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19. Woody Allen, "the Artist," and "the Little Girl"
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19 Woody Allen,“the Artist,” and “the Little Girl” David R. Shumway The heart wants what it wants. —Woody Allen, quoted in the New York Times, September 1992 The real world is a place that I’ve never felt comfortable in. I think that my generation grew up with a value system heavily marked by films. . . . My ideas of romance came from the movies. —Woody Allen, Rolling Stone, September 1993 IT BEC AME HARDER in the 1990s to separate Woody Allen’s life from his art. Allen seems to have spent most of his professional life denying that he is in real life the person he plays on screen. But his affair with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon Yi Previn, and the events that followed are awfully similar to those depicted in his 1992 film Husbands and Wives. Allen’s films do make frequent use of materials from his life, but the films aren’t autobiographical merely because we can find similarities between events in them and in his life. They seem to be autobiography because Allen repeatedly invokes the conventions of that genre, or, to be more precise, he invents filmic equivalents for them. I am interested here in a particular character, whom I call “the artist,” appearing in Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Husbands and Wives (1992), and Deconstructing Harry (1997). These films present Woody Allen in this key role, but through a differently distorting and 195 revealing lens. All make careful and self-conscious use of various conventions that lead the viewer to experience them as autobiography. The four films form a coherent body of work that explores the same themes using different kinds of narrative framing. But if we are meant to experience these films as autobiography, the films exist at a significant distance from the director’s life. The distance exists not in the details, but in the form that the filmmaker gives to them. This transformation is exactly what we would expect of a filmmaker who understands himself as an artist in high modernist terms. All four films depict what might be called a pedagogical relationship between the artist and a younger woman. In Annie Hall the age disparity is smaller, but the teaching role is quite explicit. The other three films depict relationships between an older man and a much younger woman, and in both Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry the young woman is also the older man’s pupil. Manhattan first establishes explicitly Allen’s interest in and ambivalence about relationships between older men and younger women. (The “little girl” in the essay of my paper comes from Manhattan, where it is applied derisively by Mary [Diane Keaton] to Isaac’s [Woody Allen] seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Tracy [Mariel Hemingway].) These relationships represent for Allen and for many in his audience an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, many believe in a version of Pascal’s “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of,” which Allen has articulated as “The heart wants what it wants.” Though obviously not invented by a modernist, it is a characteristic pronouncement of the modernist artist. Modernism has enlarged the significance of this view by claiming that there is a realm of personal experience—the erotic— that is not only beyond personal control (as romance would have it) but also properly outside social or public regulation or judgment. On the other hand, there is the feminist claim that the personal is the political. The modernist position seems to make the private space of the erotic free of the contamination of political struggle. Feminism sees society riven by imbalances of power between classes, races, and, especially for purposes of this question, genders. Individuals are unable to leave these determinants behind when they relate to each other erotically . These considerations have led to new forms of regulation and a new ethics. Relations between an older man and a younger woman, especially between teacher and student, boss and employee now come 196 DAVID R. SHUMWAY [18.234.55.154] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:21 GMT) into question. Allen’s films take seriously the ethical problems raised by such relationships, even as they also express the desire that produces them. Husbands and Wives is in many respects a rewriting of Manhattan, telling more or less the same story in different styles, tones, and outcomes . Both movies feature a writer, the “artist” (played by Allen himself ), who becomes romantically involved with a “girl” less...