Throughout his long career, Woody Allen has used artistic means to explore some of the most urgent but unanswerable questions about life – from the intensely personal to the frighteningly cosmological. In the secular postmodern world, Allen has often assumed the traditional role of the creative artist who dramatizes or adopts the position occupied in other times by sages, rabbis, or prophets who consistently interrogate the universe and question its inhabitants about our situation of chaos and flux, tragedy and injustice. Over several decades, Allen has reworked and revisited such themes, showing us that the quandaries depicted in his films defy immediate or apparent solutions. Allen’s art depicts a process of ethical and moral interrogation, as opposed to generating ready-made answers to pressing concerns.

In this way, Allen follows rabbinic thinkers and commentators who have traditionally questioned not only the basis of our moral and ethical value systems, but also the nature and existence of a god whose laws provide us with an ethical framework but whose definitive silence regarding matters of the material world seems to challenge his own structure. A number of Allen’s films of the past decade are darker and more reflective, and drive home the importance of an ongoing process of ethical inquiry. Accordingly, Allen presides as an original artistic consciousness in film and American culture through his unique blending of the tragic and comedic, often using humor to express the deepest concerns about the ethical and moral meaning of modern life. As Sam B. Girgus has written,

Allen made artistic and thoughtful films that also were hilarious. He not only could make films about conscience and moral consciousness without deadening his audience, he also could imbue issues of subtle moral difficulty with cryptic humor and the sensibility of ordinary, everyday experience (Girgus 2002: 171).

Films from what some critics deem to be Allen’s classic period of success and achievement exemplify this special capacity for fusing humor and social and philosophical consciousness. Famous examples of this genius abound in such films as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

Much of Allen’s art seemed to take a radical break and diversion from this complex moral vision in the films of the 1990s that followed the scandal in his personal and professional life involving Mia Farrow, his lover and star, and her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. However, with the beginning of a new century and millennium, Allen’s work went through another major change. Perhaps as a result of a combination of factors including his aging, a period of extended moral condemnation from the public and the media over the Farrow–Soon Yi debacle, and the acceleration of tragic historic events such as 9/11, Allen’s work evidenced serious change that built upon but then moved significantly beyond the moral and ethical self-consciousness of his classic films.

Allen’s films from this later period of his life and work (2001–2011) indicate a critical shift in his sensibility to a darker vision of the complexity and difficulty of the ethical condition of the modern experience. Many of his films from the last decade reveal an ethical imperative of deepening challenge and uncertainty mixed with pessimism and fatalism. A number of his later films are dark meditations on the nature and possibility of achieving morality in human relations in a world that has been ravaged by the terrors and atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Particularly with films such as Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), and Cassandra’s Dream (2007), Allen transcends the comical to reveal the world with all of its dark realities. While it is certainly true that Allen exhibited a darker side in his earlier classic films, it can be argued that such pessimism dominates some of his most important later work, despite his continuing flashes of comic brilliance in such films as Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and Midnight in Paris (2011), the latter of which deploys a lighthearted comedic undercurrent to support its musings on our tendency to romanticize eras of a bygone age.

As an aging filmmaker, Allen now conceivably confronts with a new sensibility what French philosopher Maurice Blanchot understands as “the disaster” – that is, one’s own death, that which is impossible to imagine. Allen confronts death in Scoop, symbolically imagining his own death by writing the death of the character he plays, Sidney Waterman, in a car crash. Waterman, however, dies only to return in the afterworld with which the film opens. Allen kills death. That is, he faces death only to dismantle its larger philosophical and theological possibilities by projecting his own life after death in the very same film. Clearly, Allen finds it impossible to foresee the end of his own existence, even as he attempts to imagine it. His philosophical realizations about the inevitability of death are at odds with his artistic means. Death, of course, has been, at the very least, a vividly evoked concern in Allen’s films. However, in his more recent work, death becomes a focal point of reflection. While Allen’s darker meditations on death may be little more than an artist’s grappling with the inevitability of his mortality, as readers of this moment in Allen’s artistic life, we might identify a structure for seeking meaning in life through ethical and moral engagement. The darker Allen films of the last decade do not simply incorporate the theme of death as a plot device meant to titillate, rather, instances of death and murder are set in the context of larger questions about the nature and complexity of ethical responsibility. Consider, for instance, one of the final scenes of Cassandra’s Dream, in which Terry accidentally kills his brother Ian, who, unbeknownst to Terry, had planned to poison him. One might see this accidental murder as crisis averted, a necessary evil that will leave Terry free to follow through with his plan to alert the authorities to the earlier murder for which he and his brother are responsible. We are instantly relieved to discover that Terry will not become a murder victim. But it is a relief that is fleeting if we remember that Terry, despite the agony he endures as a result of his actions, is also a murderer. Allen, not unlike the ancient writers of Talmudic narratives that reveal the nuances of ethical quandaries, leaves us with such instances of ethical ambiguity, and in this way we are led to ask ourselves questions similar to the ones that haunt the trajectory of the film.

The deepening ethical consciousness that Allen evinces in later films such as Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, and Scoop can be understood more fully by discussing them in the light of the insights of the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. For many students of modern ethics, Levinas has become a decisive figure in Continental philosophy for his rethinking the Western philosophical tradition in the context of ethical priority. In fact, it could be argued, Allen himself almost anticipates such a comparison of his own ethical position and development through the character of Professor Louis Levy (Martin S. Bergmann) in Crimes and Misdemeanors. In the film, Levy is the subject of a documentary being produced by Allen’s character, Cliff Stern. Throughout Crimes and Misdemeanors, the professor propounds a philosophy of ethics and responsibility until the end, when he casts doubt on the validity of his optimism by committing suicide. A question, however, is whether the professor’s suicide does indeed imply a squandering of his own ethically grounded philosophies, or whether it may be read as a symbolic admonition against relying entirely on one’s own ethical insights. Regardless of Levy’s outcome, he represents some of Allen’s earliest forays into questions and considerations of the ethical. Reading Allen’s films with an understanding of Levinasian ethical philosophy informs the complex ethical sensitivity of Allen’s work. Levinas, it turns out, describes the importance of the kind of growing ethical awareness that Allen’s films demonstrate.

For Levinas, an understanding of the ethical begins with awareness – an awareness of our own asymmetrical relationship to another human being, and an awareness of our being summoned to responsibility. That is, I demonstrate both respect and responsibility for a person who is irreducibly different from me. I bear infinite responsibility for this Other. For Levinas, ethical responsibility is the ultimate starting point; it precedes ontology and questions of being and knowledge. “It is I who support the Other and am responsible for him,” Levinas argues, continuing:

My responsibility is untransferable, no one could replace me. In fact, it is a matter of saying the very identity of the human I starting from responsibility . . . a deposition which is precisely its responsibility for the Other. Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what, humanly, I cannot refuse . . . I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one can substitute himself for me (1985: 100–101).

And later, in “As Old as the World?,” Levinas writes:

For the human world to be possible . . . at each moment there must be someone who can be responsible for the others . . . You are not just free; you are also bound to others beyond your freedom. You are responsible for all (Levinas 1990: 85).

We come face to face with individuals on a daily basis, but it is recognition of the responsibility that accompanies this encounter that is necessary for an entryway into the ethical. Levinas, taking his cues from the long history of rabbinic inquiry and response that marks much of his later work, contends that responsibility is very much about dialogue, allowing the Other to speak and hearing the Other speak. Indeed, Levinas’ Nine Talmudic Readings (1990), a collection of talks to French intellectuals in Paris between 1963 and 1975, explicates and deploys the system of ethics laid out in both the Torah and Talmud, allowing the sacred texts to shed light on the issues of our time, while simultaneously allowing the events of the contemporary era to illuminate the nuances of the sacred text. In this way, Levinas essentially opens up a dialogue between ancient sacred texts and modern thought. For Levinas, perhaps the most effective way of ensuring that dialogue remains ongoing is to participate in the act of questioning, one of the most distinctive hallmarks of the writings of the ancient rabbis and sages in the Talmud and Midrashim.¹ Levinas recalls the members of the Sanhedrin, who sat face to face in a semicircle. The dialogue was “never interrupted, nor did it get lost in an impersonal dialectic. It was an assembly of faces and not a joint stock company” (1990: 72). Certainly at a very basic level one can identify in Allen’s films a propensity for dialogue and a tendency to resist open–shut endings, but many of Allen’s later films also open up the potential for more complex ethical encounters.

The philosophical version of awareness that Levinas discusses proves crucial to defining and explaining the greater complexity and maturity of the ethical encounter in many of Allen’s later films of the past decade. The awareness that Levinas describes – what he frequently terms an ethical awakening to the Other – becomes indispensable to ethical discussion in Allen’s later films. The awareness occurs through several different events and actions that constitute a journey toward ethical consciousness in the films. Such moments in that trajectory that also are part of the Levinasian ethical encounter and philosophy include: questioning, vision, witnessing, dialogue, listening, and introspection. Many of these elements can be identified in Allen’s films as crucial points in the process of the construction of what Levinas terms “ethical subjectivity.”

Like both Levinas and the ancient rabbis and sages, Allen begins with questioning. Questioning becomes a key motif that is especially pronounced in Allen’s later work. Built into the very structure of Judaism and its beginnings in Torah, the impulse to question pronounces itself, and in this impulse we discover the beginnings of the ethical: the acknowledgment that there is always another way, another question in response to each question. The Torah itself abounds with retellings of narratives, sometimes multiple times and from competing perspectives. Is not the second chapter of Genesis a retelling of – or at least a deeper explication into – the first?² Implicit in the act of questioning is an acknowledgment of the importance of an ongoing exchange of ideas – that is, the importance of dialogue.

Allen has never shied away from dialogue. Since the beginning of his filmmaking career, Allen has demonstrated a propensity for portraying his characters through fascinating and often complex dialogue. For Allen, what may come across technically as a monologue might also be read as an internal dialogue with the self. As viewers, we bear witness to this dialogue and are compelled to determine our own place within it. Consider Larry David’s character, Boris Yellnikov, in Whatever Works (2009). Boris is constantly engaged in dialogues about the meaningless of the universe and the notion of blind chance among other larger than life subjects. Often, Boris has an audience of other characters – Melody, the naive 21-year-old girl who shows up on his doorstep and moves in with him, or his group of male friends. In many instances, however, he speaks directly to the audience. He looks directly into the camera and imagines the viewer into an intellectual sparring partner, albeit a silent one. As a character, Boris comes across as intellectually pretentious and egotistical, and yet a quality of his tone suggests the possibility of his self-awareness of some weakness, as indicated by conversational intimacy with the viewer. We are forced into a conversation with the thematic elements of the film, which, in this case, happen to be the bleakness of life, disillusionment, and the human condition. But the point is that for Allen, monologues often become structured as imaginary intellectual dialogues. This transformation becomes the entryway into the ethical for the filmmaker, a movement of great importance in his later films.

Allen’s unique approach to dialogue in film, however, is not enough to categorize his later work as more ethically aware. His history of self-criticism is equally important, and it is critical to differentiate between self-deprecation as a means to a comedic end – which is, of course, a hallmark of Allen’s films – and what might be read as the pungent intensity of authentic self-criticism. This form of self-criticism becomes especially apparent in Hollywood Ending. Premiering in May 2002 at the Cannes Film Festival, Hollywood Ending is not generally regarded as one of the more notable films of his career. Most critics turned up their noses at Allen’s project, while American viewers simply stayed home. “I think,” stated Allen in an interview with Eric Lax, “if people had gone to see it they would have enjoyed it. But they didn’t go to see it.” Allen, however, maintains an opinion quite different from that of his viewers: “It was one of my most successful ones in terms of an idea that was executed properly” (Lax 2007: 226). Many of his European fans must have shared similar sentiments, given the fact that Hollywood Ending was much more successful in Europe, particularly in France, where “part of the show [at the Cannes] was to be a tribute to the people of New York and the suffering they endured over September 11.” As one of New York’s “best known citizens,” Allen was asked to “represent his fellow New Yorkers. Allen not only showed up but delivered one of the funniest monologues in the history of the awards . . . When he walked off stage to thunderous applause, he was right back on his pedestal” (Veitch 2002). This is, of course, ironic since the film is about a director making a film that flops everywhere except for France.

But the financial success of the film is of less importance philosophically than appreciating its plot and overarching themes that provide a lens through which to understand the films that Allen would go on to make in the next half decade. Hollywood Ending offers an extensive exploration of how moments of ethical blindness characterize the era in which we live. The protagonist, Allen’s character Val Waxman, exhibits a distinct lack of moral vision, and Allen uses this shortcoming. Further, the notion of “executed properly,” in Allen’s term, compels further investigation as to what Allen means by it. The statement apparently concerns the effectiveness of his theme of ethical blindness. In the film, Allen plays Waxman, a washed-up film director who once achieved a couple of great successes. Seeking a new project, he fortuitously gets one through the help of his ex-wife, played by Tea Leoni. The new project involves directing a big budget film in New York City. Waxman takes the project, but, in the first stages of moviemaking, he is stricken with an apparent psychosomatic ailment that robs him of his physical vision. Therefore, “executing properly” for Allen in the film apparently relates to the strength of his use of blindness in propelling the narrative and structuring its ethical argument.

From the beginning of the film, Val constantly draws attention to his shortcomings – not in the typical self-deprecating fashion often associated with characters played by Allen, but with a deeper awareness of the possibility of a deeper ethical failure. He considers that he may have been wrong all along in his professional choices, wondering at one point if he has simply been engaged in “artistic masturbation.” He entertains such doubts and self-criticism with a level of intensity that suggests a possible connection in his mind to events outside of the film of concern to him, including the shakiness of the country’s place in the world in the struggles that followed the attacks on 9/11.

While Allen seems to suggest in his interview with Lax that this idea – presumably that of a blind director – had “been around for years,” it is perhaps significant that it finally takes shape in the metaphorical ashes of the twin towers (Lax 2007: 56). Americans have often been criticized as being blind to the struggles and tragedies of those in other less industrialized and democratic nations. While it is certainly transgressive to suggest that any meaning can be derived from the tragedy or from the suffering sustained by those who survived the collapse of the towers or the destruction of the Pentagon, it is clear that the event compelled many Americans to engage in a process of self-examination in a national context and from a global standpoint. The question of whether our collective blindness and narcissism played into the unforgivable acts of terror that touched our country became a question on the lips of many scholars, politicians, and even average citizens. While the answer to this question depends on which side of the political or economic spectrums one finds him or herself, it is the question itself that remains decidedly significant because it is a question that, followed to its logical end, compels us to ask even deeper questions about our own individual ethical universes. Hollywood Ending may be the playing field where such questions begin to take shape for Allen.

Early in Hollywood Ending, after Val has accepted the offer to direct the new film, which will take place on the streets of New York City and be about the city itself, he sits with his ex-wife in a bar, discussing the logistics of the film. To his ex-wife’s confusion and irritation, Val insists that “foreign camera men” be brought in, an idea which is borderline ludicrous considering that the film is supposed to be organically New York, and that the reason his ex-wife was able to convince the investors to allow Val to do the film was because of his deep and complex history with the city itself. But Val is beginning to take stock of his shortcomings as a director and as a human being, and has come to the realization that a “foreign” perspective is necessary if he is going to see the whole picture, as it were. Val has begun to agonize over his ability to see anything through his own eyes. He is learning to recognize that an artistic dialogue that transpires outside of the self not only holds a great deal of potential in the artistic grand scheme of things, but also is necessary if he wants to create a film that is, ironically, authentically New York.

It is well known that Allen, while outspokenly Jewish and clearly defined as such by his public, often challenges, and even ridicules, the rituals and mandates of Judaism as a religion. He also is a self-proclaimed atheist. However, there are indications of latent traces of the Jewish religious tradition in Val’s desire for another perspective. A significant hallmark of Jewish thought is the insistence that study must take place between two people. Study means dialogue. The notion of chavruta, a rabbinical approach to learning that describes pairs of individuals engaged in debate and discussion about sacred texts, forms the backbone of Jewish learning. One person’s opinion must never be privileged over that of another. The emphasis is less on product than process; the ethical is revealed in the movement between the question and the answer. The conversation – that is, the willingness to engage in conversation – transcends any “final” answers that may be derived from the process. Allen symbolically returns to his origins as a means of grappling with the question of his place and responsibility in a postmodern world.

Early in the film, Val cannot sleep because his mind is immersed in thoughts of death and blackness. Everything becomes, for him, a “matter of life and death.” He is caught up in his own personal fears connected to death and mortality, darkness and oblivion. But just as he is about to begin shooting the film about New York City, he loses his vision. “I’m blind!” he tells his agent, who becomes enraged and throws off his kippah as Val tells him that he sees “the end.” Of course, the question of Val’s actual control over his blindness persists. Is he faking blindness as a volitional act of choice? Has he been stricken with some form of psychosomatic blindness? Val’s therapist accuses him of blinding himself to the situation – all while Val makes negative references to “agents’ ethics” and emerges as a blind, stumbling director.

But rather than announce his blindness to the producers and studio executives, Val decides to go forward with directing the film with help from a few select friends including his agent and, eventually, his ex-wife. The largest segment of the film is comprised of Val’s botched attempts at directing scenes that he cannot visually witness and responding to questions regarding staging and set design to which he cannot possibly know the answer. When his agent is asked to leave the set, he helps Val employ the help of the Chinese cameraman’s translator, who “sees” things for Val and enables Val to make directorial decisions, even if these decisions result in scenes that are full of “random chaos,” according multiple characters and others on the set. After a day of directing, when Val asks the Chinese translator to tell him how the dailies were, the translator says that he is a business student and not a film student, and therefore not equipped to comment on the process of filmmaking. He continues, “But I must confess . . . there is a strong sense of . . . incoherence,” to which Val responds, “Incoherence! Great. That’s exactly what I’m going for.”

With this emphasis on the theme of incoherence, Allen lends his influence to those who have seen in the idea of incoherence a form of response to the ethical and moral uncertainty of our times, especially following the Holocaust. Blindness as used by Allen in Hollywood Ending as well as other films such as Crimes and Misdemeanors becomes a graphic means of suggesting such incoherence as the inability to see or understand ethical experience. The drama of blindness suggests the trauma of such uncertainty. The continuing demand for ethical responsibility, even in the face of such trauma in fact exacerbates and becomes part of the traumatic experience itself, as exemplified by Levinas’ argument for radical ethical responsibility.³

The experience of blindness is crucial to narratives that are told in response to – or even in the wake of – tragedy because it is an implicit acknowledgement of the facets of trauma that always already elude our understanding. Writing one’s story – or, in the example of Hollywood Ending, directing one’s story – from the perspective of blindness reflects what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls the “lacuna” that exists in all testimony. Bearing witness to this lacuna, this blindspot, means bearing witness to the trauma of the tragedy, whether personal or collective, and its fallout.

Allen does not fail to see the limitation of his own metaphor of blindness. As in both Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hollywood Ending, he must develop that metaphor to cultivate the crisis of the relationship between the trauma and the ethical vision and demand. As Val’s son quips, “Blindness as a metaphor – that’s great!” Thus, the movement between blindness and sight further illuminates the capacity for an ethical encounter. While Val is blind for the largest portion of the film, he begins and ends with vision, demonstrating not only the fluidity of movements between the two polarities, but also the significance of the transition to a more ethically aware mode of being.

After Val’s film has been made – ironically, to mixed reviews in the United States and glowing reviews in France, where critics call it the “best American film in years” – he visits his 20-something son with whom he had had a falling out. Val walks into his son’s apartment and hands him a real olive branch. In so doing, Val returns literally to the space of the domestic, realizing that he must repair his relationship with his son, who mocks Val’s metaphor of blindness for its lack of originality. Importantly, in the scene immediately following Val’s ethical encounter with his son – an encounter in which Val takes responsibility for the broken relationship – Val regains his sight and also realizes that he is still in love with his former wife, Ellie. The reunion of the couple perhaps signals a glimmer of hope from Allen’s film that learning can be gained from ethical conflict even in times of blind incoherence. Consequently, Val remarks, “Every husband should go blind for a little while.” We are not meant to wander indefinitely in blindness, but, in order to see, we must experience it and we must learn to tell our story from the vantage point of one who is blind. The question is to what degree this metaphorical blindness explored in this 2002 film continues to provide a perspective for Allen’s subsequent films, particularly those that delve deeper into the darker complexities of our world.

In Anything Else (2003), Allen’s next film, the sight-enabling blindness that Allen’s character experiences in Hollywood Ending gives way to a pervasive sense of fear, paranoia, and helplessness. Allen plays a character named Dobel, a schoolteacher and aspiring comedy writer who becomes friends with a young Jewish man named Jerry (Jason Biggs) who is also looking to break into the comedy industry. Our immediate impression of Dobel is that he is generally paranoid and incredibly obsessed with and fearful of anti-Semitism. He is absolutely certain, for instance, that he overhears a man in a comedy club say that Jews start all wars. And he warns Jerry to beware of the “jack-booted menace” that is “lurking around the corner.” Further, Dobel is fixated on information – or perhaps the perceived lack of information. “What you don’t know will kill you!” he tells Jerry: “Like they tell you you’re going to the showers, but they turn out not to be showers.” Holocaust humor – and its accompanying tension between the known and the unknown – provides the foreground for the film’s dominant comedic thrust.

“We live in perilous times,” Dobel says, “You don’t want your life to end up in a black and white footage scored by a cello in a minor key.” Here, Allen’s inescapable obsession with the Holocaust, Nazis, and the Jews perhaps conflates with the trauma of the terrorism of our own times. What could be read as Dobel’s (Allen’s?) post-9/11 paranoia manifests itself through repeated retreats into the darkness of the Holocaust.

Dobel inserts a comment or joke about the Holocaust every chance he gets, and, as a result, the film contains more explicit Holocaust humor than any of Allen’s films since Shadows and Fog (1991). But while Shadows and Fog is a film that explores death quite specifically, Anything Else is not such a film. Allen’s abrupt inclusion of countless Holocaust references in a 2003 film having nothing to do with death, individual or collective, seems symptomatic of something larger. The question of why in fact he decides to riddle the veneer of his film with an obsessive smattering of allusions to Auschwitz is not easily answered, but his comments regarding the so-called mystery of the Holocaust in an essay (“Random Reflections of a Second-Rate Mind”) that appeared in Tikkun in 1990 may offer some insight. Allen remarks on his inability to see the legitimacy of the “mystery” that had “confounded all of [his] relatives since World War II” – namely, the question of how or why the events of the Holocaust occurred. For Allen, the fact that the Holocaust happened – and that non-Jews, previously happy to live alongside their Jewish neighbors, suddenly turned their backs on Jews when it became “fashionable” – reveals what is for him the least puzzling of all human characteristics: the “worm of self-preservation, of fear, greed and an animal will to power,” that lives inside the heart of every person (Allen 1990: 72). In other words, for Allen, the Holocaust is in part a symbolic manifestation of our most pronounced fears. The event – the murders, mutilations, persecutions, humiliations, and betrayals of the Holocaust – simply makes that fear and greed visible.

The perpetrators of the Holocaust were easy to distinguish if for no other reason than they typically wore uniforms and identified themselves as Nazis. They espoused a belief system mechanized and authorized by the state. In an era of global terror, where warfare takes place off of traditional battlefields, the faces of enemies are obscured and ambiguous. Therefore, the perceived threat of the unknown could be experienced as even greater. With little to no ability to pinpoint the source from which our devastation comes, we look instead for scapegoats. In this sense, the Holocaust becomes a kind of psychological scapegoat for Dobel as he acts out all of his greatest fears through conversations with Jerry. Dobel feels threatened in a way that reflects the fears of those who feel that they have been attacked in the intimacy of their own “home,” on their own soil, so to speak. Dobel asks Jerry whether he owns a gun. When Jerry asks why that might be necessary, Dobel retorts: “Why? To defend against those who conspire to harm you.” At which point, he takes Jerry to a surplus army rifle store to purchase a weapon – just in case “he’s at home masturbating” and someone comes to attack him, and “so that they don’t put [him] in a boxcar!” Again, Dobel’s legitimate feelings of concern following a violation must be couched in Holocaust rhetoric in order to be expressed. “You’re a member of one of the most persecuted groups in history,” Dobel tells Jerry, further driving home what he experiences as Jewish persecution. When Jerry’s wild but passionate girlfriend comes home to find her boyfriend wielding a weapon, Dobel explains to her: “It was my idea that given the tensions in the world . . . he should own a means of self-defense,” and that he “didn’t mean to incite domestic strife” (although it turns out that inciting domestic strife is exactly what Dobel, through a number of carefully articulated suspicions, does). Dobel’s reference to “tensions in the world” is the closest he comes to insinuating that the threat is a contemporary one and not fully entrenched in the legacy of the Holocaust.

Allen uses the pervasive and overwhelming fear exemplified by Dobel to raise important questions about the nature of God, religion, theology, and philosophy in our era. “They’re all charlatans,” Dobel says of all the priests, shamans, rabbis, and others, who “want to help, but there’s nothing they can do for us.” Responsibility falls on the individual. Allen suggests that perhaps there is no one to whom we can turn other than ourselves. Jerry, it turns out, is working on a novel, the subject of which is “the absolute terror of confronting one’s death.” It is difficult not to see the younger Allen in Jerry, as a number of reviewers of the film pointed out, an idea which Allen himself has somewhat confirmed:

I’ve always had that idea. I think it came off fairly well. Jason Biggs was in the movie and he was another actor who people thought was playing me – and I was in the movie, playing a different part! I thought it came off and it surprised me that it didn’t do better. I thought it had everything . . . Somebody said it summed up everything that I always say in movies . . . and maybe it did and that was a negative for me (Lax 2007: 58–59).

But one reviewer takes the comparison a step further and argues that Biggs’s character Jerry is not Alvy Singer (Allen’s character in Annie Hall) redux, but is “Allen’s version of a new sort of Jewish male figure who extricates himself from the character patterns that Allen himself has been so apt at portraying” (Bronski 2003: 14).

In an effort to somehow fuse his past life and current life, Dobel tells Jerry to disconnect from everyone – his agent, his girlfriend, etc. – and do everything either on his own or with Dobel. Allen could be speaking to a younger version of himself, wishing he could rewrite his own narrative, and that he had done things differently. Ultimately, however, Jerry disconnects himself – at least temporarily – from Dobel and attempts to work on his book manuscript. We hear him read a line of his own writing to himself while we witness a scene of lovemaking between him and his girlfriend, Amanda: “If only certain moments in life could last, just stay frozen like some vase.” At this point, the scene freezes and then cuts to a shot of Amanda’s mother, who has come to stay with Jerry and Amanda, doing a line of cocaine and offering some to Jerry, who refuses it, saying that he is a “nice square Jewish boy.” Once again, Allen dismantles the domestic to create chaos and confusion even on the domestic front. Amanda, accused by Jerry of looking at her mother’s boyfriend, then becomes upset and confesses that she is not “making eyes” at her mother’s boyfriend. From this point on, we witness the advent of collective paranoia as the family unit devolves. We also bear witness to Allen’s exploration of the shared desire of so many Americans to return to a time prior to fears that we are not safe even in the most intimate spaces of our lives.⁴

At the end of the film, Amanda and Jerry break up, and Jerry decides to go to Los Angeles with Dobel. But before their scheduled departure, Dobel backs out of the move, saying that he cannot go because he had recently been out of state, then was speeding and stopped by two state troopers who “got rough” and “made a crack about his religion.” Dobel says that the troopers “implied that Auschwitz was just a theme park,” and so he went back to find them later and shot one of them, which makes it impossible for him to show his face. Dobel, it turns out, is still trapped within the grasp of the trauma and its accompanying fear, perhaps reflecting Allen’s own questions about the viability of authentically working through collective tragedy. And yet Jerry’s move to Los Angeles suggests that Allen envisions a transformative and regenerative process. However, we are left to speculate on whether Jerry – a “younger Allen” – simply represents lost potential, given the fact that Allen cannot go back in time. That Allen incorporates references to the Holocaust in this film is not overly significant – he has done it on other occasions – but what is most critical is the larger context in which these lines appear, as part of Allen’s deepening ethical consciousness.

In keeping with Allen’s increasing engagement with ethical questions, his next film, Melinda and Melinda (2004), becomes a crucial moment for exploring further the question of whether comedy is the most appropriate medium for responding to the changing ethical landscape. One critic has suggested that we might call Woody Allen’s entire oeuvre “Modern Times,” and if the problem for Allen’s city dwellers has shifted from the external one of finding a job and founding a home to the internal one of feeling secure enough to survive between appointments with the analyst, that shift is “symptomatic of five decades of change in American life itself” (Mast 1979: 431). While Allen’s insistence upon tracking this trajectory began to take shape most recently with questions of blindness in Hollywood Ending and culminated (at least to this date) in explorations of the darkness of human nature in Cassandra’s Dream, the role of Melinda and Melinda is initially unclear. The film seems to have little to do with Allen’s holistic analysis of the changing ethical landscape, but buried within the film’s two competing Melinda narratives are his serious musings on the viability of both comedy and tragedy in this era. Further, the film taps into a Levinasian notion of responsibility that insists that we acknowledge with the sages and rabbis of antiquity that there is always another way – another perspective, an alternative way to tell the story. Allen’s refusal to rely on one mode of storytelling here may be yet another instance where the filmmaker is stepping back to gaze on his own cinematic oeuvre and allowing us to bear witness to his deepening ethical consciousness.

The film’s opening scene takes place in a French restaurant where a group of intellectuals discuss the topic at length. “The essence of life isn’t comic; it’s tragic,” is the first line of the film. But as the group continues to argue about the differences between comedy and tragedy through recounting two different fictional stories about the same woman – Melinda – who struggles to straighten out her chaotic life, the differences between the tragic and the comedic begin to blur, suggesting a shift in the way we see the world. But the question remains centered on how we should see the world and through whose lens?

The juxtaposition of both Melinda stories sometimes makes it difficult to tell the difference between the tragic and comedic versions of the narrative. The problem becomes one of perspective: one person’s comedy is another person’s tragedy. But the deeper issue becomes anchored in the question of identities. Is Allen suggesting that we all have dual identities in this era, and that we must find a way to authentically account for both? “We have to move on with our lives,” says one character, despite the uncertainty that colors this possibility. The film ends with a discussion of how our collective fear of mortality underlies the reason that we laugh at all. One character says to enjoy life because it could “end like that,” and with a snap of the fingers the screen cuts to black, and, in the final shot, we witness proponents of comedy and tragedy in agreement: the only sure thing is death. This certainty provides a segue into what many see as Allen’s darkest film: Match Point.

In his conversation with Eric Lax, Allen suggests that Match Point was one of the most pleasurable films for him to make. “If I had made a career of doing films like this,” he stated, “I would feel better about myself” (Lax 2007: 43). It is a surprising statement, given the dark nature of the film, whose main character, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a former tennis pro looking for work as an instructor, is characterized by a chilling impassivity that allows him to plot and carry out a double murder without a moment’s remorse. Indeed, Chris leaves the murder scene to meet his wife at the theater only minutes later, showing no visible traces of having just committed a crime. Earlier in the film, we learn that Chris’s wealth and social status are a direct result of his friendship with Tom, a wealthy young man whose sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), Chris marries, culminating in a radical improvement in his financial and social status. Chris embodies an utter lack of ethical responsibility. He is a character whose concern is only for himself in all matters. Fittingly, his marriage to Chloe is, unbeknownst to her, marked by infidelity. He begins an affair with Nola, Tom’s ex-girlfriend, played with explosive passion and sensuousness by Scarlett Johansson, which results in Nola’s pregnancy. In a display of pathetic self-pity as opposed to a guilty conscience, it is Nola whom Chris murders to avoid the inevitable consequences of accepting responsibility for his actions. For Chris, human lives become little more than pieces to be used in his plot to avoid responsibility. He also murders Nola’s neighbor to make the murder look like collateral damage of a burglary and coldly returns to meet Chloe at the theater. When news of the murders gets out, however, Chris becomes nervous, and the detectives nearly discover that he is indeed the culprit, until a homeless man is discovered with the neighbor’s ring in his pocket, the murders are attributed to him, and the case is closed. Chris goes unpunished.

Given Allen’s twenty-first-century fascination with questions of the ethical and issues of responsibility, the end of Match Point comes as an unsettling surprise. Chris breaches a number of ethical contracts but ultimately escapes the consequences – the legal ones, at least. Of Match Point Allen has remarked: “To me, it is strictly about luck. Life is such a terrifying experience” (Lax 2007: 43). Going on to lament the fact that humans can do heinous things and, if luck falls in their favor, emerge unscathed and unpunished, Allen reasserts: “I don’t believe in God. So this is what was on my mind: the enormous unfairness of the world, the enormous injustice of the world, the sense that every day people get away with the worst kinds of crimes.” Allen’s atheism does not prevent him from insisting on the need to continually interrogate the questions of ethics and morality as they relate to human – rather than divine – responsibility, which may in fact place him into a more appropriate and useful space for addressing questions of the ethical. In Totality and Infinity (1969), Levinas has suggested that passing through atheism is sometimes necessary for the sake of the ethical. Further, for Levinas, belief in God may sometimes hinder one’s capacity to recognize the responsibility to which he or she is summoned, given that belief in God is in many instances characterized by a childlike conception of the divine as an entity that doles out rewards and punishments. From this perspective, human beings are little more than children whose responsibility is absent, its burden resting instead on the parental figure. Atheism, in this regard, may exist as a space where one retains the capacity to acknowledge his or her – rather than God’s – responsibility for what happens in our world. By insisting on the formulation of a new set of ethics, stripped of religious and theological justification, Allen clears the way for serious consideration of human responsibility.

Allen’s darker films are not concerned with blaming God for the iniquities of humans. Instead, they peer deeply into the darker facets of human existence, diverging from stereotypical Hollywood-ending films that depict a good versus evil dichotomy in which the evildoer never goes unpunished. Allen deals implicitly with questions of theodicy by presenting an authentic world where so-called good people often find themselves in worse predicaments than their evil counterparts, and where it is impossible to place blame on anyone other than the human perpetrators of heinous and irresponsible acts. Further, although the film contains two grisly murders, Allen refrains from depicting the murders – or the blood in their aftermath – visually, which sustains the focus on the human being responsible rather than the spectacle of the consequence. In November 1988, responding to Ingmar Bergman’s impression that “our world is about to go under” and that our “social behavior patterns – interior and exterior – have proved a fiasco,” Allen states,

I do think the salient feature about human existence is man’s inhumanity to man. If you were looking at it from a distance . . . I think that’s what you would come away with. I don’t think that [aliens would be] amazed by our art or by how much we’ve accomplished. I think they’d be sort of awestruck by the carnage and stupidity (Lax 2007: 82).

Thirteen years later, in September of 2001, Allen’s words proved prescient in the wake of the 9/11 tragedies, and, in the years that follow, we witness Allen’s inability to ignore the sharpest and most ominous notes of human existence.

Allen’s films provide nothing in the way of assuring us that there is a god; in fact, many of his characters insist on the impossibility of the existence of God. And while the character of Sid Waterman in Scoop finds himself in a version of the afterlife, it is unclear whether this afterlife includes the presence of a god. Regardless, we might infer from Allen’s films that if there is in fact a god, he has removed himself from the human equation if only to have one grand laugh at our darkly bumbling antics and ethical mess. Allen continues the themes of luck, chance, data collection, and death in Scoop, this time writing himself back into the narrative (he does not appear in Match Point) as Sid Waterman, an amateur magician who goes by the name Splendini, allegedly “because it’s a comedy” and because it’s “automatically lighter” (Lax 2007: 41). The film opens with a eulogy and a group of men reminiscing about life in Afghanistan and praising the skill of their friend who has died, the journalist Joe Strombel, who always “got the info before everyone else.” In the afterlife, Joe’s ghost obtains information about a serial killer and attempts to convey that information to both Sid and Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), a young journalist. Both Sid and Sondra become entrenched in the process of trying to determine the identity of the serial killer, whom they suspect, based on Joe’s tip, is Peter Lyman, a wealthy young aristocrat.

Information – who owns it, who receives it, and how it’s disseminated – plays a significant role in Scoop. The question of what happens to information when its bearer passes on is an interesting one for Allen, but the larger question revolves around the question of what one actually gains as a result of obsessive data collecting. We typically expect knowledge to give us a modicum of control over a situation, but as Sondra and Sid garner more and more information about the serial killer, they begin to lose control of the situation as the film becomes darker and darker. The serial killer continues to murder more women and he eventually tries unsuccessfully to drown Sondra as well. Sid loses his life, and so while Sondra manages to swim to safety unbeknownst to Peter, alert the authorities, and deliver the killer to them, the film remains haunted by ghosts both literally and figuratively. Unlike the killer of Match Point, Peter Lyman will face consequences for his actions, but lest we bask in satisfaction over what seems to be a just outcome to a dark tale of murder and deceit, Allen ends the film in the afterlife, a topic about which we have no information and over which we have no control. Sid, in the final scene, rides aboard a ship steered by the Grim Reaper, doomed to perform his tired magical illusions for eternity. A major misleading aspect of Scoop’s conclusion – the apprehension of Peter Lyman and the confirmation of his guilt – suggests that recovering all of the information will result in an ethical outcome, a happier ending. The resolution nearly satisfies the audience’s longings for justice and balance, but for Allen this film does not offer the gratification of previous films:

When I finished Scoop I thought to myself, What a nuisance. I’m wasting my time with this little comedy and I could be doing another piece of work like Match Point – another meaty thing . . . Now, I wish I had come to this conclusion twenty-five years ago, but I didn’t . . . there was a fierce pressure on me from many people to do comedy (Lax 2007: 185).

Yet despite Allen’s insistence that Scoop is a “little comedy,” and regardless of the fact that Allen teases us with a taste of justice for terrible deeds done, the darkly comical ending is not happy.

In 2007, Allen returns to the disturbingly dark thematic components of Match Point with his film Cassandra’s Dream, the story of two brothers Terry (Colin Farrell) and Ian (Ewan McGregor). This time, however – and unlike Chris in Match Point – the murderous impulses of the characters result in even darker consequences. If Match Point is Allen’s attempt to demonize a world based on luck – a world where murderers face no consequences if they are lucky enough – Cassandra’s Dream reminds us that even if we are fortunate enough to escape the legal or social repercussion of our behavior, we cannot escape ourselves. Terry is a London mechanic and obsessive gambler, while Ian spends his existence working away in their father’s small restaurant. They have invested in a boat that they name “Cassandra’s Dream,” but when both brothers find themselves in debt, they seek help from their financially successful uncle, who asks them to murder an associate who plans to testify against him in a hearing regarding embezzlement. The brothers go ahead with the crime and are rewarded lucratively by their uncle in addition to escaping legal punishment. However, the guilt associated with the murder becomes more than Terry can bear and he threatens to turn himself in. Ian, unable to dissuade him from going to the authorities, decides instead to kill his brother by offering him a drink laced with enough drugs to kill him. But once on the boat, Ian cannot go through with it; however, during a scuffle, Terry accidentally kills Ian and then takes his own life out of remorse.

Cassandra’s Dream is in some ways a much darker exploration of the ethical terrain than Match Point because the murders transpire as a crime between and against brothers. The most primal beginnings of what we understand to be the ethical relationship – two brothers – are violated. In a modern-day retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, brother rises up against brother. One of the opening lines of the film – “All you have in this life . . . that you can count on, is family” – becomes ironic in the film’s conclusion, in which both brothers die. The financial success for which the two brothers strive together becomes the beginning of their demise, and, in this way, money becomes a dominant theme within the framework of the film. But it is difficult not to see in the brothers’ struggles for monetary acquisitiveness an implicit indictment – or at least a serious questioning – of our capitalist impulse. This, of course, is despite the fact that, as one character in the film says, the Chinese are “way more capitalist than we are.” The characters are self-aware enough to know that their drives toward monetary success are dangerous and destructive, but they lack the capacity to acknowledge responsibility for the trouble this drive causes for other people and, ultimately, for themselves. The suggestion that the Chinese are more capitalistic belies a human tendency to obscure personal guilt in the experience of sharing it with others. If others share our lapses in ethical awareness – and especially if we can determine that their ethical failings are worse than our own – then we have somehow escaped the need to become responsible. Cassandra’s Dream illuminates the lie that others are worse than we are.

Terry agonizes over the thought of having to kill the witness: “I can’t look him face-to-face and then kill him,” he says to his brother, who says later, “As soon as you look at anything too closely, you’ll see all the ugly imperfections.” The truth is that although Terry’s agony over the potential murder offers at the very least a glimmer of an awareness of the ethical, ultimately both brothers choose not to look, so as not to see the “ugly imperfections” in themselves. And the greatest tragedy in this film is that the “Thou shall not kill,” which, for Levinas, is written on the face of every human being, is barely legible even when two brothers gaze into each other’s visage.

It is no surprise that Cassandra’s Dream marks Allen’s last “dark” film to date, or that although his next film – Vicky Cristina Barcelona – is dramatic, it returns to the safety of the comedic realm and becomes Allen’s first return into the sphere of the domestic after a foray into darkness. And later, Allen returns to New York City in Whatever Works and abandons instances of death and violence, opting instead for an extended cinematic musing on the “horror” of our era. Boris, played by Larry David, wants to be alone. He is jaded by the media saturation of death and violence. Love doesn’t last, according to Boris; we are simply reduced to “whatever works.” The film begins with a discussion of God and religion, broadly, but more specifically about how the institution of religion has failed us in this era. It has become a “corporate racket,” and Boris opts out. He makes numerous ultimatums regarding faith, God, and theology, but in hearing these brash and impassioned statements, we are perhaps compelled to ask the questions we should have been asking all along: to what degree are we responsible for our behavior? For the behavior of others? Does the absence or silence of God prohibit us from stepping into his place and becoming more ethically responsible than he has shown himself to be? Boris seems to ask all of the questions that we, readers of Allen’s recent darker films, are led to ask ourselves. Perhaps we, along with Allen, are still learning what it means to be ethical human beings, to acknowledge our own infinite responsibility. In many instances – in Allen’s films and in the real world – the answers are unclear. But at the very least we – like the rabbis of antiquity who so elegantly positioned one outcome against another, resulting in a purposely ambiguous outcome – can ask the right questions.

And this might be Allen’s Jewish way. Jewish thought moves us away from a mindset that encourages focus on an outcome, opting instead for an insistence on the value of experience – that is, on the process – placing far greater value on it than on what it produces. The tension, the struggle, the conflict, the need to investigate and interrogate – these are the impulses that have driven our greatest rabbis, sages, and Jewish thinkers since the beginning of Judaism. Perhaps these same impulses mark the artistic endeavors of Woody Allen, and perhaps, as a result, we learn to ask questions that matter.

1 The Talmud is comprised of two parts: the Mishnah, created in 200 CE; and the Gemarah, which was generated in 500 CE and is a discussion of the Mishnah and other Tannaitic writings. Together, the two parts form the basis for much of Jewish law as well as contain multiple inquiries into the Torah and the Hebrew bible. A page of Talmud is visually distinct, and illuminates the nature of the conversational component of the text. The structure of dialogue in the Talmud often takes on an if-then-but structure, often culminating in an implicit imperative for the readers to take up the discussion themselves. As such, this kind of structure tends to favor open-endedness as opposed to the restrictive nature of absolute answers. Classical midrashic teachings, on the other hand – including the Tannaitic, the post-Talmudic, and the Midrash Rabbah – were compiled at various points between the second and thirteenth centuries of the Common Era.

2 The first chapter of Genesis gives a day-by-day account of God’s creation of the world, ending with the creation of humans (1:26 “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God did he create it, male and female he created them”) and God’s blessing of the humans. The second chapter revisits the “day” on which God created humankind and offers an alternative explanation in which man is created first, and woman is created second as a byproduct from the man. Many scholars, including Rashi the legendary medieval Talmudic commentator, have suggested that the first chapter indicates the creation of one human being who was dual-gendered, and that the second chapter – arguably written much later than the first – is an attempt to provide an explanation for the ambiguity of the original text.

3 Incoherence, it turns out, seems to be the narrative strategy of choice for artists striving to respond both aesthetically and ethically to collective tragedies. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many artists attempted to depict the tragedy as it really was – to delineate through linear means the point of the traumatic moment. Recently, however, fragmented and metonymic narratives have begun to replace traditional modes of storytelling that relied on metaphors and representation. Carefully placed ellipses, moments of silence, and a hovering backdrop of incoherence now dominate the trajectories of some of the more ethical artistic responses to the Holocaust.

4 In Midnight in Paris (2011) Allen focuses precisely on our obsession with so-called golden eras – decades such as the modern era, which gave us great writers, artists, and thinkers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso – and our inability to understand that every era imagines the ones that came before to be grander. The complications that we imagine to be unique to our contemporary era are to be found in every era. We lack the capacity to understand this because of the blind spots that inevitably characterize the present era.