A Portrait of the Artist as a Neurotic: Studies in Interior Distancing in the Films of Woody Allen

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A NEUROTIC / Ronald S. Librach Studies in Interior Distancing in the Films of Woody Allen I was not bored, as I had feared I might be; rather, I found myself fascinated by the alacrity with which these great minds unflinchingly attacked morality, art, ethics, life, and death. —Woody Allen, "My Philosophy" I WOODY ALLEN'S SINGULARITY as an important filmmaker results largely from his unique approach to philosophical problems. The New Yorker pieces, for example, are frequently devoted to reducing classic philosophic profundities to nonsensical, jargon-ridden aphorisms. Allen knows well enough that even the greatest of philosophical systems are basically elaborate, self-willed rationalizations for the philosopher's temperament or mood and he himself is honest enough to remind us that his own philosophical overview derives in large part from a sincere and therapeutic analysis of his own psychological problems—namely, the fact that he tends to whine too much. Alvy Singer, Allen's persona in Annie Hall, for instance, is an incessant whiner, and Annie Hall itself is Allen's most successful attempt to construct a syllogism that will justify the philosophy of whining. In the film, both Allen and Diane Keaton play themselves with only the most transparent fictional pretense, revealing a new dimension to the career that Allen has made of devoting most of his creative energy to talking about himself. Annie Hall examines and extols this whining comic persona, and the film seems to have come at a time when Allen realized that the best way to examine his own life was to find out why his audience has always found it so funny. As the film's title suggests, Diane Keaton is the aspect of his life on which Allen chose to focus his examination: he seems to have reasoned in Annie Hall that, since his audience found his relationship with Keaton so improbable, he could get the maximum comic effect out of that improbability by playing it with maximum transparency. Annie Hall, certainly Allen's most perfectly realized film at the time, was followed by his announcement that he intended to test his maturity The Missouri Review · 265 as an artist by embarking upon a "serious dramatic" film—"not middle serious . . . , not bittersweet, but very heavy stuff, really heavy. . . . [In] The Seventh Seal that constant, unrelieved gloom, the intensity of feeling, the religious solemnity, are very pleasurable to me—it's hypnotic."1 The result was Interiors, the story of three sisters (the Chekhovian analogy is not unintentional), their father, whose middle-age, upper middle-class angst serves as the film's catalyst, and their mother, a neurotic interior decorator. On the surface, Interiors seems to be a perfectly realized example of what Woody Allen means by "very heavy stuff." Most of his critics, however, found its seriousness to be as oppressive as they found Annie Hall's brisk but thoughtful comedy to be fresh and exhilarating. But the recollection of any number of scenes from previous Woody Allen films (say, the cinema foyer scene in Annie Hall, in which Woody produces Marshall McLuhan to foil a pompous loudmouth) should remind us that nobody who bristles at intellectual pomposity the way Woody Allen does is likely to succumb to it. Indeed, there are moments in Interiors when one feels vaguely uneasy about dismissing it as an exercise in pretentious intellectualism. What I hope to do is explain the source of these conflicting critical responses in Allen's unique conception of the film. First of all, let's outline the syllogism that governs Woody Allen's "philiosophical" view of things; we will find, I think, that Interiors plays a clever variation on the terms of that syllogism. Although it's not quite accurate to characterize the film as "parody," this variation certainly has ironic implications which are not only profoundly sensible but often splendidly funny. II Although the most obvious thing about the typical Woody Allen persona in inferiors is its conspicuous absence, the film is nevertheless concerned with the theme of the persona. In fact, it is precisely the absence of his persona in Interiors which allows Allen to explore, with considerable ingenuity, a promising new dimension...