Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘History will dissolve me’, Woody Allen declares in Bananas (1971), reprising Fidel Castro’s revolution. It still well may, but not before Woody gets in his own licks against the past time that refuses to stand still, to stay buried or to stop
fattening itself by gobbling down the future. On the contrary, he has managed to harness history. In the 43 very personal films he directed in 43 years his art draws both on his life and his earlier films.
In some ways Bananas is typical of the current history implicit in all Allen’s films. As he explores always current obsessions, hypocrisies and neuroses an Allen film provides a time capsule of the culture of its day. Bananas conveys the sexual insecurities, the student activism, the (pre-Bush) banana republic politics, the New York parking space shortage even for Christian martyrs, those rumours about J. Edgar Hoover, the politics of Miss America, Jewish neuroses, the dearly departed authority of Howard Cosell and his Wide World of Sports, etc. Every Allen film records its cultural moment for posterity.
To his further credit, though the surface is period-specific his themes continue to resonate. All those typewriters in Manhattan (1979) suggest a pre-computer world as remote as Mars, but Isaac Stern’s (Allen) moral lesson and questionable conduct challenge us still.
Marxist guerilla leader in Woody Allen’s Bananas (Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions, 1971).103
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
fattening itself by gobbling down the future. On the contrary, he has managed to harness history. In the 43 very personal films he directed in 43 years his art draws both on his life and his earlier films.
In some ways Bananas is typical of the current history implicit in all Allen’s films. As he explores always current obsessions, hypocrisies and neuroses an Allen film provides a time capsule of the culture of its day. Bananas conveys the sexual insecurities, the student activism, the (pre-Bush) banana republic politics, the New York parking space shortage even for Christian martyrs, those rumours about J. Edgar Hoover, the politics of Miss America, Jewish neuroses, the dearly departed authority of Howard Cosell and his Wide World of Sports, etc. Every Allen film records its cultural moment for posterity.
To his further credit, though the surface is period-specific his themes continue to resonate. All those typewriters in Manhattan (1979) suggest a pre-computer world as remote as Mars, but Isaac Stern’s (Allen) moral lesson and questionable conduct challenge us still.
Marxist guerilla leader in Woody Allen’s Bananas (Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions, 1971).103
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
Boris: Father: Boris: Father: Boris:
He must have been Possessed.
Well, he was A Raw Youth.
Raw Youth! He was an Idiot ... I hear he was a Gambler.You know, he could be your Double.
Really. How novel.
Well, he was A Raw Youth.
Raw Youth! He was an Idiot ... I hear he was a Gambler.You know, he could be your Double.
Really. How novel.
Historical Comedy on Screen
As well as writing history Allen quotes it, especially the past of his medium. Sometimes this takes the form of allusions. The mechanical tasting job in Bananas parodys Chaplin’sModern Times (1936). In Love and Death (1975) his coitally collapsing lions reverse the arousal of Eisenstein’s in Battleship Potemkin (1925). Allen ratchets up the brow for a dialogue based on Russian classic literature:
In Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) he engaged Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on a more serious level, exploring the same themes of murder, guilt and retribution in a godless order.
In fact, Allen learned to make films by parodying popular genres, from What’s up, Tiger Lily (1966) and Take the Money and Run (1969) through his anthology, Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (1972). He became a filmmaker by engaging with the films of the past. In his maturity he embraced the spirits of his major models, Ingmar Bergman – inInteriors (1978), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) – and Federico Fellini – in Zelig (1983), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Radio Days (1987) – with their dialectical synthesis in Stardust Memories (1980). Both in his experiments with the language of film and in his more ambitious later works Allen drew upon the film tradition, its history and its masterworks. This is rather more than the individual talent ransacking tradition. His continuing penchant for black and white and for classical jazz scoring confirms his classicism in form and in values.
When he made a period (historical) film, whether looking back – as in Love and Death,Radio Days and Zelig – or ahead – as in Sleeper (1973) – comedic anachronisms root the films in Allen’s present. ‘If God is testing us, why doesn’t He give us a written?’ A 200-year sleep is ‘like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills’. That is to say, the past – or the future – is not some other country or some other time but an organic part of our present. That concept validates the magical technology (aka gimmick) by which in Zelig Allen puts himself into a black jazz band of the 1920s, in the batting order behind Babe Ruth and on platform parties with Pope Pius XI (who swats him with a sacred text) and with Hitler (who oddly does not). History is not where we were but where we are. If we don’t understand that we can’t know ourselves or how we should live.
The sense of history becomes a persistent self-referentiality in Allen’s later films. For all the seriousness of Crimes and Misdemeanors – his monumental meditation upon faith, guilt, responsibility, moral blindness and our slippery slide from casual misdemeanour into a crime as serious as murder – Allen leavens his ostensibly comic subplot with self-references. His character, Cliff Stern, apparently a descendant of his Isaac Stern of Manhattan, is a
104
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
In fact, Allen learned to make films by parodying popular genres, from What’s up, Tiger Lily (1966) and Take the Money and Run (1969) through his anthology, Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (1972). He became a filmmaker by engaging with the films of the past. In his maturity he embraced the spirits of his major models, Ingmar Bergman – inInteriors (1978), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) – and Federico Fellini – in Zelig (1983), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Radio Days (1987) – with their dialectical synthesis in Stardust Memories (1980). Both in his experiments with the language of film and in his more ambitious later works Allen drew upon the film tradition, its history and its masterworks. This is rather more than the individual talent ransacking tradition. His continuing penchant for black and white and for classical jazz scoring confirms his classicism in form and in values.
When he made a period (historical) film, whether looking back – as in Love and Death,Radio Days and Zelig – or ahead – as in Sleeper (1973) – comedic anachronisms root the films in Allen’s present. ‘If God is testing us, why doesn’t He give us a written?’ A 200-year sleep is ‘like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills’. That is to say, the past – or the future – is not some other country or some other time but an organic part of our present. That concept validates the magical technology (aka gimmick) by which in Zelig Allen puts himself into a black jazz band of the 1920s, in the batting order behind Babe Ruth and on platform parties with Pope Pius XI (who swats him with a sacred text) and with Hitler (who oddly does not). History is not where we were but where we are. If we don’t understand that we can’t know ourselves or how we should live.
The sense of history becomes a persistent self-referentiality in Allen’s later films. For all the seriousness of Crimes and Misdemeanors – his monumental meditation upon faith, guilt, responsibility, moral blindness and our slippery slide from casual misdemeanour into a crime as serious as murder – Allen leavens his ostensibly comic subplot with self-references. His character, Cliff Stern, apparently a descendant of his Isaac Stern of Manhattan, is a
104
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
Forms of History in Woody Allen
Woody Allen’s period comedies: The Purple Rose of Cairo (Orion Pictures Corporation, 1985) and Radio Days (Orion Pictures Corporation, 1987).
105
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
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105
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
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Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
Historical Comedy on Screen
pretentious Lefty documentary filmmaker who loathes his brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), a brilliant but amoral TV producer. Stern is appalled when Lester wins and weds the kindred spirit Halley Reed (Mia Farrow), for whom Stern planned to leave his wife.
As his name confirms, Stern is the familiar Allen nebbish/idealist. But he hardly comes near the saintly Rabbi Ben (Sam Waterson) as the film’s moral centre. Stern’s moral blindness registers in his harshness toward his sister’s suffering, his insensitivity to his wife’s needs and his increasingly irresponsible instruction of his young teen niece. Encouraging her to play hooky to see old films may be bad enough, but worse is when he unloads his plan for an adulterous affair with Halley. His animosity towards Lester proves both unfair to the generous and accomplished man and destructive of his own career.
Allen studs this storyline with allusions to his earlier films. The collapse of the weddingkasatzky repeats a gag in Love and Death. He dresses his niece as a miniature Annie Hall. Halley departs for England with the same two-shot, dynamic and even reassuring phrasing as Mariel Hemingway’s in Manhattan. Allen’s ironic injection of film clips – like his Stern’s newsreel Mussolini footage in his biopic of Lester – recalls his characters living through films from What’s up Tiger Lily (1966) and Play It Again, Sam (1972) to Zelig and Hollywood Ending (2002).
So why does Allen resurrect his old gags? The answer lies in the film’s central scene, Judah Rosenthal’s (Martin Landau) memory of a childhood family seder. There the debate between rational scepticism and faith concludes that whatever our belief in a god we are defined by all the choices we make through our life. This explains Judah’s guilt over the murder of his mistress Dolores (Anjelica Huston).
In that light, Allen’s recycled jokes (aka self-referential allusions) are how the auteur defines himself by the specific choices he has made all his life/career. However heroic or ignoble our pretences or our self-conception, we are only what we have done. We are our history. Allen tempers his most sombre exercise in philosophy with these reminders of his comic past. This modesty plays against his Stern’s unearned superiority and Judah’s massive hypocrisy. It coheres with the blind rabbi’s humility and even the gangster Jack’s (Jerry Orbach) saving grace: Unlike successful brother Judah, Jack does not forget his obligations. As well, the reminders of Allen the film director encourage us to detach the director from the character actor Allen plays.
Of course, Allen’s film career was seriously disrupted by the scandal involving his private life with Mia Farrow and her allegations about his relationship with their children, especially her then twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn, with whom he was having an affair. The famed moralist’s scandalous behaviour was as disillusioning and career-threatening as the notorious Fatty Arbuckle’s had been. It is difficult to read any Allen film of this period – from Husbands and Wives (1992) through Hollywood Ending (2002) – without taking that scandal into account, whether his statement seems a form of address – Deconstructing Harry(1997), Celebrity (1998) – or of avoidance – Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Small Time Crooks (2000).
106
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
As his name confirms, Stern is the familiar Allen nebbish/idealist. But he hardly comes near the saintly Rabbi Ben (Sam Waterson) as the film’s moral centre. Stern’s moral blindness registers in his harshness toward his sister’s suffering, his insensitivity to his wife’s needs and his increasingly irresponsible instruction of his young teen niece. Encouraging her to play hooky to see old films may be bad enough, but worse is when he unloads his plan for an adulterous affair with Halley. His animosity towards Lester proves both unfair to the generous and accomplished man and destructive of his own career.
Allen studs this storyline with allusions to his earlier films. The collapse of the weddingkasatzky repeats a gag in Love and Death. He dresses his niece as a miniature Annie Hall. Halley departs for England with the same two-shot, dynamic and even reassuring phrasing as Mariel Hemingway’s in Manhattan. Allen’s ironic injection of film clips – like his Stern’s newsreel Mussolini footage in his biopic of Lester – recalls his characters living through films from What’s up Tiger Lily (1966) and Play It Again, Sam (1972) to Zelig and Hollywood Ending (2002).
So why does Allen resurrect his old gags? The answer lies in the film’s central scene, Judah Rosenthal’s (Martin Landau) memory of a childhood family seder. There the debate between rational scepticism and faith concludes that whatever our belief in a god we are defined by all the choices we make through our life. This explains Judah’s guilt over the murder of his mistress Dolores (Anjelica Huston).
In that light, Allen’s recycled jokes (aka self-referential allusions) are how the auteur defines himself by the specific choices he has made all his life/career. However heroic or ignoble our pretences or our self-conception, we are only what we have done. We are our history. Allen tempers his most sombre exercise in philosophy with these reminders of his comic past. This modesty plays against his Stern’s unearned superiority and Judah’s massive hypocrisy. It coheres with the blind rabbi’s humility and even the gangster Jack’s (Jerry Orbach) saving grace: Unlike successful brother Judah, Jack does not forget his obligations. As well, the reminders of Allen the film director encourage us to detach the director from the character actor Allen plays.
Of course, Allen’s film career was seriously disrupted by the scandal involving his private life with Mia Farrow and her allegations about his relationship with their children, especially her then twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn, with whom he was having an affair. The famed moralist’s scandalous behaviour was as disillusioning and career-threatening as the notorious Fatty Arbuckle’s had been. It is difficult to read any Allen film of this period – from Husbands and Wives (1992) through Hollywood Ending (2002) – without taking that scandal into account, whether his statement seems a form of address – Deconstructing Harry(1997), Celebrity (1998) – or of avoidance – Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Small Time Crooks (2000).
106
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
Forms of History in Woody Allen
Indeed, when his personal scandal undercut the moral ambition of his films Allen turned to exercise the innocence of classic genre entertainments, as in Manhattan Murder Mystery, the superior Bullets over Broadway (1994) and the antique musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and the lesser Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). By turning to the film history he could set aside his own. His retreat included two zipless revivals for television, his own Don’t Drink the Water (1994) and Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys (1995).
In his nostalgic genre plots Allen dramatized the revival of a waning relationship – or converting an instinctive antagonism into love. In these simpler entertainments Allen considers the values required to regenerate a relationship. A character’s/artist’s fidelity to an old cultural form reflects a personal honour. This theme is reversed in his best film of this period, Sweet and Lowdown (1999), where the mechanics of the musical biopic anatomize a disintegrating psyche. Still, the public structure of a genre provides an apparently innocent, impersonal form for a fiction.
The Innocent Genre series ended with Hollywood Ending, where Allen mercifully reverted to his more acidic/Hasidic view of Lotus Land. The film still conveys Allen’s love for Old Hollywood movies and his loathing for the current Hollywood culture (an oxymoron, like ‘agent ethics’). The failed film director Val Waxman (Allen, striving against his waning career) directs a film despite mysteriously going blind. His terrible film proves a huge success in France – as Ending did at Cannes – and wins back Val’s ex-wife, Ellie (Tea Leoni). By sweeping her out of Hollywood to their ‘unfulfilled life dream’, Paris, Val effects the rescue Alvy Singer couldn’t in Annie Hall. In a satiric version of Allen reworking old themes, a Hollywood hack remakes a ‘stupid potboiler’.
Unlike Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig films-within-films, we don’t see any footage from Val’s The City That Never Sleeps. But we hear symptomatic crashes. We don’t know how it’s bad or how it might be taken to be good. But auteurism – like other religions – requires faith
Between fiction and documentary: Zelig(Orion Pictures Corporation, 1983).
107
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
In his nostalgic genre plots Allen dramatized the revival of a waning relationship – or converting an instinctive antagonism into love. In these simpler entertainments Allen considers the values required to regenerate a relationship. A character’s/artist’s fidelity to an old cultural form reflects a personal honour. This theme is reversed in his best film of this period, Sweet and Lowdown (1999), where the mechanics of the musical biopic anatomize a disintegrating psyche. Still, the public structure of a genre provides an apparently innocent, impersonal form for a fiction.
The Innocent Genre series ended with Hollywood Ending, where Allen mercifully reverted to his more acidic/Hasidic view of Lotus Land. The film still conveys Allen’s love for Old Hollywood movies and his loathing for the current Hollywood culture (an oxymoron, like ‘agent ethics’). The failed film director Val Waxman (Allen, striving against his waning career) directs a film despite mysteriously going blind. His terrible film proves a huge success in France – as Ending did at Cannes – and wins back Val’s ex-wife, Ellie (Tea Leoni). By sweeping her out of Hollywood to their ‘unfulfilled life dream’, Paris, Val effects the rescue Alvy Singer couldn’t in Annie Hall. In a satiric version of Allen reworking old themes, a Hollywood hack remakes a ‘stupid potboiler’.
Unlike Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig films-within-films, we don’t see any footage from Val’s The City That Never Sleeps. But we hear symptomatic crashes. We don’t know how it’s bad or how it might be taken to be good. But auteurism – like other religions – requires faith
Between fiction and documentary: Zelig(Orion Pictures Corporation, 1983).
107
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
Historical Comedy on Screen
in the maker. The blind Val may well have made ‘the best American film in 50 years’ (as the French critics claim), and Val may indeed be a genius who thrives on chaos, like Fellini.
Two acrid satires marked an ambitious recess from Allen’s sequence of genre entertainments and a return to his own history. In the first, Deconstructing Harry (1997), Harry Block (Allen) is a successful novelist who controversially mined his life for his fiction – like Philip Roth, who at the time was Mia Farrow’s love interest. Block’s representation in his novel is played by Richard Benjamin, who starred in the film of Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (1969). About to be honoured by the university that expelled him (‘I tried to give the dean’s wife an enema’), Harry is arrested for kidnapping his own son. He violated his visitation conditions so his son could share the experience. In Block Allen admits a view of himself as a goof more sinned against sinning. Something of his sense of injustice comes through a rejected mistress’s rage at ‘retarded talkshow hosts’ and even artists who take ‘everyone’s suffering and turn it into gold’.
The second recess is Celebrity (1998) which draws its meaning by its scene-by-scene parallels to and divergence from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). In this replay of a jaded celebrity journalist’s tour of the culture’s sordid glitz, several jokes involve the idea of history and film. One young actor is making ‘an adaptation of a sequel of a remake’. The new film leeches on the past, but sans discrimination. The Mastroianni figure Lee (Kenneth Branagh) has imagined one temptress as ‘the obscure object of desire’, a Buñuel film title (1977). The film producer plans to remake ‘Birth of a Nation – an all-black version’. As the original D.W. Griffith film is a classic of racism, valorizing the Ku Klux Klan, the improbable project exposes the producer’s ignorance of the very film he presumes to revive. Indeed, Celebrityitself mobilizes history. The theme of seductive celebrity is expressed in the classic song over the opening credits – ‘You Oughta Be in Pictures’. In context, that love song shrinks to an exhortation to join the shallow world of the Image. In the closing song Billie Holiday alludes to history: ‘Did I Remember?’ Like its characters, this film does not exist isolated in the present but is defined by its awareness of and response to its past.
Not having recovered his pre-scandal status, Allen left not just his haunting New York but America for three films set and shot in England – Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006) andCassandra’s Dream (2007) – and one in Gaudi’s wild Spain, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). The films replayed Allen’s familiar themes of romantic quest, guilt and betrayal, in other cultural landscapes.
The entire weight of Allen’s troubled personal history comes to rest upon even the title of his Whatever Works (2009). In casting Larry David as the central nebbish/loser Allen engages the most prominent current figure in the vein of Jewish-American self-satirists that Allen effectively founded.
Boris Yelnikoff (David) is Allen’s most outrageous misanthrope. He leaves his perfect wife Jessica (Carolyn McCormick) because ‘On paper we’re ideal. But life isn’t on paper’. His consequent suicide leap leaves him limping. Having abandoned his physics professorship he ekes out a living ‘teaching chess to incompetent zombies’. His story insists ‘You’ve got to take what little pleasures you can find in this chamber of horrors’. History has taught Boris that people are essentially terrible. When he marries the very young vagrant Melodie St Ann
108
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Two acrid satires marked an ambitious recess from Allen’s sequence of genre entertainments and a return to his own history. In the first, Deconstructing Harry (1997), Harry Block (Allen) is a successful novelist who controversially mined his life for his fiction – like Philip Roth, who at the time was Mia Farrow’s love interest. Block’s representation in his novel is played by Richard Benjamin, who starred in the film of Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (1969). About to be honoured by the university that expelled him (‘I tried to give the dean’s wife an enema’), Harry is arrested for kidnapping his own son. He violated his visitation conditions so his son could share the experience. In Block Allen admits a view of himself as a goof more sinned against sinning. Something of his sense of injustice comes through a rejected mistress’s rage at ‘retarded talkshow hosts’ and even artists who take ‘everyone’s suffering and turn it into gold’.
The second recess is Celebrity (1998) which draws its meaning by its scene-by-scene parallels to and divergence from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). In this replay of a jaded celebrity journalist’s tour of the culture’s sordid glitz, several jokes involve the idea of history and film. One young actor is making ‘an adaptation of a sequel of a remake’. The new film leeches on the past, but sans discrimination. The Mastroianni figure Lee (Kenneth Branagh) has imagined one temptress as ‘the obscure object of desire’, a Buñuel film title (1977). The film producer plans to remake ‘Birth of a Nation – an all-black version’. As the original D.W. Griffith film is a classic of racism, valorizing the Ku Klux Klan, the improbable project exposes the producer’s ignorance of the very film he presumes to revive. Indeed, Celebrityitself mobilizes history. The theme of seductive celebrity is expressed in the classic song over the opening credits – ‘You Oughta Be in Pictures’. In context, that love song shrinks to an exhortation to join the shallow world of the Image. In the closing song Billie Holiday alludes to history: ‘Did I Remember?’ Like its characters, this film does not exist isolated in the present but is defined by its awareness of and response to its past.
Not having recovered his pre-scandal status, Allen left not just his haunting New York but America for three films set and shot in England – Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006) andCassandra’s Dream (2007) – and one in Gaudi’s wild Spain, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). The films replayed Allen’s familiar themes of romantic quest, guilt and betrayal, in other cultural landscapes.
The entire weight of Allen’s troubled personal history comes to rest upon even the title of his Whatever Works (2009). In casting Larry David as the central nebbish/loser Allen engages the most prominent current figure in the vein of Jewish-American self-satirists that Allen effectively founded.
Boris Yelnikoff (David) is Allen’s most outrageous misanthrope. He leaves his perfect wife Jessica (Carolyn McCormick) because ‘On paper we’re ideal. But life isn’t on paper’. His consequent suicide leap leaves him limping. Having abandoned his physics professorship he ekes out a living ‘teaching chess to incompetent zombies’. His story insists ‘You’ve got to take what little pleasures you can find in this chamber of horrors’. History has taught Boris that people are essentially terrible. When he marries the very young vagrant Melodie St Ann
108
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
Forms of History in Woody Allen
Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), they are ‘two runaways from the vast, black, unspeakably violent and indifferent universe’. The theme song of Boris’s first two marriages is ‘If I Could Be with You (one hour tonight)’, an explicit gesture against the abyss of eternity.
At seventy-three Allen seems prompted to spell out as clearly and explicitly as he can his one most compelling theme and lesson. The song over the opening credits sets the valedictory tone: Groucho Marx’s ‘Hello I Must Be Going’. Not just the film but his whole career is boiled down to the title. In his world of accident, brutality, callousness, moral chaos and social conventions that however idealistic can strangle the individual spirit, people must do ‘whatever works’.
The misanthrope’s moral slogan catches on. Against Boris’s predictions for these ‘family values morons’, the whole Celestine family from the bathetic, post-lapsarian Eden, Mississippi, find fulfilment in New York. Melodie finds her true love – outside her marriage to Boris. Her mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) discovers her own creative powers – in photography, recalling Annie Hall – and finds fulfilment in an arty ménage-a-trois. Marietta’s wayward NRA husband John (Ed Begley Jr) frees his natural homosexuality and settles into an antique business with Howard Cummings nee Kaminsky (Christopher Evan Welch). Even Boris finds fulfilment in Helena (Jessica Hecht), the psychic on whom he fell on his second post-marital suicide leap. This takes him out of his neurotic insularity, as emblematized by his singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to himself when he washes his hands, to avoid germs.
The Purple Rose of Cairo (Orion Pictures Corporation, 1985).109
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
At seventy-three Allen seems prompted to spell out as clearly and explicitly as he can his one most compelling theme and lesson. The song over the opening credits sets the valedictory tone: Groucho Marx’s ‘Hello I Must Be Going’. Not just the film but his whole career is boiled down to the title. In his world of accident, brutality, callousness, moral chaos and social conventions that however idealistic can strangle the individual spirit, people must do ‘whatever works’.
The misanthrope’s moral slogan catches on. Against Boris’s predictions for these ‘family values morons’, the whole Celestine family from the bathetic, post-lapsarian Eden, Mississippi, find fulfilment in New York. Melodie finds her true love – outside her marriage to Boris. Her mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) discovers her own creative powers – in photography, recalling Annie Hall – and finds fulfilment in an arty ménage-a-trois. Marietta’s wayward NRA husband John (Ed Begley Jr) frees his natural homosexuality and settles into an antique business with Howard Cummings nee Kaminsky (Christopher Evan Welch). Even Boris finds fulfilment in Helena (Jessica Hecht), the psychic on whom he fell on his second post-marital suicide leap. This takes him out of his neurotic insularity, as emblematized by his singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to himself when he washes his hands, to avoid germs.
The Purple Rose of Cairo (Orion Pictures Corporation, 1985).109
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
Historical Comedy on Screen
In the first scene Boris criticizes religion for having become corporate and for assuming people are essentially good. ‘People make life so much worse than it has to be.’ Against social conventions, the film justifies affairs December–June, adulterous, homosexual. Allen reiterates the overriding lesson of the Isaac-Tracy romance in Manhattan and the universal moral requirement of love in Crimes and Misdemeanors: Whatever works.
One joke fugitively alludes to Allen’s notorious affair with Soon-Yi Previn. Trying to persuade Melodie to return home to Mississippi, Boris warns ‘You’ll wind up a prostitute like those Asian girls who come here full of high hopes and wind up prostitutes, turning tricks to keep alive. And many of them are actually good looking’ – unlike Melodie, ‘a three’. But Melodie wins her shelter: ‘If you throw me out and I wind up an Asian prostitute, that’s gonna be on your conscience.’ While Allen’s scandal has been left in the dust by the success of that relationship, the reference confirms the confluence of Allen’s life and his art.
Like the film character’s address to the movie audience in Annie Hall and throughoutPurple Rose of Cairo, Boris from the first scene on addresses the film audience that he sees and that the other characters don’t. To Boris this proves he alone has ‘the big picture’. He alone knows he is living a fiction. His film-awareness redoubles Boris’s dismissal of moral absolutes as but fictional constructs. Hence his disdain for social convention – ‘Charm has never been a priority with me’ – as for religions and social restrictions upon relationships.
Allen’s history both on screen and off culminate in the bleak heartiness of this film’s resolution. In a heartless universe we can find meaning and love only in each other, so whatever the laws and conventions, go for ... whatever works. Otherwise history will dissolve us before our time has come.
One joke fugitively alludes to Allen’s notorious affair with Soon-Yi Previn. Trying to persuade Melodie to return home to Mississippi, Boris warns ‘You’ll wind up a prostitute like those Asian girls who come here full of high hopes and wind up prostitutes, turning tricks to keep alive. And many of them are actually good looking’ – unlike Melodie, ‘a three’. But Melodie wins her shelter: ‘If you throw me out and I wind up an Asian prostitute, that’s gonna be on your conscience.’ While Allen’s scandal has been left in the dust by the success of that relationship, the reference confirms the confluence of Allen’s life and his art.
Like the film character’s address to the movie audience in Annie Hall and throughoutPurple Rose of Cairo, Boris from the first scene on addresses the film audience that he sees and that the other characters don’t. To Boris this proves he alone has ‘the big picture’. He alone knows he is living a fiction. His film-awareness redoubles Boris’s dismissal of moral absolutes as but fictional constructs. Hence his disdain for social convention – ‘Charm has never been a priority with me’ – as for religions and social restrictions upon relationships.
Allen’s history both on screen and off culminate in the bleak heartiness of this film’s resolution. In a heartless universe we can find meaning and love only in each other, so whatever the laws and conventions, go for ... whatever works. Otherwise history will dissolve us before our time has come.
110
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
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