23
Disappearing Act
The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen
In Zelig, Woody Allen pulls off a marvel of trick cinematography – at one point, we see him as Leonard Zelig in the on-deck circle while Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig take spring batting practice – but it is his trick philosophy on which we will focus. A magician and lover of “the magic lantern” (cinema) as a youth, it is no wonder that Allen would be drawn to trick philosophy. In Radio Days, Joe (Seth Green), the 10-year-old Woody Allen surrogate, experiences the magic of the movies as an epiphany when he accompanies Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest) and her suitor to Radio City Music Hall. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the “spirit ball” that inventor Andrew Hobbs (Allen) rigs up works like a movie projector. At the end of Shadows and Fog, Allen’s character, Max Kleinman, apprentices himself to Irmstedt the Magician (Kenneth Mars), symbolizing, perhaps, Allen’s choice of “a life in film.”1 One of the magician’s favorite tricks is the disappearing act (usually followed by the reappearing act), and Irmstedt saves Max and himself from the lumbering town murderer by disappearing into his magic mirror. To Irmstedt’s amazement, the murderer performs his own disappearing act by escaping from his chains. Shadows and Fog ends as the screen goes black a moment after Irmstedt and Max vanish before our eyes. In Oedipus Wrecks the disappearing and reappearing acts take unexpected turns as Sheldon’s (Allen) mother (Mae Questel) actually disappears during a magician’s act only to reappear projected over Manhattan, hounding her son. The trick of making oneself invisible is an ancient trope (the Ring of Gyges) used by Plato in the second book of the Republic. Allen explores this power in Alice, when Dr. Yang (Keke Luke) provides herbs to make Alice (Mia Farrow) invisible.
What we call Woody Allen’s trick philosophy puts even a great magician like Irmstedt to shame. Allen’s trick philosophy relies on the power of unconstrained reflection to make God, the external world, enduring physical objects, other people, knowledge, morality, responsibility, character, meaning, beauty, power, action, even one’s self disappear. We call this trick philosophy factoring philosophy, because its characteristic pattern of reasoning is to factor out the purely subjective, what is for us, from the purely objective, what is in itself. Factoring philosophy is trick philosophy because it makes phenomenologically unjustifiable purist splits, notably, between subjectivity and the world. By contrast, the standpoint of the present authors, which reaches back to George Berkeley’s criticism of “abstract ideas,” calls factoring philosophy into question. Berkeley argues that certain assumptions about language play tricks on us (Berkeley 1950). Because we have one word for a general idea, say “triangle,” we assume that it must represent a single, necessarily abstract idea of a triangle. And where we have two separate words, say “color” and “shape” or “subjective” and “objective,” we jump to the conclusion that we have two separable phenomena.
The consequence of applying unconstrained reflection again and again is a progressive emptying of content from the world – and us – leaving an unknowable residue. The result is a profound skepticism: we know nothing of the world as it is in itself; all specific content is deemed subjective. Even Descartes’ certainty that his mind exists as an enduring, thinking thing comes under attack in the skeptical, factoring philosophies of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume can find no evidence of an enduring self, only a parade of perceptions, and Kant distinguishes between the self that appears, which is caught up in the determinism of the phenomenal world, and the free, noumenal self, about which we know nothing. Allen sides with the skeptics:
Sure, you know, you can never resolve the epistemological conundrum. I once did a joke a long time ago about having to take God’s existence on faith, and then I realized that I had to take my own existence on faith. And that really is the truth – that you can’t be certain of anything (Schickel 2005: 157).
As Hegel describes skepticism’s disappearing act: “In Skepticism . . . thought . . . annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold determinateness” (Hegel 1977: 123). Of such thinking Hegel writes, “The sickness of our time, which has arrived at the point of despair, is the assumption that our cognition is only subjective and that this is the last word about it” (Hegel 1991: 54). Consumed by the power of the factoring philosopher’s unconstrained reflection, the world vanishes behind the veil of subjective appearances.
We might compare this peculiar disappearing trick to Truman’s (Jim Carrey) realization in the film The Truman Show that his entire life has been spent on an elaborately constructed set for a television show chronicling his life: the set doesn’t disappear with Truman’s recognition, but its identification with the world does. It abruptly becomes a staged reality, a shell of its former self. Allen creates similar effects by having a film or story within a film: both Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry start that way. Awakening from a dream is a common experience of abrupt transformation. Of Play it Again, Sam, which opens with the final scene of Casablanca, Sam B. Girgus comments, “the film also makes the important connection between the structure and nature of films and the way dreams are formed and function” (Girgus 1993: 16). This is how the trick philosophy operates; everything appears to be the same yet everything is different. Lemons still look yellow and taste sour, but we relegate those qualities to our own mental states: lemons aren’t yellow or sour. Imagine the trick philosopher holding a lemon:
“Ladies and Gentleman, is there a yellow, sour fruit in my hand?” “Yes, of course,” they answer. “Permit me a brief lecture on the subjectivity of secondary qualities (such as color and taste) . . . . Thank you. Ladies and Gentlemen, once again, is there a yellow, sour fruit in my hand?” “No,” they admit, “there’s something in your hand that looks yellow and tastes sour, but it is neither yellow nor sour.”
The more we reflect in this factoring way, the more things recede behind the way they appear, the less remains to say about them. In the end, the factoring philosophy leaves nothing to say about the world as it is in itself. The trick has worked: the world disappears while remaining in full view. Imagine the Truman Show ending with Truman returning to “job,” “friends,” and “wife,” convinced either that there is no reality beyond the set or that, if there is, it is no less a human concoction than the reality TV show he stars in.
Woody Allen is captivated by the ideas of global skepticism that question the order and goodness of the world. The vicissitudes of the global skeptic play themselves out in Allen’s films. This kind of skeptic is dogged by the thought that every meaning and purpose is illusory. Even when the illusion doesn’t vanish, what remains is never quite real. Allen’s skepticism sparks lively intellectual exchanges among his characters and feeds a comic genius, but corrosive ideas have consequences for art. For the global skeptic, matters of substance are liable to dissipate at any time. Augustine describes a young skeptic caught in adultery who, in court, doubts that the woman is married, that adultery is wrong, and that they are not dreaming. Moral seriousness disappears into the lather of “what ifs.” Allen is ensnared by dubious ideas that make it hard to love life. The joy and promise of good art is possibilities, but possibilities piggyback on necessities. To be convinced that, at bottom, nothing really matters throws up obstacles for developing characters and plot. What remains is to flip-flop between repeating the global skeptic’s moves and engaging topics of ordinary artistic concern, such as marriage. The trouble is that global skepticism threatens to bleed through to the ordinary concerns. Even infidelity, a recurring theme in Allen’s films, loses weight. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, one of Judah’s (Martin Landau) motivations for having Dolores (Angelica Houston) killed is that his wife, Miriam (Claire Bloom), would never forgive his adultery. That motivation erodes by Midnight in Paris, when Inez (Rachel McAdams) admits to her fiancé, Gil (Owen Wilson), who is wooing two other women, that she’s spent a few nights with her pedantic married friend Paul (Michael Sheen) but that Gil should just “get over it.” When the need to confess or forgive dissolves in the plotline, the ground of art slips away.
Woody Allen’s philosophy is plausibly identified with existentialism. But existentialism is not of a piece; in fact, existentialists hold differing and even contradictory views on such fundamental questions as the existence of God, meaning, and morality. L. Nathan Oaklander offers three existentialist themes that fit popular conceptions well:
One common theme is the emphasis on human freedom and the related Sartrean slogan that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that we have no prepackaged essence or nature, but that what we are is what we choose to be. Another theme stressed by existentialists is the contingency of the world, the fact that the universe has no meaning and is absurd. A third is that there are no objective values (Oaklander 1986: 7).
As Peter J. Bailey notices, the philosophy professor Louis Levy (Martin Bergmann) in Crimes and Misdemeanors embraces all three:
Levy’s existentialist philosophy emphasizes the coldness of the universe, its utter obliviousness to human happiness, and the necessity of human beings to project value into its moral vacancy, a central value being love. “It is only we with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe,” Levy argues. “We define ourselves by the choices we have made – we are in fact the sum total of our choices” (Bailey 2001: 133).
Allen affirms Levy’s philosophy, but with an important proviso: “The professor [Levy] was intellectual, and so all his insights and all his philosophy about life, while valid and deep and profound, was . . . the product of intellectualism” (Schickel 2005: 152). Allen’s reservation, which Halley Reed (Mia Farrow) voices in Crimes, commenting on Levy’s suicide, leads us to an additional feature of existentialism, distrust of philosophical systems.
In the decades following World War II, the mainstream of philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, entered the doldrums of a professionalized positivistic philosophy hostile to metaphysics and moral philosophy and indifferent toward the significance of philosophy for an individual’s life. It wasn’t that God was dead; the question of God’s existence was not meaningful in the first place. Emotivism assured us that there was no cognitive content to moral utterances, no moral knowledge to be gained. “Murder is wrong” was really a disguised way of saying, “Murder rubs me the wrong way, so don’t do it.” Into this stifling situation, existentialism arrived as a wake-up call – an alternative. Walter Kaufmann, an academic champion of existentialism, offered this account of what makes one an existentialist:
The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life – that is the heart of existentialism (Kaufmann 1975: 51).
This comes close to identifying existentialism with nonconformism and suggests an irrationalism that privileges feelings over philosophical systems.
Reflecting on his interview with Allen, Richard Schickel observes, “We are all conditioned by the values of our formative years. And, as our interview makes clear, Woody is no exception” (Schickel 2005: 174.) Born in 1935, Woody Allen’s formative years were the two decades following World War II. This was the period of civil rights activism, but whatever sympathies Allen may have had for that movement, it was not his center of gravity. At the end of Manhattan, when Isaac Davis (Allen) is ruminating over reasons to live, he turns up Willie Mays and Louis Armstrong, but not Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr. Allen was shaped more by the nonconformist sensibilities of the Beat generation.2 Like the young Russians that Ivan Karamazov describes, Allen was drawn to the eternal questions “of the existence of God, and immortality” (Dostoevsky 1993: 4). Allen says of “discussion about life and death and the meaning of both,” “Well, that’s I guess at the center of my thinking so much. I mean, it’s on my mind so much” (Schickel 2005: 156). For like-minded dissidents, contempt for the conformist culture and politics of the 1950s often took the form of a sniping withdrawal from politics. When the counterculture and radical politics of the 1960s arrived, Allen was hitting his early and mid-thirties. Though Play it Again, Sam opened as a play in 1969 and as a film in 1972, it is bleak Beat sensibilities that surface in a scene where Allan (Allen), desperate for a date, approaches a young woman at an art gallery. She is studying a Jackson Pollock painting. When Allan asks what she sees in it, she unleashes this torrent:
It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation forming a useless straightjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.3
This is scripted to be over-the-top and played for laughs, but the substance of what she has to say turns up over and again in Allen’s films and interviews, resulting in an intellectual cul de sac that boxes in Allen’s art.
Misdirection is the idea that Schickel highlights in the afterword to his interview with Allen. Allen responds to Schickel’s observation that the reversal in Small Time Crooks, where a cookie shop meant to cover up a bank robbery becomes an overnight sensation, is vintage Woody Allen, “Right. That’s my magical background. That’s misdirection” (Schickel 2005: 169).4 A magician’s technique, misdirection, when taken more broadly, evokes a kind of freedom that suits Allen’s nonconformist soul. This conception of freedom goes back to the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus, who deviated from the determinism of Democritus’ atomism: Epicurus’ atoms swerved! This Epicurean conception of freedom insists that nothing binds the subjective individual. We hear it in Sartre’s insistence that no preset essence harnesses us. So many of Allen’s loves – comedy, jazz, and magic – are like that, marked by misdirection, deviation, nonconformism. “When you see a magic trick, it defies reality” (Schickel 2005: 145). In an interview with John Lahr, Allen says, “in the end we are earthbound,” but comedy can
defy all that pulls you down, that eventually pulls you all the way down. The comedian is always involved in that attempt somehow, through some artifice or trick, to get you airborne. Being able to suggest that something magical is possible, that something other than what you see with your eyes and senses is possible, opens up a crack in the negative (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 200).
“A crack in the negative” is like the swerve of an Epicurean atom, namely, an abstract affirmation of freedom against the order of things – nonconformism. In Midnight in Paris, writer Gil Pender’s midnight time travel is the “crack in the negative” that gets him “airborne.” But when he ends his nostalgic nighttime adventures, he lands not far from where he started – with another bright-eyed blonde. At least this one loves Paris and Cole Porter instead of Malibu and whatever money will buy.
Luck, with which Allen is much impressed, likewise involves deviation. Like jokes, magic tricks, and jazz improvisations, luck is recognizable only against the background of an already ordered world. Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Myers) begins Match Point: “The man who said that it is better to be lucky than to be good saw deeply into human life.” Allen, in reply to Sander Lee’s question, says that authentic romantic commitment is “a question of pure luck” (Lee 2002: 223). Allen takes this idea to absurd lengths in Whatever Works when Boris (Larry David) meets his future wife accidentally, by falling on her in a suicide attempt. But, given what we know about Boris and his outlook, is there any reason to suppose that his luck will hold and make this new relationship thrive and endure? Looking back, wouldn’t Chris Wilton have been better off being good than lucky?
Who counts as an existentialist is controversial, just as existentialism’s defining features are. Though existentialism is widely accepted to be a mid-twentieth-century movement, nineteenth-century writers, notably Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, are numbered among the existentialists. James Collins reaches further: “Its remote historical roots lie in Kant and Hegel” (Collins 1962: 46). We want to stretch back to David Hume, who woke Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers.” Most, if not all, of the ideas associated with Allen’s existentialism are found in Hume.5 We do not claim that Allen is a reader of Hume. It is not necessary to read Hume to be shaped by his ideas: the default philosophy of the modern, skeptical person owes much to Hume. In Hume we find trick philosophy par excellence. Hume’s philosophy holds keys to understanding intellectual preoccupations and moves dramatized in Allen’s films. Hume factors out the purely subjective from the objective in one phenomenon after another to conclude that what we ordinarily take to be true of the world is actually purely subjective. One of his best known analyses concerns causality. By factoring experience, Hume argues that it provides no evidence of causal necessity; instead, causal necessity “is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects” (Hume 1967: 165). We will focus on Hume’s argument that all values, moral and aesthetic, are “in the mind.” You thought that life was in earnest; now you recognize that life is just a game to be enjoyed – or quit.
For Hume, nature and custom are the master magicians whose artifices make the world reappear, full of meaning and value and equipped with enduring physical substances having causal powers. Hume’s first trick is to factor experience so as to make that familiar world disappear. Thanks to nature and custom, the world reappears, only in a new modality, as projection. Hume’s magic is to make everything disappear while leaving it all but unchanged. This skeptical double movement, to undercut all our beliefs but then return to them, with irony, yielding to the pull of nature and custom, plays out in Allen’s films. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, for example, meaning and moral law are subjected to global doubt at the very same time that we anguish over cold-blooded murder to cover up adultery and embezzlement.
Hume’s trick philosophy is cinematic; it is a philosophy of projection. The external world, enduring physical objects, power, substance, aesthetic and moral values, and more are all projected. Hume’s cinematic philosophy pictures a mind (light source) projecting feelings (celluloid frames) onto the world in itself (screen). Hume posits a mental world of thoughts, feelings, and expectations apart from the physical world; by contrast, everything about cinema belongs to the world. Real projection, such as occurs in a movie theater, involves physical objects and processes in the world. Hume’s projection involves a mysterious injection of mental stuff into a world stripped bare. Cinema is an understandable, if imagination-stirring worldly process. Hume’s projection philosophy, by contrast, stymies efforts to make sense of how it could work (Stroud 1993: 253–272).
The trick philosophy, which makes the world disappear only to reappear as projection, is a skeptical philosophy. Skepticism is a deeply unstable pattern of thinking, predisposed to flip-flopping, which is responsible for ambiguities in how we talk of it. The opening move of skepticism is to put human cognitive faculties in doubt, leading to the conclusion that, in order to avoid error, one should suspend belief. But without beliefs one is unable to get around in the world. Hence the famous question in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: shall I leave by the door or the window? (Hume 1980: 5) Ordinarily, we exit by the door because we believe that it is safer than going out the window. How would we act if we suspended such beliefs? Though he expresses skeptical ideas, when Professor Levy “goes out the window,” it is because he believes in gravity and that his life is no longer worth living.
A skeptic may concede that we cannot do without beliefs but (1) continue to suspend belief by insisting that the beliefs one lives by are not true but only plausible or truthlike and (2) limit beliefs to what Hume called “common life,” while suspending belief on speculative questions such as the origins of the universe. Difficulties arise, however, on both scores. If I am excluded from the truth, what justifies claims that my beliefs are truthlike or plausible? If my beliefs are not even truthlike, what is there to say for them? What distinguishes the truthlike from the arbitrary? You can wrestle with the truth, but you can’t wrestle with the truthlike. As for limiting the scope of one’s suspension of belief, that requires drawing a bright line between common life and speculation, but it is difficult, if possible, to draw such a line.
Drawing that line became a key topic in philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant drew the line between claims that bear on some possible experience and claims such that no possible experience could count for or against them. This way of thinking was hardened by positivists, as by A.J. Ayer in his Language, Truth, and Logic. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, philosophy professor Leopold Sturgis (José Ferrer) hectors students with his positivist rejection of anything beyond the sensible. He gets his comeuppance at the end of the film, when he expires at the moment of sexual climax with Dulcy (Julie Hagerty) and his spirit is lifted to flit through the woods with kindred spirits.
With these trouble spots in mind, it is perhaps not surprising to find that the meaning of skepticism swings from suspension of belief to belief in a particular set of ideas, often about highly speculative matters. The profile of a skeptic’s beliefs resembles George Berkeley’s description of a Freethinker:
There is no God or providence: that man is as the beasts that perish: that his happiness as theirs consists in obeying animal instincts, appetites, and passions: that all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education: that religion is a State trick: that vice is beneficial to the public: that the soul of man is corporeal, and dissolveth like a flame or vapour: that man is a machine actuated according to the laws of motion: that consequently he is no agent, or subject of guilt: that a wise man will make his own particular individual interest in this present life the rule and measure of all his actions: these, and such opinions, are, it seems, the tenets of a minute philosopher, who is himself, according to his own principles, an organ played on by sensible objects, a ball bandied about by appetites and passions . . . . To complete his character, this curious piece of clock-work, having no principle of action within itself, and denying that it hath or can have any one free thought or motion, sets up for the patron of liberty, and earnestly contends for free-thinking (Berkeley 1950: 107).
The Freethinking skeptic does not suspend belief in God, providence, morality, conscience, guilt, religion, freedom, and moral responsibility. Rather, the Freethinking skeptic denies them all.6 Such beliefs show up in many of Allen’s characters; Harry (Allen), in Deconstructing Harry, and Boris, in Whatever Works, are particularly vivid examples.
The oscillation between suspension of belief and doctrinaire Freethinking ensnares Woody Allen and several of his characters in multiple inconsistencies. These inconsistencies show up in Crimes and Misdemeanors, as Aunt May (Anna Berger) holds forth at a Seder with her nephews Judah and Jack listening. Her Freethinking ideas echo Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov.
The global skepticism of Allen’s existentialism, his trick philosophy, sets up dead ends for him philosophically and as a filmmaking artist. Global skepticism about the true, the good, and the beautiful is a philosophy that leaves no room for development. Once factoring philosophy severs thought from the world and what goes on in it, there is nothing to do but to make that point over and over. Such repetition grows tiresome, though Allen’s brilliant wisecracks offer comic relief. By the time we get to the window exits of the nihilistic physicist Boris in Whatever Works, we have something approaching self-parody. Global skepticism and nihilism undercut the local skepticism in which we all participate. Strawson distinguishes between global and local moral skepticism, and he flatly rejects the global kind. Morality belongs to the human makeup: “our natural human commitment to ordinary inter-personal attitudes . . . is part of the general framework of human life, not something that can come up for review as particular cases can come up for review within this general framework” (Strawson 1974: 13). We all have moral questions – say, what are my responsibilities to an aging parent? But to question morality wholesale is to imagine one could unravel the fabric of human existence. If integrity were optional, would Cliff’s face turn ashen when Halley appears on Lester’s arm, now his fiancée, at the wedding that ends Crimes and Misdemeanors?
Global skepticism makes art as well as life unintelligible. An artist can no more work in a world without meanings and values than a person can walk on a frictionless surface (Girgus 1993: 18). In such a world – if we can call it that – there is nowhere to begin, nowhere to go, and no way to get there. Even to argue for global skepticism is impossible without beginning from a world fraught with meanings and values: skepticism and nihilism are parasitic on truth and goodness. Barry Stroud states the general problem for trick philosophy. It cannot make sense of the world that it wants to make disappear: “What is problematic is therefore to explain how we can have intelligible thoughts or perceptions which do not represent . . . the way things ‘really stand in nature’” (Stroud 1993: 268). Global skepticism is literally a nonstarter. So, in Allen’s films, global skepticism arises as a counterpoint to local action.
Many of Allen’s films work in both registers, global and local, but the two are discordant. Film counts on local issues to engage us in concerns that global skepticism would have us regard with utter indifference. If it doesn’t matter whether singer Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte) leaves his wife for Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow) and dumps his loyal agent Danny Rose (Allen) when a nostalgia fad gives his career a boost, Broadway Danny Rose will be hard to enjoy. How does one get worked up about adultery, lying, embezzlement, self-deception, murder, or betrayal with global skepticism all the time nagging that these activities, like every other, are morally indifferent and that “all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education”? Try writing a screenplay on those assumptions. Localized doubt is the friend of art; globalized doubt would put an end to it.
Crimes and Misdemeanors works in both the global and local registers, just as it is comic and tragic. We might view Crimes as the first of a trilogy of films dealing with family, adultery, embezzlement, and murder. In the other two, Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, both shot in England, the comic dimension drops out. In Crimes, with its overarching image of “the eyes of God,” the global register dominates. The film’s upshot appears to be that, since Judah’s crime goes unpunished – even his feelings of guilt pass – there is no justice, no God, no conscience, no moral law. Allen says, “We wish we lived in a world where there was a God and where these acts would be adjudicated in some way. But we don’t” (Schickel 2005: 151). The plot involves many local concerns: how far will Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston) go to bring Judah down? How serious are Judah’s financial misdeeds? How would his wife, Miriam, take the news that he is a liar, an embezzler, and an adulterer? But how important are these questions, if we grant that lying, embezzling, and adultery have no moral significance? If a pillar of the community such as Judah is capable not only of lying, embezzlement, and adultery, but also ordering murder in cold blood, we wonder, on the local register, how pervasive is human iniquity? But, if no morality binds, what, really, is there to wonder about?
When we move to Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, the weight shifts to local concerns. As we study Chris’s face at the window in the closing shot of Match Point, we wonder less about the eyes of God and more about what lies ahead in this life for him. Where has his strategic marriage, adultery, and cold-blooded double murder gotten him? In Cassandra’s Dream, brothers Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell) are not bent on excusing their murder of the accountant of their rich Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson) by calling the moral structure of the universe into question. The combination of Terry’s gambling debts, Ian’s business and romantic aspirations, and a sense of obligation to their cornered uncle pressure them to do something they know is wrong. The remission of Judah’s guilt feelings at the end of Crimes seems designed to cast doubt on the reality of conscience. But are we supposed to feel the same way about Terry’s irrepressible guilt as we do about his gambling, drinking, and pill popping – it’s just one more addiction? Or does the vulnerable Terry bring Ian around to face the truth that they committed a terrible crime?
Now we want to spotlight the skeptical doctrine that values are strictly subjective and the correlative doctrine of Freethinkers that “all stings of conscience and sense of guilt are prejudices and errors of education.” In his essay “The Sceptic,” David Hume insists that values are purely subjective: “We have already observed, that no objects are, in themselves, desirable or odious, valuable or despicable; but that objects acquire these qualities from the particular character and constitution of the mind, which surveys them” (Hume 1985: 171). “The Sceptic” is not of one mind regarding the consequences of this conclusion that nothing is intrinsically of any value. Hume’s opening position is that everything is left as it was. What might seem to be an earthquake is barely a tremor. Just because we discover that everything is intrinsically valueless does not mean that we stop caring. Hume points out that if the modern “discovery” regarding secondary qualities, namely, “that tastes and colors, and all the other sensible qualities, lie not in the bodies, but merely in the senses,” does not keep anyone from calling lemons yellow or adding sugar to make lemonade; neither should subjectivism about values alter our speech or behavior:
There is a sufficient uniformity in the senses and feelings of mankind, to make all these [secondary] qualities the objects of art and reasoning, and to have the greatest influence on life and manners. And as it is certain, that the discovery above-mentioned in natural philosophy, makes no alteration on action and conduct; why should a like discovery in moral philosophy make any alteration? (Hume 1985: note 3, 166).
Hume trusts in the uniformity of human feelings to preserve our ordinary practices even when we recognize that they have no objective basis. Murder is judged wrong and prosecuted whether values are disclosed as subjective or not.8
Rejecting the objectivity of values can ease into an ironic assertion of customary values. Skepticism and conservatism can be two sides of the same coin. In Hume’s Dialogues, Demea argues that skepticism is a bulwark of traditional religious beliefs. If you doubt the power of human reason, you will never discover a reason to abandon the religious practices and beliefs in which you were raised. If you are skeptical about values, that is, you think that they are all purely subjective, but you also realize that you can’t do without them, then why not avow customary ones?9 Allen is too much the Freethinker for that. Among other things, religion, perhaps Judaism in particular, offends his cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, he explores this path in his films. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey Sachs (Allen) tries Catholicism on for size, but it doesn’t fit. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, at the Seder that Judah observes in his mind’s eye, the young Judah and his brother, Jack, are buffeted by conflicting attitudes toward Jewish beliefs and practices. Aunt May, called a “Leninist” by her brother Sol, scorns them. Judah’s uncle demeans the rituals as “mumbo jumbo,” yet he goes along. Sol, Judah’s father, champions his faith and its rituals. In Deconstructing Harry, the dialogue between Harry Bloch (Allen) and his sister, Doris (Caroline Aaron), who keeps a practicing Jewish household (though she and Harry did not grow up in one), provides another perspective. Harry parodies Doris’s choice in a story where a psychiatrist (Demi Moore) abruptly adopts Jewish practices at home to the chagrin of her husband (and former patient). Doris complains that Harry “has no spiritual center,” whereas Judaism supplies her household with a set of values. Superstitious and parochial ones, Harry counters.10
Affirming a set of traditional values faces hurdles other than Harry’s Freethinking disdain. The skeptical realization that our values are without any objective warrant makes us feel funny about them and ourselves. Accordingly, “The Sceptic” concludes by regarding life as a game. We entertain ourselves only as long as we cling to the fiction that something matters:
In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and carelessness (Hume 1985: 180).11
In the interview with Schickel, Allen professes just this approach to life; in his case, making films keeps him entertained:
To me that’s the impetus for the work. For me – I’ve said this before – it’s like a patient in an institution who they give basket weaving to, or finger painting, because it makes him feel better. The actual work of making the film is great for me, because I get to create a fake situation and live in that situation and act the character, or if I’m not in the film live with those characters and bring them to life, and dress them, and put music around them, and put them in a setting that we create, and manipulate them. I control the reality for that period of time, and live amongst beautiful women and guys who are brilliant and guys who make witty remarks or who are extra brave. And it’s great (Schickel 2005: 145–146).
That’s entertainment.
So all’s well, in a way, as long as the game holds its charm. But consider the ominous conclusion to Professor Levy’s affirmation of the subjectivity of values, “under certain conditions we feel that the thing isn’t worth it anymore.” In an indifferent universe nothing really matters; mattering is up to me – though nature and custom do much to give life its savor. If we lose the taste for living, why not go out the window? In telling Halley what he knows of Levy’s death, Cliff cracks a joke, but it is more revealing than he (or Allen) seems to recognize: “He always was affirmative. He always said ‘Yes’ to life, ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes.’ Now today he said ‘No.’” Cliff and Halley are shocked and dismayed by Levy’s suicide, but why should they be either? At the heart of Levy’s philosophy, which Halley deemed “large and life affirming,” is arbitrariness. Levy’s laconic suicide note underlines that philosophy: “I have gone out the window.” The note repels the question “Why?” To what had Levy been saying “Yes”? Why affirm a remorseless universe? Why isn’t “No” every bit as reasonable an answer?
Hume considers how, if they are strictly subjective, one might change another person’s values. Where beliefs are concerned, we count on the traction that factual claims have with the world to provide footholds. To the astronomer who believed that all heavenly bodies were perfect spheres, Galileo could offer a look at the moon through his telescope, revealing a surface with mountains and craters. But what does one say to a person who finds the moon dull? Hume contrasts reasoning with valuing:
In the operation of reasoning, the mind does nothing but run over its objects, as they are supposed to stand in reality, without adding any thing to them, or diminishing any thing from them. . . . To this operation of the mind, therefore, there seems to be always a real, though often unknown standard, in the nature of things; nor is truth or falsehood variable by the various apprehensions of mankind (Hume 1985: 164).
By contrast, values are what we add, based on our feelings; if there is any standard here, it lies not in the world but in our human makeup.
But this is an untenably passive view of scientific reasoning. The categories of the objects over which the mind runs are not simply given in experience; thinking is required. Allen recognizes this in his factoring way, “We’re all given this spectacular denial system, and also a mind that puts all this chaos in order” (Schickel 2005: 157–158). This human element may account for Allen’s ambivalence toward science. On the one hand, we find characters who hold science up against superstition (usually in the form of religion) – for example, Judah in Crimes or Harry in Deconstructing Harry, who says, “I’m all quarks and particles and black holes – all that other stuff is junk to me.” In Midnight in Paris, Gil cannot fathom how Adriana (Marion Cotillard) could choose to live in a nineteenth-century world without novocaine and antibiotics. In September, we are encouraged to admire Lloyd (Jack Warden), the nuclear physicist husband of Diane (Elaine Stritch). Asked by the aspiring writer Peter (Sam Waterson) what he sees when he looks out into the universe, Lloyd replies:
I think it’s 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.
On the other hand, Miles Monroe (Allen), in Sleeper, puts no faith in science. Medicine is often the butt of Allen’s jokes. One of the doctors treating Leonard Zelig, Dr. Birsky (Paul Nevens), assures his press conference listeners that Zelig’s odd behavior results from a brain tumor, only to die of a brain tumor himself two weeks later. The narrator punctuates the episode: “Leonard Zelig is fine.”
Ordinarily, when we believe that someone is blowing things out of proportion or else dismissing the importance of something – of driving drunk, for example – we appeal to the true value of the thing. In Zelig we see this everyday process go haywire when several doctors come to visit Zelig at Dr. Eudora Fletcher’s (Mia Farrow) country home and Zelig gets into a scuffle over whether it is a nice day. Dr. Henry Mayerson points out that the sun is shining and it is mild. Zelig won’t hear of it and attacks the physicians with a rake. But what if, as Hume insists, the true value of everything is nil? Then values, being purely subjective, have no traction in the world. Hume draws the conclusion: “To diminish therefore, or augment any person’s value for an object, to excite or moderate his passions, there are no direct arguments or reasons, which can be employed with any force or influence” (Hume 1985: 171). The title of Whatever Works advertises the arbitrariness underlying Allen’s philosophy. However, “works” appeals to an objective measure by which we can distinguish working from failing to work. In a world without meaning or value, there is no non-arbitrary way to determine what works. Hume does not leave it at that:
But though the value of every object can be determined only by the sentiment or passion of every individual, we may observe, that the passion, in pronouncing its verdict, considers not the object simply, as it is in itself, but surveys it with all the circumstances, which attend it. . . . Here therefore a philosopher may step in, and suggest particular views, and considerations, and circumstances, which otherwise would have escaped us; and, by that means, he may either moderate or excite any particular passion (Hume 1985: 172).
The trouble here, as Hume sees it, is that so often these suggestions amount to “artificial arguments,” such as he finds in Stoic philosophers. Hume dismisses their extreme arguments: “The reflections of philosophy are too subtile and distant to take place in common life, or eradicate any affection” (Hume 1985: 172). We shrug them off. Such “artificial arguments” crop up in Allen’s films. In Stardust Memories, Sandy Bates (Allen) worries about entropy bringing the universe to a standstill. The young Alvy Singer in Annie Hall fears that if the universe keeps expanding, it will eventually break apart, a prospect that keeps him from his homework. These concerns are too distant to alter our feelings: I learn about entropy, but I go shop for groceries all the same.
Hume points up two considerations that are not artificial; they have the power to alter our feelings, but they introduce new difficulties. The first is an Allen standby: “When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness?”12 Discussing Stardust Memories with Schickel, Allen remarks, “Every single person – it’s a total washout after a hundred years” (Schickel 2005: 143). But Hume takes the point further, as Allen does:
And even, if we would extend our concern beyond our own life, how frivolous appear our most enlarged and most generous projects; when we consider the incessant changes and revolutions of human affairs, by which laws and learning, books and governments are hurried away by time, as by a rapid stream, and are lost in the immense ocean of matter? (Hume 1985: 176).
In the exchange with Schickel, Allen explains that Sandy “suffers from . . . what I called Ozymandias Melancholia, a depression over the fact that years from now they will come across your statue in the desert – the rotting statue in the desert – and it will mean nothing” (Schickel 2005: 118). It’s not just that I am whisked away; my accomplishments, like those of others, are “hurried away by time.”
Even the possibility that one’s work might endure brings no consolation. In Interiors, Renata (Diane Keaton) questions her poetry writing:
I mean, just what am I striving to create, anyway: I mean, to what end? For what purpose? What goal? . . . I mean, do I really care if a handful of my poems are read after I’m gone forever? Is that supposed to be some sort of compensation? Uh, I used to think it was, but now for some reason, I–I can’t.
When, after Sandy’s death, the film festival director assures her audience, “Sandy Bates’s work will live on after him,” Bates retorts from the grave, “Yeah, but what good is it if I can’t pinch women or hear any music.” Speaking in his own voice, Allen says:
Some artists think that they will be saved by their art, that they will be immortalized through their art, that they will live on through their art. But the truth of the matter is, art doesn’t save you. Art for me has always been entertainment for intellectuals. 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 were alive and the plays were forgotten.13
Nothing can compensate for the loss of my life. Sandy Bates, speaking from the grave, exclaims that he would give back his Oscar for one second of life. That leaves us wondering: what wouldn’t he trade for more life? Would he trade the lives of others for another year of his own life? If what happens to the rest of the world matters while I am alive, why would it stop mattering once I’m dead? Don’t we learn from the deaths of others that life goes on without them? If everything in the world were to stop mattering once I’m dead, why would it have mattered while I’m alive? And why wouldn’t the world have stopped mattering a long time ago, after the first person died? In Allen’s imagination, “It doesn’t matter to me” slides, perilously, into “It doesn’t matter.”
Later in Hume’s essay it seems that the problem with human affairs runs even deeper than the fact that they are “hurried away by time.” Even if they were enduring, they would be insignificant. Hume appeals to a god’s-eye view of human affairs to make his point: “It is certain, were a superior being thrust into a human body, that he never could be induced to take part in any thing, and would scarcely give attention to what passes around him.” A reflective human being can recognize the vanity of human pursuits but soon takes them up again:
Now all the same topics of disdain towards human affairs, which could operate on this supposed being, occur also to a philosopher; but being, in some measure, disproportioned to human capacity, and not being fortified by the experience of any thing better, they make not a full impression on him. He sees, but he feels not sufficiently their truth; and is always a sublime philosopher, when he needs not; that is, as long as nothing disturbs him, or rouzes his affections. While others play, he wonders at their keenness and ardour; but he no sooner puts in his own stake, than he is commonly transported with the same passions, that he had so much condemned, while he remained a simple spectator (Hume 1985: 175–176).
Hume counts on our feelings once again to pull us into life and divert us from the terrible truth of its triviality.
In Manhattan Murder Mystery, Carol (Diane Keaton) feels cramped in her Manhattan routines. When what looks like a murder mystery unfolding down the hall falls into her lap, Carol seizes upon it, especially since it doubles as an opportunity to flirt and share the intrigue with an attractive, recently divorced friend, Ted (Alan Alda).14 When her husband, Larry (Allen), eventually gets involved in the mystery and displays some daring at the same time that Ted’s attentions are shifting toward Marcia (Angelica Huston), Carol is content to resume her marriage and Manhattan condo life. Allen finds no salvation in routine: “But as long as you’re mired, as we all are, in everyday routine and reality, we’re all going to come to the same nasty end, and have the same grim lives” (Schickel 2005: 141). The affirmation of life’s routines is a denial mechanism that is always in jeopardy; the truth that all our efforts are pointless and for naught threatens to break through at any moment.
Reflection on the “shortness and uncertainty of life” can chasten us – so your team lost the championship game . . . you might be dead tomorrow, just get over it – but what will keep such reflection from draining away our desire to live, Hume wonders:
Such a reflection certainly tends to mortify all our passions: But does it not thereby counterwork the artifice of nature, who has happily deceived us into an opinion, that human life is of some importance? And may not such a reflection be employed with success by voluptuous reasoners, in order to lead us, from the paths of action and virtue, into the flowery fields of indolence and pleasure? (Hume 1985: 176).
Hume counts on nature and custom to keep us going, to give us the desire to live virtuously even when we know that there are no reasons to live.15 Like too many questions to an older sibling about Santa’s travels on Christmas Eve, reflection on the “shortness and uncertainty of life” saps our groundless belief that life matters. Into the vacuum created, slide the “voluptuous reasoners” with their siren song: “Present pleasure is always of importance” (Hume 1985: 176–177). In the same vein, Hume quotes Fontenelle’s observation: “the bright eyes of the ladies are the only objects, which lose nothing of their lustre or value from the most extensive views of astronomy” (Hume 1985: 175). The roster of “bright-eyed ladies” lending their “lustre” to Allen’s films keeps growing.
The cynical logic of the “voluptuous reasoners” shows up time and again in Allen’s films. Consider the characters that Tony Roberts plays in Annie Hall, Stardust Memories, and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Return to the scene in Play It Again, Sam where Allan asks the young woman what she sees in the Jackson Pollock painting. He answers her outburst with the question “What are you doing Saturday night?” When she replies that she is committing suicide Saturday night, Allan pauses and asks, “What are you doing Friday night?” When asked by Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) at the end of Sleeper what he believes in if he doesn’t believe in science or God, Miles answers, “sex and death.” Harry, the dissolute protagonist of Deconstructing Harry, gives us an idea of where “voluptuous reasoning” can lead, as does Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh) in Celebrity. Faced with the supermodel played by Charleze Theron, who reveals that her entire body surface is acutely erogenous, Lee blurts out, “If the universe has any meaning, I’m looking at it.” As Harry Bloch’s sister, Doris, puts it to him: “You have no values. Your whole life is nihilism – it’s cynicism, it’s sarcasm and orgasm.” If values lack traction in the world, a disturbing question for Hume – and Allen – is what can stave off dissolution if the spell cast by human sentiments and customs wears off?
Professor Levy claims, “It’s we who invest it [the universe] with our feelings.” This sort of existentialism is a rerun of David Hume’s projectionist theory of value – and is every bit as problematic. Recall Hume’s statement that, while aesthetic and moral value are purely subjective feelings, “objects acquire these qualities” from the mind that “surveys them.” Somehow, inherently indifferent objects are supposed to be invested with or acquire feelings from us. How seriously should we take Levy’s notion that we “give meaning to the indifferent universe” or “invest the world with feelings”? Not too seriously, we believe. Hume notes that “nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation, which they occasion” (Hume 1975a: 78n). But what can we make of such an assertion? How do we apply feelings to the universe? If I find a harvest moon beautiful, am I playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” on a cosmic scale, pinning my agreeable feelings on the moon? How strange! Hume contrasts reason with taste and writes that taste “has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation” (Hume 1975b: 294). Imagination is that “productive faculty,” and in Hume’s estimation, it puts the most extraordinary magician to shame: imagination makes a “new creation” appear.
If we actually could give meaning to the universe, then it would no longer be indifferent, but of course it would have stopped being indifferent ages ago, since our forebears would have given the world meaning. No one since time immemorial would have experienced an indifferent world. No, neither Hume nor Professor Levy can be serious about the idea that we actually give meaning to the universe: if it is cold and indifferent to begin with, then cold and indifferent it remains. The very idea of our injecting meaning into a meaningless world is bogus. Professor Levy’s affirmation of life is hocus pocus; it counts on nature to cast its spell over us.
Fortunately, we don’t miss the reappearing magic of projection theory when we recognize that the disappearing magic of Allen’s trick philosophy gets thinking off on the wrong foot. His factoring approach falsifies experience; the very idea of the purely subjective is a myth. We need not be like Cecilia (Mia Farrow) in The Purple Rose of Cairo, whose life would grind to a halt if the projectors stopped running. Art’s task is not the impossible but unnecessary one that the Gertrude Stein character (Kathy Bates) in Midnight in Paris assigns it: “the job of the artist is to find an antidote to the meaninglessness of existence.” For better or worse, and for all the illusions and unanswered questions we have about it, the world we inhabit is already full of meaning, of beauty and ugliness, good and evil. And it is that world, the world, that makes possible magic and the movies and all that we love about them.
We want to thank Peter J. Bailey for his many helpful suggestions.
Notes
1 On Allen’s association of film with magic, see “Interview with Schickel” (Schickel 2005: 144–145).
2 Much the same might be said of Stanley Kubrick. See Murray and Schuler 2007.
3 Contrast this with Mario Savio’s speech on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, Dec. 2, 1964: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious – makes you so sick at heart – that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all” (Savio 1964).
4 Allen also mentions The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, where the insurance investigator, C.W. Briggs (Allen), turns out to be the jewelry thief, acting on the post-hypnotic suggestions of Voltan Polgar (David Ogden Stiers). Misdirection is key plot device in Bullets over Broadway, where a mobster (Chazz Palminteri) turns playwright.
5 Allen’s introduction, in Midnight in Paris, of the fallacy of “Golden Age Thinking,” which esteems past ages to the detriment of the present, takes a page from Hume’s Treatise: “Hence we imagine our ancestors to be, in a manner, mounted above us, and our posterity to lie below us” (Hume 1967: 437). Given the gorgeous, Sidney Bechet accompanied visual homage to Paris that opens the film, one wonders if Allen replaces golden age with golden place thinking. Gil drops his romance with the 1920s, but he moves to Paris all the same. When Gil waxes poetic about how the light of Paris shines against a “cold, violent, meaningless universe,” we recall Isaac’s (Allen) statement in the Central Park carriage in Manhattan that Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) is God’s answer to Job: a city has taken a person’s place.
6 As we have seen, existentialists believe in freedom; Berkeley charges that Freethinkers equivocate on freedom.
7 In Dostoevsky’s stories, guilt works variously. In Father Zossima’s recounting of his youth in The Brothers Karamazov, the mysterious stranger Mihail, on whom Judah may in part be modeled, experiences no guilt for years after his cold-blooded murder of the woman he loved. Later, though he is in the clear with the law, Mihail is bursting with guilt. Guilt strikes Fr. Zossima (then a young military officer) like a lightening bolt the morning he is about to fight a duel that he provoked out of jealousy and pride. His interrogation of the “vile and shameful” sensation that awakes him provides a model discernment of the workings of conscience (Dostoevsky 1993: 51).
8 Hume is adamant on the point that, though any presumed objective basis for morality disappears, morality never does: “if ever there was any thing, which cou’d be call’d natural in this sense, the sentiments of morality certainly may . . . These sentiments are so rooted in our constitution and temper, that without entirely confounding the human mind by disease or madness, ’tis impossible to extirpate and destroy them” (Hume 1967: 474).
9 Sander Lee poses the “existential dilemma” that he sees as central to Allen’s work: “perhaps the greatest tension is between the desire of many of your characters to ground their lives in a set of traditional ethical values while, simultaneously, they sadly acknowledge that no ontological foundation can currently be found to justify such a belief” (Lee 2002: 222).
10 Customs can be secular. Lane (Mia Farrow), at the end of September, is kept from attempting suicide by Stephanie (Dianne Wiest), the friend who had just betrayed her. Stephanie counsels Lane to return to New York, look for work and an apartment, and tranquilize herself with life’s routines.
11 Jerold Abrams finds in Allen’s “life in film” an ethic of aesthetic self-fashioning inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault. Perhaps entertaining oneself through filmmaking is the deflated remainder of such an ethic after its urgency has dissipated. Abrams cites Nietzsche: “For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself” (Abrams 2004: 115). Perhaps keeping himself entertained is what satisfaction comes to for Allen.
12 The second is to compare our situation with that of others. The trouble here is that we are prone to compare ourselves with those who are better off, only making ourselves more miserable.
13 As quoted from a 1994 interview with Stig Bjorkman (in Bailey 2001: 242). Allen expressed the same view back in the 1970s in an interview with Lee Guthrie, “To me, all [art] – opera, painting, anything – is a diversion, an entertainment” (qtd. in Bailey 2001: 16). By contrast, in Bullets over Broadway, Sheldon Flender (Rob Reiner) would carry the last copy of Shakespeare out of a burning building rather than save a stranger’s life.
14 Peter J. Bailey observes, “What the pursuit of the mystery is for Carol (Diane Keaton) is too much what the film is for Allen: a contrived antidote for an oppressive reality, distraction impersonating remedy” (2001: 208).
15 Ivan Karamazov explains to his younger brother Alyosha why he would go on living even in a “devil-ridden chaos”: “I have a longing for life and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves, you know, sometimes without knowing why” (Dostoevsky 1993: 2). This passage is echoed at the end of Manhattan, when Isaac brainstorms reasons to live, culminating with Tracy’s face.
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