In Stardust Memories, he plays a famous film maker who despises his audience and falls in love with an insane woman; his character, incidentally, lingers in front of a poster that says ‘Incest’ as he defends himself from charges that he flirted with a 13-year-old-girl. In his masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanours, a respectable Jewish optometrist (Martin Landau) has his mistress (Angelica Huston) murdered. It is a rumination on guilt.
In retrospect, and only in retrospect, we see him, and it is no longer charming. It feels, rather, like another betrayal. He did covet very young girls. He did destroy his family. He plagiarised their lives. In Hannah and her Sisters, Mia Farrow’s real mother Maureen O’Sullivan played her on-screen mother as a drunken bawd. It was very close to the truth. “How can you act,” she asks, “If there’s nothing inside to come out?” I think that, for Allen, betrayal is love. That would explain why he stayed with Soon-Yi. The scope of the betrayal of Farrow nourished him.
“He always attracted to the crazies, the nutcases,” says Jack, (Sydney Pollack) in Husbands and Wives of the Allen character, “deep down somewhere he knows it’s not going to work, so he suffers and that kind of atones for some kind of early on guilt over what I don’t know”.
He writes in Nothing that his mother beat him daily, but he doesn’t dwell on it — nor did the critics, though it was the most interesting thing he wrote — and it flies away. She “always”, he writes, took the side of “anyone who hates me”.
I found the films brilliant but desolate, because a distinct post-war Jewish identity grew around Woody Allen, and it is self-hating. For a certain type of Jew, liking Allen’s work was a signal of status, and belonging. For non-Jews it signified a liking of Jews; a solidarity. This identity was born in the Holocaust, of course; he was born in 1935.
He wrote, for me, the best line on the Holocaust in cinema in Hannah and her Sisters. “You missed a very dull TV show about Auschwitz,” says Frederick (Max Von Sydow) “more gruesome film clips, more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question, ‘how could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is: why doesn’t it happen more often?”
That bitterness — that truthful cynicism — is what I want to hear. I don’t want Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List crying, “one more life”, with a redemptive ending patched on because Steven Spielberg panicked.
This identity is irreligious, existing to be thwarted — secular Judaism is flimsy — which is interesting, because Allen is like that too. But there was chosen-ness of a kind. Allen’s work is filled with pseudo-intellectualism — he taught me to namedrop Freud without reading him, he taught me to betray my readers — contempt for the homely, or religious, kind of Jew (his Jews are ghastly stereotypes) and social aspiration.
He mocked the New Yorker in cinema; in life he pitched to them. He mocked Hollywood in Annie Hall; in life, he demanded to star in What’s New, Pussycat?, the first film he wrote. In Nothing he writes with pride of his penthouse in the sky. That is the reason for his infamous attachment to Manhattan. It isn’t Brooklyn, where he was born. In Venice he stays at the Gritti Palace. In Paris he stays at the Ritz. He’s like the dentist he despises. His mother wanted him to be a dentist.
The self-hatred is so obvious; why couldn’t I see it? Was I laughing? The women — the love — are always unavailable. They are drug- or sex-addicted; too remote; too crazy; too young. Even if they weren’t, he would ruin it.
In Crimes and Misdemeanours, the nebbish plagiarises a love letter from James Joyce, and I can think of nothing more pitiful from a writer. In Stardust Memories he fantasises about placing the brain of a kind, plain woman in the body of a beautiful, mad one; but, he says later, he’d want the remnants instead: the mad drab. He cannot be happy.
Stardust Memories contains, for me, his essential revelation. An alien tells him, when he says his life is meaningless: “You’re not superman, you’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service, tell funnier jokes”. He used an alien for comedy, but it only exacerbated tragedy. He wanted to be a great film maker, but he remained a comedian. He collected none of his four Academy Awards. You could call it a peculiar kind of vanity, or you could call it imposter syndrome; his films leak shame. I think he is a great artist, though parochial. I am certain he would not agree.
When I first read the Soon-Yi story, I thought he should fire his shrink. He is famously in therapy, but narcissists are almost impossible to cure. And, like a narcissist longing to be found out he has goaded his audience to know him and suffers when they do; and Nothing is his surprised post-script. “I’ve seen it all before,” says a critic in Stardust Memories, “they try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art”. “The way your lead character views women,” Rain (Juliette Lewis) tells him in Husbands and Wives, “it’s so retrograde, it’s so shallow”. He kisses her on her 21st birthday and returns to Mia Farrow.
His work, then, was a brilliant deception on himself and others that, in the end, failed; when his audience realised they had practised the same deception on themselves, they ceased to believe anything he said. They stopped laughing.
Perhaps this is right, and he is a greater artist for being known — and loathed — than he was when misunderstood. I certainly find the films more moving now. He has exposed comedy for what it is; you could call that generous, even revolutionary, but it was probably unconscious. The work remains a luminous study in post-war Jewish self-hatred, and it will endure, but he has not morally survived it. He could not. Perhaps he should have listened to his mother. He should have been a dentist.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe