Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen

The Gospel According to Woody by Vincent Brook

Vincent Brook The Gospel According to Woody From Annie Hall through To Rome with Love Annie Hall (1977) was the first of Woody Allen’s films to proclaim both his coming of age as a filmmaker and the coming together of his on- and offscreenselves .Italsomarksamovebeyondthesocialandsexualconstraints oftheclassicschlemiel.TwoearlierfilmsinwhichAllenstarredbutdidnot direct, Play It Again, Sam (Herbert Ross, 1972) and The Front (Martin Ritt, 1976), had shifted the schlemiel’s center of gravity (and levity) from the shtetl to New York City and turned the caricature of Yiddish folklore into a recognizable human being.1 Annie Hall made the connection between the neurotic New York Jew and Woody Allen explicit. Not only is the film’s protagonist, Alvy Singer, a successful professional comedian who has no troubleattaining,ifstilltroubleretaining,adesirable(readgentile)woman, butalsotheeponymousshiksahewinsandloseswasplayedbythewoman withwhomAllenhadjustconcludedalengthyaffair,DianeKeaton.Henceforth , at least in the films in which he appears as prime or coprotagonist, the “fictionalized versions of Allen’s own manufactured identity as Woody Allen” became an essential ingredient of his conjurer’s art.2 As for Allen’s films’ aesthetic and thematic concerns, these had largely congealed by 1980, from Annie Hall through the three films that followed: Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), and Stardust Memories (1980). The selfreflexive aesthetic orientation derived unabashedly from the European art cinemas, most specifically Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. The thematics ,tiltingheavilytowardBergman,centeredonexistentialangstdistilled through (Jewish)humor,theredemptivepowerbut alsoproblematicofart 4 Overview (particularly cinema) and relationships (largely of the shiksa variety), and theuniquelyJewishinsider/outsidercomplex.Theinabilitytofullyreconcile thetensionbetweenStrindbergianpsychodramaandborschtbeltstand-up expressed itself, initially, in a gyration between Annie Hall–like satirical comedy (Manhattan) and deadly serious drama (Interiors). Form and content have converged most compellingly — and originally —in Allen’s exploration of the relation between documentary and fiction.WhilepresentinhisworkasearlyasTaketheMoneyandRun(1969), the reality/illusion dialectic resonated anew in the 1980s, as an objective correlative of the Woody/Allen question. Given the semblance (however illusory) between Allen and his film persona, and both of these with neurotic New York Jewishness, those films in which Allen plays a prominent role are his most distinctly Jewish—the distinctiveness heightened by his characters’ occupations or special talents that combine noted Jewish and Allenesque tropes. In the 1980s, these include Allen’s “famed” filmmaker Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories; his Wall Street broker-cum-inventor AndrewinAMidsummerNight’sSexComedy(1982);theeponymoushuman chameleon Zelig (1983) and borscht belt booking agent Broadway Danny Rose (1984); television producer Mickey Sachs in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986);anddocumentarianCliffSterninCrimesandMisdemeanors(1989). Stardust Memories, on one level a comedic homage to Fellini’s solipsistic 8½ (1963), about the creative conflict in the making of the very film we are watching,significantlyextendstheautobiographicalconjunctionofAllen’s life and corpus. The dilemma that acclaimed director Bates confronts in Stardust Memories mirrors that which Allen experienced at the time: between making comedies like the financially and critically successful Annie Hall and Manhattan or dramas like the box-office flop and roundly panned Interiors. An added Jewish element is that the fans and critics at the Atlantic City retrospective of Bates’s work, which serves as Stardust Memories’ microcosmic setting, are almost all Jews, and played by Jewish actors. As Patricia Erens observed, “The rolling credits probably contain the longest list of Jewish names in film history, apart from the Yiddish cinema of the 1930s.”3 The ethnoreligious tribute is undermined, however, by the unsympatheticportrayaloffansandcriticsalike ,leadingtoaccusations—notthe firstorlast—ofJewishself-hatredonAllen’spart.Whatsuchcriticismfails to recognize is Stardust Memories’ grounding in Felliniesque grotesquerie Brook•The Gospel According to Woody 5 and that, as David Desser and Lester Friedman point out, “Allen’s clearest target is himself. His most vicious barbs are directed inward.”4 Thepersonalnatureoftheself-hatredisreinforcedbythematchbetween Allen’swritercharacter’s(HarryBlock)assertioninthelaterDeconstructing Harry (1997) “I may hate myself, but not because I’m Jewish” and Allen’s avowal in an interview that “while it’s true I am Jewish and I don’t like myself verymuch,it’snotbecauseofmypersuasion.”5 Bothdisclaimersderive fromKafka’sfamousdiaryentry“WhathaveIincommonwithJews?Ihave hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe,” which Allen paraphrases in his farcically Kafkaesque Shadows and Fog (1991).6 Allen’s Hyman Kleinman, stuck “schlemielishly” in 1920s Austria-Hungary, when derided for not making the leap of faith necessary to believe in God, retorts, “Listen, I can’t make the leap of faith necessary to believe in myself.” IfStardustMemorieswasanattempttoresolvetheconflictbetweenAllen’s comedic and tragic impulses, it failed—but not to the detriment of his work. To the contrary, his films in the remainder of the...