After all, the guy at the cocktail party doing some armchair theorizing isn’t a professional, either, but if he starts philosophizing and says something that doesn’t seem right, we should call him on it. What’s more, if I’m diagnosing it correctly, the mistake I’m going to point out that Allen is making is one that’s quite common in contemporary American discussions of important issues.¹³ Thus, by illuminating it in Allen’s case, I may be able to shed light on the problem more generally.

The problem, as the title of this chapter indicates, is summed up in Harry Block’s juxtaposition of “air conditioning and the Pope.” There’s a fallacy, variously named a “false alternative,” “false dichotomy,” or “false dilemma,” which consists in presenting choices as if they were only ones available, when there are, in fact, other relevant options. I suggest this is where Allen’s thinking goes wrong. Specifically, when he deals with the philosophical questions discussed above – God, knowledge, meaning, value, etc. – the choice for him is between answers provided by science (air conditioning) and religion (the pope). In addition to appearing in Deconstructing Harry, that option is also evident in Whatever Works in the juxtaposition of theoretical physics and its nihilistic conclusions, as espoused by Boris and then by Melody, on the one hand, and the Southern Protestantism of Melody’s parents, on the other. The religion/science dichotomy appears as well in Crimes and Misdemeanors. In contrast to Rabbi Ben’s piety, Judah refers to himself as a “man of science” and acknowledges that he’s not a religious man. Similarly, Judah’s Aunt May isn’t presented as a believer necessarily in science, but she is identified as a Leninist (which means a materialist, in this context, someone who thinks the only reality is material or physical, as does Leopold in Sex Comedy), a nihilist, and she’s clearly an atheist, and this is in stark contrast to Judah’s pious father. To summarize: for Allen the only two alternatives are one, religion, and accompanying it: God, personal immortality, understanding, and a meaningful and valuable life; or two, science and consequently a haphazard, indifferent universe, lack of real knowledge, death, meaninglessness and valuelessness, and (in a word) nihilism. Allen then claims that the former is unreal, a delusion, and so the only justifiable conclusion is the latter. Rabbi Ben goes blind, and Judah gets away guilt-free with murder.

I want to suggest that there’s an option missing, such that Allen’s dichotomy is indeed a false one. The option is philosophy,¹⁴ and it’s odd that it’s missing because questions about God, knowledge, meaning, human nature, and so forth, have traditionally been treated as distinctly philosophical in nature, and I would argue that’s the proper way to treat them. This doesn’t mean that one must be a professional or academic philosopher to deal with these questions. What I am claiming is that when one grapples with them in a serious, rational way, in an effort to discover the truth, one is doing philosophy, and thus the methods of science and the faith of religion are inadequate and misguided. Why is that? Well, with regard to natural science, there are certain basic assumptions that we tend to have in our everyday lives regarding ourselves and the world around us, and these natural assumptions are taken up and remain largely uninvestigated in our empirical, scientific (and social scientific) investigations of the world. The assumptions include the notion that there is a mind-independent reality accessible to our sensory organs and our cognitive apparatuses; that it exists as we perceive it to exist, such that any being with any sort of mind would perceive and understand it the same way; and, broadly, that there’s nothing beyond what we perceive and understand. There’s nothing wrong with these assumptions; there’s usually no real reason to question them in our everyday lives. But natural science doesn’t for the most part question them; that’s not the job of natural science. Rather, it’s the job of philosophy. These are some of the issues dealt with in the history of philosophy, which wants to leave no assumptions unexamined. Questions about a mind-independent reality and about whether anything might exist beyond what we can perceive with our senses (including God) are part of metaphysics, and nonempirical (that is, nonpsychological) questions about knowledge and what we can know and how we know these things are part of epistemology. In addition, ethical issues and questions of meaning and value are traditional philosophical matters as well.

On the other hand, accepting certain things on religious faith isn’t an exploration or a rational investigation of the real world, and such faith isn’t meant to be. This isn’t to say there’s anything necessarily wrong with religious faith; even Allen approves of it as a lucky self-delusion! It just means that belief unsupported by evidence and argument tells us only about the attitudes of the believer. If we’re interested in acquiring knowledge about the world and about human existence, which is what I’ve been discussing, then we need something more than mere belief.

Again, to sum up, Allen’s dichotomy is a false one, since the methodology and approach of natural science and the nonrational, nonevidentiary faith of religion are inadequate to the issues we’re investigating. What we need is a philosophical approach.

I won’t here get into an overview of the history of philosophy; suffice it to say that that history represents a profound, rational engagement with the issues discussed above. And, while philosophers haven’t solved the problem of mortality, they have well demonstrated (contrary to what Allen supposes) that it’s not the only problem worth worrying about. Indeed, there are other, profound human, existential, and ethical issues worth dealing with; and, in addition, some philosophers have well argued that we can live meaningful lives, despite our mortality. To be completely frank, Mickey Sachs’s claim that none of the great thinkers of history knows any more about the deep questions than he does is jejune and ignorant. If my analysis above is correct, it’s based on the narrow and narcissistic, not to say childish, view that his own personal mortality is the only thing that matters. Once we look beyond our narcissism and our fear, we find that there are many important and worthwhile questions to ask, and issues to explore, and we find that great thinkers have much to teach us about asking those questions and offering potential answers to them.

Some, and perhaps those like Mickey Sachs are among them (maybe this is part of the reason he falsely believes the great thinkers have nothing to offer him), despair of not getting an unambiguous answer from philosophers: Aristotle disagrees with Plato; Descartes disagrees with Aristotle; Hume disagrees with Descartes; Kant disagrees with Hume; and of course Nietzsche disagrees with all of them. But that there is little consensus on a particular issue amongst philosophers is completely irrelevant. Dispute and a difference of opinion regarding an important question or issue means nothing about the issue itself.¹⁵ It doesn’t mean the problem is unsolvable or unanswerable. Rather, disagreement often points to the great difficulty of the question, and to the varieties of intellectual approach to answering it. Frankly, in my humble opinion, we ought to take heart in such protracted debate; it often points to the fortitude and largeness of the human spirit in grappling with such difficult but important issues.

Investigating the ways great thinkers have addressed these issues and ideas will enable us to come up with our own resolutions and answers. It’s the process, the asking of the questions, and not always the answers arrived at, that is transforming. Philosophy, as Socrates so well showed us, is a way of life; it is living the examined life. And the examined life is a meaningful life.

1 In a fantasy sequence after Bates imagines himself shot by a fan, his psychoanalyst says: “I treated him. He was a complicated patient. He saw reality too clearly – faulty denial mechanism, failed to block out the terrible truths of existence. In the end, his inability to push away the awful facts of ‘being-in-the-world’ rendered his life meaningless, or as one great Hollywood producer said: ‘Too much reality is not what the people want.’ ”

2 For example, Kierkegaard is mentioned in Manhattan (1979), Schopenhauer is mentioned in Stardust Memories, Nietzsche and Socrates are mentioned in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Marion Post is a Heidegger scholar in Another Woman (1988).

3 This chapter represents an expansion and development of the ideas contained in my earlier “God, Suicide, and the Meaning of Life in the Films of Woody Allen” (Conard 2004).

4 And more mildly (perhaps for the audience’s sake), some others are, or seem to be, agnostics, like Mickey Sachs in Hannah and Her Sisters and Boris Grushenko in Love and Death (1975).

5 We should note that Allen’s conception of God is a thoroughly Abrahamic one.

6 Allen’s view of nature is akin to that of the pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer, who says: “This world is the battle-ground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths” (Schopenhauer 1958: 581).

7 Allen has expressed uncharacteristic satisfaction with Purple Rose and its ending. Regarding the film, he says: “That’s the closest I’ve come to a feeling of satisfaction. After that film I thought, ‘Yes, this time I think I got it right where I wanted to get it’.” Regarding the unhappy ending, he says: “Some people have suggested that perhaps if they had married at the end, Cecilia and the movie star, the film would have had a bigger audience. There was such a feeling of unhappiness or melancholy when he left her at the end. But that was the whole reason I was doing the film, that was the whole point of the film” (Björkman 1993: 116, 80).

8 “Allen’s intelligentsia are incapacitated by their intellects,” says Maurice Yacowar in reference to Another Woman (1991: 268).

9 Another guest at the imagined or remembers Seder in Crimes and Misdemeanors says, “Sol’s faith is a kind of gift. It’s like an ear for music or the talent to draw. He believes, and you can use logic on him all day long, and he still believes.” Sol responds: “Must everything be logical?”

10 Allen goes on: “So unless you have a strong spiritual feeling, spiritual faith, it’s tough to get through life. Ben is the only one that gets through it, even if he doesn’t really understand the reality of life. One can argue that he understands it more deeply than the others. I don’t think he does myself. I think he understands it less, and that’s why I wanted to make him blind. I feel that his faith is blind. It will work, but it requires closing your eyes to reality” (Björkman 1993: 224–225).

11 The naivety of religious belief is smartly and succinctly expressed in Manhattan, when Mary says: “Hey listen, hey listen, I don’t even want to have this conversation. I mean, really, I mean, I’m just from Philadelphia, you know, I mean, we believe in God. So, okay?” Isaac is baffled by this comment, thinking it nonsensical, but the implication is clear: belief in God is for those who are a bit backwards and ignorant, as Philadelphians are in comparison to sophisticated New Yorkers.

12 One other suggested means of distraction in Allen’s films is neurosis. As Isaac Davis in Manhattan says, dictating notes to himself: “An idea for a short story about . . . people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves ’cause it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.” This seems to be the case with Boris in Whatever Works. He hasn’t deluded himself about reality, but, knowing the truth, he has developed a number of neurotic ticks (for example, singing “Happy Birthday to You” every time he washes his hands).

13 See, for example, Robert Wright’s article from The New York Times (2009) regarding the existence of God. The options presented in this discussion are the point of view of materialist/atheistic natural science and faith-based religious conviction. The author neglects the alternative of approaching the problem philosophically.

14 Of course Allen does at times present another option besides science or religion. For example, in Whatever Works he seems to be offering art as an alternative, as Melody’s mother is reformed of her religious ways by her immersion in creativity and the art world; and he seems to be offering human relationships and love as a second alternative, when Boris falls on (and falls for) a woman in his second suicide attempt and then ends up in a relationship with her. But, as discussed above, for Allen art and romance are only temporary distractions from the horror of existence and not any kind of real solutions.

15 That Bob and Joe differ with regard to claim A is irrelevant to the truth of A. For example, people at one time argued whether the earth was round or flat.