Blue Jasmine

The eponymous heroine of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is both a study in even the postfeminist woman’s vulnerability and an anatomy of American amorality. 

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) and Ginger (Sally Hawkins) are sisters, but even more distant than Blanche and Stella in the Tennessee Williams classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, that Allen often echoes here. Both were adopted, i.e., both are deracinated, with no genetic link, no knowledge of their roots and no proper bearing. Both lack the confidence to live free from male protection and support. Jasmine especially lacks any moral grounding. Indeed “Jasmine” is an adopted name, because her real “Jeanette” lacked flair. From her name on, nothing about her is genuine. Certainly not her putative concern for her long disdained sister. As Jasmine is an ornamental flower, Ginger is a useful root.

Ginger ran away from home feeling their mother preferred Jasmine. She was content with her marriage to the rough-hewn handyman Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) until they won a $200,000 lottery. Augie was saving to set up his own construction firm but Ginger, sensing a chance to match Jasmine’s success, persuades him to invest all his money with Jasmine’s husband Hal (Alec Baldwin). For “doing [her] duty” Hal gives his bathing wife an expensive bracelet. That stills her hope that Hal will make her sister some money. Stealing her sister’s money thwarts Ginger’s one chance to escape a life of failure and poverty -- and Jasmine’s chance to save her own soul. 

Despite their gap in social status and achievement, Ginger is the moral superior. She lives her modest life and is about to marry her devoted grease monkey Chili (Bobby Cannavale), until Jasmine again interferes. As a result of Jasmine’s own neediness, Ginger slips into a promising affair with the “sweet” Al (Louis C.K.), an unsound “sound engineer.” She abandons the crushed Chili, until she learns Al is married. Ginger lives gingerly, spirited, modestly, with two unappealing sons who may or may not amount to anything but at least she has given them life and supports them. Until her seduction by Al, abetted by Jasmine, Ginger has lived her modest life honestly and with the self-respect that does not need ambition.

Jasmine accuses her of accepting losers because she doesn’t respect herself enough. This classic projection from the woman so abysmal in self-esteem she abandoned college to marry the slick businessman, who abetted his ponzi scheme, and who -- humiliated to learn he has been a serial adulterer -- in revenge turns him in to the FBI, prompting his imprisonment and suicide. That shocking revelation trumps the betrayal by which Allen parallels the Williams play. Jasmine like Blanche is robbed of her last romantic salvation when the rough Pole Augie, like Stanley Kowalski, exposes her lies and her past to her suitor. 

Yet Jasmine’s betrayal of Hal is itself surpassed, when she regrets -- not abetting the ponzi schemer -- but having turned him in. “The moment I did what I did I regretted it.” Even as she sees what her fraud cost her sister, in the flashbacks Jasmine regrets her one act of honest citizenship. Her large matching set of Vuittons is an emblem of her far heavier psychological baggage.

Her new hope Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a diplomat and wouldbe politician, dumps her because he’s appalled less by the fraud than because she lied to him. He like Hal was wowed by her shallow elegance -- which is as fake as her name. Like Hal -- and like the even seedier dentist Dr Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg)-- he wants her ornamental support for his career. As Allen intercuts Ginger’s optimistic affair with sweet Al and Jasmine’s with Dwight, both women are exposed as desperate, deluded and prey to false, self-serving men. Given all these a-holes, no wonder a woman’s colonoscopy prep-day “is always very special.”

The flashback structure shows Jasmine craving the shallow status and luxury -- however foully based -- that she lost. She futilely tries to start afresh, working as dentist’s receptionist in order to learn computers so she can do an online course in -- that emblem of superficial grace -- interior design. While her interior crumbles under her humiliation, shock therapy, and lack of any moral grounding and self-respect, she aspires to relive the design that failed her. However she tries she remains victim of her ungrounded life -- so Allen and Blanchett show sympathy for her. The interior design metaphor harkens back to Allen’s first foray into the sombre, Interiors (1978). He’s come a long way, baby. 

The helpless dependency of even this beautiful contemporary woman is only one of Jasmine’s resonances. As an anthropology student she would have traced our social structures back to its primeval roots. Her dentist boss, Dr Flicker, similarly claims to read peoples’ characters from his perspective, i.e., their mouths. The part embodies the whole. The whole can be read from its part.

In that context Jasmine is a metaphor for the current American mainstream. The echoes of the fraud Bernie Madoff, his humiliated wife and his alienated sons, make Jasmine’s lack of moral awareness, self-respect and integrity a summary of American business/politics. She has no sense of justice beyond self-service and no values beyond the materialistic. When she buttonholes strangers or lectures her two nephews her self-obsession admits no awareness of others. She talks to herself, even when addressing others. As the causers of the financial meltdown go unpunished, Allen exposes the culture of “looking the other way,” denying one’s own responsibility. But “Some people can’t put things behind so easily.” Certainly not the victims.

In a tacit note of the society’s degeneration Allen contrasts his shallow heroine and current America to the energy and integrity of its lost music. Especially the honest blues of the underclass, like “A good man is hard to find” and “My man rocks me with a steady roll.” In the film’s last phrase Jasmine admits she doesn’t remember the words to the upperclass song that played when she met Hal, the Rogers and Hart Blue Moon. We hear the music but not the words:

You saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own

Blue Moon

You know just what I was there for

You heard me saying a prayer for

Someone I really could care for

In not remembering the words Jasmine reminds us she doesn’t have what she pretends to -- the understanding beneath the sentiment of the song -- and the morality and language she needs. Both in her marriage to Hal and in her current affair with Dwight, she sought a powerful man she could adorn -- in return for being spoiled -- rotten. As if any of that were love. She’s living by her old tune but she has forgotten the words, the truth. She suppresses the lyrics' insight into her situation. Jasmine is blue not because she has the insight of the blues but because she’s dying cold. Check the blue buildings behind her when the film ends on her desolate isolation on a bench, homeless, alone, no resources left. Her flashbacks to a lost wealth and the illusion of social authority could reflect upon post-Bush America. As a weakened, marginalized America aches to recover a lost power, its focus on the exterior trappings only feeds its interior decay. 
     Blue Jasmine is not Allen's first politically oriented film. See my blog on his 1972 mock-documentary, The Harvey Wallinger Story, which PBS commissioned then declined to run. I have also added another on the current film's specific use of A Streetcar Named Desire, Streetcar Named Blue Jasmine: Reading Woody's Williams.