Woody Allen's theatre trilogy (Reprint)

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Woody Allen’s New Trilogy? Maurice Yacowar
Ever the one to serve up old whines in new battles, Woody Allen replays familiar themes and strategies in his three new one-act plays. Indeed, the familiarity of his material by now approximates to ritual. But a close examination finds fresh nuance and development. Moreover, as their coincidental language and themes make the plays a triptych, even a familiar element gains new meaning from the enlarged context.
Like most of his films since Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), the trilogy deals with amoral rationalization, betrayal, and infidelity among the urbane intelligentsia. As he anatomizes his neighborhood’s Civilization and Its Discontents, each title cites a location that connotes class, affluence, and sophistication— “Riverside Drive,” “Old Saybrook,” “Central Park West”—yet the relationships prove savage. The first and third refer to Allen’s own Upper West Side. The first play’s hero, Jim Swain, lives at Central Park West and 78th.1 The middle setting offers escape, to the Connecticut slick of Annie Hall’s alien gentile/genteel family—but which also includes the psychopathic brother Duane (Christopher Walken). As the setting returns home, the lead characters return to their original relationships, their escapes thwarted. They clutch their illusions with the bittersweet resignation that closes The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), where Cecilia (Mia Farrow) sinks back hopeless into her fantasies.
The first two plays were originally produced by Atlantic Theatre Company in New York under the title Writer’s Block (2003), with Allen’s debut as stage director. They center upon—as it happens—blocked writers. Freed from blockage, the third presents the disintegration of a successful psychoanalyst, her marriage, her friendships, and finally her illusions. Taken as a whole, the three plays detail the frustrations of modern intellectuals as they confront their mortality, cosmic doom, and the destructive compulsions of contemporary (a)morality.
***
In “Riverside Drive,” 50-ish writer Jim Swain is accosted by a “large, unsavory
type” actually named Fred Savage, a roughened alternative to the courtly “swain.”2 Savage is an admitted mental case who believes he receives orders from radio
Maurice Yacowar is Professor of English and Film Studies at The University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His books include Hitchcock’s British Films, Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen, and The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series.

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signals. Savage is convinced that Swain stole from his overheard musings the plot for his successful film script. As the rough fancies himself the writer’s more insightful collaborator, he is a crazy version of Cheech (Chazz Palmentieri), the gunsel genius playwright in Bullets Over Broadway (1994).
Savage uncovers a second betrayal: Jim’s adultery with Barbara, for whom he is waiting in order to end their affair. When Barbara tries to blackmail Jim for $500,000, Savage throws her in the Hudson River. By restoring Jim’s marital security, Savage establishes a more serious claim upon Jim than his script idea. However crazy, Savage is not necessarily altruistic. Having anticipated Barbara’s demands when he sought “money—some kind of payment and a credit of some sort,” in killing her, he eliminates a rival for Jim’s payment.3
The weather—a chilly “mizzle—mist and drizzle”—characterizes all three characters’ lives. Savage’s madness has left him broken, divorced, homeless.4 Jim has withdrawn his warmth from his marriage and now from his affair. Barbara is victimized by both men and by her greed when she is dumped, then drowned. Given all their pragmatism, the fog is moral as much as climatic.
As Savage describes his anti-psychotic “cocktail,” “I don’t drink it out of a stemmed glass.” Savage and Jim define the same class distance that Judah (Martin Landau) and his underworld brother Jack (Jerry Orbach) do in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). There too the ostensibly upright citizen, threatened by his mistress Dolores (Anjelica Huston) with blackmail, to preserve his image and security, has her killed. In that way Savage proves Jim needs him as “a collaborator” in life as in art. Similarly, in Bullets Over Broadway, Cheech not only rewrites the hero’s play, but also kills the bad actress to preserve the show’s integrity. Here Jim, flustered by Barbara, finally accepts Savage’s claim upon him: “Say something, you’re my collaborator! . . . I need a fresh concept.” As Jim’s comfort turns murderous, he evokes Savage’s slogan—from his ad writer days—for a Japanese air-conditioner: “They’re sleek, they’re silent, they’ll freeze your ass off.” As Savage personifies the indecorous truth, “Company would not go for it.”5 But Jim comes to accept him.
Foreshadowing Barbara’s oblivion, Savage remarks that a cap thrown into the river would reach the ocean in twenty minutes. The image is of modern life reverting to the primordial. Reversing the river’s movement toward civilization—in bathetic specific, Poughkeepsie—is inconceivable. The title of Jim’s film, The Journey, establishes Allen’s overall theme—modern life journeying back to primitive urges, the intellect reverting to older and wilder compulsions. By this inverse value the psychotic Savage claims to “outrank” the merely neurotic Jim.6 Jim’s journey from wife Lola to mistress Barbara and back pulls him to the savage, Fred.
As the smug innocent discovers his own guilt, the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock falls across the play. When Jim imagines killing Barbara and framing a stranger, he would register in the hotel as “Sam and Felicity Arbogast.” In Hitchcock’s

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Psycho (1960), Sam is Marion Crane’s avenging lover and Arbogast, the insurance investigator Norman Bates murders. Though there is no Felicity in Hitchcock, he is always felicitous. More pointedly, Jim recalls an Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV episode: “I read a story once where the guy beat someone to death with a leg of lamb and then ate the murder weapon.”7 In “Lamb to the Slaughter” (1958), Roald Dahl‘s adaptation of his short story, a policeman’s wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) beats her unfaithful husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then serves the weapon to the investigating police. In unconscious protection, especially since his mistress has the actress’s name, Jim switches the killer’s gender.
In that light/shadow, Jim’s complicity with a psychotic killer recalls Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). Savage’s unsolicited collaboration parallels Bruno’s (Robert Walker) fatal service to Guy (Farley Granger). To Jim’s “But she’s a human being,” Savage responds, “You say that like it’s a good thing. . . . I don’t know. Have you ever gone to a tenants’ meeting in a co-op?” Savage is a variation on Bruno’s madness and misanthropy. To Savage and Bruno (and Cheech and Judah), murder is not “the ultimate act. To a more creative mind like mine it’s—another option.” At the end, Savage explains his peremptory deed: “That’s the difference between us two—with you it would have been labored and overanalyzed. This is not real, that’s not logical. To me it just felt right.”8 Savage pretends to the intuition of an artist.
More generally, Allen turns Hitchcock when his upright citizen finds himself considering and then benefiting from murder. Having dipped into his dark side, the innocent can never recover his old peace, however happy his ending. His innocence is lost. As normalcy resumes here, Jim calls to tell his wife he loves her and will pick her up at work, while Savage responds to another of his voices. Their last words are parallel openings. Jim fumbles with “I love you . . . I—oh, Lola—” and Savage closes the play with the more upbeat but sinister invitation: “Come in!”9 Both men are resigned to their helplessness.
Allen also shows a Hitchcockian black humor. Unable to keep his stories straight, Savage has another homeless man variously die by getting his throat cut in a shelter and by having a piano fall on him in the street. The forms of death derive from the urban melodrama and the slapstick cartoon, respectively. Anyway, “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”10
As Hitchcock undermined the rational, Allen exposes the limits of the intellect. His panhandler was once a classy ad writer, so this Savage can quote Sartre: “After the age of thirty a man is responsible for his own face” [sic]. Jim contends the source is Camus. For all his loony radio signals, Savage enjoys the paradox that “men being executed want to become one with the wall they’re put up in front of—to lose themselves in the stone—to become solid, permanent, to endure, in other words, to live, to be alive.”11 That is, to him life lies in the inanimate and insentient.

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Savage even has his own version of the mind-body split. In a commercial he wrote, a Hessian horseman holds his aching head under his arm but finds relief in Extra Strength Excedrin. Unfortunately, “if he gets a backache, he can’t find relief, not being attached to the head.” The agency’s rejection—“Too Cartesian”— “unhinged” Savage.12 He became the shattered mind that suffered the shock therapy depicted in The Journey. If this life is a journey it’s a lunatic trip, through foggy chills.
And Absurd irruptions. In another of Savage’s rejected ads—for “Volkswagen— for the man with special taste”—a man spurns eight whores in a brothel to have sex with an umbrella. The image equates whore and umbrella as shelters from inclemency. Savage’s Ph.D. thesis—“the Positive Results of the Triangular Tension between Goethe, Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer’s Mother”—yokes scholarly logic and twisted sexuality. Savage—however helpful his nature and refreshing his ad copy—is a homicidal psychopath. Yet his ex-girlfriend Henrietta’s disorder “might charitably be characterized as thermonuclear masochism.” That is, even the murderous madman has a place in our ostensibly rational civilization. All Savage remembers of his marriage is his wife “forever dialing 911”—the modern sensibility’s cry for help or version of Munch’s Scream. Yet his “unstructured madness” bolsters Jim’s impotent “craftsmanship” to make them “a good team.”13
With his allegorical surname, ominous intuitions, and climactic salvation, Fred Savage might be read as an Id figure, perhaps a projection of Jim’s guilt (though Barbara sees and converses with him). He seems to spring out of Jim’s troubled mind as fortuitously as Bruno crossed Guy’s path. So, too, Savage articulates Jim’s sexual dissatisfaction with wife Lola despite his denials. Unlike characters of normal motivation, Savage responds to unheard signals, whether from his dog or from the Empire State Building, including his orders to burn down the ad agency that fired him and his permission to kill Barbara. Unlike characters with their own promptings, Savage serves an outside script.
***
This possibility is amplified in “Old Saybrook.” Two couples we assumed were
real are revealed to be dramatic inventions who—like Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) in The Purple Rose of Cairo—have escaped their playwright. They left their maker tied and gagged because he was unable to resolve their romantic tangles. As Allen’s film blends fiction and theology, the characters reject their maker when he fails to solve their problems. This confusion between art and life follows Fred Savage’s charge that, by stealing his plot, Jim “stole my life.” In a similar continuity, the blackmailed screenwriter Jim is succeeded by the captive playwright. Max Krolian seems but a name in the back story until he breaks into the action as a kind of incapacitated deus ex machina.

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Allen has played with the dramatic continuity between life and art at least since Bananas (1971), where the hero’s wedding night intimacies were telecast by Wide World of Sports, with Howard Cosell calling the plays. In Allen’s short story, “The Kugelmass Episode” (1977), a modern professor enters Madame Bovary’s life and brings her into his world. Here the shift from theatre-as-life to theatre-as-product provides the play’s first joke. “I hate Russian plays,” Jenny opines, “Nothing happens and they charge the same price as a musical.” Her first objection deals with the play’s content, her second with its external nature. More lightly, David claims the doorbell made Tiger Woods miss his putt on TV.14 Life and art are continuous here. Typically, even Allen’s throwaway gags spark to their context. To lightly introduce the theme, the ATC production sampled Jerome Kern’s Make Believe as the curtain rose.
Sheila and Norman Pollack have her sister Jenny and husband David over to their country home for a barbecue. They are interrupted by Hal and Sandy Maxwell who want to see their old home, which they sold to “Max Krolian, a fairly well- known writer.” Hal quickly becomes prickly. He’s disturbed that an amoeba-shaped pool (“Those little germs . . . ”) has replaced the old maple tree under which he and Sandy were married. A “smoother” finish has replaced the lost “random planking” on the floor on which he and Sandy first made their impetuous love.15 A random planking indeed.16
The peace is destroyed when Hal shows Sheila the secret safe behind the fireplace, where she finds Norman’s diary of his affair with her sister. Hal pretends to literary interest when he grabs for Norman’s lurid confession, though diaries are “very useful for tax purposes.” Under Hal’s prod, Norman explains that Jenny seduced him by changing into a thong. “Will you butt out,” Sandy aptly orders her husband. “I’m trying to follow the narrative,” he explains, as if he were reading a story not party to a crumbling marriage. “Can I help it if I’m an inadvertent participant in this all-too-human drama?”17
That metaphor turns literal. Just as David prepares to kill everyone with his shotgun, the playwright stumbles down the stairs from the attic/heaven: “These wild animals—I created them—then they turned on me.”18 That is, the first two couples we met are fictitious creatures, while Hal and Sandy are “real.” The latter’s “random planking” connotes their independent will, in contrast to the others’ scriptedness and smoother surface. When the “real” Hal is drawn to Norman’s lurid diary, he is indeed attracted to fiction.
When Max couldn’t finish his play, he threw it in the drawer. David’s “It’s dark in the drawer. . . . I hated the goddamned drawer,” recalls the inner film characters’ frustrations with their script in The Purple Rose of Cairo and the more real Cecilia’s with her far bleaker life. True to form, the adulterous Jenny “got the idea we push it open and escape into the world.” The characters “hoped we could figure out some way to finish his third act,” Sheila explains. They take their life

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into their own hands, but prove helpless. Norman’s desire—“So we could have a life every night in theatres—forever”—expresses Allen’s familiar hope to find immortality through art (though he prefers to find it by not dying). It also echoes the Cairo film audience’s yearning for the security of formula fiction, which is shared by the simpler film characters who resent the paralysis caused by Baxter’s escape. But here, paradoxically, it is the playwright who claims to be “written out,” as the Maker—both excluded and exhausted—is in an indulgent, amoral society.19 The “written out” playwright signifies the death of God, with both the faithful and the divinity too exhausted to sustain Him.
Max scripted the characters’ adulteries to enliven their prosaic lives, especially given their stereotypically dull professions. As Norman reminds his wife, he is “not a perverted dentist. I’m a perverted orthodontist—you never got that straight.” His function is as a cosmetic straightener, not to fill others’ cavities. Whichever, in his wild pragmatism, he had sex with Jenny four times on President’s Day “because Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays are celebrated together.”20 In that explanation clearly the wrong union is celebrated.
David is a plastic surgeon “who streamlines rear ends.”21 Where Norman escapes into adultery David is a sport spectator. As Jenny summarizes him, “In the winter it’s the Knicks, in the summer it’s golf—talk about Freud—he loves to watch young men put balls into holes. [She goes].”22 The exit line reflects her affair with Norman. David “can’t watch Tiger Woods without pistachio nuts”: “Cashews are basketball. Pistachios are golf.”23 Nuts and balls go together for the self-unaware David. Hence, too, his obtuseness: “DAVID: Do you play golf? / HAL: No. / DAVID: Um, terrific. We must play sometime.”24 David takes three pages to “get” the implications of Norman’s diary and the photo of Norman with his tongue in Jenny’s ear and his hands on her breasts: “Hmmm—Norman, is this some new dental procedure?” His realization seems to come as an elision in language rather than a perception: “So what is your point? That the woman in the diary—in the photo—resembles Jenny? That the woman resembles Jenny? That the woman resembles Jenny? That the woman resembles Jenny? That the woman—that the woman’s Jenny—it’s Jenny—I got it—I got it.” Even that insight he immediately loses: “NORMAN: I’ve been having an affair with Jenny. / DAVID: Jenny—a woman with the same name as my wife! / SHEILA: The trauma’s too much.”25
In their negative attraction, the adulterers lack any harmony. Asked how long they had their affair, Norman and Jenny simultaneously reply “Not long” and “Three years,” then “Six months” and “A year,” then “And a half” and “Not long,” as Jenny finds Norman’s initial position. “There was a lot of downtime,” he explains ambiguously. When Jenny claims “we fell in love,” he says, “It wasn’t love, it was pure sex.”26
Like the fictional characters, the “real” accountant Hal fancies that he has transcended his profession. He has written sonnets “about the dangers of

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cholesterol,” and he designed and built a birdhouse “Based on the Guggenheim.” The latter suggests the comic irrelevance of art to life. So, too, on that lightning- lit night of “random planking,” his and Sandy’s spontaneity transcended their respective marriages. As Sheila admits, “accountants can be poetic. You should see some of our tax returns.”27 Hal finally gets to write his play in the scene he is living, when he draws on his own experience of dwindling marital desire to inspire Max.
In fact, all these professions are cosmetic. Jenny’s “lingerie shop in Manhattan” exploits disguise and vanity like her husband’s plastic surgery. But then, on the subject of adult responsibility Allen has shown face preferred over fate. The characters’ work and ardor conceal two levels of terror. One is domestic, the lover’s betrayal. When Sheila reels from her husband’s infidelity, Hal doesn’t “see what the big deal is here. Everybody in suburbia cheats.” Despite their initial denials, even Hal and Sandy admit to adulteries. The real characters prove as false as the fictitious. Hal, as ever drawn to fiction, was seduced by the actress Holly Fox. Sandy’s real estate agent Howard Nadelman “knows how to make a woman feel her sexuality.” Preferring to deny his wife’s appeal to other men, Hal thinks Nadelman may have been “getting even with [Hal] for the audit.”28
Beyond the cosmetic of romantic insecurity lies the cosmic. For playwright Max, love’s belabored loss is only “one of the sad truths of existence. Nothing in this world is permanent. Even the characters created by the great Shakespeare will, in millions of years, cease to exist—when the universe runs its course and the lights go out.”29 So much for Norman’s desire for “a life every night in theatres—forever.” Instead, we get shades of little Alvy Singer over his quavering blood-red tomato soup, refusing to do his homework because the universe is going to end.
The characters’ trivial pursuits—David’s sports, the others’ adulteries—are attempts to avoid facing not just their own but the universe’s mortality. “Jesus,” says David, “I think I’ll just go back and watch Tiger Woods. The hell with it all.” Norman agrees: “What’s it all mean if the cosmos breaks apart and everything finally vanishes?” For Jenny, “That’s why it’s important to be held and squeezed now—by anyone willing to do the squeezing.” Jenny spells out the earlier play’s notion of sex with/as an umbrella, a small shelter against the cosmic storm. But Sheila objects: “Don’t try to justify screwing my husband on existential grounds.”30 Allen replays the moral dilemma of Manhattan. Should the futility and insignificance of our lives in the doomed cosmos justify or discourage our self-indulgence?
Of course, as God is made in man’s image (or possibly vice versa), here the maker shares his characters’ weaknesses. Playwright Max bought the house “to live alone and keep out of the rat race of romantic relationships. I was having an affair with my wife’s mother”—rather trumping Norman’s with his wife’s sister. Max couldn’t write his drama into his play because his wife’s father was himself already a figure of fiction—“a well-known film star”—who left his wife for an

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au pair girl and who “was a shoe fetishist who could only get aroused if Prada was having a sale.”31 The latter detail is transformed into Jenny seducing Norman in her lingerie shop changing room. The mother’s incriminating diary becomes Norman’s. At another remove, Max’s domestic snarl recalls the public scandal when Allen betrayed his former partner Mia Farrow with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, whom he later married. For Max as for Allen, art transforms the materials of the writer’s life.
Where the first play echoed Hitchcock, this one evokes Allen’s personal film world. Sandy has the befuddlement and nervous naivety of Sandy Dennis’s character in Allen’s Another Woman (1988) and her persona-defining role as Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols 1966). When Sheila confronts Norman, Sandy edges away: “Well, it was nice meeting you. . . . We’ll just let ourselves out. . . . We love what you’ve done with the place. . . . If you’re ever in Nutley.”32 Similarly, Norman Pollack may recall Sidney Pollack, the director friend Allen cast as a vulgar adulterer in Husbands and Wives (1992). More importantly, the playwright is given the “Max” that Allen and buddy Tony Roberts call each other in Annie Hall, revived as Roberts’s hedonistic Dr. Maxwell Jordan in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982). The name confirms Max Krolian as Allen’s playful surrogate.
To this Max falls the play’s—and the trilogy’s—apparent moral: “Everybody has their dark secrets, their longing, their lusts, their awful needs—so if life is to continue one must choose to forgive.” But Allen undercuts this message in two ways. First, his characters hijack this spirit as a license to indulge. They use forgiveness like the corrupt medieval church’s pardons. For the real Sandy, however, “how is forgiveness different than just sweeping all your problems under the rug?” Second, after Sandy’s remark, Max’s ostensible morality proves false: “Forgiveness—it gives this little sex farce dimension and heart. . . . It’s much grander—it takes a bigger person—forgiveness is divine. . . . I like it—it’s funny, it’s sad, and best of all, it’s commercial. Come—let’s go to my study so I can complete the third act while it’s all fresh—I feel my writer’s block lifting. The key word is ‘commercial’—I’m sorry, ‘forgiveness’—the key word is ‘forgiveness.’”33
After Max takes his characters off, the real Hal and Sandy remain behind, unable to forgive each other. Though Max seems right—“he’s a deep playwright . . . a clever craftsman”—they are too disillusioned to forgive each other. Instead, because of their mutual need, they take another solution from fiction—they will begin anew. That is, the real characters pretend to start a new relationship. They agree to live a shared fiction. “Clean starts work better in fiction,” Sandy contends, and Hal agrees, “[E]very life needs a little fiction in it—too much reality is a very nasty thing.”34 The play opens with the noise of migrating geese.
If their observation evokes “the tragic heroine of a Russian play,” the image also evokes Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) disturbance by the departure of the ducks

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who settled into his pool and then left him.35 In Allen’s play, all three men reveal, but also serve, themselves in how they read those geese. To the cynical Norman, the geese “symbolize impending disaster—the honking is a mating call and a mating call always spells trouble.” David reads in them “the inscrutable magnificence of nature,” specifically the lesson “That one day we all must grow old and decay.” But that bleak message is professionally heartening to the plastic surgeon. When accountant Hal frees his inner poet, the honking geese signify “a fresh start—of geese where geese never were. . . . We were looking for some sign—some way to recapture the music in our relationship and then—the honking of the geese.” Hal imputes a more hopeful model to nature: “Geese mate forever.” And if they have affairs, “they work it out somehow—it’s all in nature’s design.” The play fades out on the couple’s kiss, “Sound of geese honking, and music rises.”36
As usual Allen presents a world bereft of any absolutes, with only compelling human needs and the aesthetic/anesthetic artifices of fiction to provide our balm and direction. The real couple’s last kiss dramatizes the fictitious Jenny’s need for a loving embrace—a kind of umbrella—in the face of our cosmic nothingness. Like a writer, Hal imposes on the geese the meaning he wants. His “nature’s design” is his invention. In the final sound, the cacophony of the geese’s honking is overwritten by an artifice, man’s music. Art overwrites nature when it imposes the artist’s need.
Still, the writer has broken through his block. When Max resumes his play, Allen ends the writer’s block through an insight that reconciles the lofty impulse— forgiveness—with the base—the commercial. In that light, the play recalls his Stardust Memories (1980) and its model, Fellini’s 8 1⁄2 (1963). Perhaps even the name “Old Saybrook” may be allegorical—like the Porlock whose emissary reputedly stanched Coleridge’s flow of “Kubla Khan.” Here the writer can now pronounce the links or flow, where he had been dammed to blockage before.
***
In “Central Park West,” Phyllis Riggs, a neurotic psychoanalyst, discovers her
husband Sam has been having an affair with her friend Carol, who in turn discovers that Sam is leaving Phyllis—but plans instead to marry 21-year-old Juliet, who is herself drawn away by Carol’s husband, Howard. As cruel fate would have it, Carol tells Howard of her adultery on the day he puts his dilapidated old dad into a home.
The trilogy’s finale amplifies the characters’ civilization. Phyllis’s affluent home/office is described as “spacious with dark woods and books”—an implicit metaphor for the intellectuals’ jungle that Phyllis to the end denies: “All right— knock it off—we’re not in the jungle—this is Central Park West.”37 The November setting extends the first play’s dank chill.

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This third circus of betrayals is the most piquant because its arena is psychotherapy. References to therapy increase across the trilogy. In the first play, when the psychiatrist told Jim to stop seeing Barbara, Jim did stop seeing—the psychiatrist.38 In the second, Sheila reminds us that “Freud said there are no jokes,” and Norman toasts him as “the poet of penis envy.” Hal repeats Sheila’s line. The fictitious (!) Dr. Fineglass is the real Sandy’s cover for her therapeutic thrice weekly trysts with Nadelman: “Didn’t you think it was strange I had the only shrink who didn’t take August off?”39
In the finale, psychotherapy is the setting for betrayal and self-destruction. Phyllis is indignant about another of Sam’s affairs: “Nancy Rice is on the ethics committee! . . . Nancy Rice is chairwoman of the ethics committee at the hospital— her specialty is moral choice.”40 Again, the heart overrules the mind; the body pursues its pleasures as if headless. But as Fred Savage’s rejected ad reminded us, the body can’t be healed when it’s separated from its head.
Phyllis finds herself “the ironic shrink who could see everybody’s problems but her own.” To her literate credit, the shrink is both ironic herself and caught in the irony of a betrayal beyond her awareness. In Phyllis’s ultimate irony, Sam’s Juliet was her patient, who came to her “a year ago—introverted, confused, anorexic—petrified of men. My goal was to liberate her so she could emerge as a woman and function.”41 Phyllis is the shrink hoist on her own efficacy.
Though she has left Carol “this frantic, desperate message—emergency, crisis—help,” Phyllis refuses to speak to her: “No details, please . . . I said let’s not get into it. . . . No details, please. . . . Can we not discuss it? . . . Can’t you see I’m being evasive? . . . Look how she probes.”42 This melodramatic ploy recalls Helen Sinclair’s (Dianne Wiest) “Say no more” to her young playwright lover (John Cusack) in Bullets Over Broadway. But here the therapist’s reticence jars against her profession of confession.
Phyllis is also undercut by the resonance of metaphor that she craves: “It’s such a curse to be literal. A waste of wit—all my jokes and little ironies go straight down the toilet.” Her joke—“What’s the difference between sushi and pussy?” (Answer: rice)—suggests a male sexism that reduces her to a consumable. So, too, Phyllis charges Carol with a more commonly male image of randiness: “I knew all the time you’d fuck a snake if they held its head.”43
Sam first importuned Carol when “Howard was in the kitchen getting the Steins’ recipe for baba ganoush.” As if to excuse the infidelity, the cuckold is feminized. Later, he impotently offers to prepare the dish to cool everyone down.44 Still, Howard’s baba ganoush is a considerable step up on “Saybrook” Jenny’s making ice, “one of the only things I learned in cooking school.”45 In another continuity, Sam’s ploy with Carol was the same as Norman’s with Jenny: they pretend to buy a present for the wife.

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Ever analytical, Phyllis reads Carol’s phone ring as “tremulous and tentative,” projecting onto it/her a naiveté and vulnerability at first belied by Carol’s betrayal, then confirmed by Sam’s preference for Juliet. When the raging Phyllis breaks the penis off her fertility statue, she handles it coolly: “That’s OK—I’ll just bring it to my penis repairman.” Later, “A stiff prick knows no conscience.” Her imagery confirms Howard’s diagnosis: “I think the problem is Phyllis can be castrating.” She proves more subtly devastating in her sympathetic response to Carol’s nausea: “I may have some Compazine suppositories, but I’m not sure I have extra-large.”46 Phyllis already suspects Carol when she calls her.
As a therapist, Phyllis is the most articulate about marital malaise: “He doesn’t love me. . . . It gives him the dry heaves to imagine himself going through the joyless choreography of sex with me anymore. Those are the vague reasons he gives, but I think he’s just being polite.” As she realizes now, when they communicated, “there were two speakers but no listeners.”47 Nor does she pick up on Carol’s incriminating nervousness: “I have to sit down—my legs are weak . . . But he didn’t say where he was going? . . . Did he say who he was leaving you for? . . . You know, I really don’t feel well.”48
Despite its drawing room realism, the play resumes Allen’s theme of fictionalizing life. At first, Howard is surprised at Carol’s affair: “You never had a good word to say about Sam.” Then Carol calls him “a failed writer, Howard— judging from the characters you create you shouldn’t even be a writer—you should be in the cardboard business.” Reversing her charge, Howard claims that Carol tries to make a fiction of herself. That explains her affair: she was so “obsessed with everything about Phyllis” that she tried to remake herself like her, down to taking her husband. Howard declares Carol a rewritten fiction: “Carole’s always had an identity problem. She doesn’t know who she is. Or rather, she knows who she is and she’s desperately trying to find someone else to be—and who can blame her? . . . At least I have an identity. I’m Howard who’s manic-depressive. Carol wants to be you, but you’re already taken—.”49
Again the characters’ romantic illusions draw on Hollywood, though bathetically. Phyllis says Carol “dove for [her cell phone] like you were going down on Cary Grant.” Less romantically, Howard describes Carol’s rejected baby as “quite cute considering he resembled the movie actor Broderick Crawford.” Phyllis translates Carol’s passion with Sam—“it’s like lightning—two people meet—a spark flares up and suddenly there’s a life of its own”—into B-Hollywood horror: “You’re describing Frankenstein.” When Sam rejects Carol, Phyllis exults as Blanche du Bois: “Sometimes there’s God so quickly.”50 In a drama about fictionalized selves the characters draw their language from film and theatre.
So alluring is fiction that Phyllis says Carol lusts for Sam “because he works for a show business law firm.” (She shares Hal’s denial of the spouse’s own attractiveness.) Howard lures away Juliet, a would-be film editor, with promises

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of a Hollywood connection, despite his awareness of that folly in Sam: “Marriage is a huge step for anyone—much less a kid like you [Juliet] and a screwed up middle-aged Casanova.” Juliet accepts Howard’s story even though he can’t keep it straight, claiming first MGM then Paramount as his offer, and he improbably declares Warren Beatty “a very dear friend of mine. Not that we’ve spent a lot of time together, but we met at a political rally.”51 Howard and Juliet eagerly bypass their skepticism for delusion.
To Sam, Howard has lost any “shred of credibility.” ”He’s a cartoon.” But Sam seems to project himself into his summary of Howard’s novel:
Instantly remaindered. A thinly disguised novel about an ex- college athlete who’s competitive with a brilliant, foul-mouthed wife who heads the department of a hospital and writes books and is the center of attention wherever they go and who never realizes he’s weak and she is inadvertently emasculating the poor bastard so all he lives for is illicit sex.
“With the physically and mentally handicapped,” adds Sam’s understanding wife.52
Indeed, as the geese in the second play evoke Tony Soprano’s comforting, discomfiting ducks, Sam’s affair with Juliet recalls Tony’s affair with Gloria (Annabella Sciorra), whom he meets in Dr. Mefli’s (Lorraine Bracco) waiting room (season III, episode 8). Phyllis’s therapy also resembles Melfi’s, as Juliet suggests: “It’s terrible because I hate to lose you as an analyst. On the other hand, you always tried to guide me to act in my own best interests.”53
On that principle Sam has also been sleeping with Mrs. Bucksbaum, the crippled lady on the second floor. Yet he claims he wants commitment: “I can’t go on like this—I want something stable for once—I have to bring some sanity to my life. Juliet, you’re everything I ever dreamed of.”54 Clearly he is imposing those qualities upon the troubled girl. Of course, he is deluded by his own vanity, lust, and the subliminal power of her literary name.
The play and the trilogy end with a telling combination of filmic consolation and incontrovertible reality. “We’re going home,” Carol commands Howard, “The Movie Channel is showing The Island of Lost Souls. I want to see if our names come up.” As Juliet returns to Phyllis’s therapy and ignores Sam’s begging, the psychoanalyst’s dubious authority is restored. Against the fading lights, Phyllis declares, “Grow up, Sam—she shot you in the ass—it’s called rejection!”55 Some visceral truths even the dream factory can’t assuage.

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***
The trilogy develops several continuing motifs. Scriptwriter Jim leads into
playwright Max and pretentious Howard. Like Fred Savage’s creative impulses and the lunatic Max, Carol bets “wrong that all [Howard’s] mental instability was a sure sign of literary genius when in fact it was just plain dementia.”56 Savage’s shock therapy returns to sustain Howard but in the middle play is supplanted by Pirandello existentialism.
When Howard remembers that his debilitated but once “strapping, virile” father “took me to ball games,” he slips into Jenny’s target, David, who measures out his life in ball games and their attendant nuts.57 Howard’s competition with Sam at racquetball, then for Juliet, provokes Carol’s last cut at her chef husband: “You got enough nutmeg to last a lifetime.”58 Carol’s image draws its sexual dismissal from Jenny’s summary of her David’s nuts and balls.
In all three plays, the adulterers are so weak they leave their confessions to third parties. Savage informs Barbara of Jim’s intention to dump her, Sheila tells David of Jenny’s affair, and Phyllis tells Howard about Carol’s. Expanding upon the “perverted orthodontist” Norman, when Carol had an affair with her dentist, he “charged me for an extra filling.” Like Sheila, Phyllis suspects Sam of sleeping with her sister Susan. Norman’s incriminating diary derives from Max’s mother- in-law’s, then leads to Sam’s Filofax. Sam, like Norman, denies having admitted “love” to his lover. If Phyllis warns, “Never fuck a lawyer, they get you on the terminology,”59 dentists know that drill, too.
In the finale Carol revives playwright Max’s plea for forgiveness: “Because we’re human beings, Howard—fallible and often stupid but not evil—not really— just pathetic—mistaken—desperate. . . . Howard—this is not the cosmos—this is Central Park West!”60 Even in the first play, Jim and Savage forgive each other their transgressions, blackmail and plagiarism, respectively: Jim out of need and Savage out of madness. Barbara is doomed because she won’t forgive. What we reject as Max’s commercial strategy to finish a play, we can accept in life.
Allen’s third play resumes the implicit reference to Chekhov in the opening of the second. The first line, “Look, Norman, the geese are back,” is “Spoken like the tragic heroine of a Russian play.”61 As Chekhov is also known to have prescribed, a gun planted in Act One must go off in Act Three. David’s rifle in the second play leads—suitably shrunk—to Howard’s Luger in the third. Before he could fire, David was interrupted by playwright Max. Like Mickey’s (Allen) in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Howard’s suicide attempt fails: “It’s a German Luger—it should be like a Mercedes!”62 Typically, Howard blames the gun for his failure to release the safety catch. The Luger finally fires when the flustered Juliet shoots Sam in the rear (realizing the “Butt out” lines in the last two plays).
To Juliet’s “I didn’t mean it—it was an accident,” Phyllis replies, “There are no accidents, baby. You still need me to tell you that? Now go home and stay home.

124 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
We’ll discuss this Monday.”63 Now that Juliet has rejected Sam, Phyllis reclaims Juliet as her patient. To save her from the Law, Phyllis sends her home. As all these victims close forces, the initial form of their relationships is restored. “There are no accidents” replays the second play’s “There are no jokes.”
Allen’s three one-act plays are so continuous in theme and in imagery that they can be considered a single work in three parts. Individually and as a unit, they depict our sad attempts to find a personal refuge from the impermanence not just of the cosmos but of emotional commitment. The trilogy exercises the saving grace of art even as it reconfirms its futility.
Notes
1. Unless otherwise noted, all citations for the three plays—“Riverside Drive,” “Old Saybrook,” and “Central Park West”—are from Woody Allen, Three One-act Plays (New York: Random House, 2003); here 14.
2. “Riverside Drive” 3.
3. 12. In the Atlantic production, Skipp Sudduth played Savage; Paul Reiser, Jim; and Kate Blumberg, Barbara.
4. 3.
5. 22, 27, 46, and 45.
6. 52.
7. 59.
8. 60-2 and 69.
9. 70.
10. 19.
11. 10.
12. 11 and 20.
13. 26, 40, and 62-63.
14. “Old Saybrook” 73 and 79.
15. 77-81.
16. In the ATC premiere, Bebe Neuwirth played Sheila; Jay Thomas, Norman; Heather Burns,
Jenny; Grant Shaud, David; Christopher Evan Welch, Hal; Clea Lewis, Sandy; and Richard Portnow, Max.
17. 89 and 94. 18. 107.
19. 109 and 111. 20. 96 and 90. 21. 83.
22. 80.
23. 75.
24. 83, 80, 75, and 80.

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25. 100-101
26. 92-3.
27. 82, 84, and 82.
28. 83, 90, 118, and 124.
29. 112.
30. 112-3.
31. 115-6.
32. 85-7.
33. 122-3.
34. 123.
35. 73. Richard Portnow, who played Max in the ATC production, appears in The Sopranos as
Tony’s lawyer, Malvoin. 36. 76, 74, and 126.
37. “Central Park West” 210.
38. “Riverside Drive” 37.
39. “Old Saybrook” 74, 75, 115, and 120.
40. “Central Park West” 192-3.
41. 159 and 200.
42. 130, 134, 136, and 137.
43. 131 and 154.
44. 155 and 197.
45. “Old Saybrook” 75.
46. “Central Park West” 135, 138, 192, 194, and 148.
47. 141-2.
48. 141, 144, 146, and 147
49. 164, 165, and 167-8.
50. 149, 172, 152, and 188.
51. 157, 205, and 209. The Beatty allusion has an additional spin for Allen. Diane Keaton lived
with Beatty after leaving Allen. The real-life witnesses in Allen’s Zelig (1983) and the therapist’s pursuit of her lover/patient to Europe are both parodic references to Beatty’s film, Reds (1981). The title of Allen’s first film-script, What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), was a Beatty greeting.
52. 207-8.
53. 202.
54. 202.
55. 212 and 213. 56. 174.
57. 161.
58. 195, 207, and 213. 59. 173, 183, and 195. 60. 177.

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Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

61. “Old Saybrook 73.
62. “Central Park West” 178. 63. 212. 

Die Hard (1989) -- reprint

JUMP CUTA REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
	Die Hard The white man's mythic invincibility by Maurice Yacowar from Jump Cut, no. 34, March, 1989, pp. 2-4 copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1989, 2006       Though the box-office success of John McTiernan's DIE HARD is primarily due to its breakneck action, it may also be striking a popular nerve in its reactionary politics. When the ruggedly individualist hero thwarts a terrorist takeover of an L.A. office tower, he lives out a macho pipedream on two political fronts, the international and the sexual.      In Los Angeles for Christmas, New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) meets his separated wife, Holy Gennero McClane (Bonnie Bedelia), at her office party in the Century-City and Fox Towers. The building is taken over by a highly-institutionalized terrorist group, faintly suggestive of the Baeder-Meinhof group in Germany. McClane fights a guerrilla war against the terrorists. Despite the intervention of the police force, FBI and television reporters, McClane eventually overcomes the terrorists and is reunited with his wife.      In terms of international politics, McClane exercises the mythic invincibility of the U.S. individualist. Not only is he out of his element, a N.Y. cop in L.A., but he is a reject/misfit in his separated wife's world. He wears working class among the designer silk suits. But he exploits his nature as an outsider. His separateness - for a close shave - saves him from the terrorists' initial sweep, enabling him to wage his war. From the chief terrorist's sneer at the cowboy heroic, McClain adopts the nom de guerre Roy (as in Rogers but also - as we shall see vis-á-vis women - as in King).      At its simplest this is a reflexive escalation of the first Rambo film, First Blood, which replayed the Viet Nam war in a small U.S. town. The L.A. battle graphically evokes Nam. There's the spectacle of swooping and suddenly rising military helicopters. The terrorists deploy such sophisticated weaponry as an anti-tank rocket. The glossy building is reduced to rubble; specifically, McClane rushes through the indoor garden that has been turned into a reeking jungle. So too his strategy has him belly-crawling and swinging through the skeleton of the building, the air vents and elevator shafts, as if he were engaged in jungle warfare. This metaphor - Coppola out of Conrad - discovers the jungle at the heart of the L.A. slick. That's also the implication of his fighting barefoot, bleeding from the deliberately shattered glass (the unsympathetic environment) and shifting from white undershirt to combat green. At one point McClane must duck FBI bullets (the "friendly lire" of Nam). The FBI are also prepared to accept the massive loss of "civilian" hostages to effect their textbook "rescue." Indeed one attacking FBI officer (Robert Davi) even gloats "Just like fuckin' Saigon" - as indeed it will prove in his military failure. The abundance of "Johnsons" in the FBI delegation locates the assault in the context of Lyndon (as in Mel Brooks's version of the Johnson County wars in Blazing Saddles). Finally, as a New York City cop in Los Angeles, McClane assumes a moral authority outside his precinct (another Beverly Hills Cop), as if his movable authority were by necessity valid in alien terrain. More profoundly, this plot attempts to deny the hard reality of the United States' failure in that war. The Rambo and Chuck Norris series have well established the commercial viability of such revisionism.      To conceal the film's denial of Viet Nam, the villains are drawn from broader traditions. The chief killers are two Aryan brothers, who evoke the Hollywood Nazi. Karl (Alexander Godunov) proves even more of a die-hard than the hero - or his dinosaur macho ethic. Their colleagues include an apparent Japanese, a wisecracking black (of whom more later), two Italians and more Germans. The leader is a sophisticated business-type (the post-war Nazi?) Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). He disguises the greed of his mission (objective: $640,000,000 in bonds) in clichés of third-world radical politics. With tongue-in-cheek the villain demands the initial release of a variety of "political" prisoners, his "comrades in arms" from Ireland, Quebec and Sri Lanka (the latter cited from Time). Thus the film reduces the concept of freedom fighter (or even terrorist) to a greedy hypocrite, in effect denying the validity of any non-U.S. crusader.      In the hero's isolation the film by implication draws upon common rationalizations for the United States's loss in Viet Nam. The myth assumes that the indomitable, just U.S. soldier could only lose a war through sabotage. Here the local police are ensnarled in red tape (the hero is scolded for calling on an emergency channel). Deputy Police Chief Dwayne Robinson (Paul Gleason) is not just mean but always dead wrong. The FBI proves even more unwieldy and treacherous.      The second institutional scapegoat is the ever-reliable Media. An unscrupulous newsman (William Atherton) endangers the hero and his hostage wife by exposing their children on TV. In context this replays the myth that the U.S. lost in Viet Nam because of television's irresponsible exposures. There is a civilian fifth-column counterpart to the journalist: a self-serving executive, Ellis (Hart Bochner), reveals McClane's identity to the terrorist.      The film also seems studied in its xenophobia. Gruber is triply negative because he is a German thief, British-educated and cultured. The occupied office is already suspect because it now belongs to a Japanese company. The country lost its Pearl Harbor attempt so it's now coming with tape decks, the president quips. The audience is set up to relish the demolition of the posh tower because it represents foreign ownership, the clutch of transnational megacapitalism, which makes the individualist's rescue all the more satisfying. The victim company is also contaminated with high culture, what with a string quartet performing at the Christmas party and a Degas stashed in the vault.      Even more condescendingly, the film plays all its blacks for laughs. One black cop comically pricks himself on a rosebush. The film's one super-intelligent black, gang member Theo (Clarence Gilyard Jr.), has the most technological skill and cleverness but he personifies play. He raps about basketball to set up the first murder ("Two points!"). As he makes a game of everything, he represents ability spoiled by amorality. Here we have an upscale version of the "shuck'n'jivin" black character of yore.      McClane is aided by two blacks outside the tower, but both are introduced as comic figures and allowed only dubious redemptions at the end. The young chauffeur Argyle [Devoreaux White) is Theo's opposite number, a cocky streetwise black who misses the early chances to act because he's lost in his four-wheel stretch ghetto-blaster. In his style-pretentious name and in the glories of his lavish limo, Argyle represents the young black of larger style than merit. He's the over-dressed buffoon. When he finally acts it is in a simple, brutish reflex that smashes the luxury he has been (undeservedly?) enjoying. Ironically, the untalented Argyle thwarts the technological, experienced but corrupt Theo. That is, U.S. innocence bests worldliness. That happens every time out, except perhaps in reality.      McClane's chief support is the middle-aged, portly black cop who first responds to the alarm, then by his CB conversation sustains a spiritual lifeline to McClane. Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald Veljohnson) is introduced as a comic stereotype, loading up on Twinkies for his pregnant wife. But he grows to provide a human alternative to the textbook deputy Robinson. Powell is so sensitive that he has refused to fire a gun since he accidentally killed an innocent 13-year old. But the film does not allow this sensitivity to stand. As if liberated by McClane's example, Powell overcomes his (neurotic) sensitivity to kill again. (The audience dutifully applauds.) It is also given to Powell to correct McClane's estranged wife: "You've got yourself a good man. You take good care of him." Thus Powell is allowed to transcend his initial comedic register, but only to deliver retrograde macho.      Powell's advice to McClane's wife defines the sexual politic in the Die Hard pipedream. The couple is separated because the woman has presumed to move West to pursue her brilliant business career, while her husband chooses to fight New York crime. Although she manages home and career superbly, the film subtlely condemns her for abandoning her husband. The implication is that she is wrong to stand by an additional man, as she serves her boss. The Christmas setting amplifies Holly's violation of family sentiment, especially as it means celebrating the winter fest in balmy (both senses) L.A. (where the only snow off the soundtrack is up Ellis's nose).      Here is the pipedream: McClane's adventure provides him with the opportunity to correct his wife. He demonstrates that she cannot survive without him; she needs him to look after her. The TV exposure even proves that she cannot escape her married name. At first she used her maiden name at work out of respect for her boss's traditions; she reaffirms her married identity at the end. In her climactic rescue McClane sends Gruber to his death by undoing the expensive watch on Holly's wrist. In an early scene that Rolex was introduced as her company's reward to her for a spectacular business success. The symbolism is clear: McClane saves his wife by stripping her of the emblem of her success. In bringing her down from her tower he saves her from her vulnerability, her success, in a word, her independence. The film speaks potently to and for men who have lost their protective power over their women. Holly's last aggression is wholly within the traditional role of woman: she slugs the newscaster who violated her family's privacy.      Consistent with the film's demeaning of woman are the passing bits of gratuitous sexism. McClane catches the stewardess's eye. He glances at overstretched tights at the airport and an undressed woman in the next tower. He ritually pats a pin-up by the power panel. This sexist is a man's man. He laughs off a man's kiss at the party.      The casting of Bruce Willis confirms the film's sexist ethos. From his first scene, anxious in an airplane, Willis draws upon his bathetic, mock-heroic persona from the airwaves, David Addison of MOONLIGHTING. He plays roughly the same character here, wise-cracking even when he's alone. In the TV series the light characterization and self-reflexivity undermine his macho pretensions and authority. But the larger-screen epic allows them unquestioned sprawl. Willis's heroic role here contrasts sharply to his ironic roles in his two Blake Edwards films, BLIND DATE and SUNSET. DIE HARD could be David Addison's pipedream, wreaking a largescreen vengeance unallowed in his small-screen reality and reaffirming a male dominance over woman that his "real" (i.e., MOONLIGHTING) persona lacks.      The open appeal of DIE HARD lies in its snappy wit and crisp action. But it has a deeper appeal in its political assumptions, which speak to the sexist who craves to have his obsolete delusions reaffirmed. To topCurrent issue Archived essaysJump Cut home

Bird People

Like her 2006 adaptation, Lady Chatterly, Pascale Ferran’s Bird People celebrates the expansiveness of the human spirit. Here it’s expressed in the need for non-carnal freedom, through the specific metaphor of flying. 

The opening montage in the Charles de Gaulle airport surveys a large number of people between flights, rushing helter skelter ground bound. They seem constrained, locked in patterns, in a word, caged even as they roam. A later montage shows the airport at night, still, vacated but for a strew of bodies asleep. Awake or sleeping the people bound to their daily regimens are cut off from the free range of their spirits and imagination. From that crowd two characters emerge to take flight. 

Gary Newman is the American in Paris, a Silicon Valley engineer there for a business meeting en route to a major project in Dubai. Gary is at a midway station (c’est la gare) in his life; an anxiety attack (angoisse) persuades him to become a New Man. He quits his job and abandons his wife and kids. By skipping his plane to Dubai and holing up at the airport Hilton he takes flight from all his responsibilities.  Actor Josh Charles has a bird-like mien, especially in our first view, with his beak, furrowed brow and pursed lips. He imagines a bird’s eye view of his rejected landing and reception at Dubai. 

In the hotel restaurant a piano is computer-rigged to play its keys without a pianist. The modern machinery continues without the original human engagement. Newman is confident his company and his family will carry on without him so he flies their respective coops. He breaks up with his wife through another magical technology. Skype allows a vivid, extended face-to-face discussion though an ocean apart. The dynamic reverses their usual discussions, where their physical closeness failed to bridge the growing abyss between them. Ferran encourages us to approve Newman’s clearly selfish declaration of potentially destructive independence. (To me his unforgivable irresponsibility was his tapping of the hotel mini-bar, not just the overpriced booze and chips but those little bottles of water! Damn, that hurt. True, when he sells his partners his company shares he will be able to support his ex-family and pay the Hilton tab, but still….)  

Hotel maid Audrey is oppressed by her job and its encroachment upon her university studies. Like Newman, she needs air; both open windows immediately upon entering a room. In the wake of a relationship she lives a solitary life. Her sense of people living encaged is suggested when she peers across the courtyard at the apartment dwellers living their separate lives in a row (shades of Rear Window). 

Though (or because?) she lacks Newman’s wealth, station and responsibilities Audrey discovers a magical power. She turns into a sparrow and flies all over the place. She learns how the polished hotel clerk Simon lives (sleeping in his car), gets a closer view of the other people in their cages and feels the exhilaration of soaring beyond her normal physical limits. The magic stays realistic: she also learns the bird’s urgent feeling of hunger and the existential threat from wind, cat, owl, traffic and locked stuffy room. 

Both as woman and as bird Audrey glimpses a touching alternative to the Newman marriage, an elderly woman waiting for her old husband to join her in a still juicy love. That injects a romantic possibility into the film’s last shot. Audrey and Newman finally meet and after parting return to introduce themselves and shake hands. They have discussed a verbal paradox: “personne” carries the contrary meanings of person and nobody. They consider the words that are contrary to “contrary.” They may find the ultimate romantic paradox: the greatest freedom can be found in a connection. Prefiguring that union, the Japanese artist saves bird Audrey from starving by giving her some chips and the woman by finding her unconscious and bringing her to a recuperating sleep in his room. His drawings of the bird prove her flight happened.    

     This delightful fable takes wing from yet another miraculous technology: the personification of sparrow Audrey. That also reminds us how we’re more richly endowed than ever with the potential of imaginative flight. In the flesh or in our fancy we can escape our lives of quiet desperation.

Serena

Serena seems to have evaded its audience by risking an unusual experiment in form.  
      One scene relates the post-Depression North Carolina to a contemporary concern: the battle between ecologists and the commercial exploiters of the natural world. But that’s the only modern element in the film. Even there it goes against our current grain by arraying our sympathies with (horrors) the lumber baron, George Pendleton (Bradley Cooper). His love and new wife Serena (Jennifer Lawrence) loves trees but shares his ardor for lumber profits, especially his plan to expand into the virgin wilds of Brazil. The environmentalist lefties here are played as homely schemers, fumble bunnies and betrayers. The issue may be modern but the film's perspective is deliberately archaic -- to fit its ancient genre. 

The titular heroine tips the film away from modern storytelling back into the tone and structure of the classic medieval ballad. It's an old-fashioned story with only that one political scene to root it in our present. For Serena is not so much a modern heroine as a classical ballad figure, a mysterious woman with destructive powers and an other-worldly mien. 

Serena is a force of nature. She rides a white stallion as if it were a loveseat. She trains eagles to destroy the rattlesnakes. She reads people with an animal’s intuition, whether George’s frustrated-lover partner or the girl carrying George’s child. She has an eagle eye. Serena's face seems mask-like until George finally confronts the rumoured alien predator — a panther. Then Lawrence’s face and makeup make sense. She’s like the panther, an exotic untamed, murderous outsider. The feral animal and her George die in mutual destruction — in each other’s arms. 

But that’s George and the cat. The jig up, their epic extra-ethical passion thwarted, Serena burns herself alive, consigned to the ashes from which she rose phoenix-like from the earlier fire which consumed her family. Serena certainly is not serene but then neither is that nature — red in tooth and claw — that we gloss over when we “preserve” its wild forces as a Hallmark card national park. Clear-eyed director Bier’s Nature is blood-thirsty without people around, torn with mutual predators, and even bloodier when humans bring their own lusts, greed and mishap.     

Set aside that one debate over exploiting nature and this film is like a ballad. The characters are abstractions, the passions primitive, the narrative elliptical, skipping scenes like the heroes’ courtship and wedding and the disclosure of George’s illegitimate son. The incidents pass in a formal rhythm, detailing a story that has been happening since time immemorial. The gifted seer Galloway (Rhys Ifans) drifts through the narrative with macabre, invincible force, joined with Serena by bis mother’s prophecy. She’s La belle dame and he’s devotedly sans merci.  

     To enjoy this superb film you have to take it on its own terms.

The Death of Klinghoffer -- The Movie (2003)

Having examined Alice Goodman’s controversial libretto for the opera of the 1985 Achille Lauro highjacking (see my Oct 24/14 blog) we now turn to Penny Woolcock’s inventive film adaptation of the opera. From the title onward -- the crippled American Jew didn't just die; he was murdered --  I found the libretto biased against the Jews and whitewashing the terrorists. Woolcock makes enough attempts at balance that the Palestinian Film Festival rejected the film for being pro-Israel. Of course, it’s not that simple. 

For openers, Woolcock made three strategic innovations. First, she eschewed a theatre stage for the physically real world, the landscape, crowded dusty village streets, the ship in dock and at sea. Though initially the real backdrop jars against the artifice of the singing the clever staging and editing ease our way. Some lines are spoken, not sung, in keeping with the extra naturalism. That choice enforces the historic setting of the action and grounds the characters’ emotions in the real world. Second, she leaps back and forward in time. The 1985 hijack is intercut with Israel events of 1948,  2001 and 2003. This serves this story because in the Palestinian-Israeli war the past and the present are inseparable. Each side’s current action radically derives from its sense of historic injustice -- and, alas, feeds into the next.  Third, as Woolcock emphasizes the realism and the historic context she drops the libretto’s choruses of the sea and the desert. 

Woolcock strips away the heroism of Goodman’s terrorists. A pre-title sequence shows the beaten quartet arrested, defeated, woebegone, confronted by the widowed Mrs. Klinghoffer. She spits in one man's face, to the cocky Rambo’s amusement. In the epilogue the four “heroes” are again diminished. Leader Molqi has grown into a pampered big shot, chauffeured into the village in a Mercedes limo The idealistic Mamoud is a broken man, led away from a chance encounter with his damaged old girlfriend. His friend Omar has an arm in a sling, another emblem of reduction. This inflection may have disturbed Palestinian audiences because those terrorists — like their descendants — are national heroes. They are martyrs, with streets named after them and handsome pensions and rewards paid their families (which is one reason the Israelis often destroy their family homes). Here they're last seen mainly as losers.

The narrative opens with black and white footage of May 15, 1948, the day after Israel’s creation as a state. Woolcock often intercuts the black and white (pseudo-documentary) past with the colour present, an emblem of the past as a persistent ghostly presence. In choosing how to define that source of the conflict, Woolcock stays within Goodman’s blinkers. She takes the Palestinian perspective — that the birth (and the continuing existence) of Israel was a disaster to the Arabs. The alternative emblem is the Arab nations’ refusal to accept a division of the land with their own new state and instead amassing immediately to destroy the Jews. When Woolcock cites the 3.7 million Palestinian exiles she frames out (i) their descendancy from the original number of “only” 750,000; (ii) the equal number of Jews who were at that time dispossessed and expelled from the Arab countries; and (iii) the other Arab nations’ refusal to accept their refugees the way Israel accepted the Jewish ones. That would make those Arabs not the Israelis responsible for the Palestinians’ generations of suffering. Clearly, the issue is too complex for any such shorthand.

Woolcock begins with a specific incident where a young Israeli, a concentration camp survivor,whipped and tattooed, leads a raid which expels the Arab family from which Mamoud will descend. That Israeli and his wife are among the hostages on this Achille Laura. Unlike the libretto Woolcock includes several obvious Jews among the hostages in addition to the Klinghoffers. As the other Jews are not per se singled out for abuse the implicit effect is to exempt the terrorists from anti-semitism, beyond Rambo’s rhetoric. Klinghoffer becomes “the chosen” victim not because he bit an attacker (here) or exposes the terrorists’ false-idealist bloodlust but because Rambo drew his passport at random from a passenger’s bag. When Rambo steals and smashes the Israeli’s watch it could be anyone’s. Woolcock also dropped the woman passenger’s embarrassment to admit she’d felt grateful not to be a Jew. Rambo's speech is the only sign of anti-semitism in a project historically based on the denial of the Jewish right to survive. Finally, the presence on board of Mamoud’s nemesis might be taken to justify the attack. In sum, the film like the libretto whitewashes the terrorists’ anti-semitism. In reality Hamas, of course, is constitutionally pledged to annihilate all the Jews, not just the Israelis, and the ostensibly “moderate” Abbas refuses to accept the “Jewish state,” without it being swamped by the refugees. Still, Mamoud’s increasing disenchantment with the movement is a balancing addition.

Another is the inclusion of the Jews' historic suffering. After the ship’s boarding in Genoa Woolcock cuts in footage of Jewish refugees fleeing their cemetery of Europe for Palestine in 1946. (There’s no mention of the 1922 world commitment of the entire Palestine for the Jewish state, including not just the now contested Judea and Sumeria but also what became Jordan.) Later a scene of Arabs slaughtered (cited in the libretto) is balanced by Jews in the concentration camps (which wasn’t). When we see the one side’s slaughtered while hearing about the other, there’s a questionable equation implied between the people threatened with annihilation (the Jews) and the people who decades later again plot that people’s annihilation(the Palestinians). That’s no equivalence.

Woolcock takes advantage of her physical settings to make some touching additions. In playful foreshadowing the five-year-old boy shoots his space gun first at the amiable Klinghoffer, then at the four terrorists as they go to prepare their weapons to attack. There is little room for innocence in this world. In the newly taken town an Israeli teacher erases the Arabic from the blackboard. She doesn’t have to write anything; the erasure makes the point. Mamoud inherits from his mother their old housekey in hopes of someday reclaiming their home. As they wear the key on their neck their memory can be read as a burden. Woolcock cuts from the Jews partying in their cabin -- and Mrs Klinghoffer's "L'Chaim," "To Life" -- to the terrorists prepping their weapons and impulsively killing the maid. The contrast defines both sides.

As in the libretto the terrorists don’t refer to Allah. Further to enable our empathy Woolcock puts them into matching khaki business suits, until Rambo strips down to his Sly t-shirt. She sets up a praying scene, though, when three roll out their mats. Like Miller, she lets us think they share our god.

Woolcock uses British TV to record the outside world’s response to the incident. Jon Snow is the tony reporter. Instead of Hagar’s Chorus describing the two peoples’ fraternal derivation from Ishmael and Isaac a Middle East specialist tells that story. Rambo stares at Klinghoffer before angrily turning off the set, denying such brotherhood. Woolcock moves the party girl’s airhead remembrance ahead to a post-landing press conference. 

Woolcock then shifts back to dramatize the four terrorists’ radicalizing. Mamoud, his beautiful girlfriend and three buddies witness Israeli soldiers knocking over a fruit stand and killing the merchant. A spray of pamphlets introduce them to the radical cause and the men lock hands over the Koran. A title — “Islamic fundamentalism flourishes in a climate of despair” — introduces Woolcock’s most dramatic addition. Our four heroes are in the mob that stones his girlfriend for not wearing a hijab in public. When we later see her her face is still badly burned and bruised and she hides behind the cover. This addition diminishes the terrorists beyond anything in the libretto.

Where the libretto Klinghoffers seemed burdened with bathos and the Jewish comic stereotype, the performance elevates them. Klinghoffer is made likeable and brave. He poses comically for a passenger’s camera. His diminishing, silly soliloquy (“I should have worn a hat”) is made touching and emotional when he delivers it in close-up to assure his cuddling wife.  As Rambo coldly watches the loving couple the murder seems to grow out of his envy. She watches two terrorists cruelly toy with her crippled husband below and sleeps through the sound of his shooting (which we see here, but only heard about in the libretto). After the murder, into the unawares Mrs Klinghoffer’s face Rambo sings of having taken the Jew’s filthy money. His callousness and her dignity reverse the bias in the libretto.

Mamoud is moved by Mrs Klinghoffer’s first aria. Her finale segues through three settings. In the first her rage shrinks the captain. In the second she is passive as two women passengers change her clothing to prepare her to disembark. In the third she sings her memories of her husband to the passengers and reporters gathered on the pier. Her dignity, impassioned singing and emotional force gain majesty from the respectful faces of the listeners. The film makes her the clear hero and the dominant spirit, in contrast to her fatuous stereotyping in the libretto. 

In short, Woolcock has respected the parameters of Goodman’s pro-Palestinian text but has taken definite measures to make the political argument less biased. That political sensitivity is as impressive as her truly inventive approach to filming an opera.  

In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011)

Perhaps if this film had not been written and directed by the beautiful Angelina Jolie it would be recognized as one of the great war films. Its distinctive focus is the victimization of women in war. An end title tells us 50,000 women were raped in the Bosnian war. In the title’s variation on the Promised Land, the phrase ‘milk and honey’ is supplanted by ‘blood and honey.’ That is, murder replaces sustenance, rape love, betrayal trust, and humanity is supplanted by the murderous machinery of war.

One soldier tells Danijel that his pregnant wife must be delivering a son because a little daughter would drive him mad with doting. In the context his madness would have a different source: her doom to become another victim of a soldier’s rape.

The larger theme is the pervasiveness of division. The first shot is an aerial view of the landscape, A slash of river divides the Serbs and Bosnians. The people get along well enough to enjoy a dance together, where the Bosnian Moslem Ajla charmingly connects with the Serb soldier Danijel. Their promising romance is interrupted when a bomb shatters the club.

When they next meet Ajla is a prisoner and Danijel the camp commander. That power gap inhibits both their attraction, until her humiliation drives them together. The tender eroticism of their first lovemaking derives from the refuge each finds in the other, she from the other Serb soldiers’ brutality and he from the callousness of his job, personified by his father the general. Even Danijel’s protection fails when he is transferred to Sarajevo. 

They are reunited when she, having escaped the first camp, falls in with the Bosnian underground and agrees to let herself be captured to enable her comrades to get at Danijel, now more murderous than his father. Their lovemaking turns wild from Danijel’s doubting her. 

The division of that promising romantic couple gives way to the division within each character. Danijel is torn between his love for her and his father’s hatred of the Bosnians, for what they have done to the Serbs. Ajla overcomes her emotions for Danijel to avenge the Serbs’ murder of her infant nephew. So neither a passionate love nor a driven character’s mission can survive the division by war. Arguably Ajila is most victimized by the war not by her imprisonment, humiliation and rape, but when she is turned against her true lover. There her most positive aspect is poisoned.

In her first scene Ajla is painting a self-portrait, in relatively naturalistic style. At the end we see her final self-portrait, a more expressionistic one in which she seems to have imposed her own splotchy image on the portrait Danijel’s father ordered her to make of him, before he ordered her rape by another brute soldier. In this painting Ajla tries to expunge the general and her lover. Her ultimate portrait is what Danijel makes when his bullet to her head leaves an abstract red brushstroke against the canvas of the white wall. Bereft of all his resolve and mission he surrenders to the UN peacekeepers as a war criminal. In another form of self-portraiture Each character discovers him/herself from the tests of the war. 

In their night visit to the art gallery Ajla teaches Danijel that in art the most important part is the empty spaces, where the artist decides to do nothing. The war is the something the parties should not be doing. The war discovers the vacancy in both warring parties and the war’s emptying of all the people’s hearts, whether the respective ethnic communities or the central lovers, both together and alone.
     The film should not be judged as a documentary record of this war. As a fiction its thematic sweep covers a larger issue: every war’s undermining of nature, humanity, and the positive sustenance of our feminine nature.   

Rosewater

Rosewater is the film Argo should have been but wasn’t. It tells its story without hype or melodramatic fakery. Without the lies Jon Stewart won’t reap Ben Affleck’s box office. But he made by far the better movie. He respected the truth more than the cliches of the blockbuster.

Stewart has a great, moving story. The saga of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari’s 118-day imprisonment records the largely psychological torture he suffered and his personal responses to it. In solitary confinement he summons up the company of his dead father, whom the Shah had imprisoned and — physically — tortured for being a Communist, and his dead rebel older sister Maryam, who’d introduced him to the marvels of Leonard Cohen and the joys of culture and life. As Stewart shoots the film Iran itself — at least, as played by stand-in Amman, Jordan — is infused with a magic realism that reflects the absent powers and spirits in the cityscape. The imaginary life in the city is like that in the cell -- the country is a jail.

To set the political tone, the film opens on an Iranian poem abut a loving world endangered by the new threat to light. The title records the change in the connotation of rosewater, from the piety and warmth the child Maziar associated with it to the sinister insecure “specialist” who wafts it when he interrogates him. Rosewater has shifted from a humanist piety to serve a dehumanizing tyrant. That distills the tragedy of Iran.

The film deflates some common myths about that enemy country. The young airhead infatuated with Ahmadinejad is no famished street urchin brainwashed with chocolates but an educated Brit. Stewart’s strongest point is to distinguish between the Iranian people and their government. The government may be evil — ironically, itself the Great Satan character it projects on America — but the people are warm, spirited, hungry for freedom and for connection to the outside world. The point is concentrated in Maziar’s comic interview on Stewart’s TV show, where he points to a similarity between Iran and America. This of  course convinces Rosewater that Maziar must be a traitor and a spy.

When Maziar inveigles Rosewater with tales of his international massage experiences he exposes not just the Iranian puritan’s hypocrisy but his projection upon the Other — in this case the profane West — his own suppressed desires and shame. The jailor is more frightened than the prisoner — his power belies his vulnerability. 

     Yet Maziar and Stewart remain confident in the future. In the final scene the Iranian security force demolishes the subversive army of satellite dishes. But behind a door a furtive wide-eyed boy with a cell-phone camera bears witness. As the frightened savagery continues another generation of freedom fighter rises from the shadows. Hope springs eternal.