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

"Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goodbye)" by Elliot Shapiro

Elliot Shapiro “Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goodbye)” Disposable Women in the Films of Woody Allen Alvy Singer might begin this way: “There’s an old joke. Women: can’t live withthem.Can’tkillthem.”Thatthisjokeisoffensivedoesn’tmeanithasn’t been played for laughs. When we hear, in Manhattan (1979), that Isaac (Woody Allen) tried to run over his ex-wife and her girlfriend, or when he shows up at their door and says to his ex-wife (Meryl Streep), “I came here tostrangleyou,”wetaketheseasjokes,inpartbecausethecharacter,likeall characters played by Allen, is so thoroughly unthreatening. We know that Isaac—the shrimpy, neurotic, guilt-ridden, and (not incidentally) Jewish comedy writer for TV —could no more go through with it than could any of the other characters Woody Allen has played in his own movies. In later movies, the joke turns. Sometimes you can kill them, and sometimes it’s supposed to be funny. Something not very funny happened on the way from Manhattan to Match Point(2005).InManhattan,whenYale(MichaelMurphy)andIsaac areconfrontedbyanolddilemma—howdoesamandisposeofonewoman when he is involved with two?—Yale and Isaac do the honorable thing: they dump someone. In Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point, JudahRosenthal(MartinLandau)andChrisWilton(JonathanRhysMeyers ) take more extreme action. Judah contracts out the murder of his mistress . Chris takes care of the job himself, with a shotgun, a solution made more coldhearted by his decision to obscure the motive for the murder by also murdering an elderly widow who lives next door. For a filmmaker who has been identified for decades with comedy—as You’ve always had problems writing for women. •Ellen to David, Bullets Over Broadway Shapiro•“Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goodbye)” 191 a writer, stand-up performer, actor, and director—it is striking how many women Woody Allen has killed in the movies he has directed and (co-) written since 1989. While this cycle begins with Crimes and Misdemeanors, oneofthelastfilmstofeatureMiaFarrow(whosecharacter,onemustnote, isnotkilled),anarrativepreoccupationwithwomenwhomustbegottenrid of reaches full flower after the last Farrow film, Husbands and Wives (1992). At least one woman per movie is murdered in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), and Match Point. In Scoop (2006), the death toll exceeds a dozen, with a failed murder attempt to wrap up the picture. In each case, the women are murdered by men.1 While no one would confuse Match Point with a comedy—no matter who wrote and directed it—the same could not be said of Manhattan Murder Mystery, Bullets Over Broadway, and Scoop. In the hopes of achieving depth perception, this chapter interchanges twolensestoviewtheplaceofJewishnessinWoodyAllen’spost-1992films. One lens focuses on film itself, the medium that is foregrounded in so many of Allen’s films: film as storytelling; film as made object; and most of all, film as cultural heritage. Although Hollywood was (to invert Neal Gabler’s line) invented by Jews, characters identifiable as Jews were largely banished from the screen for much of the period generally identified as classical.2 Engaging with the film genres of classical Hollywood, as Allen does in highly reflexive ways, means engaging with the question of where the Jews weren’t and figuring out where they belong. As Allen makes films in which women die, he seems to try out different genre models: Do Jews belong in whodunit versions of smart, urbane comedies modeled on the Thin Man series (W. S. Van Dyke and others, 1934–47)? Do they belong in backstage comedies whose long history in sound pictures can be traced to the intensely Jewish musical melodrama The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)? Do they belong in Alfred Hitchcock–style thrillers? If the view through this first lens requires long shots, intended to trace thelineageofcertaingenericfeaturesofAllen’sfilms,thesecondlens,which focuses on the place of women’s bodies in these same films, moves in for tightershots.Notonlydoasurprisingnumberofwomeninthesefilmsturn up dead—but a surprising number of the living women are professional sex workers. Livewomenasprostitutesanddeadwomenasplotdevicescouldcrudely 192 Women’s Issues describeasignificantpercentageofthefilmmaker’soutputafterAllen’svery public breakup with Mia Farrow. This chapter focuses on points where the representationofJewishness—oritsnotableabsence—intersectswiththe presenceofdeadwomen’sbodies,thusilluminatingapersistentconcernin Allen’sfilmswithJewishnessasatemplateforethicalbehavior,alongsidethe evenmorepersistentpresenceofmarkersofJewishnessasculturalbaggage to be called for when needed and disposed of when the journey requires some other kind of suitcase. While this chapter and this book focus on Allen’s films post-1992, one cannotwriteaboutdisposablewomeninrecentWoodyAllenfilmswithout some discussion of Crimes and Misdemeanors, the film in which questions of Jewish identity intersect most overtly with the presence of disposable women. For this reason, Crimes and Misdemeanors provides a...