Academia Meets The Loser

ACADEMIA SPREADS its clutches far and wide. The academic industry gets bigger and bigger, and people lose their jobs if they don't publish. Every field becomes fair prey for new books. But the academic jargon doesn't fit everything--there's something especially out of place in the sort of analytic attention which Maurice Yacowar gives to Woody Allen in his new book, Loser Takes All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen. The cult of Woody Allen would be inexplicable if he didn't touch on some particular mood special to his times--the anxious defeated mood of the likeable losing neurotic. And the extent of his success would suggest that he touches on it rather in kind reassurance than in a searching or nasty spirit.

His films will certainly date quickly, like the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope Road to... series with which they have much in common. But Woody, though sprightly, dislikes himself for his relentless spry evasiveness (and it's been less and less prominent in his recent films); the innocence that met a popular demand in the post-war years won't do in the sophisticate seventies.

So, what we get is the Allen persona of all his films, at least up to Annie Hall--ingratiatingly awkward and insecure, morbid, conscientious; intellectual and only saved from pseudo-intellectualism because his sidekicks are transparently far more pompous and shallow. Above all, he's acutely aware of all these things about himself, and, therefore, by an easy step, somehow above all his failings because he knows about them, After all he wrote the film--A Woody Allen Film.

The distance between the director and the screen persona is exactly the same as the distance it flatteringly allows the viewer to place between his real and everyday persons. It licenses us to believe that our everyday behavior doesn't truly reflect our character, which is altogether deeper, more astute, suffering and sensitive. The procedure is increasingly cosy and conspiratorial-we go to a Woody Allen film knowing exactly what to expect, and sure enough there it is, a flabby shapeless dish, occasionally spicy, but altogether sagging and apologetic.

The films are all but indistinguishable-we come away with a memory of one or two good jokes, but people don't remember Woody Allen jokes. Because Monty Python, like anything surrealistic, depends on the realism it parodies; it takes not of the world outside and (ab)uses it. Whereas Woody operates in a vacuum, surrounding himself with flimsy satirical types who recur in each film he makes, and his humor vanishes once his personality isn't on screen.

He gets away with it because his only distinctive talent is that he tells jokes extremely well. (Though he's a dreadful actor, embarassing when he's not laughing at something or other.) This is where he's been so lucky with Diane Keaton, who's a decent enough actress, and the Diane Keaton role is the soul-unburdening one-this cranks the show up to the touch of seriousness which is needed to vindicate Woody's Indomitable Comic Spirit, so that Time Mag can duly call him America's Comic Genius.

At once massively narcissistic and entirely cowardly, Allen is everywhere, but almost never filmed alone in close-up. He's never shown in solitude (though often oh so wrenchingly alone.) It's his privilege to make fun of himself (so that by a sleight-of-hand he accepts the contempt of others, and yet is knowingly beyond it)--but also his privilege to make fun of other people (who don't have this let-out).

So Diane Keaton has to get stoned before sex in Annie Hall; this is just a joke (like her family). With Woody Allen, the same situation would be defused (but taken seriously) by a reference to his maternal ogre, a castrating Semite battleaxe. And he's notably coy about showing sex scenes, for all the doughy portent about 'relationships' in his films.

Allen's private life is a taboo, reserved for the absent analyst, though the films are about him and intend us to imagine his complex 'interiority.' He's quite unable to imagine other people fully, as sufferers through the unspeakable Interiors will know. In Manhattan, though, he winningly has his ex-wife write about his obsessive narcissism, and the end of that film seems to me truer than anything he's done yet. Exactly because it's about the limitations of the Woody Allen persona, and the possibility that Mariel Hemingway stands for something different and better, that he ought to move himself to see her. He's always had an inviolable thin honesty, and it suggests that what he may go on to do (which is well worth doing), is to expose the sorry evasive figure who was so welcomingly forgiven in the seventies.

AND NOT JUST IN the movie theatres. He's reached the course directories, too, and now the bookshops display a new-spawned product of academia, Loser Takes All by Maurice Yacowar of Brock University, Ontario. For Yacowar, Allen is 'a serious, probing artist with a consistent and distinctive vision.' His films are indeed suspiciously clone-like, but 'serious, probing'? By what standards? Well, says Yacowar, Manhattan can be compared with 'Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, another classic analysis of the decay of western culture.' Oh, and 'like Kafka, Allen makes Jews of us all.' We might wonder just what manner of man this is whose films can unite Kafka and Renoir. Yacowar has his answers:

'Allen is especially interested in the relationship between art and life.'

'Allen deflates romantic rhetoric by pointing up the embarassing vulnerability of the flesh.'

The 90-pound weakling before, Yacowar magically transforms him into the beach bully of the art world. For some of us, precisely Woody Allen's redeeming feature is that he places himself on the 'before' side; he knows that it's good to be able to laugh at yourself, but it's better not to find yourself needing to spend all your time in this pastime. Hence the nimbus of gloom on all his films. Certainly few people would recognize what makes Allen so popular in the tone Yacowar wields:

'Thus in Bananas a coffin with a stereo attachment is intended for the California market; already Allen identifies the state with irrational pleasure and obliviousness to death.'

(in the planetarium in Manhattan) 'their inchoate love seems to be extravagantly literalized by the moon imagery.'

BUT IT'S distinctively Woody Allen's quality that he doesn't say these things; he limits himself to lighter moods. Conscious that his comedy doesn't do justice to the world around him, he won't permit himself to generalize. The airs of Yacowar's flimsy elevated prose exactly betray this caution. Yacowar has written a worthwhile book about Hitchcock's British Films - we need books about Hitchcock, since it's dismally current for people to think of him as 'the master of suspense,' the public property, grand and genial. Most film criticism tends to be dull, especially the kind which tries to give a prose version of the film. This can only be a dilution, so, the first priority should be to find something strong enough to need explaining. This doesn't necessarily limit film criticism to 'art' cinema--good articles could be written on, say, Allen, Scorcese, or Polanski, besides Hitchcock. But - surely - we don't want books explicating Woody Allen, who's obvious enough anyway.