Woody Allen's Narcissistic Movies: Chapter 6 Part 6 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
THE WOODY ALLEN MOVIES
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My real obsessions are religious. —Woody Allen |
If being everything is in some sense the condition of traditional films, it is particularly that of series (which grow amorphous as their length increases) especially at what one might call the “Woody Allen movies.” As writer, director, producer, and actor—some times one rôle at a time, sometimes several—Allen has contributed to a wide body of films, ranging from the somber introversion of Interiors (1978) to the slapstick of What’s New, Pussycat? (1965). In the public mind, however, these diverse works lump together. When details of his personal experiences showed similarities to Husbands and Wives (1992), journalists began treating his life as one more film in the series.
If he is, as some consider him, the one true American auteur, his career may help clarify what an auteur may be. First, Allen does not completely avoid collaboration—habitually coediting and sometimes collaborating in other areas, such as cowriting Take the Money and Run (1969) and Bananas (1971) with Mickey Rose; Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977), and Manhattan (1979) with Marshall Brickman. During scripting, Brickman particularly worked for continuity while Allen invented comic juxtapositions (Lax 251).
Certainly, one should not imagine Allen beginning and ending film production with a sustained vision of what he is doing. The entire focus of his works frequently shift, as with the academy-awards-winning Annie Hall, originally titled Anhedonia (joylessness—a symptom of clinical depression). As first conceived, it stressed the emotionally empty life of Allen’s persona. Then, it became a love story. During such shifts, Allen requires notoriously expensive postproductions, revising and re-shooting scenes. Where the typical American movie making is a lively collaboration between different individuals, Allen’s is a collaboration between his varying moods and impressions, with his helpers intervening to improvise coherence. In either case, the result is a composite.
Notably, his personae are also bundles of contradictory impulses and ideas. Throughout Joanne Wieland-Burston’s Chaos and Order in the World of the Psyche, she argues that repressed chaos manifests itself in depression, fear, anxiety and various physical symptoms. This could be applied to the Allen films, which exhibit related reactions to chaos: either embracing it happily or showing how the attempt to repress it leads to hypochondria, anxt, and melancholy. Almost by definition, no single religion (or consistent atheism) can be championed in these films. A single worldview (repressing the chaos) would be depressive. Appropriately, Allen’s personae are perpetual questers, forever changing their opinions of what (if any) unseen order may exist beneath the flux of appearances.
Characteristically, the phrase “invisible world” (referring to
the supernatural) forms a motif throughout Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
(1982) as part of an on-going debate. The champion of positivism is Professor Leopold
Sturgis:
| Sturgis: Ghosts, little pixies, I don't believe in
them. . . . Apart from this world, there are no realities. Student: But that leaves many basic human needs unanswered |
Unlike the pompous Professor (Jose Ferrer), the character played
by Allen not only believes in the Beyond but invents a “spirit box” to communicate
with it. His personality muddles science and residual religious attitudes. This mixture
works, however. By film’s end, the dead Sturgis speaks through the fully functional
box, explaining that he is now one of the “fairies” who bless the wood. From the
magic herbs of Alice (1990) to the skyscraper-sized mother in Oedipus Wrecks,
Allen frequently employs such exuberant fantasy in the midst of verisimilitude. Religion
(or hallucination) appears necessary as an alternative to the sadness of “this world.”
Narcissus or Zeus
Consider Allen's most self-reflective work, Stardust Memories (1980), a depressive
film about making a depressive film. His persona, Sandy Bates, first appears with
his head beneath the famous photo (vastly enlarged) of a Vietnamese shooting a prisoner
through the head. Then Bates watches a movie within the movie about two trains. The
first has happy passengers, the second miserable ones (Bates among them). Both exit
in a dump. This self-pitying image about ultimate garbage for all suggests its maker’s
acute depression. E. J. Parkins defines that condition as “thinking in polar opposites
(black and white)” while identifying with the dark and somber (Parkins 136). Paradoxically,
the control and power of being a famous filmmaker has exacerbated his natural melancholy,
as the repressed disorder reasserts itself in dreamlike imagery (e.g., the garbage
dump—a common representation of chaos). Is this self-preoccupation Narcissism?
When Sandy is accused of that condition, he says the Greek religious figure with whom he identifies most is not Narcissus but Zeus. According to Kohut, young children have a grandiose image of themselves, but if the environment fails to foster realistic self-assurance, they repress the grandiose image into the unconscious (Kohut 9). Fantasizing identification with almost omnipotent Zeus (i.e. with everything) would thus itself be a sign of Narcissism—though not as serious a symptom as if it were repressed so deeply that he could not joke about these feelings. The fantasy of power compensates for a depressive sense of inferiority. Allen presents a situation so strikingly similar to those called “Narcissism” by Kohut that two critics have considered it a parody (Gabbard and Gabbard 195). (Note that for Kohut, Narcissism does not mean what it did for Ovid—conscious self-love—but rather an immature, doubt–ridden, fragmented sense of self.)
Stardust Memories, nonetheless, concludes with “a degree of optimism.” Bates's film may be therapeutic, and he also works through his problems with hallucinations or vivid fantasies. Among these is one with ludicrous, yet in some respects godlike, “super-intelligent” aliens. They tell him that the best he can do for the world is make humorous movies. According to Jung, saucer sightings often (as here) form modern analogs of traditional religious imagery, such as the epiphany of gods to reveal the meaning of life (Jung CW X, 307-436). From the Kohutian perspective, the aliens would be projections of the “grandiose self,” particularly since their function is to reassure Bates of his worth and raise him from depression.
Also a study of contrasting moods, Hannah and Her Sisters
(1986) has Allen's persona Mickey a once-creative melancholic slipping into the acute
stage. He enters a television taping during a professional censorship crisis. He
is also having a personal censorship crisis, the inability to keep down long repressed
feelings. No longer able to function effectively, he aggravates the situation, proposing
skits accusing the Pope of child molestation and Cardinal Spelman of homosexuality
(long before such humor became popular). Because of a slight hearing loss in one
ear (he can't remember which), he presumes he has a brain tumor.
Titles flash across the screen to highlight a dichotomy: Mickey as “hypochondriac” vs. a less sensitive family having a “terrific time”—rather like the radically contrasting trains in Stardust Memories. Despite his normally anti-religious attitude, Mickey considers making a “deal with God” to leave him partly blind and deaf but alive. Ironically, finding himself perfectly well, he becomes more depressed and quits his job. To the absolute horror of his Jewish parents, he almost makes a Kierkegaardian “leap” to Christianity. Staring at a picture of Jesus that opens and shuts large eyes, Mickey buys a whole bagful of Catholic images, which he then dumps unceremoniously on a table. Losing patience with Christianity, he considers joining the Hari Krishnas, but ends up muttering “Oh, God, I'm so depressed.”
Thinking that in a Godless universe all is meaningless, he holds
a gun to his head. It fires but misses. In shock, he wanders into the Marx-brothers
comedy Duck Soup (1933) and is, in a sense, saved (McGann 164). He has accepted
life as slapstick-like chaos.
Cinemalatry
To what extent does cinema preserve relics of an earlier, more-religious view of
the world? The controversial psychologist Julian Jaynes sees Biblical literary tradition
as trying to bring imagination under the control of a consciousness dedicated to
law and morality, while visionaries not subject to such control were “hunted down
and exterminated like unwanted animals” and idols, embodiments of pagan fantasy,
smashed—victims of a new, more-orderly world (Jaynes 311). Thereafter, the choice
has been between a methodical but depressive rationality and a visionary mode that
seems to many people an even greater madness than depression. Allen's works frequently
enact a comparable (though comically presented) agon with movies standing
for the visionary mode—cinemalatry, if one forgives the neologism.
In Play it Again, Sam (1972) to serve as an instructor or model, the Bogart of Casablanca materializes next to Allen's persona (named “Allan [sic]”). The latter remarks the inherent conflict between his obsession with Bogart and his Jewish background: “lookit, if you're gonna identify, who'm I gonna choose? My rabbi? I think Bogart's a perfect image.” The lines are similar to an exchange in Manhattan where Michael Murphy says to the Allen persona, “You think you're God.” The latter responds, “I gotta model myself after someone!”
Although in Play it Again, Sam, Allan seems to be dismissing the rabbi as totally inferior to the cinematically graven image, he continues to be influenced by Judaism. In several of Woody's films, his personae momentarily become or hallucinate themselves to be orthodox Jews or rabbis. He has never entirely forgotten his religious training. His mother insisted that he: “learn Hebrew and say the prayers . . . . But although he attended Hebrew school as he was told to and went to the synagogue with his grandfather . . . Allen had an ecumenical view of religion. That is he found all organized faiths equally useless” (Lax 40).
Even the seemingly useless, however, may be difficult to get out of one's mind. In Play It Again, Sam, Bogart must give Allan such advice as not to use Jewish religious candles for lighting in an adulterous rendezvous. Nonetheless, despite receiving guidance to sin in the manner of his Hollywood hero, Allan feels nervous about breaking a Commandment. In a mock review of his own film, Woody Allen instances his own comic ambivalence toward scripture: “And the prophet saith, play it again, Sam. And Sam did play it again and there was rejoicing and they made a covenant and got boils” (quoted in Guthrie 82).
For a television special, Allen invited Billy Graham (!), who denounced
idolatry as the greatest sin. As usual expressing sympathy for it, Allen responded:
“[Doesn’t God's requiring undivided devotion] seem[] to you an egomaniacal position?”
(quoted in Guthrie 91). In his anthology Without Feathers, Allen includes
yet another Biblical parody: “And the Lord said [about Abraham's willingness to sacrifice
Isaac], ‘It proves that some men will follow any order no matter how asinine as long
as it comes from a resonant, well-modulated voice’” (Allen 1983, 27). Allen thereby
notes how easily people fall under a spell as in his The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
(2001) about the power of a stage hypnotist, who compels an investigator to commit
crimes, but, in the process causes the investigator’s suppressed love for a colleague
to surface.
Non-Kosher Nostalgias
What then, according to Allen, is one to do? Consciously dealing with inadequacies
and stresses leads his personae into depression; but surrendering completely to the
unconscious is (for him) not today a viable option. His The Purple Rose of Cairo
(1985) figuratively explores the situation more thoroughly. The public, exemplified
by Cecilia (Mia Farrow), turn from the Great Depression to the movies, where the
audience sits virtually mesmerized. As if in answer to their collective need that
the fantastic be made real, a character walks from the screen. Despite his difficulty
coping with sordid reality, Cecilia falls in love with him and considers going with
him into the screen world, a timeless state beyond age and privation, a “private
place” that she can reach when she closes her eyes. It sounds much like the right-brain
condition that Jaynes locates as the site of ancient visions—which is perhaps only
to say many myths, poems, and scriptures allude to some sanctuary beyond the transitory,
external world—and that this place cannot be described in the orderly manner that
(roughly speaking) arises from the left-brain.
In The Purple Rose of Cairo, the imaginary is, however, not presented as a panacea. As a press agent remarks, “The real ones want their lives fiction, and the fictional ones want their lives real.” The only hope is a “squash” of the two. Unfortunately, Cecilia temporarily chooses reality and loses the lover. She can, though, still watch movies, all the fantasy she can tolerate, since her century had difficulty accepting an unmediated manifestation of the visionary mode; however, that mode still attracts Allen. He has said that in his films he tried to recreate a mood he remembers from Sabbath matinees long ago: “You'd go into the theater at noon on a hot summer day . . . and it would be nothing but sheer magical joy” (Lax 27). Krin and Glen Gabbard comment on such “stranger-in-a-strange-land” films as The Purple Rose of Cairo: “The prototype of the story of innocence among the corrupt is, of course, the Christ story. Woody Allen is obviously aware of this parallel as he pans to a shot of a crucifix when Tom Baxter [the screen hero] visits a church on his tour of Cecilia's world” (Gabbard and Gabbard 221). In the Gabbards' interpretation, the nostalgia is for a “transcendent, near-perfect quality”—the Divine (222).
In Radio Days, the fantasies that make life tolerable are
“the golden radio voices and sounds that nurtured the dream life of the lower middle-class.”
As usual for Allen, a fantastic state falls foul of Judaism. The rabbi complains
that radio is corrupting the young persona, who cares more about the Lone Ranger
and Masked Avenger than the Commandments. On the Day of Atonement, atheist neighbors
play the radio, occasioning the persona's father to visit them, eat non-kosher food,
and commit apostasy.
The Run of (from) a Vocation
Further evidence of Allen’s personal fascination with religion comes from traces of his process of composition. While writing Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), he considered titling it, “The Lord's Prayer,” “Success in Men's Eyes is God” (from Aeschylus), “The Eyes of God,” “Windows of the Soul,” and “The Sight of God” (Lax 367). In a scene deleted from Annie Hall, Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka appear with the persona as basketball players who do not score because they are paralyzed by spiritual anxt.
Many of his religious images, though, made their way to the screen. A focus on metaphysical problems so permeates his oeuvre from early to late as to make his career almost a “vocation” in the theological sense of the word—though whether he is pursuing or running from that vocation is another question. The “super-intelligent beings” tell Sandy Bates, he is not “the missionary type,” but Allen’s oeuvre does, in a sense preach accepting one’s ideosyncracies and utilizing them as sources of humor and fantasy.
Setting a pattern for Allen’s early comedies (the “funny” ones) was Take the Money and Run (1969). Virgil’s grandfather, who takes him to the cinema, lives in a dream world, his hallucinations shown in a short segment. Virgil's father, totally ashamed of his criminal son, wears false nose, mustache, and glasses for an interview where he explains that he is not responsible for the boy's misdeeds, “I tried to beat God into him.” The prison system also attempts to rehabilitate Virgil. It gives him a chance to test vaccines, one turning him into a rabbi for several hours. Later, he becomes an enthusiastic assistant to the Christian chaplain (though his manner of bowing repeatedly in prayer resembles Jewish rather than Christian devotion). His girlfriend comes of a pious (though strange) background. Her mother talks often with God about “salvation and interior decorating.” Unfortunately, Virgil escapes prison, is denounced by the FBI as a pinko atheist, and re-sentenced to 800 years. He expects with good behavior to cut the sentence in half. He also has daydreams of escape. Despite its cheerful manner, the film depicts its protagonist as being abjectly weak and inept, with no time to grow, for he is always on the run.
In contrast, Alice (1990), is typical of his later films in focusing on the course of spiritual change. Suffering from backpains, the title character, a bored housewife, consults the Taoist herbalist Dr. Yang, who finds them to be psychosomatic, hypnotizes her, and learns that her problems come from lack of self-knowledge. She is repressing the chaos within. He gives her herbs, which so release her inhibitions that she feels as if she were “possessed,” then further releases inhibitions with an invisibility drug.
Yang gives her herbs to be burned in a teacup and a ghost appears to her and flies through the air with her. She takes yet another drug, this one to make her more creative (or as Yang tells her, to relieve a pinched creativity nerve at the back of her neck). Her muse or goddess (a cheap-looking, brazen woman bedecked in flowers) materializes and tells her to write about her alcoholic mother—the image of disorder she has most deeply submerged. Alice learns more about that mother by confronting repressed information and talking to the mother's imago. Later, at Yang's private opium den, he shares a pipe with her. In a vivid vision, she returns to her old home and talks to her sister about their far-from-ideal parents. Nuns walk by and Alice recalls her youth at “Sacred Heart.”
Despite thinking “This is so wicked, I'll go straight to Hell,” she eavesdrops on acquaintances and learns of her husband's long run of affairs. This information surprises her since she has trusted him as thoroughly as she did her idealized parents. After other adventures, she discards another herb (a love potion) and decides to go to India to meet Mother Teresa, her “idol,” previously seen in an inspirational movie. On returning to New York, she works at a social welfare project, and rapturously spends her spare time with her children—a happiness she has earned by so thoroughly utilizing her visionary experiences (most certainly including the movie about Mother Teresa).
This is not to say that Allen is openly preaching utilization. The message arises from his own willingness to reflect his artistic flexibility in his characters. Typical of that flexibility, he said to his collaborator Sandy Morse during the cutting of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989): “There's a question of whether we're strong enough with the religious aspect at the beginning. Put another way, a clearer statement of the argument of the movie: No higher power is going to punish us for our misdeed if we get away with them. Knowing that, you have to choose a just life or there will be chaos, and so many people don't do that there is chaos—then go on to prove or disprove that” (Lax 362). After having supposedly shot the entire movie, he remained unsure whether he should “prove or disprove” its main point, the relationship of evil and chaos. He finally rejected the idea that succumbing to evil brings irrevocable disorder. Rather, evil stems from a failure to utilize (i.e., transform) chthonic impulses creatively and thus locks the culprit into an inflexible, very material world, as Alice was at first imprisoned by her wealth.
Taking the money makes one run away from the “magical” world within, as also does the lure of perfection when it is improperly seen as outside and material. Instead of following those she admires (including mother Teresa), Alice should embody her own anti-materialist ideal.
Perhaps his attitude toward the visionary can be seen most clearly by comparing his Love and Death (1975) and one of its main sources, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1956). Concerning his own position, Bergman writes: “. . . it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. . . . The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.” About his modern condition, Bergman adds: “The religious problem is an intellectual one to me: the relationship of my mind to my intuition. The result of this conflict is usually some kind of tower of Babel.” In other words, he cannot reconcile quotidian life with the voice of inspiration, but imagines a past time when one might heed the latter. The Seventh Seal is set in an age when the visionary realm is more accessible, with at least the appearance of practical advantages. The knight seemingly postpones his demise by playing chess with Death, and, at film's end, the character Jof, by being able to see the supernatural, escapes having to join Death's dance.
In Allen’s parody Love and Death, a Grim Reaper and other
oneiric characters appear, but the scenes are always comically undercut. Finally
an angel of God promises that Allen's persona Boris will not be shot, but he is and
goes dancing after death. He concludes, “I got screwed.” Before Fanny and Alexander,
Bergman often expressed the wish to return to some age when he might have been a
religious artist with every movement dictated by intuition or inspiration. Understandably
shying from the complexities of modern life, he wished he did not have to utilize
his religious anxt as a source of art, but what has been remarkable in his work is
this utilization. Allen's ota has not yet reached as clear formulation. It
requires escape from depressing present reality but without any need to submit oneself
completely to the caprices of the visionary. It thus requires the union of conscious
and unconscious that stage seven achieves eventually—the stage Bergman evoked throughout
Fanny and Alexander. Allen has played with deconstruction, representing an
early phase of stage seven as in the very name of his Deconstructing Harry
(1997). But he still remains tentative about any ultimate “big picture,” both philosophically
and in his conservative use of technical resources.
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What is the big picture? No filmmaker has entirely captured it, yet cinema collectively is sketching its general form. At the outset of the movie era, the closing of the American frontier forced whole segments of the population to clamber from stage three to stage four, as government and religion took the place of gun duels in regulating human affairs. Early films told this tale, anchoring it in the popular imagination. Then, depicted and partly inspired by a very materialistic cinema, alterations in the economy opened a plenitude of positions at stage five. The transformation to stage six, has depended even more heavily on the arts—particularly cinema—to make strangers (human and otherwise) sufficiently imaginable for empathy. And complex movies are nudging large audiences above even that. In all likelihood, cinema will not be the last medium that arises in this evolution, but it is today a major force, extending into the internet, via “Quick-Time” and other animations. At present, the worldwide proliferation of people and possessions gluts postmodern society like a living entity grown larger than its structure permits. What is needed is a restructuring at a higher level of complexity that can integrate the whole. Applying the present politics and technology in a larger way would be inadequate. Complexity theory, for instance, has shown that simply expanding our computers cannot make predictable or controllable such phenomena as storms or the electrical turbulence inherent in any communication cable. Chaotic difficulties will always be with us; but if (as the above films suggest) we can utilize these to progress, we have a promising future
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