Sweet and Lowdown: Woody Allen's Cinema of Regret by Lloyd Michaels (review)

In his book on Woody Allen, Lloyd Michaels argues that "shallow regret" categorizes Allen's narrative voice and confers legitimacy on the auteur in American cinema. Michaels characterizes shallow regret as his own worthy contribution to the scholarship that recognizes the serious auteurship, pervasiveness, and longevity of Allen's work. In addition, the author claims that his research focus offers an alternative to the usual scholarly analyses of Allen's films that mainly discuss Freudian narcissism and Sartrean existentialism (46).

According to Michaels, shallow regret is the type of regret experienced by most of Allen's characters. These are characters who deny that they have any moral responsibility to right a wrong. The shallowness of the characters' regret is shown in their superficial admission of guilt and remorse, not in any profound experience of self-defeat that would lead them to a morally righteous change of heart. Remorse follows inaction. Allen's characters appear motivated by a blissful complacency that allows them to live with the personal consequences that follow from their mistaken course of action. Their disinterest in attempting to change or correct the mistakes that inevitably cause tragedy to others—most obviously seen in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Match Point (2005), Cassandra's Dream (2007), and Irrational Man (2015)—reveals the shallow regret Michaels defines as "the absence of deeply experienced, sustained remorse" (xii). Although tragic, the consequences are merely taken as undesirable or unfortunate yet still livable. In this sense, Michaels calls Allen's characters "fundamentally shameless" (xiv).

Sweet and Lowdown serves as an anthology of reviews of Allen's films and may be useful to Woody Allen fans and scholars in the fields of philosophy, psychology, literature, and cinematic studies. However, this volume does not offer conclusive evidence of legitimate humor research that would be needed to elicit a committed interest from humor scholars. Michaels freely uses the terms "comedy" and "the comic" as downgraded or inferior counterparts to their opposing literary and cinematic referents, "tragedy" and "the melodramatic." The author fails to provide sufficient theoretical background from humor studies for him to responsibly make use of the labels "comedy" and "the comic." He refers to "the movie's comic premise" (5), "an example of what might be termed 'comic remorse' that marks so much of Woody Allen's cinema" (5), the "comic double of progressively darker characters that mark Allen's mature work" (12), "a caricature of contrition" (12), Allen's recurrent "motif of returning home" that he uses for "comic effect" (112), the "(fundamentally comic) resilience" of Cecilia's gaze in Purple Rose of Cairo that is neither "psychotic nor tragic" (118), and the "comic moment" as a violation of a character's principles (130), but he does not fully explain how such notions contribute to or draw on scholarly understandings of the comic, except to suggest that the comic in Allen's more serious films may be understood as ethical incompetence, antipathy, or the "insensitivity to the suffering of others" (12).

Despite the fact that Michaels does not reference humor studies research, his hypothesis of shallow (i.e., comic) regret poses an interesting convergence of Aristotelian and Bergsonian philosophies, though it does not pertain to the laughable or entertaining quality of humor. Bergson regards the superior, aggressive oppressor who mocks the inferior, defective other as providing moral and social correctives. In Allen's films, the characters' decision to kill innocent people is morally justified. Similarly, Aristotle emphasizes the morally defective, inferior, and disgraced as worthy of ridicule in his theory of comedy. Combining the two perspectives, one might theorize that the morally reprehensible action of committing murder without regret and the murderer's motive of killing may both be seen as comic.

Still, Michaels's downgrading of the relevance of the field of humor is apparent in his one remark about Aristotle's take on comedy: "The history of literature in the Western world might have been much different if...